’’Let there be light," he whispered. "And let there be ash."
After that, the combo spell began to take shape.
Golden mana surged from Gabriel’s core, flowing up through his arms, his palms, his fingertips. It siphoned a full quarter of his gigantic mana pool—a cost that would have killed any ordinary archmage, yet only made Gabriel’s smile widen. Above him, the sky answered.
Thunder.
RUMBLE!
Not a gentle rumble, but a deep, guttural roar that shook the floating island to its foundation.
The red clouds that choked the heavens began to churn violently, twisting into spiraling vortexes.
’’!!!!"
The sky itself seed to howl—a long, mournful wail as if reality were suffering, as if the dungeon were crying out in protest against the power being unleashed upon it.
Every monster on the island felt it.
"!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
A chill. Deep and primal. The kind of cold that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with death approaching, the grim reaper closing on you that type of feeling.
One by one, whether they were sleeping, hunting, or fighting among themselves, they stopped. Their single eyes snapped upward.
Badump~ Badump!
Their hearts hamred against their ribs. For creatures born of mana and violence, who knew no fear of sword or spell, this was sothing new. Sothing wrong.
Then ca the sound.
RIIIIIP—
The sky was violently tore open.
Not taphorically. Literally. The red and purple clouds parted with the sound of shredded fabric, revealing a glimpse of sothing beyond—a cold, starless void on the other side. And from that void, they ca.
Five teors.
Each one was a mountain of blazing rock, wreathed in flas that burned white-hot at their cores and crimson at their edges. They descended slowly at first, as if hesitant, then faster, then faster, trailing tails of fire and smoke that stretched for kiloters behind them. The heat preceded them—a wave of scorching air that baked the forest below, causing ancient trees to crack and split before the teors even landed.
It was as if Armageddon itself was descending.
The monsters—mutated cyclopes of various sizes, their gray skin now pale with terror—scrambled. They dropped their weapons. They trampled each other. They ran in every direction, crashing into trees, falling into ravines, clawing at the earth as if they could burrow deep enough to escape. So roared defiance, raising their stone swords at the sky, but their voices trembled. Others simply stood frozen, their single eyes reflecting the growing inferno above.
Useless.
There was nowhere to run. The island was finite. The teors were not.
Gabriel watched from above, his golden wings spread wide, his cross-shaped pupils drinking in the chaos. He raised one hand.
And commanded them down, giving the final command for the mass slaughter.
SLAM.
The first teor struck the center of the forest. The impact did not make a sound—not at first. For a single heartbeat, there was only blinding white light and silence. Then the sound arrived: a thunderous, earth-shattering BOOM that rolled across the island like the anger of a dying god.
The second teor hit two seconds later. Then the third. The fourth. The fifth.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
Each explosion on the last, rging into a continuous roar that drowned out all thought, all sound, all life. The forest flattened instantly—trees turned to splinters, splinters turned to ash, ash turned to nothing. The shockwave expanded outward in a perfect circle, a wall of compressed air and fire that destroyed everything in its wake. Boulders vaporized. Ravines filled with molten rock. The very ground liquefied, then evaporated.
And the monsters?
They did not even have ti to scream. Bodies that had taken minutes for Lilith to dismber were erased in fractions of a second. Flesh, bone, horn, armor—all beca dust, then light, then mory.
The final impact did more than destroy the forest.
It shattered the floating island.
Cracks spread from the impact craters like spiderwebs, racing toward the edges. The entire mass of earth groaned—a deep, sorrowful sound—before breaking apart into countless fragnts. Chunks of rock the size of houses tumbled into the void below, so still burning, so already cooling into blackened stone. The island that seed to had stood for centuries was now a debris field.
Gabriel hovered amidst the falling rubble, flas licking at his golden feathers but never burning. His smile had not left his face. If anything, it had grown wider. He looked like an arsonist admiring his masterpiece—like an artist standing before a canvas of ash and destruction.
Beautiful. Explosion is an art!
Far away, on another floating island, Lilith felt the tremors. She turned her head just in ti to see the distant explosion—a blossom of fire and light that consud an entire landmass. Her mouth hung open in shock. Her crimson eyes widened.
He didn’t.
He had.
She had been savoring her kills, playing with her prey, drawing out the hunt. And he had simply erased an island. In seconds. With a single spell.
That cheating archangel.
But even as irritation flickered across her face, sothing else stirred beneath it. Respect. Admiration. And a tiny, grudging acknowledgnt that perhaps—just perhaps—she had been outdone. Well, it is what makes this little competition fun.
Gabriel’s golden bracelet flickered. Numbers raced across its surface—one after another, too fast to count—before finally stopping.
75.
The number of monsters killed in a single, devastating attack.
Seventy-five mutated cyclopes. In the ti it had taken Lilith to kill five, Gabriel had annihilated seventy more. Surpassing her by a margin of seventy. It might seem like a small number of monsters, but the island had not been large. And cyclopes were a territorial race—they did not enjoy living together. A typical settlent might have ten to fifteen, at best twenty. To find seventy-five on one island ant this had been a gathering ground, a rare convergence. And Gabriel had turned it into a graveyard.
He glanced at his bracelet, then at the distant speck that was Lilith’s island. He raised a hand in a casual wave, as if to say, Catch up if you can.
"Onto the next," he said to no one in particular.
His golden wings beat once, twice, and he shot toward his next destination, his mana already recovering—the vast, nearly limitless reservoir within him refilling like an ocean reclaiming a shoreline.
Behind him, the debris of the shattered island spun slowly in the void, burning chunks of rock casting long shadows across the crimson sky.
The dungeon had not known fear before today.
It was learning.
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