Chapter 760: 760. They Buried A Dragon In A Tomb Of Earth And Stone (They Aren’t Useless)

The thrashing stopped. The violent lashing of its tail, which had been cracking the stone like whipcord, suddenly went limp.

The dragon stood in the center of the containment zone, its massive head drooping slightly, its eyes glazed and vacant. It didn’t look like a monster anymore; it looked like a mountain that had suddenly forgotten how to be solid.

"It’s working," Diana whispered.

Her voice was unnervingly quiet, the kind of silence that precedes a storm. She didn’t lower her bow; her eyes remained locked on the dragon’s massive, pulsing right shoulder.

"But don’t celebrate yet... It’s just... empty."

"The right wing," Lily breathed, her heart hammering against her ribs. "Status?"

"Still folded," Diana replied, her knuckles white against the bow. "But it’s twitching."

"It’s like a muscle trying to remember how to move without a brain... Watching it... Watching it..."

As the dragon stood in its stupor, the team moved with the frantic, synchronized efficiency of a well-oiled machine. The containment structure began to surge upward.

Nerith’s roots, reinforced by the earthen energy flowing through the meteor, spiraled around the beast like colossal, woody serpents.

CREAK... SCHLIP... THUD!

The stone of the plaza groaned as the roots forced themselves into the cracks, binding the dragon in a cage of living earth. Simultaneously, Mireya’s ice expanded, lashing the exterior of the root network with jagged, crystalline plates.

CRACK! SHHHHH!

The combination was brutal and unrefined, a desperate patchwork of earth, ice, and stone designed to hold a titan.

"The northern section is failing!" Nerith yelled, her face flushed a deep crimson from the energy drain.

CRACK!

A massive root groaned as it struggled to find purchase. "The soil under the residential district is too thin! It’s not organic enough!"

"The anchors are shallow; they’re slipping!"

"How much reinforcement do you need?" Lily shouted, her golden barrier flickering as she diverted her focus to stabilize the ground.

"Everything I have left!" Nerith roared back. "But the roots need a foundation!"

"Mireya! The ice wall! Instead of spreading it outward, drive the base downward! Use the ice to wedge the roots into the bedrock!"

"Mireya!" Lily commanded.

"Already on it!" Mireya yelled.

She was drenched in sweat, her hands glowing a lethal, frostbitten blue. She slammed her palms toward the ground.

KRA KOOOOM!

The ice didn’t just grow; it erupted, driving deep into the earth like frozen spears.

The dragon’s behavior shifted from a hollow stillness to a heavy, sluggish passivity. It wasn’t calm; it was a beast experiencing the terrifying sensation of being a ghost in its own body.

Its breathing was a low, rhythmic rumble that shook the very air: HUUUUU... HAAAAA...

"Elizabeth!" Lily called out, her eyes darting to the scholar. "How long until the biological compensation kicks in? How long until it wakes up?"

"Sixty seconds!" Elizabeth shouted, her voice strained.

Her eyes were wide, her entire body trembling from the effort of maintaining the counter frequency.

VREEEEEEE!

The air hummed with a dissonant, nauseating vibration. "The bond is fighting back!"

"The maintenance pulse is trying to re-establish itself, but my interference is holding it at bay!"

"But my reserves... they’re bleeding out faster than the calculations predicted!" She gasped, a bead of sweat trailing down her temple. "I can hold this for sixty seconds..."

"After that, the interference will shatter, and the dragon will reclaim its senses!"

"We need forty more seconds to finish the structure!" Nerith screamed, her hands clawing at the dirt as if she could pull the earth together by force.

"I can give you forty!" Elizabeth countered, her teeth gritted. "Not sixty! The energy is evaporating!"

"Forty is enough!" Nerith yelled. "Just give us forty!"

"The northern wall!" Mireya cried out, her voice strained with the effort of the deep freeze. "The ice base is at maximum extension!"

"The temperature is equalizing! If I go any deeper, the stone will become too brittle, and the root network will lose its flexibility! It’ll snap like glass!"

"Let it snap!" Nerith commanded, her eyes fierce. "Flexibility is a luxury we don’t have!"

"We need anchor strength! We need depth! Drive it in, Mireya!"

"Drive it into the marrow of the earth!"

"Dropping the temperature... NOW!" Mireya roared.

KRRRRR SHHHHHHHHHHHH!

The sound was deafening, like a glacier calving into the sea. The ground beneath the northern sector groaned in agony as the temperature plummeted, the stone itself shrieking under the sudden, violent contraction of the frost.

Twelve seconds. That was all it took for the chaos to solidify into a tomb.

