After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 66: 377th Attempt On Vorkapar, The Spector Dragon King

The black ice shattered all at once, and Vorkapar rose out of his tomb like the sky itself had decided to hate them personally.

He was enormous, wings of torn, translucent membrane stretching wide enough to blot out the bruised sky, a body of pale bone wrapped in flesh that flickered between solid and spectral with every slow beat of his wings. His eyes were two collapsed points of dead starlight, and when he opened his jaws, the sound that came out wasn’t a roar.

It was a verdict.

[Boss Zone: Vorkapar’s Tomb. Battle begun.]

Aidan didn’t wait for an opening line. "Arthur. Full suit. We’re not doing this halfway."

Arthur burst into crimson-gold motes and poured over him in an instant, the Argon Exo-Armor sealing shut with a deep, resonant hum, and Aidan felt every one of Arthur’s stats layer onto his own.

’Alright, old man.’ He rolled his shoulders inside the armor, lightning already crawling along his knuckles. ’Let’s dance.’

Jovan folded out beside him, Colored King Black veil settling over his features, and Tom perched sharp-eyed on his shoulder, every drop of the housecat’s usual complaining gone from his face.

"Fortune says this ends badly for someone," Jovan murmured. "Let’s make sure it isn’t us."

Vorkapar moved.

He crossed the distance between them in a single wingbeat, faster than something his size had any right to be, and a claw the length of a spear came down toward Aidan’s chest without any wasted motion at all.

Aidan barely got a wall of electromagnetic force up in time.

The claw went through it anyway.

Not around it. Through it, like the barrier had never existed at all, and only a desperate twist of Aidan’s whole body kept the strike from opening him from collarbone to hip. It still caught his shoulder, and the armor there simply ceased to be armor for a heartbeat, Arthur’s plating flickering like static before it reasserted itself.

[Warning: Conceptual-tier attack detected. Physical mitigation reduced by 80%.]

’That’s not fair.’ Aidan skidded backward across the frozen ground, shoulder screaming. ’That’s really not fair.’

Jovan was already moving, Star of Misfortune flaring black-gold in his palm, threading bad luck into every angle of Vorkapar’s next strike before it landed. The dragon’s claw missed by a hair it shouldn’t have missed by, and Jovan used the gap to drive a thread of drained luck straight into the beast’s flank.

Vorkapar didn’t even flinch.

He turned on Jovan instead, jaws wide, and a Divine-rank counter of pure spectral force crashed into the fortune-teller hard enough to send him skidding a hundred meters across the ice.

Jovan got up. He always got up. But blood, actual blood, dark and thin, ran from the corner of his mouth when he did.

[Jovan: Note. I cannot take more than one of those either.]

’Divine-10 stats, and he’s still barely holding on.’ Aidan’s stomach dropped. ’If Jovan can’t tank this, I definitely can’t.’

They threw everything they had at him after that.

Aidan wove Lightning, Metal, and Burst into a compressed drill and drove it into Vorkapar’s ribs, and it staggered him, actually staggered him, a wound blooming pale and spectral along his side. Then the wound simply closed, flesh knitting back together like the strike had happened an hour ago instead of a second.

’He heals through everything that isn’t final.’ Aidan circled wide, breathing hard already. ’Okay. New plan. Hit harder.’

He layered Wind and Spin and Blade into a Windshear Spiral and threw it full force, and Vorkapar simply flew through it, wings shredding a hundred cuts deep and closing before he finished the pass.

He tried Epoxy next, seeding it wide across the ice, and Vorkapar’s claws didn’t even register the threads as an obstacle, tearing straight through the anchors like they were smoke.

Tom’s voice cracked through the chaos, sharp and fast. "Left wing, now, he’s winding up the roar!"

Aidan didn’t ask questions. He threw himself sideways on a burst of wind, and the death-toll scream that followed cracked the ground where he’d been standing into a spiderweb of black frost, the kind of sound that didn’t just hurt to hear, it hurt to have heard.

Arthur, wrapped tight around him as armor, made a small, pained noise that wasn’t like him at all.

[Arthur: Master, that sound made my teeth hurt, and I don’t even use my teeth right now.]

’I know, buddy. I know.’

They kept fighting, minute after minute bleeding into a blur of near misses and glancing hits, and every trick Aidan had built across sixty Chapters of his life landed somewhere on that dragon’s hide and meant nothing in the end. Metal, lightning, burst, wind, spin, blade, epoxy, flame, pierce, even threads of Blood and Nether pulled straight from the deepest, most expensive part of him.

Vorkapar shrugged off all of it, patient as the tomb he’d slept in, and struck back only when he felt like it.

[Aidan’s shoulder: torn. Ribs: cracked. Left leg: burned from a graze he barely dodged in time.]

’I’m not gaining ground.’ Aidan’s breath came ragged now, blood in his mouth same as Jovan’s. ’I’m not even holding it. I’m just not dead yet, and that’s not a strategy.’

Something old and furious began to stir under his ribs, the same thing he’d spent a billion years learning to bury.

’No.’ He clenched his jaw. ’Easy. Breathe it down. Anger doesn’t win fights, it just feels like it does.’

