Capítulo 741: Ready for her to be born
The fireballs stopped, suspended in the air, like an artificial firmant about to collapse.
The ice salamanders began to retreat—but it was too late. Their movent wasn’t escape. It was instinctive reaction. Reflex. Panic mixed with aggression.
And Strax?
Strax simply lowered his fingers.
A small gesture.
An absolute sentence.
The ceiling descended.
Not literally—but the fireballs plunged like inverted rain, shattering the air into incandescent trails. The hall echoed with a roar of sudden heat, so violent that rcedes felt her skin protest, even in the intense cold.
The salamanders reacted en masse.
A million blue eyes lit up at once.
The swarm advanced.
And Strax advanced too.
Not hastily.
Not furiously.
But with the cruel tranquility of one performing a natural duty.
He opened his mouth.
And exhaled.
Not ordinary fire—it was a concentrated, pure white beam of heat that expanded like a jet of light. Everything it touched lted instantly. Ice turned to vapor. Crystals turned to dust. Salamanders… turned to shadows.
The roar filled the hall.
rcedes scread, not from pain, but from the force of the heat explosion that pushed her hair back.
The egg in her arms pulsed—not from pain, but from pure contentnt.
Strax moved.
One step.
Another.
It was almost a dance—predatory, inevitable, ancestral.
The salamanders, once a cohesive and living mass, broke into disjointed waves. So tried to attack directly, launching jets of cutting ice.
Strax raised his hand and a circle of flas exploded around him, lting the attack as if it were snow in the sun.
Another salamander, larger, leaped from the ceiling with a shrill cry.
Strax swung its tail.
The creature was split in two before falling to the ground.
rcedes’ eyes widened.
“STRAX! YOU—”
He didn’t hear her.
Or rather: he couldn’t hear anything but what the egg showed him.
The instincts of the offspring.
The demands of the tomb.
The silent order to clear the territory.
The spheres of fire followed his command like disciplined soldiers. Each gesture of Strax transford the air into blades of heat, incandescent trails that cut, burned, vaporized.
The salamanders scread—a sharp, crystalline sound—and vanished in light.
In three minutes… yes, three minutes… half the hall was clear.
Molten crystals dripped down the walls.
The warm mist mingled with the continuous cold of the chamber, creating swirls of blue vapor.
rcedes trembled, no longer from fear, but from sothing indefinable.
Sothing between horror and fascination.
Because Strax… Strax didn’t seem to be fighting.
He seed to be reclaiming a place that had always been his.
The egg in his arms glowed intensely blue—so bright that the light pierced his coat, his skin, his vision.
And suddenly, all the remaining salamanders stopped.
Not because they were defeated.
But because they realized.
They realized who was there.
They realized what was about to be born.
The entire hall froze.
Strax took a deep breath, still illuminated by the flas evaporating into the air.
“There,” he murmured. “Now they understand.”
rcedes looked around. The floor was covered in small, burnt shadows, still freezing again at the edges.
The lted ice ford bluish puddles.
The steam rose like sacred smoke.
“D-do you understand… what…?” she whispered, almost voiceless.
Strax turned to her, his eyes burning with incandescent red.
“That this hall no longer belongs to them.”
He pointed to the egg.
“It belongs to her.”
The egg pulsed one last ti.
And then… silence.
Not like soone fading away—but like soone waiting.
Strax raised his face, still bathed in the blue glow and the last sparks of the massacre. The salamanders frozen in the hall—so still whole, others reduced to white outlines like ice ash—glead with a ghostly light.
rcedes barely breathed.
“Strax…? What are you going to—”
He raised his hand.
And everything around responded.
Not with heat.
But with cold.
A cold so intense that it made the air vibrate, cracking like glass about to shatter.
The salamanders’ bodies began to glow with an inner light—not fire, not life—but the remnant of their essence: the primordial energy that each creature there carried, inherited from the tomb, from the Empress, and from everything that slept beneath that ancient ice.
Light emanated from them like bluish threads, like luminescent mists ripped from the very air.
“Strax… STRAX… what are you doing?!” rcedes clutched the egg, as if that could protect her from whatever was happening.
Strax didn’t answer.
He was… connected.
His eyes stopped glowing red. They beca completely blue—the sa blue as the runes on the tomb, the sa blue as the egg, the sa blue as the salamanders that agonized in silence.
Their energy detached from their bodies, forming currents that floated through the air like ethereal serpents. Each small dead salamander beca a blue spark, a cold ember, that went straight to Strax’s outstretched hands.
And he absorbed it all.
rcedes took an involuntary step back, her heart pounding.
“This… this isn’t normal, Strax! Not even for you!”
The energy kept coming—an ever denser, ever colder flow. The floor was covered in a thin layer of newly ford ice, as if the heat itself had vanished from the room.
Strax opened his fingers.
