Chapter 1046: Victory Day

A cold wind howled in from the coastline, stirring up the dust that had just settled over the desolate land. The slanting rays of the blazing sun cast a shimmering glow over the scarred earth, even coating the dragon’s scales with a faint, wavering halo. The blue dragon, newly awakened from slumber, stood dazed amid the shocking wasteland. For the first few minutes, she was lost in a fog of confusion: Who am I? Where am I? Who beat me up like this? And who did I beat up in return?

A gust of wind swept past, and Melita instinctively shook her long neck. A small, round, black object was blown off a nearby mound of dirt. By some twist of fate—or perhaps destiny—she realized it was part of the lamp from her bedroom.

“My house… my huge house… my nest… my balcony… where are they…?”

Her mind, just rebooting, couldn’t process such overwhelming information. The blue dragon slipped into a brief mental haze, but as time passed, her powerful physiology began to take effect. The damage to her nervous system healed rapidly, and the hazy, dreamlike memories gradually sharpened. The distorted, surreal impressions gave way to reality. Melita’s stunned, bewildered expression slowly faded into silence. Her gaze hardened, and when she looked out over the ruins before her, it was as if a different dragon stood there.

At that moment, the sound of beating wings nearby pulled Melita from her reverie.

She snapped her head up toward the noise, and in the next instant, her eyes lit up with joy—a familiar, pure white figure was soaring overhead, scanning the wasteland as if searching for something. Unable to contain herself, Melita let out a roar toward the sky. The white dragon finally spotted her among the rubble and immediately began descending.

Moments later, a gust of wind and a tremor announced the white dragon’s landing at the edge of the ruins. Melita summoned her remaining strength, breaking free from the debris and limping toward her friend—shifting back into human form halfway to conserve energy.

The white dragon, Noretta, remained in her draconic shape. When Melita reached her, Noretta lowered her head. “Thank goodness—you’re really alive!”

“…Looks like only a small fraction of our kin survived,” Melita immediately caught the deeper meaning in her friend’s words. Her eyelids drooped, but she quickly lifted her head again. “Still, it’s good to see you.”

“Likewise,” Noretta said softly, her voice low and warm. “Looks like you’re fully awake now? How much do you remember?”

“I’m not sure. My mind’s still a bit foggy, but I recall many fragments from the final battle… I remember falling from the sky at the end, but somehow surviving. I remember a firestorm…” Melita muttered, pressing her hand to her forehead. “Now all the voices are gone—the gods’, Omega’s… I’ve never felt my mind so quiet before. It’s strange.”

“Everyone who survived feels that way. We’ll get used to it,” Noretta said, lowering her head to gently nudge Melita’s hair with her chin. “I woke up a bit earlier than you, so I know the process.”

“Survived…” Melita whispered. “How many of us are left? Have we gathered anywhere? What’s the situation now?”

“Not many. Survivors are scattered across the battlefield, but the ancient dragons who survived in the Council and the Elders are working to restore order and gather our people. I was sent out to find survivors. A dozen or so others with lighter injuries are patrolling nearby,” Noretta explained, lowering one wing to invite Melita onto her back. “It’s complicated now. There’s a lot to explain. Come up—I’ll take you to our temporary base. We can talk while we fly.”

Melita glanced at her friend’s sloping back. Amid the elegant white scales, a jagged scar stood out—though healing, it was still gruesome.

Melita knew her own wounds were probably worse, but she hesitated and shook her head. “No, you’re not in any better shape than me…”

“You never used to be so polite,” Noretta teased, lowering her wings again. “So, are you getting on or not? I’m telling you, chances like this don’t come often. If you miss this one, there might not be another.”

“That’s what you said!” Melita shot her a glare, then gritted her teeth and climbed onto her friend’s broad back.

With a jolt, she felt herself lift off the ground, embracing the sky once more. The protective barrier dragons automatically deploy in flight shielded her from the biting wind. Only after the cold ceased did Melita realize just how frigid it was. “The wind’s so cold… feels like it’s blowing straight from the ice ocean…”

“Of course. The great shield is down. The entire continent is exposed to polar climate now—we’ve lost almost all weather and tidal controllers. Talrond’s climate will only get worse.”

Melita said nothing. She carefully stepped forward on Noretta’s scales until she reached the shoulder blades, then leaned over to look down. For the first time from this height, she saw Talrond’s true postwar face.

Agondor was utterly destroyed. The mountain ranges bordering the city had collapsed like sandcastles after a storm. Ancient palaces and temples lay in shattered ruins among rocky chasms. Scorch marks scarred the debris, evidence of the searing heat waves. A terrifying fissure stretched from the city center all the way to the coastline.

Scattered across the bleak land were the remains of dragons and war machines—black spots on the apocalypse’s canvas.

Melita pressed her lips together. “…It’s all gone… even the Council’s headquarters. Not a single intact roof remains.”

“Nothing can withstand the wrath of the gods unscathed,” Noretta’s voice came from ahead. “We survivors are the luckiest in all of Talrond.”

The wrath of the gods…

Melita repeated the phrase silently. Memories buried deep in her mind surfaced little by little, stirring complex emotions. After several minutes of silence, she finally asked, “So… we won?”

“Looks like it,” Noretta replied. “You can’t hear the gods anymore, right? No more unspeakable visions or voices… me neither. We’ve all broken free from that pervasive mental corruption—that’s proof we won. Elder Dukemore has already declared victory at the gathering point… yes, we won.”

“Won… the greatest miracle of all miracles. We actually won…” Melita murmured, unsure whether to feel joy or sorrow.

