Chapter 627: Tier 6 [Bonus - ]

Chapter 627: Tier 6 [Bonus Chapter]

"Haha. Very funny," Number 5 replied with her voice so dry and flat it could have ignited the desert dust.

The Fifth Seat of the World Council was currently dangling through the freezing five-thousand-foot air like an unruly stray cat, suspended by the collar of her oversized ceremonial robes, which were clamped firmly within Kara’s single muscular right hand.

Number 5 wore a voluminous mantle of deep midnight-violet silk, heavily embroidered with spinning platinum compass-roses along the hems.

Her face was completely hidden behind an ornate half-moon porcelain mask of black and silver that revealed only the sharp line of her chin and a pair of dark unblinking eyes that were currently glaring at Kara with venom.

’Ah, she looks so cute.’

RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMBLE!

A violent earth-shaking updraft tore through the sky, causing the air around them to violently rock but it wasn’t because of the wind.

It was because they were standing or rather, Kara was standing, and Number 5 was dangling upon the armored crimson back of dragon.

Talira.

The Crimson Dragon had fully shed her humanoid guise.

She spanned eighty paces from horned snout to barbed tail with her scales burning like polished rubies forged in the core of a star.

Every beat of her massive, bat-like wings displaced hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of air, creating howling horizontal vortexes that shredded the low-altitude clouds and sent smaller rift-beasts tumbling out of the sky like crushed insects.

"Keep your wings level, girl!" Kara called down, tapping the dragon’s spine with her leather boot. "Head straight toward that monstrosity climbing out of the sky! Anything with teeth that enters your flight corridor... delete it!"

"GRAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Talira let out a heaven-shattering roar that shook the teeth inside Number 5’s skull.

"BY YOUR WILL, MY LORD!" the dragon’s voice echoed directly into their minds, booming with the joy of a beast finally permitted to hunt without restraint.

’Is it just me or did she learn telepathy too? What a cheat!’

From the left, a swarm of forty six-legged bone-gargoyles dove from a rift with their barbed talons clicking as they converged on the dragon’s flank however Talira didn’t even adjust her rudder.

FWOOSH-CRACK!

With a terrifying snap of her wings, two colossal whirlpools of superheated compressed air exploded outward.

The pressure crushed the lead twenty gargoyles instantly with their stone-and-bone frames imploding into powder before they could get within fifty yards and for the twenty surviving beasts that managed to claw through the gale...?

KRAAAAA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Talira raised her serpentine neck, her throat glowing with an incandescent white-hot radiance that illuminated the dark sky!

She opened her jaws, releasing a torrential three-hundred-foot cone of pure draconic flame.

WHOOOOSH!

The fire was so terrifyingly hot that the oxygen in the surrounding air combusted into an instantaneous vacuum!

The gargoyles were erased at the molecular level with their physical mass vaporized into drifting white sparks before the roaring flame-plume tore through three more rift fissures, searing the edges of space until the rifts themselves hissed and closed shut.

"Good girl," Kara murmured, reaching down with her boot to tap the dragon’s armored crest.

The massive crimson lizard’s snout subtly twitched and beneath her thick ruby scales, a ridiculous flush of pink crept across her nostrils.

"E-Ehehe..." Talira rumbled internally, sounding less like a dragon and more like a pampered guard dog whose head had just been scratched. "It was nothing, My Lord... mere pests..."

Kara gave an amused chuckle, finally swinging her arm inward and dropping the Fifth Seat onto the broad flat ridge of scales between Talira’s shoulder blades.

Number 5 hit the warm scales with a soft rustle of silk, immediately smoothing down the crumpled folds of her robes with her posture stiff as a board as she sat cross-legged, refusing to look up.

"You are thoroughly insufferable, Kara White," Number 5 grumbled behind her porcelain mask. "I am an elder of the World Council... I am not a sack of turnips to be hauled around by the scruff of my neck."

