Last Born Of The Desdemona

Chapter 378: Chapter 378: We Lost the Little Boy

Chapter 378 – We Lost the Little Boy

Cassius knew he had no other choice. The gravity still pressed down on him, choking him from within. And the barrier he’d placed around his three teammates was cracking, on the verge of collapse.

He didn’t have much time left. He had to act now, and hope for the best. Hope...that was the only thing he had left, standing in front of a Fourth Rank being.

He could have summoned Scarlet in that moment. Or at least called out and waited for her answer. But that was exactly the problem.

His relationship with his spirit was still a reluctant one, and the Last Born had neither the time nor the spare energy for that kind of negotiation with a death sentence hanging over him.

So he decided to handle it alone.

As Cassius thought it through, he realized the most effective way to fatally wound a dragon of this caliber was to strike from the inside, not its scale-armored body.

So that was what he did. He drove both hands into the beast’s mouth, up to his elbows, vanishing into the darkness of its jaws.

The dragon’s mouth bulged, its teeth sinking deep into his flesh, its eyes reopening after the blinding flash of plasma had scorched them shut.

They were red, and bleeding.

But the beast didn’t pause to think. Instinctively, sensing danger screaming through it, it clamped its jaws shut with everything it had, and then some.

By then, though, Cassius had already acted. Using blood manipulation, he seized control of much of the dragon’s own blood with precise mastery, and detonated it, all at once.

The explosion inside the beast’s body tore a muffled, agonized roar through the entire steel dome, scales cracking and sloughing off its body. Blood poured from its eyes, mouth, and every orifice, its cries alone enough to gauge the pain.

But the dragon’s jaws stayed clamped shut. Which meant Cassius remained trapped in front of it, taking the full brunt of the shockwave. His ears burst, and his lungs collapsed under the sudden, staggering spike in gravity.

The ground around the dome caved inward.

Cassius’s eyes nearly rolled back, his breathing growing agonizingly difficult. That was when the dragon snapped its head hard to the left, tearing off both of Cassius’s arms, then swallowing them whole.

Its worst the mistake yet.

Cassius grinned through the agony threatening to knock him unconscious, blood dripping down his face.

He staggered, swaying on his feet.

Gritting his teeth, he used the control he still held over his severed arms and turned the two limbs into a vessel with every ounce of his concentrated Burn Truth plasma packed inside.

Which meant that, in that instant, his two severed arms were made of volatile, destructive red plasma, crackling gold lightning plasma twisting endlessly on itself, and corrosive purple plasma that ruined anything it touched.

He forced all three plasmas together, deliberately unstable, to create maximum friction between them.

The beast instantly dropped to its knees, feeling its insides on the verge of being annihilated.

Cassius couldn’t stop there. He couldn’t afford to. If his arms detonated where they were, he and his teammates would all be caught in the blast.

They’d die instantly, him first, given his current state.

So he took the blood still spilling from his stumps, along with the blood already pooled on the ground, and shaped it into makeshift arms.

He grasped the dragon with them, and it felt as though the heavens themselves were held between his hands of blood. The weight was unimaginable.

But Cassius detonated the blood inside him and the blood forming his hands at once — feeding fresh blood into them as he went — then, with a sudden surge from his Sun Core wrapping gold plasma around himself...

...he spun with the force of a storm and hurled the howling, maddened dragon straight into the steel wall of the dome.

At the same time, using Nourishment to heal his ruptured lungs and reattach his arms, he sprinted towards his three sleeping teammates.

Before he reached them, the dragon’s insides detonated at the exact instant it hit the wall.

A wide, gaping hole tore open in the steel, and the dragon flew straight through it.

Cassius reached his teammates and jolted William awake by deactivating his Blessing, then slapped the daylights out of him with a hand made of blood.

William snapped upright, his sense of danger screaming at him. He turned to Cassius and froze, the sight before him chilled his heart.

"D-Diaila!" Cassius shouted, voice hoarse, pointing at her while he scooped Meadow into his arms.

William understood instantly. No questions asked, he grabbed Diaila, and the two of them flew out through the hole the dragon had torn open.

The moment they cleared it, high in the sky, they looked around and saw nothing but a sprawling expanse of black forest, black trees crowned in blue leaves and grey fruit stretching in every direction.

