Chapter 1032 — The War of Tearing

Deep beneath Talund, a silver-white train hurtled with a roar through layer upon layer of protected tunnels, bearing mechanical weapons and ammunition supplies ready for the next battle. Ancient computation centers hummed, ceaselessly calculating the firepower arrangements for the next second and the remaining numbers of the dragon legions. The subterranean furnaces and doomsday factories ran day and night without pause, converting steel ingots into new weapons, or patching up dragons recovered from the battlefield that could still be "repaired," then sending them back into the fight.

And in the deepest part of this underground steel kingdom, Omega's core ran without a moment's pause, running calmly and efficiently — with no reverence for gods, and no pity for any individual of flesh and blood.

As a machine, the core directive its creators had left in its deepest recesses stood above all else. Driven by that core directive, it carried out its final task, commanding the dragon legions and the omnipresent ancient gun emplacements just as it had commanded Talund's countless machines for over a million years.

The numbers of both legions and gun emplacements were steadily dwindling, yet in Omega's precise calculations, victory would ultimately be its own.

That calamity-like "Dragon of Disarray" had already weakened. More importantly, He had severed the chains of faith between Himself and mortals, shedding the power of divinity. He was still stronger now than every living thing in this world, but also weaker than at any stage in His own history, and those dragonkin who had once been His "believers"... every attack they made upon the Dragon of Disarray was truly destroying the power by which the latter sustained Himself.

On the western side of Talund, in a mine shaft at an extreme depth underground, an attack from the god had just punched through the last steel plate of the defensive works.

A silver-white metal egg was destroyed. Yet to Omega... it had lost only one insignificant node. It had tens of thousands of similar nodes, scattered throughout Talund, and even across the seabed nearby.

Heat waves surged through the underground base; flames were spreading along every pipe and passageway. The distant sea gates had already opened, and the roar of seawater flooding backward into the mine shaft was like thunder.

The just-destroyed silver-white egg-shaped device lay quietly in the center of the base about to be submerged by the sea. Its shell had cracked open, and a great many sparks leaped between its main body and the nearby walls. Before the nearest support pillar, some badly garbled characters were flickering on and off, displaying a brief fragment of thought Omega had produced before this node was destroyed:

"The meaning of life... lies in perpetuating oneself...

"The creators... chose to destroy themselves...

"Contradiction... error... absence of logic...

"Error, error, error..."

The leaping red characters stood out with particular harshness in the deepening gloom of the base, while the faint alarm was swallowed by the roaring seawater and the thunderous blasts of exploding facilities all around. With a sound like thunder, the last isolation gate was burst open by the surging sea; immeasurable volumes of icy seawater poured into the depths of the mine shaft, devouring this Omega node and the fragments of its lingering thought together.

And across all of Talund, among those tens of thousands of silver-white egg devices, Omega's thinking went on, and this bloodbath... went on as well.

……

At the former headquarters of the Dragon Council, the mountain city of Agondor had been utterly destroyed. The mighty gravity storm had shattered the once-lofty mountains, sweeping up everything upon them and the city at their feet alike.

A colossal structure tumbled through the uncontrolled gravitational environment. It had a magnificent transparent shell, its overall form an ellipsoid like a nest and like a giant egg. At the structure's edge, some energy still lingered in the great neon installations, and flickering, fitfully glowing characters pieced together an incomplete word: XX Arena.

A vast black limb suddenly descended from the clouds; like a scythe it clove the arena structure in two. Amid the chain of massive explosions, a golden figure burst forth under cover of the wreckage, spewing searing flame and potent lightning at the surface of that immense limb, then narrowly dodged aside.

This was a golden giant dragon, stronger and more massive than most of his kind, his hundred-meter body covered in the radiance of ancient runes. The various features of his form showed that this golden dragon had once held no ordinary station in dragon society — yet at this moment, like the other dragons on the battlefield, those great eyes had lost their original emotion, leaving only a mechanical, icy gaze.

The fierce battle was at its height, but suddenly, the golden dragon's movements came to a halt.

Something seemed to return to his eyes—a flicker of feeling—and driven by that faint stirring he lifted his head. High above he saw the Dragon of Disorder coiling in the sky, giving voice to a mad, chaotic roar; pale violet lightning churned among the low, dim clouds, and the creature's body was seamed with cracks from which light blazed forth—as though this were some kind of threshold, a sign that the bloody battle had entered its final stage.

A mighty presence came rushing toward them from another direction, and out of the smoke and fire burst an enormous body almost equal in size to the golden dragon—a dragon already unimaginably ancient. Perhaps he had once been a black dragon, but the long ages and deep, invasive alterations had turned nearly every scale to a grayish white, and visible implants and reconstructed structures covered his whole frame, so that he scarcely seemed a dragon of flesh and blood at all, but rather a heap of flying steel.

"Hragor!" the aged dragon spoke, his deep voice like rolling thunder. "Hurry! We cannot hold our clarity for long!"

At his old friend's cry, the golden dragon Hragor could not help but turn his gaze toward where the Dragon of Disorder's "head" should be, as though trying to find some familiar line of sight within that roiling mass of madness—but he found nothing.

The old dragon's urging came again from beside him: "Make haste! Bayang'er is almost here!"

Hragor drew back his gaze from the high sky. Driven by his newly rebuilt sense of self, he fought against the loss of control deep within him—a feeling like his very soul being torn apart—and then, without hesitation, he and the ancient gray-white dragon turned together and hurtled toward the distant sea.