She didn’t know how to describe her feelings. The final battle—deep down, every dragon knew this day would come. Though none openly spoke of it or admitted it would happen, this apocalyptic war was like a curse hanging over their entire race. Every dragon, from the moment they were implanted with the resonance core and gained independent thought, knew it was inevitable.

Talrond maintained balance in its cradle, but no balance lasts forever. Even short-lived humans understood this; dragons did too.

Only no one dared speak of it before the final battle arrived.

Faced with this looming curse, some dragons drowned themselves in the bliss of hallucinogens and enhancers, some resigned themselves to fate, waiting for the end, and some prepared quietly with clear minds. But almost no dragon ever imagined mortals would be the ones to claim victory.

Yet now, victory had truly come.

“We won, but theoretically, none of us should have survived…” Melita suddenly realized the problem. As a high-ranking dragon of upper Talrond and a member of the High Council, she was privy to more details of the final battle, which raised more questions. “So why are we awake? Did we… lose half the battle?”

“No, we did win, but something unknown changed,” Noretta said in a low voice. “Omega didn’t completely erase the original consciousness in all nodes, nor did it execute the planned ‘self-cleanse’ protocol. In fact… it seems to have disappeared from Talrond, releasing all nodes before vanishing. That’s why we could wake up.”

“Disappeared? Omega disappeared?” Melita’s eyes widened in disbelief. “How did it disappear? Do you mean the servers and nodes are gone? Or the Omega system itself?”

“Seems like the latter, but I don’t know the details. I’m just tasked with finding survivors. Elder Dukemore and a few technicians seem to know more, but even they are uncertain. After all… Omega has been running autonomously for millennia, iterating itself multiple times. It’s become a complex system even its original creators can’t fully understand. For tens of thousands of years, technicians have mostly just made fancier casings and replaced decorations on some nodes.”

“…I can’t help but think of what Gawain said about Talrond in private—he called our situation a ‘Lost Sacred Authority,’” Melita muttered, frowning. “Anyway, Omega releasing our consciousness… that really doesn’t fit the logic of its directives…”

“But it’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Noretta tilted her head slightly. “It let us ‘live.’ Though surviving now will be more complicated.”

Noretta’s words reminded Melita. The blue dragon on the white dragon’s back looked down again at the wasteland below. “Things must be bad now. Tell me what problems we’re facing…”

“Alright, though it might not be pleasant,” Noretta sighed. “Let’s start with the great shield’s collapse, then the ecological breakdown, followed by food and medical shortages, and the factory shutdowns after Omega’s disappearance… though we don’t have many factories left anyway.”

…

Outside the ruins of Agondor, the massive complex that once served as the headquarters for factories and giant corporate conglomerates had also collapsed. Its vast steel frameworks and protective walls were shattered by chaotic gravity storms and scorching heatwaves, twisted into grotesque, crawling shapes sprawled across the plain. Yet compared to the city ruins that had been utterly destroyed, this area still retained a surprising degree of structural integrity and stability.

This was largely thanks to the factories’ own rigorous construction standards—unlike the city’s elegant but fragile architecture, these vital industrial plants were built with extra-strong frameworks and multiple layers of defense. Moreover, this region hadn’t been a primary battlefield in the earlier conflicts.

So, although the factory operations had ceased and the critical, delicate control systems were completely ruined, some of the sturdier workshops and the caves built beneath them had survived. These now served as a temporary refuge for the survivors—wounded dragons who had lived through the final battle dragged their exhausted bodies here, licking their wounds and waiting for what the future might bring.

This was the scene Melita saw after climbing down from Noretta’s back.

To be honest, the bleakness of the place made it hard for her to associate it with any kind of “victory.”

“I know this doesn’t look like a comfortable place to settle, but it’s the best ‘livable’ spot we could find right now,” Noretta said, turning back to look at Melita as she limped down from her wing, a teasing note in her voice. “We’re limited on options, so just think of these rocks as your zero-gravity bed back in your nest—after all, that thing you got from the flea market never really worked properly anyway.”

“Instead of mocking my financial situation, maybe you should find a place to rest. If you keep flying like this, your wounds are going to split open again,” Melita shot back, glancing at her friend. “And speaking of money, well, we’re all in the same boat now.”

“Alright, still optimistic—that’s a relief,” Noretta said, folding her wings. A twitch flickered at the corner of her mouth from the pain in her back wounds, but she shook her head. “I’m going to set out again, head south to one of the battle zones to see if any of our kin have just woken up. The temperature’s dropping. While dragons’ physiology can handle the Arctic chill, the energy drain from injuries is huge, and the cold will turn wounds that might have healed into something far worse.”

She glanced around at the battered factories and cave shelters gathered here, scarred by war. “At least there’s some shelter from the wind, and a few barely functioning heat pumps.”

“Are you sure your wounds can handle it?” Melita couldn’t help but ask.

“To be honest, it still hurts a bit, but flying again won’t be a problem,” Noretta said, stretching her wings. “White dragons have strong regenerative abilities—I’m confident in that.”

“Alright then, be careful.”

“I will. You should go find Karador first. He’s in charge of order here,” Noretta said, lifting her head and pointing her long neck toward the center of the camp. “There are a few red dragons there too. Their healing magic and repair skills can help stabilize your injuries. Now that Omega’s gone, the medical and auto-repair devices are useless. We have to rely on old-fashioned ‘craftsmanship’… though their skills aren’t exactly top-notch.”

(End of chapter)