Comtois ascends through the troposphere with the terrifying velocity of a redirected comet, his body cutting through the thickening mist until the very concept of rain disappears beneath his feet. The air thins rapidly, becoming a cold, sharp vacuum that bites at his lungs, while the rolling thunderheads he once feared begin to flatten and spread, transforming into vast, roiling oceans of white and grey far beneath his boots.
The world curves slightly at the edges of his vision, a breathtaking arc of blue and shadow that reminds him of his insignificance, while the wind screams against his body with a high-pitched, metallic howl that vibrates through his very teeth.
Behind him, the Drakolimne follows with a terrifying, mindless persistence, its massive, serpentine body twisting through the sky far beyond what any biological creature should be able to survive.
Its obsidian and emerald scales begin to smoke and hiss from the sheer friction of its ascent, the atmospheric drag acting like invisible sandpaper against its prehistoric hide.
Its supernatural healing struggles to keep pace with the structural damage caused by the thinning pressure, the wounds from the Ents and the stone wall beginning to weep glowing yellow blood that vaporizes instantly into a fine mist.
But still, driven by a corruption that knows no exhaustion and a rage that defies physics, it climbs. Comtois laughs breathlessly, the sound a ragged mixture of half-exhilaration and half-pure, unadulterated panic that he can feel rattling in his chest.
"THIS IS SO STUPID!"
Morito's sword, sensing the impending climax, floods his nervous system with a tidal wave of raw, jagged power that makes his vision pulse in shades of crimson and black.
The black veins spread farther up his arm, etching themselves into his shoulder and neck like a roadmap of shadow, while the sword's voice begins to murmur inside the dark corridors of his head. It is a voice as ancient as the bedrock of the world, hungry for the essence of the dragon and whispering warnings of the price such power demands from a mortal vessel.
He ignores it with the practiced stubbornness of a man who has already committed to the fall, his eyes fixed on the darkening blue above where the stars are beginning to pierce through the thinning veil of the atmosphere.
The clouds fall farther away until they are nothing more than a soft, textured carpet of cotton, and the deep blue of the sky darkens into a bruised, impenetrable violet.
The cold intensifies, a biting, absolute frost that attempts to seize his joints, as they reach the rarified height of the stratosphere.
The Drakolimne slows slightly, its massive movements becoming visibly heavier and more labored as the lack of buoyant air makes its flight less an act of grace and more a desperate struggle of will. Comtois notices the change immediately, his teeth bared in a defiant snarl as he feels the creature's momentum begin to flag in the void.
"Yeah that's right. No lake up here."
He pushes harder, ignoring the way his heart thrashes against his ribs, forcing his mana to burn hotter as he seeks a height that the serpent cannot endure. Faster. Higher.
The mesosphere approaches like a wall of invisible glass, and now the air itself—what little remains of it—begins to burn with the friction of their impossible speed. Fire blooms around them in a sudden, spectacular aura of orange and white light, wrapping across Comtois's body in a protective yet terrifying sheath of heat.
The Drakolimne ignites as well, its scales glowing a dull, angry red as the heat of re-entry in reverse begins to cook it from the outside in.
The creature opens its maw to scream, but no sound emerges in the vacuum-thinned air; it is a silent, agonizing display of monstrous agony played out against the backdrop of the stars.
Comtois remembers disjointed fragments of Earth documentaries, flickering images of meteor simulations and physics videos he had only half-watched during his school days while dreaming of better things.
The data points flash through his mind like lightning: no oxygen to fuel the beast's fire, thin air to negate its wings, and a recovery rate that is visibly stalling as the extreme conditions overwhelm its biological limits.
He knows he has to keep dragging it higher, to push it into the killing frost of the upper heights where the laws of the lake no longer apply. The Drakolimne struggles harder now, its massive tail lashing out at nothingness, its body shedding burning, incandescent scales that trail behind it like a shower of dying sparks. Comtois's grin becomes feral, a look of pure, scientific triumph amidst the chaos.
"SCIENCE, BABY!"
Then both combatants ascend even farther, breaking into the terrifying reaches of the thermosphere where the darkness of space finally begins to dominate the horizon.
