In Chapter 5, I fought in a forest.
Open sky above me.
Trees around me.
Leaves shaking with every clash.
An E-rank Gate.
In the boss fight I primarily fought two monsters.
One Goblin General.
One Goblin Soldier.
The general’s roar felt threatening to me then.
His blade cutting through bark felt violent.
The force of his strikes cracked tree trunks and tore roots from the soil.
When I was hit, my body absorbed it.
My increased endurance sealed the wound internally — blood refusing to spill outward — but the impact still rang through bone.
That was power… at my level.
Elsewhere—
An SS rank Gate opened in the Middle East.
And the word “power” meant something entirely different.
Amir Al-Hazrad had requested assistance from two fellow Sovereigns, Hana Mizushima and Roderik Weiss (chapter 1) to clear an unstable SS rank Gate whose internal readings suggested a boss entity beyond standard classification.
The three of them stepped through together.
The desert inside was wrong.
The sky hung low, bruised in color. Wind moved in reverse currents. Dunes spiraled upward instead of settling. In the distance, jagged black formations pierced the sand like broken ribs from something buried beneath the world.
The ground trembled.
Then the first dragon descended.
Its shadow swallowed a dune whole.
Wings stretched wider than a passenger jet. Scales layered thick as fortress plating. Each flap displaced enough air to send shockwaves rippling across the sand.
It opened its jaws—
And a torrent of flame poured out, not as a narrow beam, but as a rolling wave that carved a molten trench hundreds of meters long, turning desert into glass.
That was not the boss.
That was the welcoming party.
Hana disappeared before the embers settled.
A small paper talisman slipped from her sleeve and ignited mid-air — releasing a low-lying mist that rolled across the sand like a silent tide.
She reappeared above the diving dragon, a mana-infused kodachi drawn in a reverse grip.
The blade hummed — its edge vibrating at a pitch too high to hear, distorting the air along its length.
One precise downward cut.
The dragon’s neck separated in a clean vertical line, cauterized instantly by the resonance of the blade.
A flick of her wrist — three shuriken snapped from her palm, splitting mid-flight into nine.
The dragons lost both wings as the spinning blades carved through joints and bone before returning to her hand.
Their bodies crashed into the desert like collapsing towers.
Amir
He inhaled once.
Humidity vanished.
Sand rose.
Entire ridgelines fractured and lifted, breaking apart mid-air before reforming into jagged constructs under his control. A colossal mass of compressed sand formed at his side and swung outward.
The impact shattered an incoming drake’s ribcage and launched it through a stone formation, pulverizing both.
Weiss stepped past the falling debris.
A ground dragon charged him head-on.
The collision flattened a dune.
His mechanical arm ignited.
Internal thrusters roared.
He vanished forward.
The punch folded the dragon’s skull inward and sent its body tearing backward through sand and rock in a straight-line trench nearly a hundred meters long.
More shadows filled the sky.
Dozens.
Wingbeats alone stirred storms.
An elite drake exhaled a concentrated blast that split a rock outcropping in half. Another dove low and cleaved the desert floor open with its tail, creating a fissure that ran like a scar across the battlefield.
Hana reappeared above a cluster of five aerial units, a capsule crushing quietly beneath her heel.
She extended her fingers.
Nearly invisible steel mana-threads unraveled from concealed bracers at her wrists, snapping outward in razor-straight lines.
Each filament pierced the scale at the sternum.
She twisted her wrist once.
The threads constricted.
Five chests imploded inward as if crushed by invisible anchors.
A second pull — and five glowing cores tore free, trailing thin arcs of blood before falling into the sand.
Weiss rocketed upward, catching a dragon mid-air and driving it downward with enough force to trigger seismic readings outside the Gate perimeter.
Amir extended both hands.
The desert answered.
Sand spiraled upward into a vortex hundreds of meters wide, grinding dragons between compression layers strong enough to pulverize stone.
The ground beneath them shifted.
Not by Amir’s will.
From below.
A pressure rolled outward, deep and heavy.
The surviving dragons pulled back.
The desert cracked.
Something enormous moved beneath the sand, displacing earth as if the land itself were breathing.
Weiss felt the vibration through his arm.
Hana stilled.
Amir’s currents faltered for half a second.
Then came the roar.
Low.
Ancient.
The sky darkened.
And the desert began to rise.
High above the fractured desert, a formation of elite dragons descended in controlled spirals — larger than the first wave, their scales darker, their wingbeats synchronized like a military drop unit. Each one radiated compressed mana strong enough to distort the air around their bodies.
