Chapter 770: 770. They’re Going To Have So Many Question About This! (No Worries...)

The silence that followed the impact was more deafening than the collision itself. They stared at one another for two agonizing seconds, a lifetime in the heat of a battlefield.

The dragon’s eye, a massive, slitted orb of molten gold, was positioned at a height roughly level with Rex’s chest, forcing him to tilt his head back. Rex didn’t look up with fear or even the frantic adrenaline of a survivor; he looked up with the terrifying, calm patience of a man who had already written the final Chapter of this encounter and was simply waiting for the beast to catch up to the conclusion.

"You are going to move now," Rex said.

The command wasn’t directed at the trembling Iris or the breathless Aurelia. It was directed at the mountain of scales and fury.

His voice wasn’t a shout; it was a calm, conversational statement, the tone of someone addressing a minor inconvenience, a misplaced tool, or a sudden rainstorm that had been identified and categorized and was now being told how to rectify itself.

The dragon’s nostrils flared, a violent HSSSSSSS of hot, sulfurous steam erupting from its snout, smelling of old blood and scorched earth.

"I understand that your rider has not given you a return instruction," Rex continued, his voice steady despite the dragon’s massive weight still pressing against his hands.

CREEEAK.

"That is not my problem to solve for you..."

"This city is my problem... The people in it are my problem..."

"You are currently in my city, pressing your weight against my hands, and I have been awake for a very long time... so we are going to resolve this quickly."

From behind his broad shoulders, Iris spoke. Her voice was a whisper, unnervingly quiet and flat, as if her brain were trying to insulate itself from the madness of the moment.

"Rex... are you actually talking to the dragon?"

"It is less efficient than using geological awareness, but it is more direct," Rex replied, not bothering to turn around.

He didn’t need to; he could feel their presence behind him like a part of his own shadow. "It helps to give things clear instructions."

"Even things that cannot follow instructions in the conventional sense... They read intent."

"Does it even... understand you?" Aurelia asked.

Her voice had finally shed the strangled, nonverbal sob of a moment ago. It had hardened into the sharp, brittle tone of a woman forcing herself to function in a nightmare, using logic as a shield against the sheer impossibility of the scene.

"Probably not the words," Rex said, his eyes never leaving the reptilian slit of the beast’s eye. "But the intent? Yes. They are very good at reading intent."

The dragon let out a sound, a low, vibrating RRRRRRRUMBLE that shook the very marrow in their bones. It wasn’t an aggressive roar, not like the war cries from before.

It was a deep, guttural hum, the sound of a massive biological processor running a behavioral evaluation. The beast was recalculating.

It was staring at the man who should have been a crushed smear of red meat on the pavement but was instead standing like an iron pillar.

Rex slowly lowered his hands, the tension in his arms rippling through his muscles. He looked at the creature with the weary, knowing patience of a veteran who had seen this exact brand of arrogance before.

The dragon did not move. It hovered there, caught in the gravitational pull of Rex’s presence.

"The geological anchor is currently defining my position as a fixed point relative to the island’s substrate," Rex explained to the women, his tone remaining maddeningly casual, as if he were lecturing in a quiet classroom rather than standing in a crater. "A fixed point at a geological scale does not yield to large animal force."

"The dragon has just processed that I did not move when it expected me to break..."

"That is the specific experience that most apex predators find deeply, fundamentally confusing."

"It is doing what all confused large animals do: it is reassessing its survival odds."

"How long..." Aurelia swallowed hard, her eyes wide as she watched the dragon’s pupils dilate and contract. "How long does the reassessment take?"

"Approximately," Rex began.

SNAPP!

He didn’t get to finish. The dragon completed its reassessment with a violent, sudden snap of realization.

It was faster than the Academy’s xenobiological texts had ever suggested; mature dragons didn’t just think they reacted to anomalies with a terrifying, predatory speed. The confusion in the beast’s eyes vanished, replaced by a sudden, sharp, and lethal clarity.

Then, he threw it.

He didn’t use his hands. He didn’t need the crude leverage of muscle when he possessed the terrifying, surgical precision of molecular telekinesis.