The planet below glows in a breathtaking tapestry of blue-green and silver, a world called Terre that is not his Earth, yet remains heartbreakingly similar in its fragile beauty.
Comtois finally stops his upward climb, his momentum bleeding away until he floats weightless above the world, a speck of dust in the eye of the cosmos.
The Drakolimne approaches him much slower now, its movements jerky and dying, yet it remains furious, still trying to close the gap to sink its fangs into the man who lured it into the void.
Comtois breathes shakily, each gasp a precious commodity in the thin atmosphere, while Morito's sword screams frantic, discordant warnings inside the sanctuary of his mind.
The protective magic he has layered around himself is draining with catastrophic speed against the unseen bombardment of solar radiation and the impossible vacuum.
Beneath his arm, the fake Teufel bundle begins to burn apart, the straw incinerating instantly and the leather straps curling into ash.
Only the swords remain in his possession—the dark, hungry length of Morito and the damaged, radiant weight of Teufel's blessed blade. Comtois looks at them both, the shadow and the light, and with a grunt of exertion, he presses them together.
The magic of the two blades collides with the force of a collapsing star, black and gold energies fusing violently in a spectacular display of magical smithing.
The blades appear to melt in his hands, the metal flowing together in a glowing, white-hot slurry that defies the cold of space until a new weapon begins to solidify inside his grip.
It is long, elegant, and terrifying; a blade of deepest black etched with crimson veins that pulse like a heartbeat, topped with a razor-thin edge of shimmering gold.
The sword vibrates with a resonance that shakes his very soul, and a new voice forms in his mind—not the hunger of Morito or the duty of Teufel, but something new, confused, and undeniably alive. It is the fusion of Morito's corruption and Teufel's blessing, a single weapon forged in the fires of the upper atmosphere.
Comtois smiles weakly, his vision beginning to blur at the edges as the lack of oxygen finally takes its toll.
"Blackguard. Cool name. I'm keeping it."
The sword pulses in a rhythmic acknowledgment of its new identity, but immediately warns him of the precariousness of their position. {Master, you are at 117 kilometers high.} The protection is failing, the energy consumption has reached a critical threshold, and the radiation is beginning to seep through the magical barriers.
Comtois glances upward into the deeper, infinite darkness of the void, where the sun's unfiltered light threatens to blind him.
"Nah. I know what comes next. Temperature spikes again. Ultraviolet. X-rays. We're not doing that."
The Drakolimne reaches him at last, but it is a shadow of the god it claimed to be, its body trembling and its blackened eye flickering like a dying candle. It still tries to roar, its jaw unhinging in a pathetic, silent gesture of defiance, but Comtois simply raises Blackguard above his head. Then, with a scream of effort, he dives.
The descent begins instantly, gravity reclaiming its prize with a violent, bone-crushing tug. He becomes a streak of fire, a human meteor plummeting toward the green world below. The Drakolimne, seeing its prey escape, finds one last reserve of strength and charges too, two blazing objects tearing downward through the upper atmosphere in a race toward the earth.
Comtois screams as the wind begins to roar in his ears again, a sound that is not born of fear, but of pure momentum, rage, and the bone-deep exhaustion of a man who has reached his limit.
He swings Blackguard in a wide, shimmering arc that leaves a trail of gold and crimson light in the air. The blade carves through the Drakolimne's neck mid-descent, and the collision of forces is cataclysmic. Dark magic, blessed magic, atmospheric friction, and the inherent corruption of the beast all collide simultaneously in a singular point of impact.
For one impossible, frozen moment, the Drakolimne stops its descent, its massive body locked in a halo of golden fire. Then, it simply disintegrates.
There is no dramatic corpse to fall into the lake, no final speech of ancient malice; the creature simply becomes a cloud of ash and glowing, celestial dust scattered across the burning sky before even a final scream can escape its throat.
Silence follows, heavy and absolute, as the monster vanishes into the wind.
Comtois keeps falling, the pieces of Teufel's armor finally separating from his body one by one as the straps fail.