CRACK BOOM!

With a final, violent surge of frost, Mireya’s ice wall slammed into the bedrock, locking the northern section into place with the finality of a prison gate. The ice didn’t just sit on the surface; it shrieked as it forced its way into the deep substrate, weaving through the massive, pulsating roots that Nerith had driven into the earth.

The roots, thick as ancient oaks and slick with dark, viscous dragon blood, threaded through the frozen channels of the ice, creating a composite cage of stone, wood, and frost.

SKREEEEE THUD!

The dragon gave one last, involuntary shudder, a massive, heavy lurch of its muscular frame against the restraints, but the cage held. The beast settled into the containment structure with a heavy, hollow sigh that sent a cloud of steam billowing from its nostrils.

It was no longer fighting; it was simply there, a captive god held in a cradle of improvised geometry.

The silence that followed was not the peaceful quiet of a meadow; it was the heavy, ringing silence of a battlefield after the screaming stops. It was the silence of an engagement that had been forcibly concluded.

Lily let the barrier drop.

FZZZZT...

The golden light dissolved into the morning air, leaving behind a shimmering haze of exhausted mana. Lily slumped onto the jagged edge of the meteor, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps.

Her light affinity awareness pulsed a dim, warning rhythm in the back of her mind: fifteen percent. She felt the grit of pulverized stone under her fingernails and the deep, soul-aching exhaustion that came not from physical labor but from the sheer, terrifying precision of holding back a titan.

"Is anyone... still in one piece?" Lily asked, her voice barely a rasp.

"My drawing arm is going to feel like it’s been put through a meat grinder tomorrow," Talyra muttered, rubbing her shoulder where the tension of the bow had been punishing. "But nothing’s broken... Yet."

"The ice extension nearly blew my secondary channels," Mireya added, her voice tight with pain.

She stared at her hands; the frost-blue glow was fading, leaving her skin a bruised, angry violet. "My blades are gone... they’re shattered..."

"I can’t regenerate them for at least an hour... maybe more."

"Nerith?" Lily called out, looking down toward the street level.

"Tired..." Nerith’s voice drifted up, muffled by the dust and debris. "The root network in this district is a wreck."

"I had to pull old growth roots that were never meant to be wrenched from the earth like that... the ground is going to be a scar for a long time."

"Elizabeth," Lily said, turning her gaze to the scholar.

Elizabeth wasn’t resting. She was staring at the dragon with a terrifying, clinical intensity, her eyes reflecting the dim light of the containment structure.

"The counter frequency... it was a glutton for energy," she said, her voice already shifting into a rapid-fire analytical cadence. "It consumed far more than the initial projections suggested."

"But the data..." She paused, a spark of predatory intellectual hunger in her eyes. "The bond link architecture... it’s unlike anything documented at the Academy."

"The waveform wasn’t a standard magical resonance; it had a rhythmic, almost... divine adjacent structure..."

"I need to study it... The moment this beast is secured, I want a full dissection of the frequency harmonics."

Diana lowered her bow with a heavy thud, her eyes scanning the horizon. "The dragon isn’t going anywhere, Elizabeth."

"You can study its soul after we make sure the rest of the city isn’t actively burning to the ground."

"Parts of it are likely still quite active in their combustion," Elizabeth replied, her tone maddeningly detached.

"Then we go fix them," Diana snapped, her eyes hardening.

Lily looked from the dragon to the sprawling, wounded city of Aethelgard and then up to the morning sky, where the silhouettes of two figures still drifted above the rooftops. She thought of Rex’s instructions, four words that had carried the weight of an entire destiny.

She had done it. She had held the dragon.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, was already looking past the immediate victory. She turned to Nerith, her mind already constructing the next layer of the cage.

"Nerith," Elizabeth said, her voice commanding. "The current structure is a temporary fix."

"We need a permanent containment."

"A deep root foundation, approximately twenty meters in diameter, with enough structural mass to discourage any active, high output movement."

"We need to bury it in a tomb of earth and stone."

"That will devastate the root system in this entire zone," Nerith countered, her voice weary but pragmatic.

"Significantly less damage than the dragon will do if it decides to wake up and lunge again," Elizabeth replied coldly.

Nerith stared at the dragon, then at the wounded earth, and finally at Elizabeth. She considered the cost for two long, silent seconds.

"Alright, Lady Elizabeth," Nerith grunted. "Start the preparations."

As the sun began to climb higher, casting long, jagged shadows over the ruins, the team began to move again, not as victors, but as architects of a living prison, preparing to lock the nightmare away for good.