Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Brida stepped heavily forward, towering over the completely immobilized Hero.

The Titan Bastion raised her colossal Astral-Forged Void Cleaver high over her head.

Her red eyes burned with final executionary intent.

She was preparing to bring the massive axe down to cleave Kassandra completely in half.

Tasmin pulled back hard on her chains, tightening the metal links around Kassandra’s throat, preparing to sever the Hero’s head from her shoulders in a brutal, synchronized decapitation.

”Gah! Fuu!”

Kassandra squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable end but the strike never landed.

A sudden incomprehensible shift in the atmospheric pressure washed over the center of the battlefield.

It wasn’t the heavy, crushing weight of gravity. It wasn’t the roaring heat of fire or the chilling bite of frost either.

It was a cold and terrifying silence.

Before Brida could swing her axe downward, and before Tasmin could pull her chains taut...

An invisible and geometrically perfect slash cut straight through the air directly between them.

The strike did not carry any roaring sound effects.

It did not create a massive shockwave of displaced air. It was simply a localized deletion of space.

The invisible slash cleanly severed Tasmin’s super-heated Eclipse-Thread chains exactly down the middle.

The incredibly dense mythril links snapped effortlessly and fell into the mud.

The exact same invisible strike continued forward, cleanly cutting a microscopic perfectly horizontal line straight through the thick, adamantine face of Brida’s tower shield, leaving a razor-thin glowing gap entirely across the metal surface without actually applying any force to Brida herself.

”Huh?!” Both Brida and Tasmin let out.

Finally, the invisible strike reached the fading dissolving walls of the Shield World domain.

The remaining pink fabric of the domain was sliced completely in half, collapsing instantly into a harmless shower of pink dust that rained down over the crushed bedrock.

Brida froze completely.

Her massive axe remained held high in the air.

Her red eyes widened in genuine instinctual shock as she looked down at the clean, perfect cut running across her previously unbreakable shield.

Tasmin instantly dropped her severed chain handles.

She used a quick Phantom Leap to blink twenty feet backward, landing in a low, hyper-defensive crouch.

Her twin shortswords were raised and ready with her eyes scanning the clearing with a bit of a panic.

Kassandra, suddenly freed from the agonizing burning chains, dropped heavily onto one knee in the mud.

She was panting heavily, clutching her bruised throat, but as she looked up through the settling pink dust, a deeply relieved smirk touched her lips.

Footsteps approached through the quiet clearing.

Tap!

Tap!

Slow unbothered footsteps walking calmly across the shattered bedrock.

The tall, lean figure of a man stepped out from the dissipating dust cloud.

He was dressed in the high-quality combat uniform of Sky’s elite vanguard.

His posture was perfectly relaxed with his hands resting casually at his sides, completely lacking any aggressive combat stance.

A thick dark cloth blindfold was wrapped securely around his eyes, obscuring the upper half of his face entirely.

It was Hiro.

Kassandra let out a long ragged breath, looking up at the blindfolded Hero from her position in the mud.

”It is... about time...” Kassandra coughed with her voice hoarse from the void flames. ”I was beginning to think... you were just going to stand back and let these two monsters execute me.”

Hiro stopped walking. He stood perfectly still exactly ten feet away from the tense, highly defensive forms of Brida and Tasmin.

He didn’t draw a weapon.

Hiro simply tilted his head toward the two S-Rank women with an eerie, serene smile curving his lips.

”You must forgive my tardiness, Kassandra,” Hiro spoke.

’Is this really the way he speaks? Aeli said he was quite different initially...’

His voice was incredibly smooth and lacking any sort of fear or adrenaline.

”I was simply observing,” Hiro continued calmly. ”I must commend the strength of the Blessed Land’s Vanguard. It is exceedingly rare to see someone breach the physical hardness of the Shield World with such effortless, brutal synergy. You two are truly magnificent warriors.”

Brida slowly lowered her Void Cleaver.

Her boisterous, laughing demeanor completely vanished, replaced by the grim focus of a veteran.

