Noah felt as wards slid into place one after another, each one settling over the building like a layer of pressure added to the air.
He felt them in sequence, with the spatial suppression ing last, closing over the bar like the lid being placed over a bucket.
Noah felt it and laughed to himself. If they believed that was enough to hold him, they had not been paying enough attention.
He didn't bother to do anything about it though, staying where he was and watching the door.
The elite soldiers came in first, fanning out around him. Just like the soldiers Arlo had brought two days ago, they filled the available space, their spell formations already burning above their palms.
He could tell that these soldiers were a cut above the ones he'd faced. They covered all the angles in the room like a net being drawn closed around a fish.
When they finally settled in place, Daisy entered the room, her expression carefully blank. It was clear that Arlo had reported his capabilities to them, and she'd attended every briefing.
Behind her came a shorter hooded figure that he recognized. He'd seen her before. Irina Valey, the S-rank mage capable of casting spells above her level. Or to be more precise, SS-rank spells.
She moved to the side without being directed, her eyes finding Noah immediately and staying there.
Then the last figure came through the door. The same person, or entity, that Noah had been waiting for.
He'd been expecting it. Had known, with the particular certainty of someone sensing their own presence in a room, that this was ing.
The shape was made of corporal darkness, the shadow wearing his face and his dimensions.
The soul shard stopped just inside the doorway.
"Hello, me," Noah said.
The shard said nothing.
"We meet again, Noah Webb." Daisy's voice was level and professional, carrying the tone of someone opening a negotiation.
Noah's hand moved.
The sword of darkness crossed the distance before the sentence had finished, entering one side of Daisy's head and exiting the other, blood spurting through the air.
The room went pletely silent.
Noah hadn't taken his eyes off his soul shard even once.
"Shut up," he said.
To the side, Daisy's corpse met the floor.
There was a moment of stunned silence before bone erupted from the floor beneath him.
This was Irina's attack, designed to kill him in one hit, but before it could fully materialize, Noah's Feast appeared, its maw opening, darkness rising from beneath Noah's feet and consuming the bone.
Irina's darkness came immediately after, pouring into the maw in a sustained push, the two forces meeting and grinding against each other in the space between them.
The soldiers read it as their signal.
The spells came from every direction at once, the formations they had been holding releasing in a coordinated burst.
Noah moved before the light finished leaving the first caster's hand, his body finding the gaps in the crossfire with the particular ease of someone whose perception had long since outpaced what even an elite mage could track.
A beam of light passed close enough to his face that he felt the heat of it against his nose.
His sword was already moving, finding the soldiers as he passed through them.
Irina's attacks followed him through the chaos, bone and darkness working in bination, adapting to his movement with the intelligence of a veteran who had fought unpredictable opponents before.
He swung one hand backwards without fully turning and sent a wave of decay through the bone structures, the material destabilizing and crumbling before it could plete its shapes. His own darkness held hers at bay, preventing her from using it against him.
Then the soul shard came.
It moved through the battlefield without interacting with it, passing through the residual spell energy and the fallen soldiers as if neither existed.
It was still B-rank, but that didn't matter because the shard was a soul, and that meant physical attacks lost their effectiveness against it. It materialized claws and slashed.
Noah ducked the attack, feeling the displacement of air above his head, and used the same motion to drive his elbow into one of Irina's bone constructs as it closed in from the side, shattering it on the downswing.
He fired one of his area of effect spells, and a pulse of energy spread outwards from him in a ring, the S-rank attack lighting up the interior of the bar. And in a single move, he'd killed the remaining soldiers.
The shard slashed again, but this time, Noah stepped into the attack rather than away from it, letting it pass his ear, and closed his hand around the shard's neck.
With a snarl, he pivoted, using the shard's own momentum to swing it across the room.
It hit Irina's darkness like a projectile.
The spell caught it, darkness coiling around the struggling shard, and for a moment Irina was focused on controlling what had been thrown at her rather than on what was ing next.
The shard dropped as her grip adjusted, and her vision cleared.
Noah's hand was already there, wreathed in fire, moving faster than the adjustment she tried to make.
The fire consumed her pletely. They surged over her body in an instant, and when they finished, there was nothing left of Irina Valey that hadn't bee ash drifting down to the blood soaked floor.
Noah reached down and closed his hand around the soul shard before it could recover its orientation.
He felt it struggle, felt the strange doubled sensation of holding something that was himself fighting back against him.
"Feast," he said.
The maw of darkness opened and swallowed the shard.
Immediately, a prompt appeared before him.
[Soul Shard detected! Threshold met!]
[Would you like to advance or gain a new affinity?]
He didn't hesitate in his choice. "Advance."
The mana came from everywhere at once, moving through him, starting from the cellular level, remaking things that hadn't been touched since the Dragon's energy had first merged with his soul.
He felt it as a pure sensation of ecstasy, as if he was being remade into what he was always meant to be.
A few seconds later, the sensation subsided. Then the notification appeared.
[Congratulations! You have ascended to SSS-rank.]
[100% synchronization with Abyssal Energy plete.]
Noah could feel it beneath his skin. He could instinctively tell what the hundred percent synchronization to Abyssal Energy meant.
The Dark Dragon was no longer something merged with him.
It was him.
Which meant the transformation was no longer theoretical. He could actually transform himself into a dragon. That was why every advancement came with its own reward.
First it had been horns and claws, then the tail and the wings, each part synching until now, when it all took shape.
He was a Dark Dragon.
He had barely begun to process it when the roof came off.
The wood and beams tore away in a single motion, daylight pouring into the bar.
Noah looked up to see two figures hovering in the open sky above him, their mana filling the air between them.
High Magus Edric on the left, and the Stormborn on the right.
Both of them looking down at him.
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