But he was losing, and he knew it, and for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, he genuinely did not know how to fix that with cleverness alone.

’Fine.’ Something in him snapped its leash a fraction of an inch. ’Fine. Let’s gamble.’

He let it rise.

For one dangerous second, the rage he’d carried out of the Darkness surged up toward the surface, hot and total and terrifyingly ready, and the whole battlefield seemed to dim around the edges as it did.

[WARNING. Emotional output critical. Suppression protocol engaged.]

Something clamped down on him from outside himself, cold and absolute, smothering the rage back into its cage before it finished rising.

’What.’ Aidan staggered, furious and violated in a way that had nothing to do with the dragon in front of him. ’What did you just do to me?’

[This space is secured against Terroreign. Your current emotional output, left unchecked, would breach that security. The system does not permit that outcome under any condition.]

’So I’m just supposed to lose?’ Aidan’s voice cracked with something raw. ’I don’t accept that.’

[There is another path. You have already achieved ascension of your Soul Spirit. If you can comprehend a Conceptual Technique using everything you understand, you will hold power enough to end this. Conceptual mastery exceeds anything gear or aspect can grant you, and your Power Bond talent gives you an edge in being able to conceptualise something.]

’A technique. Right now. In the middle of this.’ Aidan almost laughed, wild and desperate. ’Sure. Why not.’

[Jovan: Whatever you’re about to do, do it fast. I’m running out of luck to lend.]

"Buy me time," Aidan said, already sitting cross-legged, and turning inward. "All of you. Whatever it costs."

Arthur unwound from him in a burst of crimson-gold light, shedding the armor form entirely and unfolding into his true shape, wings spreading wide, claws digging into the ice.

[Arthur: On it. Nobody touches him.]

Arthur met Vorkapar’s next strike head on, dragon against dragon, and held thanks to buffs from Tom and Jovan.

Jovan surged forward on the last of his strength, veil flaring black-gold, weaving every last thread of misfortune he had into Vorkapar’s every motion, buying fractions of a second one at a time.

Tom rode his shoulder, calling warnings in a voice gone completely serious, watching every twitch of muscle under spectral flesh for the tell that would kill them all, and also used his Space-Time Nexus to save them, which could at least delay this peak Divine-rank boss by less than half a second whenever Tom wished.

Aidan closed his eyes and went looking for a shape inside himself he had never named before.

He found grief first, old and enormous, a billion years of it. Then rage, clamped and patient, the thing the system had just reminded him it could take from him. Then something under both of those, something that had never once been about anger at all.

Judgement.

Not fury. Not vengeance. The simple, absolute certainty that some things did not get to keep hurting people forever, and that someone had to be the one who finally said so.

He felt every aspect he owned fold toward that single point, lightning and metal and wind and blood and nether and blade and fire, all of it losing its separate names and becoming one thing instead, and the concept took shape in his mind whole and complete, like it had always been waiting there for him to notice it.

[Conceptual Technique comprehended.]

[Fist of Judgement | Conceptual Power Rating: 183,290]

Aidan opened his eyes, and the world looked different through them, clearer, slower, like he was standing a half-step outside of time itself.

He rose.

"Vorkapar." His voice came out quiet, and it still cracked across the whole frozen tomb. "Look at me."

The dragon’s dead-starlight eyes turned toward him, and the instant they locked on, everything about Vorkapar simply stopped. His wings, mid-beat, froze in the air. The claw already swinging toward Arthur hung motionless, every ounce of intended violence in it locked in place like the world had forgotten how to let it move.

Aidan drew his fist back, and light began to gather around it, pulling in every stray thread of hostile intent still hanging in the air, every echo of the roar, every claw strike Vorkapar had thrown and would have thrown, all of it dragged into a slow, spiraling orbit around Aidan’s knuckles.

The spin built. The light built with it, faster, denser, until the air itself screamed under the pressure of it.

’Everything you tried to kill me with,’ Aidan thought, watching the surrounding violence of energy collapse into a single spinning point above his fist. ’Thanks for the fuel.’

He struck.

The Fist of Judgement crossed the frozen ground in less time than the eye could track, all that gathered, converted violence riding behind it, and it landed square in the center of Vorkapar’s chest.

For one heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then it burst.

Every ounce of absorbed power discharged at once, converting whole into a single, absolute detonation of lightning, and it didn’t simply strike the Specter Dragon King. It judged him, arcing through spectral flesh and ancient bone alike, refusing to let a single cell of him claim it hadn’t been found guilty.

Vorkapar’s death-toll scream tore out of him one final time, and then his enormous body came apart into drifting, silent motes of pale light, scattering across the frozen tomb like snow finally allowed to fall.

[Vorkapar, the Specter Dragon King, has been defeated.]

[Total Attempts on Vorkapar: 377. Successful Clears: 1.]

Aidan’s knees hit the ice.

Every last drop of energy in him, Mana, Stamina, Spirit Energy, all of it, had gone into that single fist, and there was nothing left in the tank to even hold himself upright with.

"I..." he managed, and then his vision went dark before he finished the sentence.