The energy accumulated between his hands swirled.
First a point.
Then a circle.
Then a sphere.
A huge sphere—the size of the egg itself—ford of pure icy, blue-white energy, spinning in complex spirals like a small frozen planet.
rcedes could barely see Strax behind the light.
But she saw… sothing transform.
Sothing beneath the skin.
For a mont, his outline seed larger, more defined, closer to the dragon he always denied being entirely.
His tail glowed with runes.
His arms gained veins of pulsating blue light.
His fangs lengthened.
And the air around him grew so cold that rcedes saw her own breath freeze into tiny crystals.
Strax finally spoke, in a voice that seed to co from a place much deeper than his chest:
“Don’t worry.”
She felt her stomach sink.
“I’m not… worried.”
rcedes stared at him, offended and terrified at the sa ti.
“That doesn’t reassure !”
The sphere in his hands grew larger—now floating a hand’s breadth above his claws, spinning so fast it seed to bend the space around it.
The last salamanders dissolved into bluish dust.
Nothing remained of them.
Nothing but pure power.
Strax opened his arms.
And the sphere rose slowly, pulsing like a frozen heart.
“This belongs to her,” he said, pointing his chin at the egg. “All of this. All of this mory. All of this strength. All of this ice.”
rcedes gripped the egg even tighter.
“And you’re gathering all this for… for WHAT?!”
Strax smiled—a smile very different from the previous ones.
An ancient smile.
A smile that seed to precede language and history.
“To feed the egg.”
Strax took a step forward.
Slow. Deliberate. As if each movent needed to exist in absolute harmony with what he carried in his hands—that sphere of icy energy, imnse, compact, alive in a way that no elent should be.
The blue light pulsed like a primal heart, beating in a rhythm that the hall itself followed. The runes on the walls shimred in sync, as if the tomb were… waiting.
rcedes instinctively recoiled as Strax approached with the sphere.
“Food…? Strax… STRAX, THIS IS VITAL ENERGY! YOU— YOU CAN’T just—!”
“I can,” he replied calmly. “And I will.”
“That’s not feeding, it’s—it’s—it’s an infusion! You’ll explode the egg! Or—or I don’t know, wake it up with an overdose of ice!”
Strax didn’t look away.
“She asked for it.”
rcedes stifled a sob of pure terror.
“W-W-What?”
“Not with words.”
He raised his chin, indicating the egg in her arms.
“But she asked for it.”
The sphere in his hands vibrated—as if reacting to its own na, as if the offspring inside the egg had answered from afar.
The sound wasn’t a roar.
Nor a crack.
It was a call.
rcedes felt the weight in her arms shift. The egg, once heavy and inert, now seed… hungry.
“Strax, I—I don’t know if—”
“You don’t need to know.”
He stopped directly in front of her.
So close that rcedes felt her skin burn with cold.
The sphere shone even brighter… and then began to shrink.
Strax placed his hands around it, like a predator holding sothing infinitely fragile. His fingers closed slowly, compressing the energy with brute force and absolute control.
The sphere resisted.
It cracked.
It vibrated.
And then… it yielded.
The light, once imnse and chaotic, was crushed until it beca a compact core, the size of Strax’s palm—so dense it looked like a fragnt of a frozen star.
rcedes felt the air leave her lungs.
“Strax… this is dangerous.”
“For you?”
He tilted his head.
“Perhaps.”
He lifted the core.
The blue light reflected off his skin, his fangs, the scales that appeared and disappeared like echoes of what he truly was.
“For her?”
He smiled.
“Never.”
rcedes held the egg with both arms, as if she could protect it—or protect herself from Strax. She was trembling so much she could barely speak:
“Strax… don’t do this if—if you’re not sure…”
“I always have been.”
He placed his hand—the hand that held the core—on the egg.
The contact was instantaneous.
And devastating.
The energy core didn’t enter the egg like light flowing into a container. It wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t slow.
It was swallowed.
The egg pulled the energy into itself like a gravitational collapse, as if it had opened an internal fissure, a hungry vortex.
The sphere vanished in a single, sharp jerk—shoom—accompanied by a blue flash that extinguished all other light in the room for an instant.
rcedes scread, clutching the egg to her chest.
But the egg was… warm.
Warm.
For the first ti.
Strax took a step back, breathing deeply, his eyes still luminous.
The entire tomb sighed with him—a wave of dry heat that then dissipated, replaced by a chilling, deep, expectant cold.
rcedes looked at the egg.
At Strax.
At the hall.
And realized.
Everything there was in absolute silence.
The silence of sothing about to awaken.
Strax smiled with a restrained, fierce, almost reverent satisfaction.
“Ready.”
rcedes swallowed hard.
“R—ready for what…?”
Strax tilted his head.
The blue glow reflected in her eyes, making them almost identical to those of the egg.
“For her to be born.”
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