"You looked like a turnip," Kara grinned, resting her right hand on her hip, her dark cloak thrashing wildly in the turbine-like slipstream. "And besides, I’m still thoroughly pissed off at you. What happened to our lovely professional relationship? We walked through the World Vault together, you helped me pick out some exquisite toys, and the very moment we concluded our business... you dumped me straight into the Sector Six slums like a bag of wet laundry!"

Number 5 let out an exhausted suffering breath through her mask.

"We were inside a classified room," Number 5 retorted, her voice dripping with dry disdain. "I fulfilled the World King’s mandate by guiding you through the treasury tiers, however I was under zero administrative obligation to provide a luxury limousine ride back to your private estate... When did equipment retrieval constitute a lifelong bond of friendship?"

"Oh, so we’re strangers now?" Kara scoffed, taking two strides across the dragon’s scales, leaning down until her face was three inches from the porcelain mask.

PINCH!

Kara reached out with two fingers and aggressively pinched the soft, fleshy tip of Number 5’s left ear through the edge of her cowl.

"Isn’t that a remarkably rude way to speak to the person who literally saved your life bare minutes ago?" Kara teased, giving the ear a firm, playful tug.

Number 5’s head snapped sideways with her hands flying up to swat Kara’s fingers away and her porcelain mask tilting with murderous indignation.

Now that Kara could see her face... it seemed the woman got pissed off more quickly.

"You did NOT save my life!" Number 5 hissed through clenched teeth.

Kara crossed her single arm, raising an eyebrow with disbelief.

"Really? Because from where I was standing, a four-legged gore-hound had dropped directly out of an alley roof, was mid-leap toward your delicate little spine, and its teeth were approximately four inches from your jugular when I casually incinerated it with a bolt of magic."

"I was aware of the beast!" Number 5 snarled, her voice pitching up with uncharacteristic frustration. "I was in the middle of executing a continuous high-precision spatial inversion across sixty-four shelters! My sensory field is three hundred miles wide! You think a common trench-hound could sneak past my perception?! I had twelve microscopic spatial blades already calibrated around its throat... The moment its momentum carried it three inches closer, it would have been sliced into carpaccio and then you dropped from the sky, blasted it with fire, and began parading around proclaiming you were my heroic savior!"

"Uh-huh," Kara smirked, sounding unimpressed. "And if we asked the satellites, who does the combat log say struck the killing blow?"

Number 5 went silent with her small hands clenched into tight fists against her silk knees.

She couldn’t argue because nobody would ever believe her.

The entire council would assume she had been cornered like a novice and rescued by the new darling of the Exhibition.

Number 5 let out a sharp bitter scoff, turning her head away to stare out at the burning city, refusing to give Kara the satisfaction of another word.

Kara stood above her with the teasing smirk slowly fading from her lips. Her dark eyes narrowed, drifting over the small, cloaked figure sitting on the dragon’s back.

’It’s just like I thought...’ Silas mused in the quiet fortress of his mind.

Ever since the battle in the deep chamber... ever since he had struck Ititius with those six consecutive soul-reversal strikes, something fundamental had permanently shifted behind his eyes.

He didn’t need to channel mana to see it at all.

If he unfocused his gaze by a fraction of a millimeter... if he pushed his intent beyond the physical world of meat, bone, and cloth... the world peeled away.

He could see the Soul.

’Ah...’

He had tried experimenting with it on the flight up from the crater, but he had quickly hit an impenetrable wall.

There were no manuals for this.

In the modern world, cultivation was strictly categorized into physical body, elemental affinities, and territorial domains.

There were no scrolls in the libraries that taught "Soul Magic" and no grandmaster walked the academies offering courses on how to shape the spirit.

’Fuck...’

He was essentially stuck since he had been granted the rare ocular perception to gaze directly into the spiritual architecture of living beings, yet possessed zero methods to manipulate it beyond hitting it with raw Gold Core power.

And looking down at Number 5...

Silas felt a genuine cold prickle of unease crawl across his scalp.

Inside the physical chest of the small, masked woman, there wasn’t a single clean soul-core.

