Dragon Raja 3; Chapter 466: Dark Day (5)

Dragon Raja 3

“Hold onto it for me,” Anjou said. “It would be a shame to lose it here.”

“Are you preparing your last will?” Caesar frowned.

“I’m not some sentimental youth,” Anjou retorted, frowning. “Although I can’t guarantee an absolute victory, I still want to survive.” He glanced at the massive figure nearing in the black tide. “My job is to hold off the horde and that big thing. Your job is to set up the bomb. The helicopter’s coming!”

Caesar could hear it too—their helicopter was still circling overhead, and another one was approaching fast from a distance. No pilot would risk flying in such violent winds unless absolutely necessary. It could only be the helicopter carrying the refined sulfur bombs. The problem was that the bomb had to be manually set up. Fortunately, they had Chu Zihang, who, as a tech expert, could handle setting the delayed detonation, leaving the task of protecting him to Caesar.

The only issue was that Anjou staying behind to fight the dragon-shaped corpse had an almost negligible survival rate.

“Don’t waste my time! The faster you set the bomb, the better my chances,” Anjou said, both hands gripping his massive weapons as they sliced through the air with a piercing whistle. He locked eyes with the massive creature approaching from the black tide. “I’ve lived long enough—long enough that all my old friends are dead. If I die, no one will remember them, and they’ll truly vanish from this world. So, I don’t want to die just yet!”

Caesar and Chu Zihang exchanged glances. “Got it!”

Anjou glanced toward Caesar and Chu Zihang, who were now working to unload the refined sulfur bomb from the helicopter, preparing to fix it to a crane. Given Chu Zihang’s speed, a few minutes should be enough to set up the bomb, thanks to the technical knowledge shared with the Equipment Department.

Anjou took a deep breath. He knew he couldn’t afford a drawn-out fight—he needed to quickly defeat the dragon-shaped corpse and reunite with Caesar and Chu Zihang. If he got caught in an extended battle, he’d only end up as bait for the horde. He wasn’t lying; he truly wanted to survive, though he couldn’t calculate his chances. Luckily, having lived so long, he had come to accept death.

The giant shadow beneath the sea drew closer. Anjou couldn’t clearly judge its size—perhaps tens of meters, perhaps more. It was one of the largest dragons ever recorded. Facing such a target required Wrath and Greed, the most violent weapons of the Seven Deadly Sins, forged with alchemy beyond human understanding.

The waves crashed against the base of the lighthouse, sending tons of seawater into the sky as the massive shadow leapt from the water, twisting its body and advancing with terrifying momentum. This was what ancient dragon slayers had faced—a colossal enemy that filled the skies, with only the sword in their hand as their companion.

Anjou unleashed Time Zero to its fullest. In the slow flow of time, he caught a glimpse of the ancient, majestic creature. Though it was now only bones, it was still beautiful—beautiful in its utter grotesqueness. Its back was still covered with tough dragon scales, but its relatively soft abdomen had long since decayed. Or perhaps the White King’s descendants had hollowed out its belly after hunting it, leaving only its skeletal frame. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of golden eyes opened simultaneously within its ribcage, the horde of corpses hidden inside shrieking in unison.

The dragon’s ribs expanded like the blooming of a flower, and hundreds of corpses rained down, as if the dragon’s nest in the sky had opened.

Anjou swung Wrath and Greed in a wide arc, sealing off all the space around him as the corpses hurtled toward his blades. Each weapon produced a different effect. Wrath roared violently, its hilt adorned with a dragon’s head, its eyes glowing as if it were a living, ferocious dragon in Anjou’s hands. Meanwhile, Greed was nearly silent. Only Anjou could feel its pulsing, as if it had a heartbeat of its own. Its sharp edge sliced effortlessly through muscle and bone, giving the wielder a visceral satisfaction with each cut. With every slash, the blade became redder, as blood-like veins extended from the hilt toward the tip, greedily sucking the remnants of black blood from the corpses. Blood gushed from the dragon’s head at the end of Greed’s hilt.

Anjou let out a thunderous roar, stepping forward with each strike—Niten Ichi-ryu, Two Heavens as One!

He remembered his late friend in Japan, the kendo master Danryu Iwa Fudozai. Together, they had studied the “Two Heavens as One” technique, created by the legendary sword saint Miyamoto Musashi.

This was a very peculiar school of swordsmanship. Its founder defeated countless enemies in his lifetime, never losing a single duel, yet this style remained rather insignificant within the broader field of swordsmanship. Successors were unable to replicate Musashi Miyamoto’s dual-wielding technique. After much study, Danryu Iwa and Anjou concluded that the secret of Niten Ichi-ryu was not complex: it simply required immense strength, allowing one to wildly swing two long swords with both hands. Using both hands on a single sword generates much more force than one hand, but it also limits the angles of attack due to wrist locks. Wildly swinging, however, covers a full 360 degrees, leaving no blind spots—as long as one is strong enough. The decline of Niten Ichi-ryu wasn’t because the swordsmanship was lost, but because none of the successors were as physically powerful as Musashi, who wielded such strength.