They didn’t even have time to consider where they were before a roar echoed from the distance.

Cassius was utterly stunned.

’Still alive??’

His blood ran cold. "Run! Now!!"

His body blurred as he plunged down into the black forest, running without any sense of direction. William followed close behind, his mind still struggling to grasp what had just happened.

Behind them, the maddened dragon kept roaring, sounds of destruction echoing from where they’d left it.

But the two of them just ran. At some point, Cassius could no longer sustain his Blessing, and both Meadow and Diaila jolted awake mid-flight.

Diaila reacted so violently she threw William off-balance, and the two of them slammed face-first into the ground. They hit with such speed their noses were bleeding on impact.

Cassius didn’t stop. If he had, he doubted he’d have found the strength to start running again with his current wounds.

Meadow knew it too, so she activated two healing artifacts to speed his recovery while she scanned the surroundings, her face tight with horror and seriousness, trying to figure out where they were.

Behind them, William, in a flash of anger, knocked Diaila unconscious with a blow to the neck, showing no mercy. Part of him wouldn’t have minded if she’d died right there.

But he swallowed the impulse, gathered her into his arms, and pushed himself to keep pace with Cassius as best he could.

They lost track of how long they ran, or how many times they had to change course to dodge monsters, but at some point, the dragon’s roar finally faded behind them.

Not long after, the four students stumbled onto an enormous black tree, a wide hollow carved into its trunk.

They should have had a thousand questions. But they didn’t stop to ask any of them.

Cassius dove in first, landing in a dark, hollow space littered with old bones, big enough for five people. He collapsed instantly, his blood-formed hands splashing apart against the ground.

William followed close behind and, without ceremony, tossed Diaila aside like a piece of trash. Then he sealed the hollow shut with his formless sword essence.

Meadow came in after and set up three Tier 5 artifacts, meant purely to mask their presence.

Once that was done, she turned to Cassius, unsure what to do.

"What... what just happened?" she blurted, staring at him, armless, her chest tightening painfully. "Did you actually fight that thing? Are you insane, Cassius??"

Cassius coughed, blood spraying out. His eyelids threatened to fall shut, but he forced them open.

Honestly, he wished he knew the answer himself. Everything had happened so fast he was still piecing it together. He’d acted only because he’d known they’d all die otherwise.

All he understood was that someone wanted his left eye, someone likely high-ranking within the Academy, connected somehow to a race of dragons, whose subordinates carried weapons resembling guns.

Guns. Something that wasn’t even supposed to exist in this world. So how was that possible?

The questions were endless, but there were more urgent matters to deal with.

"It’s fine," he said, glancing at his empty shoulders. "I’ll... regrow them fast enough."

And that was true, thanks to what he’d arranged when he’d lost his arms fighting Emrys during the Entrance Test.

He’d asked the Eye of the Divine for arms that would remain useful regardless of his power level.

Cassius realized how important that detail was now. Because he could regrow his arms even after losing them entirely. They weren’t ordinary arms, after all.

All he needed was blood, lightning, shadow-based materials, and a substantial amount of fire-aligned essence and spirit essence.

And given his status as Lightbringer, Prince of the Fire State, spirit essence wouldn’t be an issue.

As for the blood and other materials...

"You have them, don’t you?" he asked Meadow weakly.

She nodded, lips pressed thin, and pulled all the ingredients out of her space ring.

"Need a hand?" William suddenly asked, watching Cassius seriously, unsure what to feel.

The Last Born smiled, blood trickling down his chin. "Just cover my mouth when I start screaming."

And William did.

...

At the same time, four figures, faces hidden beneath dark cloaks bearing the symbol of a howling, pained dragon stitched in red across their backs, stood a fair distance from where the steel dome had once stood.

A dome that no longer existed.

Nothing of these four could be seen except their hands, clearly human, but with nails a deep, unnatural black.

Each of them also wore a bangle of dark metal on their left wrist, etched with crimson words in some unknown language.

All four stared at the man who’d fought Cassius, now nearly back to his human form, gravely wounded, drenched in blood, unconscious on the ground.

The silence between them stretched, uncomfortably sterile, until finally a small yet commanding voice broke it,

"We lost the little boy."

—End of Chapter 378—