They burn away into nothingness, spinning through the atmosphere like tiny, falling stars. Blackguard groans under the immense strain of maintaining the protective enchantments around his body, the blade glowing with a fierce heat. Fire wraps him completely now, a cocoon of orange flame that shields him from the friction of the descent.
Below him, Terre stretches out in all its vast and impossible beauty—the blue lakes like sapphires, the green forests like emerald velvet, and the clouds painted in hues of gold and violet by the approaching dawn. For a fleeting moment, he forgets the weight of the slavery, the cold bite of the collars, the endless missions, and the constant presence of death. He just watches the world rotate beneath him.
Then he sighs softly, the sound lost to the rushing wind.
"Still not Earth..."
He descends lower, the fire of his re-entry brightening as he nears the thicker air of the troposphere. Far below, near the muddy shores of Lake Admonito, Ryong and Lei finally see the streak of light returning from the heavens, a lone star falling back to the mud.
The sky, once a jagged theater of obsidian clouds and electrical fury, begins to yield to the relentless approach of the dawn, though the transition is marked by a sight far more harrowing than the rising sun.
Three burning streaks had previously punctured the upper atmosphere, carving incandescent gashes through the thinning veil of the heavens as they tumbled toward the earth with the weight of falling gods.
Now, as the friction of the descent bleeds away into the cooler air of the troposphere, only one remains, a solitary spark of defiant light trailing a tail of white-hot vapor that refuses to be extinguished.
Down in the valley, the village of Admonito stirs with a collective, traumatized breath as the inhabitants emerge from their damaged-and-recently-rebuilt homes to stare upward in a paralyzing mixture of terror and religious awe.
One old man, his hands stained with the soot of his hearth, drops to his knees in the mud, whispering that the stars have finally decided to judge the sins of the world.
Nearby, a weaver clutches her children to her chest, her eyes wide as she sobs quietly, convinced that the falling fire is a harbinger of the end times or perhaps the return of the ancient dragons.
Some kneel in the muck, crossing themselves against the unknown, while others simply stand paralyzed as the morning begins bleeding slowly across the horizon in a bruised spectrum of violet and gold.
"It was a sign from the Lady of the Lake, I tell you!" shouts a blacksmith, his voice cracking as he points a trembling finger at the fading streaks. "First the water rose, and then the sky threw back the fire to drown the beast!"
An elderly woman beside him shakes her head, her face a map of deep-set wrinkles highlighted by the ethereal glow. "Nonsense, Guntar, that was no sign; that was the heavens breaking under the weight of the serpent's sins, and we are but the dust beneath the wheel."
Ryong squints upward, the glare of the atmospheric friction reflecting off his cracked glasses as he tries to reconcile the mathematics of the descent with the impossibility of what he witnessed.
"…There were three objects before," he notes, his voice flat with the kind of shock that settles in the marrow when reality bends too far.
Lei nods slowly, his gaze never wavering from that single, descending point of light that seems to be fighting against the very air to maintain its course.
"Now there's one." he replies, his tone heavy with an unspoken dread.
Neither of them wants to imagine what Comtois just did in the silent, freezing reaches of the void, nor do they want to contemplate the sheer violence required to turn three celestial objects into a singular, lonely survivor. The burning streak descends farther, piercing through the lower cloud layers and shedding its outer shell of flame as it approaches the jagged skyline. Lower it falls, until the roar of its passage becomes a physical pressure against the eardrums of the watchers below.
Then, with a suddenness that defies the laws of momentum, the object slows, hanging suspended several meters above the towering, rain-slicked pine canopy like a marionette whose strings have finally been pulled taut. The flames fade into a dull, shimmering heat haze, revealing Comtois, who hangs motionless in the air, smoke curling in lazy, grey ribbons from his scorched and armorless body. Blackguard, the newly forged nightmare of a blade, trembles weakly in his hand, its golden edge flickering like a guttering candle as its supernatural glow dims.
Comtois coughs, a harsh, rattling sound that ejects the last of the high-altitude cold from his lungs, and then he laughs. It is a genuine, manic laugh that echoes through the stillness of the morning, a sound born of the sheer absurdity of surviving the vacuum of space while clinging to a piece of sentient metal. Because of course he does.
