Hide’s boots crunched softly against the pulverized rocks as he walked up to the corpse of the dead dragon.

From the top of the mountain, the beast had looked like a massive, swirling eel. But standing directly before it, the unfathomable scale of the creature was paralyzing. It was even more majestic up close.

Its elongated, reptilian face alone was so impossibly large that its open jaws could easily swallow entire multi-story buildings whole.

Thick, tree-like antlers grew from its crown, and its long, ethereal whiskers lay limp across the crushed stone. Even in death, its faintly glowing, luminescent blue-scaled skin rippled with residual static electricity, sending tiny, popping arcs of blue lightning into the damp earth.

Looking at the mass and biological perfection of the dragon, Hide’s mind flashed back to the basement beneath the Sihue estate. He suddenly remembered the chained, teal-furred feline Calamity Beast locked in the dark.

The Doom Overseer.

That was the only True A-Ranked Calamity Beast Hide had ever seen in his life. But this dragon... according to the gate’s structural laws, it was supposed to be, at best, a D-Rank Gatekeeper.

But Hide felt a sharp, undeniable nudge in the back of his mind.

He was wrong.

Hide stood there, the freezing wind whipping his silver hair across his forehead. He was standing inside a Loop Gate. According to everything the world had taught him, Loop Gates were stable.

When you killed the Gatekeeper of a Loop Gate, the beast didn’t die permanently. The dimensional mechanics of the gate would simply gather the ambient mana and revive the Gatekeeper along with the beasts over the span of a specific time.

Logically, if Hide wanted to turn this dragon into a phantom, he didn’t need to do it now. He could just step out of the gate, wait for the tournament to end, sneak back in later when the beast had regenerated, kill it himself, and take its core.

But for some baffling reason, it all felt terribly wrong.

A cold, heavy knot tightened in Hide’s stomach. It felt as though if he walked away right now, if he stepped out of that violet portal and left this corpse behind—he would never see this magnificent blue dragon again.

And there was a slim chance, one in a thousand, of that thing actually happening.

Hide didn’t ignore his instincts. He had survived this long by trusting the cold, predatory logic of his unique class.

"Let’s see what you really are," Hide muttered.

He raised his hands, and summoned his double blades. The Twin Viper Blades gleamed menacingly in the dim light. With a confident smirk, Hide vaulted onto the massive, scaled belly of the beast. He drove the A-Rank blades deep into the dragon’s underbelly.

He cut down the dragon, carving a massive fissure through its chest cavity until he reached the center of its biological structure, right near its stomach.

Hide reached into the steaming, dark blood and pulled his hand out.

Resting in his palm was a bright, scaled thing. It wasn’t a smooth, round crystal like normal beast cores. It looked like a cluster of compressed, interlocking sapphire scales, crackling violently with wild electricity.

Hide narrowed his eyes and pointed the black Exterminator ring on his finger directly at the glowing object. The ring’s scanner hummed, and a small, pale blue holographic window projected into the air.

[Item Scanned: Beast Core]

[Classification: Lesser Calamity Lord]

Hide’s glowing blue eyes widened by a fraction. His breath hitched as he stared at the floating text.

A C-Rank core.

The dragon had not been a D-Rank beast. At some point during this gate’s endless, miserable cycles of death and rebirth, the Gatekeeper had accumulated enough life mana and evolved from a D-Rank Calamity Beast into a C-Rank Lesser Calamity Lord!

Hide let out a short, incredulous laugh. His hunch had been absolutely right. Calamity Lords did not regenerate. The moment a beast crossed the threshold into the C-Rank domain, the laws of a Loop Gate could no longer bind it or revive it.

This dragon would not live again. This was the dragon’s absolute final cycle.

He jumped down from the massive carcass. He held the crackling, scaled core out in front of him, resting it on his open palm.

Hide activated his talent, which opened the gates of his Dark Abyssal Core.

The response was cataclysmic. Hide threw his head back as the ambient dark mana from the environment violently rushed toward him. The pulverized ground shook. Thick, suffocating currents of corrupted violet energy spiraled into his chest from the earth, filling his core to the absolute brim.

Then, the dark mana violently escaped his body, shooting forward and aggressively surrounding the crackling blue core in his hand.

But it wasn’t enough. The mass of a hundred-foot dragon required an astronomical amount of energy.

Hide gritted his teeth, his glowing eyes flaring with intense violet light. As his body pulled in more and more!

The churning, bruised-purple storm clouds above them were forcefully ripped downward, they too were made up of dark mana which was sucked into Hide’s chest before being violently expelled into the growing, swirling vortex of pitch-black mist hovering before him.

The air turned freezing cold. The wind howled like a dying animal as the dark mana was entirely consumed by the endless void of Hide’s core and subsequently forced into the roaring, tornado of dark mist forming the phantom.

Hide gasped, his muscles bulging as he pushed his physical and magical limits to the absolute maximum.

The required mass was finally met.

The swirling, colossal tornado of pitch-black mist suddenly stopped. The chaotic energy rapidly condensed, solidifying into an intricate, terrifying structure.

First came the massive, skeletal framework of dark iron. Then the dense, shadowy muscle fibers. Finally, the thousands of interlocking, pitch-black scales locked into place, rippling with crackling streaks of dark-violet lightning.

The mist faded, revealing the reconstructed Dragon in all its majesty!

It was breathtaking. The phantom dragon floated effortlessly above the crushed valley, its colossal, serpentine body easily spanning hundreds of feet. Ethereal, shadowy whiskers trailed from its regal, antlered head, and its hollow eye sockets burned with a blinding, dark flame.

The colossal shadow dragon slowly lowered its massive, terrifying head until its snout was mere inches away from Hide.

Hide stood perfectly still, looking up into the burning eyes of the phantom.

The dragon respectfully bowed its massive head, and a deep, ancient, and endlessly loyal telepathic voice echoed directly into Hide’s mind.

"My Liege. You have finally come!"