Her heavy boots shifted cautiously in the mud and her eyes locked onto the blindfolded man with deep instinctual caution.

”Who the hell is this guy?” Brida muttered, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous growl. ”I didn’t even feel him swing... There was no kinetic buildup and no muscle telegraph at all.”

Tasmin’s crimson eyes were narrowed into sharp lethal slits.

Her shadow mana curled tightly around her boots, entirely ready to execute a supreme evasion maneuver at a moment’s notice.

”Do not let your guard down, Brida,” Tasmin warned softly, her voice tight with immense tension. ”His core signature... it is completely suppressed. I cannot read his depth.”

Hiro let out a soft, highly amused chuckle. He raised his right hand slowly toward his face.

”You are on the offensive,” Hiro noted calmly with his fingers gently grasping the edge of his dark cloth blindfold. ”That is good. Caution is the hallmark of true veterans. However... mere physical caution will not save you from what comes next.”

The atmosphere in the clearing plummeted into absolute, freezing dread.

Slowly and deliberately, Hiro pulled the blindfold away from his face, letting the dark cloth slip from his fingers and fall silently into the mud.

Brida and Tasmin both tensed, expecting to see glowing magical eyes capable of casting devastating illusions or targeted spells.

Instead, they saw nothing?

Hiro’s eyes were completely gone.

His eye sockets were deep, hollow, and heavily scarred, bearing the gruesome marks of a brutal violent gashing that had occurred a very long time ago.

The flesh had healed perfectly around the empty voids, leaving a chilling macabre visage of permanent physical blindness.

Yet, he wasn’t looking at them with empty sockets.

As Hiro stood there with his ruined face exposed to the open air, a terrifying unnatural phenomenon began to spread across the battlefield.

From the empty voids of his scarred eye sockets, a brilliant piercing blue light began to violently leak outward.

The light didn’t just illuminate his face. It bled directly into the surrounding environment, altering the very fabric of reality around him.

Deep, jagged lines of glowing blue energy began to spread out from the crushed dirt beneath his boots.

The lines crawled rapidly across the shattered bedrock, climbed up the broken stone pillars, and etched themselves directly into the ambient air itself, forming a massive three-dimensional geometric web.

The blue lines mapped absolutely everything.

They mapped every single pebble, every blade of grass, the exact angle of Brida’s heavy axe, and the microscopic shadow seams surrounding Tasmin’s boots.

It was spatial awareness at its finest.

”It has been a very long time since I lost my physical sight,” Hiro whispered, his serene smile remaining perfectly intact even as the terrifying blue light flooded the battlefield. ”The physical wounds healed... but the darkness remained. However... true sight does not require eyes.”

The glowing blue jagged lines suddenly shifted entirely.

They changed from a bright sapphire into a deep and infinitely suffocating shade of dark purple.

The entire world surrounding the girls was instantly drowned in the suffocating purple light, suppressing the ambient mana, locking the coordinates entirely in place, and subjecting both Brida and Tasmin to a terrifying inescapable domain of perception.

Hiro stood perfectly still in the absolute center of the purple hellscape, his voice echoing perfectly into their minds.

”Mind’s Eye.”

...

The eastern ridge of the Umbral Basin offered a panoramic view of the chaotic blood-soaked battlefield below.

Gideon stood perfectly still near the absolute edge of the jagged stone cliff.

He did not flinch as a stray volley of heavy magical artillery fire from the distant Blessed Land Vanguard slammed into the bedrock thirty yards to his left.

The resulting explosion sent a violent shower of dirt, ash, and stone shrapnel washing over his heavy mythril plate armor, but he didn’t even raise a hand to shield his face.

The Last Dragon-Slayer merely watched the carnage unfold.

His pale gray eyes, marked by an unnatural golden ring around the pupil, scanned the war zone with the cold look of an apex predator.

A large gruesome scar ran vertically entirely across his left eye.

It was a permanent, horrific reminder of a hunt that had gone terribly wrong in his youth.