He teleports.
He reappears instantly atop the jagged peak of Mount Morito, the displacement of air sounding like a thunderclap that startles the remaining 205th Company slave-soldiers who had been huddled amongst the ruins.
They immediately stare, their faces pale and drawn from a night of waiting for a commander they assumed was dead. Some freeze mid-conversation, their mouths hanging open in disbelief, while one boy drops a wood-cutting axe with a heavy thud that rings against the stone. Another slowly points upward, his hand shaking as he realizes that the smoking, half-naked figure standing before them is the same comet that just carved a path through the heavens.
Comtois lands dramatically beside them, his knees bucking slightly from the residual kinetic energy, and then he slams Blackguard into the mountaintop stone with a final, echoing strike. The impact sends a spiderweb of cracks outward from the point of contact, the ancient rock groaning under the weight of the sword's lingering power.
A sudden wind sweeps across the ruined garden, carrying away the last of the stagnant smoke and the smell of the storm. The slave-soldiers stare at him with wide, unblinking eyes, noting the way smoke still rises from the charred fabric of his clothes and how his hair is partially burned into jagged, wild tufts. The air around him smells faintly metallic, a pungent mixture of ozone and burnt blood that makes the closest soldiers recoil.
For several long, heavy seconds, nobody speaks, the only sound being the whistling of the wind through the mountain passes. Then Comtois throws both arms upward in a gesture of absolute, unearned triumph.
"I SLAYED A DRAGON AND BECAME A COMET IN TERRE'S ATMOSPHERE!"
Silence.
Then chaos.
The entire 205th erupts in a deafening wave of noise that seems to shake the very foundations of the mountain. Cheering, screaming, and laughing collide in a cacophony of relief as the boys rush toward him like a tide of deranged fans who have just witnessed a miracle. Someone tackles him around the waist, their weight nearly toppling him over, while another starts yelling incoherently at the sky, pumping his fists in the air as if he personally struck the blow. One kid, no older than fourteen, begins to cry while laughing, the tears carving clean streaks through the mud on his face. Comtois disappears beneath the pile of enthusiastic bodies instantly, his voice muffled by the press of sweaty tunics and cheering soldiers.
"GET OFF ME— I CAN'T FEEL MY LEGS—"
Nobody listens.
Down below near the village, where the water is finally receding from the saturated streets, Ryong Min Ki slowly watches the dawn spread its cooling fingers across the horizon. The eastern sky softens into a pale, regal gold before deepening into a delicate, bruised rose that reflects off the mirror-like surface of the lake. The sunlight touches the ruined roofs of Admonito, highlighting the splintered timber and the resilient stone, and it touches the wet pine branches that are still dripping with the remnants of the night's fury.
Animals slowly emerge from their hiding places beneath roots and stones, their instincts signaling that the predator from the deep has finally been erased. Birds return cautiously to the broken trees, their tentative songs beginning to fill the silence left behind by the dragon's roar. Mist drifts low and ghostly across the lake where the Drakolimne once ruled as an undisputed god, a lingering shroud over a grave that has no body.
Ryong adjusts his glasses, his fingers brushing against the worn leather of his notebook which rests heavily against his chest. The pages inside are soaked, stained with ink that has bled into illegible blossoms, and overcrowded with frantic sketches of a battle that defied every known principle of biology and physics.
Beside him, Lei exhales a long, slow breath, the tension finally leaving his shoulders as he watches the light reclaim the world. Neither speaks.
Far away atop Mount Morito, the distant, muffled cheers of the 205th faintly echo through the crisp morning air, a ghostly sound of celebration that carries on the breeze. Ryong stares toward the mountain, then shifts his gaze toward the tranquil, deceptive lake, and finally upward toward the empty blue where the comet had fallen.
"…What exactly are we becoming?" he whispers to the empty air.
No one answers.
The sun rises higher, shedding its morning modesty to bathe the valley in a brilliant, unforgiving light. Its rays spill across the rugged landscape of Terre in a soft, rosy hue like a maiden's lips.