The Dragon of Dreams

Music for today:
''Approaching The End'' - Gothic Storm Music (Epic Dark Ominous Hybrid Trailer Music)

Early Morning - Early Spring : Year 24 : Center of the Death's Gape

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-W..What the..?- Watching the massive tower bouncing within the icy slurry like a fisherman's bobber being tugged by a fish, my mind spun.

Above the ice, the water was still, with hardly even a shift in currents.. and yet the tower was shifting and correcting itself as if the ocean flipped.

*VvvVvvVvvmm* Hearing the tower's fluctuating hum as its gyroscope sped up and slowed down to correct its rocking, I pushed my aura through the ocean floor, sifting through the nearly fifty kilometers of liquid ice before reaching the edge of the planet's mantle.

*Vwoom* But while I wanted to push deeper to find if something was below.. I couldn't.

The magma was thick, almost viscous with mana, diffusing my aura like a bubble at the bottom of the ocean. At best, my aura would be reduced to a few dozen kilometers down there even after all my recent training.

But, I didn't feel the need to.

Just like the plane of collision between the ice and the ocean, where the ice met the mantle was similarly fluid, with every tiny shift in the magmas currents causing waves on the surface of the ice.

But.. it was calm as well...

So calm it was upsetting...

-Am I hallucinating?!- It was like whatever caused the tower to shift did it from another plane of existence. The shift in the tower was simply too significant to be as isolated as it was.

But then, as I watched the tower continue to bob while barely slowing.. it clicked...

-Wait...- It wasn't that the event was isolated, or that the culprit was sneaky... -Its because I'm late...-

I was mistaken.

Communication between the lab and the tower should have been instant—I paired them with entangled electrons for that exact purpose.

But when the error populated, I also felt the shockwave, and quakes don't travel that fast...

-The error must have been populated by the lab when it felt the shockwave...- Unlike what I initially thought, the lab didn't order the tower's correction at all. Even after the correction happened, the lab only logged it when it felt the shockwave and polled the tower for an explanation as to what it was.

Meaning despite my arrival being instantaneous, I was minutes late.

So, I needed to try again.

Or at least.. I thought I did.

*Vwoom* The moment my mind wandered, the subtle currents in the magma shifted and settled—unnaturally so—and the mana locked beneath the ice like the shell of a reserve, began permeating it, and overpowering my aura as if it were an aura itself.

Something.. was coming...

But I never could have guessed what...

*WOOM* In the next blink, the entire ocean floor rose as if the planet itself took a breath—the area around the tower rising almost a hundred meters, and compounding with the structure's bobbing from the last correction, threw it through the water so fast the entire structure rotated...

And triggered another correction...

*vvvvVVVMM-WOOOOM* The impact of the tower's piston rocked my senses like a meteor impact, punching it back into the layer of ice with a burst of bubbles, and screaming its deafening tune straight into the planet's core.

-What the hell?!- My senses heightened in an instant.

Thinking it could be Jormungandr or one of his offspring coming up from the mantle, my pupils thinned, and divinity sharpened.

But I was wrong...

*VWOOOOM* Like a bubble breaking through the tension of the ice like the surface of a lake, an unfathomable wave of mana blew over me—one so immense it coated my scales in crystal.

And unlike normal mana, it made my skin crawl... -W..What the...-

It was unlike anything I had ever felt.. a wave of ambient mana that acted like aura.. moving and flowing against logic to trace my scales and look at me...

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But then.. it settled...

In less than a minute, the 'bubble' flattened, and everything returned to normal as if it never happened in the first place.

Nothing came.. and nothing went...

To say it was puzzling was beyond an understatement...

But little did I know, it was far from the last time I'd feel it...

Hardly minutes later, the wave came again.. with it, another correction...

Then again...

And again...

The errors at the lab were typically days, weeks, or even months apart...

But after going there myself.. that shortened to minutes...

Before the tower could even correct itself, another pulse—another bubble...

And every time.. the tower responded with an echo...

It was a phenomenon I simply couldn't wrap my head around...

And for hours.. it continued without end, like the thrum of a racing heartbeat...

A thrum.. that eventually weakened...

Until ceasing entirely the very next moment...

-What.. the.. hell..?- As minutes of silence ticked by, my mind sputtered like a machine running out of fuel.

Even in the deepest recesses of my mind, I didn't have a single wandering theory as to what it could be from...

For the first time ever.. I was at a loss...

But the world didn't care to wait for that to change.

After around ten minutes of silence, the magma beneath the ice stilled once more.