There was a swirling turbulent vortex.

A dozen different spiritual essences... flaring in vivid discordant hues of crimson, emerald, pale gold, and deep violet were revolving around a central, lightless axis like planets caught in the gravitational pull of a dying star.

Each soul carried a distinct resonance, whispering against the spiritual ether with voices that didn’t sound like hers.

’What the hell is she?’ Silas wondered, his pulse hitching. ’That’s not a single human... That’s a walking graveyard of bound spirits.’

Number 5 suddenly flinched.

Her spine stiffened, her masked head whipping around to lock her dark eyes straight onto Kara’s face.

"Stop that," Number 5 said, her voice dropping into a quiet, raspy, and genuinely chilling register. "It feels like you’re peeling the skin off my brain and staring directly into my soul... It is exceptionally grotesque."

Kara blinked, forcing her optical focus back to the physical plane with an innocent breezy shrug.

"Just admiring your lovely posture. You sit like an empress."

Number 5 glared at her through the slit visors of the porcelain mask, her tone hardening into a strict deadly warning.

"Listen to me closely, Kara White," Number 5 murmured. "I do not know what peculiar eye spell you unlocked down in that basement, and frankly, I do not care but do not attempt to pry into the spiritual architecture of high-ranking people... Entities who have crossed the threshold of the Fourth and Fifth Stages possess souls that are not merely dense, they are armed... If you stare too deeply into a being whose spiritual sensitivity exceeds your own, the backlash will crack your core before you can blink. You will invite an exceptionally early grave."

Kara held up her single hand, offering a dry placating chuckle.

"Alright, alright. Message received though I wasn’t staring at your soul or whatever... I just like how small you are."

Yet, Silas filed the warning away in the back of his mind.

’A graveyard of souls,’ he thought. ’I’ll deal with whatever that means later... Right now, we have a bigger carcass to butcher.’

Both women turned their faces toward the heavens as the atmosphere around Talira’s climbing silhouette had grown freezing cold.

Directly ahead, at ten thousand feet of elevation, the primary tear in the sky hung like a bleeding wound across the ceiling of the world.

The edges of the rift were weeping dark purple spatial discharge, vibrating with a sound that made the scales on Talira’s spine rattle.

And reaching out through the center of that void... was the arm, when Kara had seen it from three miles away, it had looked like a terrifying monolith.

But being seen from two hundred yards away, the scale was mind-shattering...

It was an arm forged entirely from petrified yellowed bone... easily the size of an eight-story residential tenement block.

The wrist was a tangled mass of calcified tendons that creaked like ancient ship timbers as the titanic hand flexed its fingers.

The bone was pitted with hundreds of deep, hollow fissures where thousands of screaming weeping humanoid skulls were embedded directly into the marrow, their empty eye sockets dripping with sickly green ethereal fire.

The fingers... each eighty feet long, tipped with jagged obsidian-like talons were clamped firmly over the outer edge of the dimensional rift, hauling a shadowed shoulder through the tear!

Number 5 stared up at the monstrosity with her posture growing rigid and the casual irritation on her face completely vanishing beneath her mask.

"That entity..." Number 5 whispered, her voice tightening with grim assessment, "...is operating at Tier 6. At the very least."

Kara narrowed her eyes, assessing the oppressive mass of the thing. "Tier 6, huh?"

"It is out of our league," Number 5 stated flatly. "In the classifications of the Sovereign Realm, a Tier 6 monster is a regional catastrophe... It possesses enough mass and power to flatten an entire city like Iunu in an afternoon... Our current priority must be containing the breach, not engaging in suicidal heroics."

Kara let out a soft amused scoff, rolling her right shoulder back.

"Come now, Number 5," Kara smirked, her raspy voice dripping with casual, unbothered arrogance. "Don’t be such a pessimist... I’ve taken down a Tier 5 monster before and that was before I grew my second arm back though I’ve cut it off... A Tier 6 is just a Tier 5 that ate too much calcium. We can take it."