And behind them—
Something blocked the sky.
The giant dragon.
It ascended slowly.
Its wings stretched wider than entire city blocks. Each downward beat displaced the atmosphere in visible shockwaves, pushing sand outward in expanding rings across the battlefield. Its scales were layered like fortress plating, each segment glowing faintly with internal heat. When it exhaled, steam rolled from its nostrils hot enough to warp the air beneath it.
Amir narrowed his eyes.
“That one commands the nest.”
Weiss flexed his mechanical arm, the internal reactors humming as readings spiked across its interface.
“No way that thing is Sovereign rank… it must be low apex rank.” he muttered.
The elite dragons fanned outward, forming a perimeter around their ascending monarch.
Hana stepped forward, mist beginning to coil around her ankles.
“I will remove the perimeter,” she said calmly.
Her gaze never left the smaller elites circling overhead.
“Focus on the primary.”
Amir gave a single nod.
Weiss cracked his neck once, eyes fixed on the giant dragon as it came toward them.
“Fine by me.”
Above them, the massive dragon’s shadow swallowed the desert whole.
The smaller elites began their descent.
And the battlefield split.
The battlefield split.
Hana vanished into the rising swarm of elite dragons.
The giant dragon began to fly and hover.
Each wingbeat displaced enough air to flatten dunes in expanding shockwaves. Sand rolled outward in rings beneath it, carving the desert into spiraling ridges.
Then it attacked first.
It folded one wing inward and swung the other.
The motion alone generated a horizontal pressure wave that tore through the battlefield like a moving wall. Sand constructs shattered. Rock formations splintered. The lingering vortex Amir had formed collapsed instantly.
Weiss launched skyward to intercept.
His arm ignited, propulsion flaring bright against the darkened sky.
He collided with the dragon mid-air.
The impact cracked across the Gate interior like thunder.
For a fraction of a second, the dragon’s enormous frame shifted backward — displaced by sheer force.
Then its claws snapped forward.
One talon the size of a bus raked across Weiss’s arm, sparks exploding outward as metal and mana clashed. The force sent him spiraling downward, carving a diagonal trench through the desert before he stabilized mid-slide.
The dragon inhaled.
Its chest expanded — plates along its torso shifting open slightly as internal heat intensified.
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A beam of compressed flame erupted.
A focused column.
It struck the ground and cut.
The desert parted as if sliced by a god-sized blade. A molten trench hundreds of meters long split the battlefield in two, glowing white-hot at its center.
Amir stepped forward.
He raised both arms.
The entire desert answered.
Sand did not simply rise — it compressed.
Dunes flattened and condensed into hardened pillars. Ruined structures disintegrated and fed into the forming mass. Within seconds, a new construct emerged — taller, denser, more refined than the earlier colossus.
One hundred meters.
Then one-fifty.
The golem’s shoulders broadened.
Its torso thickened.
It planted both feet, each step sending shockwaves across the sand.
The dragon banked and dove.
The golem reached outward, seizing a shattered megastructure embedded within the Gate’s warped ruins. Under extreme compression, the remains fused into a massive cylindrical form.
A bat.
Nearly the height of a skyscraper.
The dragon’s claws extended.
They collided.
The shockwave from the impact flattened everything within several hundred meters. Sand liquefied under pressure. Remaining rock formations burst outward like shrapnel.
The dragon’s jaws snapped downward toward the golem’s shoulder—
Amir clenched his fist.
The bat swung.
It connected with the dragon’s side in a strike that distorted the air itself.
The sound followed a heartbeat later — a detonation that rattled the entire Gate interior.
The dragon’s massive body was launched sideways across the sky.
Its wing tore through a floating rock shelf the size of a city block, pulverizing it into debris mid-flight.
It did not fall.
It stabilized.
And it roared — the vibration alone cracking hardened sand pillars across the battlefield.
Below, Weiss rose from the fractured desert, dust falling from his shoulders.
His arm’s output climbed.
Stabilizers flared brighter.
Across the battlefield, Hana’s mist flashed as elite dragons began dropping from the sky one by one.
Above them all—
The giant dragon spread its wings again.
The air trembled.
And this time, it prepared to descend with full force.
The dragon folded its wings.
A controlled dive.
Its massive frame cut through the air like a descending fortress, friction igniting along the edges of its scales. The pressure built ahead of it visibly, compressing the atmosphere into a shock cone that tore sand from the ground before it even struck.
Amir’s golem stepped forward.
The dragon collided with it.
The impact detonated across the Gate interior.