When Anjou had fought against Inuyama Katsu, he hadn’t used this technique, because this windmill-like swordsmanship wasn’t meant for duels. It was a battlefield technique, meant for dealing with waves of enemies, not a single renowned strategist. In battle, you had to swing continuously, using unmatched brute strength to turn two swords into one, striding forward amidst the blood and chaos. It was a ferocious and relentless style, cutting down everything—whether it be iron, mountains, or even dragons.

The “Osho” in this battle was the dragon-shaped corpse. It roared silently at the sky, its vocal cords long since decayed into dust over millennia, yet its posture still hinted at the majesty it once possessed. Its wings were reduced to skeletal remains, resembling black iron. It beat the air with them, slashing at the ground with the jagged wing bones like a field of blades. Even the other corpse soldiers could not withstand its violent attacks, being crushed beneath the wing bones. Anjou dodged between the gaps in the wing strikes, but the other wing would immediately come down again, leaving radial claw marks behind. The horde of corpses continued surging forward, and the dragon-shaped corpse, like a frenzied general, drove its soldiers to their deaths while simultaneously raining down destruction.

Anjou was covered in wounds, in a condition he had never experienced before. His tortoiseshell glasses had long since fallen off in one of the wing strikes… Luckily, he wasn’t actually nearsighted or farsighted; he just used the glasses to hide the sharpness in his eyes. His suit was torn, revealing the snow-white shirt underneath, while sweat and blood mixed and soaked his muscular back. The tattoo of “All the World’s Malice,” depicting a tiger and a yasha demon, moved vividly with his muscles, as if ready to leap off his skin and join the fight against the dragon.

But the deadly twin swords he wielded—Greed and Wrath—were also chopping the wing bones into fragments.

Niten Ichi-ryu’s two heavens were symbolic of yin and yang. When yin and yang unite, they form chaos—a pure force that can cut through iron, mountains, or even dragons!

“This is just a reckless expenditure of stamina for time! He can’t keep this up!” Chu Zihang exclaimed as he grabbed a corpse’s skull with one hand, incinerating it with King’s Blaze, then casually tossing the burning fragments to clear some space on the battlefield.

The bomb had been secured to the crane, but the setup was not yet complete. Seawater had already flooded the artificial island, and the torrents now separated them from Anjou.

“Stop looking back!” Caesar fired a round from his Desert Eagle into a corpse’s forehead. “Just focus on your job! I’ll handle the dirty work!”

The man-made island swayed underfoot, with unknown debris falling from the sky, ignited by King’s Blaze and burning like fiery snowflakes. The rising seawater had already reached Caesar’s waist, as he stood in a lower part of the island.

Chu Zihang, having cooled his searing hot sword in the water with a hiss, couldn’t help but turn his head to witness the apocalyptic scene.

He had dreamed many times of the end of the Nibelungen in Beijing—probably something like this. After the subway rumbled away from them, the solitary cavern had collapsed, molten iron forming serpentine patterns along the tracks, and fissures spreading like wildfire. The shrieking Kamaitachi spiraled aimlessly… only Xia Mi and Fenrir remained, resting side by side like sleeping cats, fire raining down on them.

He thought of the Beijing girl, years ago, who had taken a subway ticket to the far end of Line 1, to Apple Orchard. Instead of joining the crowd, she had disappeared into the depths of the tunnels alone. After a long journey, she reached the center of the Nibelungen and gently touched the dragon’s brow bone. The dragon nudged her face with its tongue—the softest part of its body. They couldn’t embrace, but the gaze they shared felt like an embrace that had lasted for centuries. It was heartbreaking. The story began with them, alone in a world apart from everything, and ended with just the two of them, as their world was destroyed.

But there was no time to dwell on such thoughts now. Chu Zihang turned back to continue setting up the bomb.

The dragon’s wing bones were shattering, and it began attacking with its long tail. The sound it made as it whipped through the air was a low, menacing hum—the sound of supersonic turbulence. Anjou’s stamina was visibly failing; he could no longer maintain the relentless rhythm of Niten Ichi-ryu. The weapons that had once slain the Earth and Mountain King now seemed ineffective in his hands. Anjou retreated, trying to bait the dragon-shaped corpse into lunging at him. A lunge would throw the massive creature off balance, allowing Anjou a chance to strike at its most vulnerable points—its brain and the massive nerve cluster located near its waist. Destroying its central nervous system would render even a dragon-bone-made corpse inert.

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