Thinking it was another wave, I pulled my mana back to brace for it.

But I was wrong.

*CRACKLE* In the next moment, a short, instantaneous impact blew through me, and cracks ripped through the ice. *WWWWOOOMM*

-W..WHAT THE?!- It wasn't a bubble...

It was something trying to force its way through...

Pushing my aura through the ice as I accelerated my divinity, I found colossal cracks spanning hundreds of kilometers from right beneath the tower, each rapidly blending and healing like a non-Newtonian fluid trying to repair itself.

Just in time for the tower to sing once more.. and for me to watch as a creature larger than an island slammed its scaled nose into the ice.

That was when the prophecy clicked...

The 'singing metal' wasn't uranium...

It was the tower.

And by the time I realized, it was already too late. *CRRRRACKK* 'They' had already been lured to the surface.

Like thumping the side of a wasp nest, the tower's corrections had woken the hive...

But I wasn't just about to let them take the tower. -You must have lost your mind, Jormungandr...-

With a burst of blurry memories surfacing from the depths of my soul, a face textured the head of the young serpent beneath the ice, and my pupils thinned.

'It' had a god's presence—liquid divinity swirling in its soul—so when I opened my mouth, I knew it could hear me. "~Stop.~" Curling my divinity with blood, I echoed my voice not with language, but with intent.

And the serpent heard it...

Pausing, its colossal, dozen-kilometer-wide snout froze in place...

Even a creature as mindless as a machine could understand what was going to happen if it broke through the ice...

I was going to slaughter it like a pig.

But the very moment it pulled its mouth away, a bubble of 'ambient' mana thousands of times larger than any prior blew over us, warping up the layer of ice as far as my aura could reach, and throwing the tower off kilter...

*vvvVVVVVMM-* And as if to egg on the monster beneath its feet.. the tower echoed... *WOOOOM*

And the serpent snapped back like a gator getting pawed by a lion.

*CRRRAAACKKKK—KRA-KRA-KRA-KRAK!* The serpent's skull slammed into the ice instantly, sending fractures like lightning bolts through the frozen ocean ceiling. Water hissed and boiled—the pressure from the steam accelerating the fractures as the icy shield grew brittle.

This time, it wasn't stopping at a warning... Now, it was committed to silencing the piston that kept it awake.. and it knew it would get through on the next hit...

Feeling it flare its divinity, a pressure like molten iron wrapped my body...

I had two options... Rationality said to try to move the tower out of the serpent's path...

But in that moment, the ambient mana filling the ocean from the bubble that just breached the ice.. it gripped into my scales.. clinging like the claws of a being I couldn't fathom, and hardening a shell above me...

I had no escape... And I wasn't about to let the tower get eaten by an oversized snake.

*VWOOOM* Expelling mana from my reserve, the ice beneath the tower instantly hardened beyond diamond, shearing away from the slurried ocean bottom outside of my grip, and with a violent twist of my wings, I carved my way through it.

*WOOOSH* Frost and powdered crystal exploded outward as I tore through the frozen barrier, flooding it with my enriched mana to harden it further with every passing moment.

Then.. I pierced the bottom, and my paws connected with something harder than the planet's crust.

*WOOM* The scale on the snout of the creature was larger than an island, but in that moment, size was irrelevant.

"~You have one chance.~" My voice—my intent—poured into its skull like molten lead.

No language. No mercy... Just the raw command of a predator staring down another as if to correct its arrogance.

And for an instant.. it listened... It's scattered aura wavered...

But as the pressure of holding together the island of ice settled, another burst of mana blew up from beneath us, and like a scorching cattle prod struck its rear, the serpent lurched.. and fate laid itself before me... *THUUUUUUUMM-CRRRAAACKK*

With the burst of kilograms of antimatter, heat beyond the most violent starbursts blew across its scales.. and while they gave resistance, after liquifying, the blast slowly tightened, focusing into a beam that bored a hole through its snout and passed down its throat before scattering within its body.

But it wasn't meant to kill it... Something like that never could...

It was merely to carve a path.

Folding my wings once more, I threw myself off the ice, zipping through the hole I bored before accelerating myself with more antimatter, and slamming my paw into its mana core.

I was going to kill it from the inside.

*Whoop* But space warped the moment I touched it... Having hardly felt its aura through the suffocating ambient mana, I figured it would be small.

But the moment my paw connected with it.. I found out just how wrong that assumption was...

*Tink* Being larger than my whole body.. my impact wasn't enough to even crack it...

And before I could react, it clamped me like a bear trap.

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