The golem’s upper torso fractured backward from the force, compressed sand bursting outward like an avalanche. The ground beneath both titans cratered inward as shockwaves rippled across the small-city-sized battlefield, collapsing remaining stone formations and shattering the glassed trenches created earlier.
The dragon’s claws tore into the golem’s shoulder, carving channels through compressed sand dense enough to withstand artillery.
It opened its jaws at point-blank range.
Flame erupted.
The blast swallowed the construct’s upper half, heat so intense the air turned white around them.
Amir did not retreat.
Both arms rose.
The desert responded violently.
From every direction, sand surged inward — not drifting, not flowing — accelerating. Entire dunes lifted and collapsed into the golem’s frame. Ruined megastructures dissolved into particulate matter and fused under crushing pressure.
The construct grew.
Two hundred meters.
Its legs thickened. Its spine extended. Its mass multiplied until it stood eye-level with the dragon.
The fire cleared.
The golem’s torso reformed almost instantly.
It drove one fist into the dragon’s jaw.
The blow snapped the creature’s head sideways and sent a shockwave outward strong enough to flatten what remained of the battlefield perimeter.
The dragon retaliated.
Its tail whipped across the desert, striking the golem’s midsection and shearing away an entire section of its torso. The displaced sand blasted outward in a massive spray, burying a kilometer-wide stretch of terrain.
Above, elite dragons still falling from Hana’s execution rained down like debris from a collapsing war.
Weiss now powered up launched.
His arm’s output indicators surged to controlled maximum.
Internal channels flared brilliant white as he redirected every reserve into propulsion and impact calibration. The air around him distorted from acceleration alone.
He circled wide.
Amir saw it.
The golem pivoted.
The dragon reared back, wings spreading to regain balance mid-air.
Amir clenched both fists.
The golem mirrored the motion.
Sand from miles around compressed into its right arm, thickening it to absurd density — each layer reinforcing the next under crushing force.
The fist expanded.
Then expanded again.
The arm alone became the size of a skyscraper.
The golem stepped forward and punched.
The strike connected squarely with the dragon’s chest.
The impact bent the dragon’s massive body backward and forced it downward through the air, scales cracking under the pressure. The shockwave blasted outward in a circular wall of compressed air that erased the remaining surface structures inside the Gate.
At that exact moment—
Weiss arrived from the opposite side.
His arm’s thrusters ignited at full burn.
He drove forward with a punch calibrated beyond prior limits.
The air split around him.
He struck the dragon from behind.
For a fraction of a second, everything paused.
Then—
His fist punched through.
Through scale.
Through bone.
Through the reinforced chest cavity already destabilized by Amir’s strike.
The force did not stop there.
Momentum carried the dragon forward.
Weiss’s attack continued through the dragon’s body—
And into the golem.
The compressed sand arm shattered on impact.
The entire construct fractured outward from the collision point, exploding into a massive wave of particulate debris that blasted across the battlefield like a man-made sandstorm.
The dragon’s body tore through the collapsing golem, spinning violently before losing lift.
It fell.
Not gracefully.
Not slowly.
It hit the desert like a falling continent.
The impact crater expanded outward in a massive ring, swallowing fractured terrain and sending sand geysering into the sky.
Silence followed.
Weiss descended through the drifting debris, thrusters powering down in stages.
He landed at the edge of the crater, boots sinking into sand still vibrating from the impact.
He burst out laughing, “ Now that was a good fight!”
Across the battlefield, the remnants of Amir’s shattered golem collapsed into harmless dunes once more.
High above, the sky slowly stabilized.
The giant dragon lay broken at the center of the crater, its massive wings twisted and partially buried.
Dust settled.
And for the first time since the Gate opened—
The desert was still.
Amir Al-Hazrad — The Desert Monarch — SS Sovereign — Ruler of the United Arab Emirates (Leader of the Arabian Coalition Defense Pact) says,
“Thank you. Both of you. This is the third SS Gate in my territory in under two months. They are appearing more frequently.”
Lady Hana Mizushima — The Silent Ocean — SS Sovereign — Ruler of Japan, says,
“The Pacific pressure lines have shifted as well. These surges are not isolated to your region.”
The Sovereign Roderik Weiss ( SS+ ) of the United States, Guildmaster of Iron Howl says,
“It feels like stronger Gates keep appearing. We’re going to need to keep up.”
He flexes his artificial arm once.
“The world doesn’t wait.”
President Claire Bennett — S Rank Awakened says,
“Agent Voss has eliminated two additional Cult of Evolution branches.”
