Chapter 768: 768. The Girl’s Problem Isn’t Over Yet... I’m Curious What They’re Going To Do

Silence.

It was a heavy, suffocating void longer than the silence that had swallowed Lily and far more predatory. It was the kind of silence that precedes a landslide or a scream.

Mireya was already lunging toward the collapsed outer wall, her boots skidding on the grit, when Talyra’s voice finally tore through the stillness.

"Still here," Talyra rasped.

The voice was jagged, broken, possessing the raw, sandpaper roughness of someone whose lungs had been rattled against their rib cage.

"The wall... it broke my fall better than I broke the wall’s. A long, agonizing pause followed, punctuated by a wet, hitching breath. "I am... going to need a moment."

"Take two," Mireya called back, though her eyes never left the wreckage.

She spun around to face the containment structure, and her heart sank.

What remained of the barrier was a lie. It was no longer a containment structure; it was a graveyard of broken magic.

The root network had recoiled like severed tendons under the violent force of the substrate disruption, the anchor points snapping in a sickening, rhythmic sequence—CRACK... SNAP... THWIP—starting from the north section Nerith had been desperately reinforcing.

The ice wall was a ruin; the deep anchors Mireya had driven into the bedrock still held at the base, but the upper tiers had been pulverized by the tail’s lateral strike. The once mighty wall was now nothing more than a collection of jagged, isolated pillars, standing like broken teeth against the sky.

It wasn’t a defense. It was debris with architectural pretension.

Elizabeth had been standing at the analytical periphery, far enough to escape the dragon’s sweeping wrath, but she was far from safe. Her eyes moved with terrifying, mechanical speed, calculating the widening chasm between their dwindling defensive capacity and the dragon’s escalating ferocity.

The math was brutal. The gap was widening, and the numbers were bleeding out.

"Nerith!" Elizabeth’s voice cut through the chaos, sharp and commanding.

"The anchor network is gone," Nerith replied.

She was standing in the middle of the street, her eyes rolled back slightly, her hands trembling. Through the druid channel, the collapse of the living network hadn’t just been a visual event; it had been a physical trauma.

The feedback of the dying roots had surged through her, a phantom sensation of snapping wood and tearing earth that made her skin crawl. Her voice was steady, but it carried the hollow, haunted quality of someone who had just felt a part of her own soul being ripped away.

"The substrate is too unstable... I can rebuild in approximately four minutes... if the ground settles."

"But the earthquake residue is still propagating through the deep channels...|"

"Anything I try to anchor now will just be torn apart by the next seismic wave."

"The dragon is not going to give us four minutes," Elizabeth snapped, her eyes fixed on the beast’s massive, heaving flank.

"I know," Nerith whispered, the realization settling like ash in her throat.

Then, the dragon moved.

It lifted its massive, scarred head from the ruins of the containment structure. The beast let out a low, guttural rumble that vibrated in the very marrow of their bones, a sound of pure, unadulterated confusion and rising rage.

Its bond link was still flickering, a stuttering connection, but the interference was fading. As the magical static cleared, the dragon began to receive its orientation signal once more.

But the signal was broken. The rider had gone down.

The rider had not given a return instruction. To a bonded dragon, a silent rider wasn’t just an absence; it was a command for primal, instinctual reactions.

Without a directive, the dragon defaulted to its most basic, terrifying programming: territorial defense of the last known position.

The last known position was Aethelgard. And the dragon was preparing to purge it.

Elizabeth watched the beast’s head turn. She tracked the movement with the cold, clinical precision of an academic mage, her mind mapping the behavioral architecture of the creature.

She was looking for the target, the source of the disruption, the source of the "noise" that had interrupted its bond. She expected the dragon to lunge at the mages, at the healers, at the source of the earthquake.

But as the dragon’s massive, reptilian eye swiveled, Elizabeth’s breath hitched. Her eyes widened, her face draining of color as she realized the creature wasn’t aiming for the center of the fray.

"It is not looking at us," she whispered, her voice trembling with a sudden, chilling dread.

Mireya’s gaze followed the dragon’s predatory focus, her eyes tracking the massive, reptilian head as it pivoted. The beast wasn’t looking at the mages, the warriors, or the wreckage.

It was looking past them.

