“Shit!” Ganta jumped back with a terrified face and reached into her pocket. “Drakaina! Here! RUN!”

All of the gnomes couldn’t sense what she sensed, and they were too late to react. A fraction of a second later, tens of them screamed in pain as waves of shadows danced around their bodies, ripping their souls to pieces. A cacophony of agonized screaming and dying moans filled the caves, signaling the end of a long war of attrition.

How did she find them? Was it Ganta’s fault? That didn’t matter anymore. What mattered now was that she was now locked here with them. She’d die here with the gnomes. Out of all the scenarios of her death that she imagined, this wasn’t one of them.

That’s why Ganta was willing to take a risk, put everything on the line one last time, and try to rewrite history, even if no one would survive to tell her tale.

Ganta held two scales in her hand- Arad’s scale and the shadow drakaina’s scale. “What a clusterfuck.” She threw the two scales into her mouth and swallowed them in a single gulp.

For a second, she felt nothing, but then, all hell broke loose. Her whole body jolted with pain. Her vision blurred, turned black, and then flashed with light as her stomach twisted as if thousands of snakes were crawling inside her.

She could hear her heart beating like drums, her ears ringing, and her arms and legs vibrating as if they were getting jolted by lightning. Consuming two scales at once was suicidal, but she is dying anyway, so why not go out with a bang?

Something strange was now happening inside Ganta’s body. Two different energies were fighting for dominance over her blood: Arad’s void and the drakaina’s shadows.

While those two energies were fighting each other, Ganta should be able to use them both at the same time, giving her an edge, as small as that edge was. But, eventually, the fighting between the two energies would leave her body destroyed, burned from the inside out.

Ganta transformed into her beast form and now was a large black ape with massive horns, black fur, glowing white eyes, and strange black mist flowing out of her arms and back.

Then something even stranger happened. Even Ganta didn’t see it coming. The drakaina’s shadow energy drowned in Arad’s void like a drop of ink fading into a sea of boiling tar.

Ganta knew about such a thing being possible, but the only time it had ever happened was when someone injured the scale of an adult dragon with that of a wyrmling. That was the difference of power needed for one energy to completely erase the other. But, even then, the process is usually too few minutes, not a single second.

Arad’s void had beaten the drakaina’s shadows into submission and erased them from Ganta’s body like acid on soft flesh. She didn’t even stand a chance.

It was just then that Ganta started to realize what kind of monster Arad was. For his power to crush the horrifying drakaina’s shadows, just what kind of abyssal horror is Aella in bed with?

But Ganta didn’t even have time to think about that. Because the abuse her body was going to suffer was only getting worse. She suddenly felt as if her bones and muscles were about to rip apart, that her blood had started boiling, and that her mind was now dancing on the cusp of madness.

She was high- high on power. This also was something she knew of, and a thing that only happens when an extremely young ape eats the scale of a really powerful dragon. She once suffered this backlash when she was a kid and ate the scale of a young adult dragon. But now, it was ten times worse.

The shadow drakaina stopped walking and stared at Ganta, her expression as dead as it was before, but a strange darkness danced behind her tar-black eyes. She recognized the magic surging through Ganta’s body. It is the magic of that large black dragon, the void magic of Arad.

She lifted her hand and sent a wave of shadows at Ganta. The shadows instantly swallowed Ganta whole and tried to rip her shadow apart, killing her soul first.

Ganta screamed, but not from her soul being torn apart, but from Arad’s void taking hold in her body and granting her strength far beyond what her mortal body could endure.

The moment the shadows tried to catch Ganta’s shadow, they were surprised to find that there were no shadows in the void because there was neither light to cast them nor solid matter for them to be cast upon.

Ganta tried to jump at the drakaina but instead ended up stepping through the void and appeared behind her back.

“OO! OOOO! OOOO!” Ganta grabbed the shadow drakaina by the head and swung her around like a ragdoll, smacking her to the ground and wall. This four-meter-tall gorilla looked gigantic compared to the 1.8-meter-tall dark elf woman.

As the surviving gnomes ran away, the shadow drakaina finally shifted into her massive draconic form, shattered the tight cave, and sent Ganta flying back with a deadly swat of her wing. The impact was so powerful that Ganta even forgot the pain of Arad’s void consuming her body. Her bones rattled, and her muscles tore apart- even her mind refused to think straight.

Ganta flew through the stones and soon emerged in a massive cavern. Her momentum never slowed down until she hit the massive stone wall on the other side and coughed a mouthful of blood.

The drakaina slithered out of the tight cave like a snake. She had already changed her form into a massive black shadow, which allowed her to crawl through the tight caves and use her full power at the same time. As she reached the cavern, she finally shifted back to her massive draconic form again and glared at Ganta, hissing like a cobra.

Ganta looked at the massive drakaina, seeing her death approaching like a shadowy ghost. But even though her whole body was broken, and her mind was already a mess, something swelled inside her chest. Hot, violent, hungry, and brilliant.

Ganta opened her massive jaw to scream, but instead, a roar burst forward, and a beam of blinding light flashed across the cavern, exploding right beneath the shadow of drakaina’s legs in a massive inferno of fire and heat.

Arad’s breath was far more powerful than anything that Ganta’s body could endure, leaving her without her massive fangs as they got evaporated by it.