No! I don't want to be a Super Necromancer!

The black dragon screamed.

Chunks of scale ripped free. The sound was like thunder gnashing its own teeth. The sky quaked with the blast.

Damien hovered in the smoke, watching the wound pulse.

He hadn't won.

But the dragon was bleeding.

The dragon bellowed, more insulted than injured, and lunged through the smoke with a roar of spatial disruption.

Damien disappeared again, skipping through frozen time like steppingstones, reappearing behind the beast with a narrow dagger of compressed chronomantic death clenched in his palm.

He plunged it into the base of the dragon's skull.

The wyrm screamed—louder this time—and thrashed wildly. Its tail lashed into Damien mid-air, hurling him into a stone cliff hard enough to crater it. But even as his back struck rock, Damien vanished again, reappearing below with another rune in hand.

This one didn't detonate.

It whispered.

A prayer in the tongue of the Remnants. A binding chant pulled from Vel'khara itself.

The rune latched onto the wound in the dragon's chest and began to feed.

Damien watched as the beast's mana was siphoned, not into the air, but into him. His core pulsed once, ravenous.

The dragon howled and clawed at the rune in panic. But it was too late.

Damien surged forward, wreathed in violet-black flames that churned like a sentient storm around his frame. Every step carved through the air with purpose. The world blurred, slowing before his sharpened perception as invisible runes spiraled in orbit around him—death scripts etched into the folds of reality itself.

He struck again.

And again.

Each cut more precise than the last, each guided by those silent, circling glyphs. The wyrm's scales, once thought unbreakable, were nothing more than paper before his will. He found the seams beneath the armored ridges, under the wing joints, through the cracks opened by his first assault.

The beast faltered in the air.

Its wings twitched, spasmed. Its breath weapon, once a rolling inferno of ancient magic, somehow failed to ignite.

It hung there, trembling, unaware it was already dead.

Damien ascended calmly, rising to meet its eyes. His hand pressed gently against the wyrm's massive snout.

Its pupils shrank.

"Time's up."

He released the collapse sphere he'd planted deep within its chest.

There was no sound.

Only the fold.

The air twisted inward like fabric being pulled through a needle. Space compacted, curling around the point of detonation. The wyrm's body gave a single, instinctive shudder. Its roar cut short as its lungs collapsed inward. Bones snapped like dry sticks. Flesh inverted. Mana screamed.

And then it was gone.

Reduced to drifting particles of black snow… Scale, bone, and soul scattered across the sky.

Damien floated downward, untouched, through the silent storm of ashes. His eyes burned with cold fire. He landed slowly, the ground beneath him cracking from the weight of power he didn't bother hiding.

This one…

This dragon was magnificent.

Proud. Ancient. Dangerous.

His hand rose.

Death energy surged around him, a growing vortex of jet-black light that coiled like a serpent ready to strike. Mana twisted unnaturally as he extended his will, wrapping tendrils of death energy around the scattered remnants of the wyrm's soul.

But at that moment, the world itself seemed to groan in protest.

The wind howled. Trees bent back unnaturally. The clouds above swirled into a pale green spiral. The very forest screamed, as if all of nature had recognized what he was trying to do…

And refused to permit it.

A wall of pure elementless energy slammed down on his death energy, nearly breaking the link it had with the Black Dragon's spirit.

It was the raw will of nature.

It rose up like a barrier, resisting his grip on the wyrm's shattered spirit.

"There's even such a thing?" Damien's brow furrowed. "I killed this dragon fair and square. This dragon… Is mine!"

Damien's will flared with stubborn fury, and he sent an even thicker and more powerful wave of death energy to enforce the revive spell he was casting upon the dragon spirit.

At the same time, nature's roar intensified and the formless, elementless energy resisting him spiked in power.

Both energies clashed, churning and roiling just inches away from the Black Dragon's spirit.

Nature itself was denying him. Denying Death.

Denying the power that would be granted to him should he succeed in his revival attempt.

"No." he growled. "You will not deny me."

He extended his fingers again, and this time, time energy bled into his death mana, threading it with strands of silver and gray.

He merged decay with chronology, entropy with memory, rot with rewind. The fusion sparked violently, and for a moment, the space between his palm and the ground fractured like broken glass.

The resistance intensified.

A gale slammed into him. Thunder cracked from a clear sky. The ashes of the wyrm scattered wildly as the earth itself tried to reclaim them.

But Damien pressed forward, unwavering.

"Submit."

The moment he spoke, the fused energy detonated downward, not an explosion, but a reweaving. The ashes halted in mid-air, then spiraled back inward, drawn not to the past, but to something greater.

Something beyond.

The earth rumbled. Light bled from between cracks in space. Bones reformed—not as they were, but as they should have been. Stronger. Taller. Sharper. The wings returned, now layered with glowing runes. The eyes opened, swirling not just with death, but with time itself.

Damien stepped back as the Black Dragon rose… Taller than before, leaner, meaner, humming with unnatural stillness. Not undead. Not alive. Something in between.

Something worse.

A notification flashed across Damien's vision.

[New Skill Discovered]

[Temporal Revive – Bring back target to life as its strongest form]

The wind died. The trees stilled. Even nature had gone quiet, as if acknowledging his defiance.

Damien looked up at his new general,its obsidian scales laced with silver veins of chrono-mana, its wings humming like ancient clocks wound too tight.

Its eyes glowed a deep black, and its head was bowed in absolute submission.

He smiled faintly with deep satisfaction at the discovery of the new skill.

Nature's resistance had turned out to be an extreme blessing in disguise.

"Welcome back. As promised… No tongue for you."