It was staring at the wide, desolate expanse of the eastern market district, the cleared killing field where the noncombatants had been shoved by the tide of war. The place where the survivors of the Nightwing household had huddled in terror.

Where Iris was. And where Aurelia was right now after they’re evacuated from the fight.

"The territorial response is seeking the largest open space," Elizabeth said.

The clinical, detached tone of the scholar had vanished, replaced by the sharp, staccato urgency of a commander realizing a catastrophe is in motion. "To a dragon without a directive, an open space isn’t just ground; it’s defensible terrain."

"It’s a throne... It isn’t targeting the people, Mireya..."

"It is targeting the very space they are standing in."

"Then they need to get out of its way!" Mireya barked, her boots already churning the dust as she lunged forward.

"The dragon is between us and them!" Elizabeth shouted, her voice a whipcrack of reality.

Mireya skidded to a halt, the grit spraying from her heels. She looked at the dragon’s hulking, armored mass, then at the eastern plaza, and finally at the distance between them.

The geometry was a nightmare. Elizabeth was right, in that infuriating, mathematically perfect way that made Mireya want to scream.

The beast was a living wall of muscle and scale, standing directly in the path of any rescue.

"Can we reapply the bond disruption?" Mireya demanded, her eyes burning. "Can we blind it again?"

"Not with what we have left!" Elizabeth replied, her hands glowing with the fading embers of her mana. "The counter frequency working drained my reserves to the dregs."

"That specific channel needs twenty minutes to recalibrate... I have other workings, but they are useless for a brute force engagement of this scale."

"What do you have?" Mireya hissed.

"Academic class at depleted capacity!" Elizabeth snapped back. "Taxonomy, structural analysis, identification... but nothing in the combat output category that can stop a mountain of scales moving at terminal velocity!"

Mireya didn’t have time to argue. She turned her head toward the garden wall.

"Lily! Status report! Now!"

"My healing is at twelve percent!" Lily’s voice drifted back, strained and thin. "The light affinity barrier is possible, but it’ll be a single layer shell."

’It won’t hold a direct impact from a creature of that mass... It’ll shatter like glass."

"I’m not asking you to hold a direct hit!" Mireya yelled, her mind racing through the physics of the battlefield. "Can you redirect?"

A heavy, pained silence followed.

"If the impact angle is glancing..." Lily’s voice came back, breathless. "A glancing redirect is within twelve percent."

"But if it hits head on? It’ll punch through before the magic even settles."

Mireya’s eyes darted to the dragon’s current position near the western ruins. "The open space is to the east..."

"If the dragon approaches from the west side of the containment ruins, its approach vector is roughly thirty degrees off axis from us."

"If you place a barrier at the left edge of that vector, you can catch it on a slant and whip it toward the northern rubble zone!"

"I need to be on the left edge of the approach vector to anchor it!" Lily shouted.

"Then move!" Mireya commanded.

A moment later, Lily appeared, vaulting the garden wall. She didn’t land with her usual grace; her left knee buckled with a sickening pop and crunch as she hit the ground, her face contorting in a silent grimace of agony.

Her healing magic was working frantically, the flesh knitting and the bone resetting in a wet, microscopic frenzy, but she was still limping, her movement a forced, rhythmic struggle to hide the limp. She scrambled toward the calculated position, her breath coming in ragged, desperate bursts.

"The barrier is going up!" Lily cried, her hands trembling as she began to weave the light.

A shimmering, translucent veil of gold began to coalesce in the air. "At current reserves, it holds for forty seconds against passive contact."

"But if that dragon hits it at full speed... assume fifteen seconds of survival!"

"Diana!" Mireya roared, looking toward the street. "I need the left shoulder gap! Same coordinates as the last engagement!"

"I’m on the eastern street level!" Diana’s voice came back, her breathing heavy and rhythmic, the sound of someone mid-sprint. "The approach vector puts me behind the beast once it starts moving!"

"I don’t have the angle!"

"Then find the angle!" Mireya screamed, her voice raw with the sheer tension of the moment. "Find it or we’re all dead!"

"Working on it!" Diana yelled back, the sound of her boots slamming against the cobblestones, thud, thud, thud, echoing through the district as she threw herself into a desperate, high-speed maneuver.