The flesh had healed over the decades, but the memory of the beast that had taken his eye had not faded for even a single second.

From his elevated vantage point, he observed the heavy infantry lines of Sky’s army... The Unmovable Wall colliding violently with the women of the Blessed Land’s army.

It was a massacre.

Down in the western quadrant, he saw the blinding pink flashes of Kassandra’s defensive dome being deployed, only to violently dissolve into useless dust moments later.

In the central clearing, he watched the catastrophic explosions generated by Ignis and Frost, only to see both elemental Wardens forcefully and brutally crushed into the dirt by a massive deep-purple spatial singularity.

Sky’s elite commanders were falling one by one, completely overwhelmed by the perfection of the enemy forces.

Gideon’s jaw tightened.

He let out a low, disgusted scoff.

”Weak,” Gideon muttered.

His voice was a deep rasp that carried easily over the howling winds of the battlefield.

”You rely entirely on your shiny little elemental toys and static spatial domains,” Gideon criticized the unconscious Wardens below. ”The moment an enemy bypasses your predictable formulas, you fall apart like unbaked clay. You call yourselves Heroes, but you do not even know how to properly bleed. Pathetic...”

Gideon rested his heavy leather-clad gauntlets on the thick pommel of his massive weapon.

The Dragon-Bone Greatsword was planted tip-first into the solid stone directly in front of his boots.

It was an absolute monstrosity of a weapon, a Tier 4 relic forged entirely from the spinal column of an ancient primordial dragon that his great-grandfather had slain centuries ago.

The blade was impossibly sharp, its edge carrying the lingering hateful power of its original owner.

Gideon was not here to play infantry commander.

He didn’t care about Lord Sky’s territorial expansion.

He didn’t care about Blessed Land’s incredible synergy or the shifting borders of the Sovereign Realm.

He had joined Sky’s mobile fortress for one specific reason.

Sky’s territory constantly moved into the most dangerous untamed sectors of the Unknown Zones, crossing paths with some of the rarest monsters in existence.

Gideon was here for a hunt.

His pale gray eyes shifted away from the main melee line, scanning through the thick clouds of black smoke until they locked onto a single, isolated figure tearing through a cluster of Sky’s heavy shield-bearers near the northern ruins.

Talira.

She was currently fighting in her humanoid form.

Her long cascading ruby-red hair whipped wildly in the wind as she moved with terrifying lethality.

Two polished dragon horns curved proudly from her temples.

Her long scale-armored crimson tail swished violently behind her boots with the heavy mythril-tipped spike at the end shattering enemy shields and ribcages with every single sweeping arc.

The Hunter’s Talisman hanging around Gideon’s neck grew instantly, searingly hot against his scarred chest.

HUMMMMMM!

The Dragon-Bone Greatsword began to vibrate violently in his grip, humming with an eager bloodlust as the weapon recognized the presence of its mortal enemy.

Gideon’s pulse began to race.

A deep throb echoed in his ears. It was a familiar, intoxicating, adrenaline-fueled rhythm that he hadn’t felt in such a long time.

It had been so incredibly long since he had actually seen a living breathing dragon.

”There you are...” Gideon whispered softly.

A terrifying obsessive grin slowly stretched across his heavily scarred face.

His mind was instantly assaulted by a violent inescapable flashback.

He saw the massive, scaly claws tearing through the dark sky of his youth...

He felt the searing unbearable heat of white-hot dragon fire instantly melting his father’s armor into liquid slag.

He remembered the agonizing pain of the jagged claw slicing across his left eye, permanently taking half his vision and leaving him bleeding out in the freezing mud while the beast flew away into the clouds.

His clan’s legacy was a fading ember.

His ancestors had been one of the most feared warriors in the entire Sovereign Realm.

They had hunted beasts that could level entire mountain ranges yet, Gideon had spent his entire life obsessively training for a hunt that had never actually come.

Until this exact moment.

Gideon wanted to hunt a Dragon.