Rex reached into the very heart of the beast, finding the dragon’s center of mass with a mental grip that bypassed scales and bone. He didn’t fight the dragon’s massive, forward surging momentum; he hijacked it.

He took the colossal kinetic energy the beast had spent so much effort building and, with a violent, invisible wrench, redirected it upward and backward.

WHHHH OOMP!

The dragon didn’t just fly; it was launched. It was hurled into the sky above. Aethelgard with a sickening, reluctant arc, the sound of its massive body tearing through the air like a cannonball SHHHHH WIP! as it was forced into a trajectory it had never intended to take.

Iris watched the golden speck ascend, her eyes wide, her breath hitching in her chest.

"You... you redirected its own momentum," she whispered, her voice trembling with the sheer physics of what she had just witnessed.

"The momentum was already there," Rex said, his voice a steady anchor in the chaos.

His eyes were glazed, tracking the dragon’s arc through the continuous, hyperaccelerated window of the Foresight. "Stopping a moving mass wastes energy."

"Redirecting it costs significantly less than generating new force from nothing."

"That is a very... calm way to describe throwing a dragon," Aurelia added, her voice tight.

She looked at him as if he were a stranger, a force of nature wearing the skin of a student.

But Rex was already gone. His mind had already leaped ahead.

Before the dragon had even cleared the height of the rooftops, he was already weaving the next sequence of destruction. His attention was split—a terrifying feat of mental multitasking—between the conversation behind him and the lethal trajectory in front of him.

"The calm part comes from knowing exactly what the next twelve seconds look like," Rex said.

As the words left his lips, the ground began to scream.

CRACK RUMBLE!

The Earthen Authority tore massive, jagged slabs of stone from the island’s substrate, pulling them upward with a violent, gravitational hunger. The stone constructs didn’t just fly; they were propelled like railgun slugs, following the dragon’s arc with the terrifying, precalculated precision of a god.

"The first construct is at the right wing’s apex," Rex commanded himself, his voice a rhythmic chant of tactical execution. "The second is at the tail intercept."

"The third and fourth... are at the approach angle from below."

He spoke as if he were reciting a grocery list while simultaneously performing a masterwork of art. His hands began to glow, the Elemental Mastery’s full compound expression building in his palms a swirling, violent vortex of raw, primordial power.

CRUNCH!

The first stone construct slammed into the dragon’s right wing at the very apex of its arc. The sound was a sickening explosion of bone and scale, KRA KOOOOM!, the wing buckling under the impact, sending a spray of dark, reptilian blood raining down toward the city below.

THWACK CRACK!

The second construct caught the tail just as the beast began its desperate, tumbling descent, snapping the massive appendage with a sound like a falling redwood tree.

Then came the killing blow. The third and fourth constructs surged upward from the depths of the city, intercepting the dragon from below.

But they weren’t just stones. Rex funneled the Elemental Mastery into the strike.

He poured white-hot fire into the impact, wrapped it in compressed, screaming winds to accelerate the thermal differential, and then at the exact microsecond the temperature gradient reached the threshold, he triggered the lightning.

KRA BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

The sky didn’t just light up; it shattered. A colossal discharge of elemental fury erupted at the dragon’s position, a blinding pillar of white, gold, and violet light that could be seen as far away as the outer agricultural districts.

It wasn’t just an attack; it was a localized apocalypse. The elements didn’t just hit the target; they merged into a singular, devastating force of elemental creation that pulverized everything in its path.

Mireya, watching from the edge of the battlefield, felt the shockwave rattle her teeth. She saw the morning sky ignite, a beautiful, terrifying bloom of destruction above the rooftops.

She felt the heavy, hollow sensation of watching a single man accomplish in four seconds what the six of them had spent twenty minutes of grueling, blood-soaked combat building toward.

She didn’t say a word. She simply filed the moment away in a mental folder labeled "Things to have complicated, existential crises about later."

The dragon’s energy signature, once a roaring, massive sun of life and fury, plummeted. In a matter of two seconds, it went from a godlike presence to a dead weight.

The light faded, leaving only a trail of smoke and the smell of ozone and burnt meat.

And then, the carcass came down.