Around the table sit:
- Vice Chairman Marcus Hale
- Secretary of Defense Richard Coleman
- Director of National Intelligence Dr. Hannah Reed
- Secretary of Homeland Security Miguel Alvarez
- National Security Advisor Laura Whitman
Marcus adjusts his glasses.
Vice Chairman Marcus Hale says,
“The cult’s activity clusters continue expanding across state lines. Recruitment appears strongest among recently awakened mid-tier Hunters.”
Dr. Reed nods.
Director Reed says,
“They’re preaching refinement through divine influence. "Evolution through the old gods.’We heard rumors that's their central doctrine.”
Secretary Coleman exhales slowly.
Secretary Coleman says,
“They’re convincing people the current rank ceiling is artificial.”
President Bennett’s voice hardens.
President Bennett says,
“Chairwoman Voss has authorization to dismantle every confirmed branch and extract intelligence on their leadership. We still have no confirmed identities for their upper structure.”
Marcus glances at the screen.
Vice Chairman Hale says,
“They operate compartmentalized. Captured members don’t know who’s above them.”
President Bennett nods once.
President Bennett says,
“Keep pressing. I want names.”
The Chairwoman of the USHC — Evelyn Voss — wears:
- Matte-black adaptive stealth fabric
- Lightweight segmented power-armor plating across shoulders and thighs
- Mana-thread conduits embedded in the suit
- Dual mana-infused daggers secured at her hips
- Masked visor with spectral and mana-trace optics
The suit enhances her speed and output.
Her Hunter abilities allow near-perfect invisibility.
Abandoned rail-yard refinery complex.
Rain hits rusted steel.
Wind cuts between broken structures.
Inside:
Thirty-seven confirmed Cult of Evolution operatives.
Her mana compresses inward.
She disappears.
Existentially.
Her presence almost ceases to exist.
A cult lookout smokes near the loading dock.
He senses nothing.
A flicker of pressure behind him.
Two fingers touch the back of his neck.
A precise injection of mana disrupts the brainstem.
He collapses silently.
No blood.
No alarm.
She steps over him.
Inside …
The main chamber is lit by candles and stolen industrial floodlights.
A crude insignia carved into the floor.
Cult members kneel.
Chanting about ascension.
About breaking ceilings.
About evolution.
Voss moves between shadows.
First target.
Slice across the Achilles tendon.
Hand over mouth.
Second blade through the heart.
She lowers the body gently.
No thud.
She continues.
One by one.
No spectacle.
No chaos.
Only removal.
An A rank awakened senses something is off.
Turns.
Too slow.
She appears in front of him.
Her left dagger pins his casting hand to the wall.
Her right blade severs vocal cords.
He never finishes the spell.
She retracts.
Keeps moving.
An S- rank cult lieutenant finally reacts.
He activates a mana burst.
The room flashes.
She’s already behind him.
Armor plating absorbs the shock.
Her blade punctures between ribs.
She whispers:
“You believed you were chosen.”
He dies confused.
The chanting stops.
Bodies hit the floor one after another.
No screams.
No alarms.
Just silence replacing noise.
Thirty-six down.
One remains.
He is young.
Shaking.
She lifts him by the collar and slams him against a support beam.
Her invisibility fades.
He sees her.
Understands.
Fear becomes total.
“Who is your leader?” she asks calmly.
He trembles.
“They— they call him the Shepherd,” he gasps. “He says the old gods will refine us— that apex is not the peak of humanity”
Her eyes narrow.
“Location.”
“We don’t know. We only get instructions through—”
His eyes widen.
Panic.
His pupils dilate unnaturally.
Mana spikes violently inside his chest.
Voss reacts instantly—
Too late.
A sigil ignites beneath his skin.
Black light fractures across his veins.
His body convulses.
Internal detonation spell.
Not explosive.
His heart collapses inward.
Brain liquefies.
Mana signature disintegrates.
He dies before he can scream.
The spell consumes all residual memory traces.
Nothing extractable.
Silence returns.
Voss lowers the corpse slowly.
She studies the fading mana residue.
“Self-termination fail-safe,” she murmurs.
She is not surprised.
She taps her comm.
“Branch eliminated,” she says evenly. “Leadership remains obscured. They are using embedded suicide seals.”
A pause.
Rain continues outside.
She looks at the cult insignia carved into the floor.
The word etched beneath it:
EVOLVE
Her expression does not change.
But something behind her eyes sharpens.
This isn’t random fanaticism.
This is infrastructure.
She vanishes again.
Mission complete.