The docks of Pearlbay burned with lantern-fire and tidewater spray. The tide beasts crashed in waves, hulking silhouettes with fins like jagged blades, eyes glinting with abyssal hunger.

Kaen stomped forward, his jacket whipping with the sea wind, teeth bared in a savage grin.

"Let me show you my training after three years!!"

He slammed his palms together, and fire spiraled outward, wrapping his arms in molten glow.

"Echo Art: Flame Burst!!"

The swamp-like pools around the shore detonated in pillars of fire, steam hissing as tide beasts shrieked, their scaled hides burning to ash. The night lit up in a sudden inferno.

Khael's eyes tracked him, calm even amidst chaos.

"(Hoh… as expected of the main protagonist of this world… Kaen really became much stronger than before.)"

The tide beasts regrouped, churning the sea black. But then another voice cracked through the storm.

Juno stepped forward, bandages peeling from his fists as the veins across his forearms bulged with Taishin pressure. His eyes sharpened like drawn blades.

"Taishin…Third Gate, OPEN!!"

The ground beneath his feet shattered in concentric cracks as raw power flooded his frame. His body moved faster than sight, one punch caved the chest of a beast inward, bone and ichor exploding outward. Another kick followed, sharp and controlled, breaking a tide beast's jaw in half.

"Tch… still not enough." Juno spat blood from the strain but didn't falter.

Ceyla surged next, stepping past him, lightning dancing wild and beautiful. Her wolf-cut hair whipped across her face as her grin stretched sharp.

"Echo art: Volt Stride!"

She vanished in a blur, lightning trails lacing the dock planks. Each arc of her movement carved beasts apart, bodies collapsing before they even knew they'd been struck. Sparks leapt into the black tide, boiling the water.

"Boys play with fists, I end wars with storms." She smirked, crackling with pride.

From the other side, Rael stood like a pillar of light. His emerald eyes locked on the swarm. He drew his hand along his Lumen Blade, and its edge sang with radiant clarity. His spirit, Seraphis, shimmered faintly behind him, mirror-green wings unfurling like judgment itself.

"Echo Art:Verdant Severance."

One swing, and a crescent of luminous energy split the dock's length, bisecting half a dozen beasts cleanly. Their bodies fell silently into the tide, steam rising where they sank.

Captain Roan's eyes widened for the briefest moment recognition flashing as he saw Rael wield the blade with precision few could master.

"(hoh….no wasted movement. Impressive.)"

The Pearl Guardians roared behind him, courage rekindled by the sight of the young elites.

But amidst them all, Khael still hadn't moved. He only stood at the frontline's edge, his robe swaying with the ocean wind, eyes narrowed on the abyss.

Kaen shot him a glare mid-strike.

"Oi, Dragon Knight! You just gonna stand there and watch us show off?!"

Khael's smile returned, faint and maddeningly calm.

"(Not yet. My turn… will come when the storm deepens.)"

The sea rumbled, darker and heavier than before. The tide beasts had been pawns now, something vast stirred beneath the surface, scales glinting faintly in the moonlit depths.

The frontline froze for a heartbeat. Even the Guardians' cheers faltered.

Rael lowered his blade, sweat trickling down his temple.

"(That presence… it's not just another beast. Something higher. Something corrupted.)"

Ceyla's grin dimmed, sparks fading for once.

"(Tch… so the real fight begins now.)"

Juno clenched his fists tighter, ignoring the tremor in his bones.

"(Damn it… even Third Gate feels small compared to this.)"

Kaen's flames blazed higher, reckless as always, yet his heart pounded faster.

(Then I'll burn it! No matter how big, no matter how strong, I'll burn it all down!!)

And Khael still calm, still carrying that strange, weathered smile, stepped forward until the dock's salt-wet wind braided with the dragon-light at his sleeves.

"(Three years of growth… I show you my growth.)" His thought landed like a bell.

Captain Roan cut a soldier's silhouette into the chaos and barked the order: "Hold the line. Protect the people. No charging off for glory, we trap it at the shallow!"

The Pearl Guardians slammed their spears into the planks. The frontline bristled like a blade. The true monster flexed, a dark ripple that tugged at the tides an instinctual pull to drag the dock into the deep.

Khael watched for the opening, not to strike first but to orchestrate. He had not come to win alone. He had come to lead a chorus.

"Rael, bind its head. Juno, plant the core. Kaen, burn from the flank. Ceyla, cut its speed. Lira, keep our veins sewn." His voice was a low command, and each name answered as if a bell had rung inside them.

Rael didn't hesitate. "tsk." He stepped out, Seraphis's light unfurling into six radiant wings not gentle feathers but blades of law. "Echo Art: Lumen Cage!" The wings slammed downward like a falling cathedral, etching a ring of blinding sigils into the water. Light stitched the beast's jaw and narrowed its vision, anchoring its head in place with judgment itself.

The monster thrashed, black ichor spattering the guard rails. It tore at the cage with voided tongues and teeth that flared like fragments of night. The ship-manship of the Pearl Guardians staggered; the beast's bulk rocked the dock as if the sea wanted to swallow them whole.

Juno exhaled, soundless, and the Taishin pressure rolled through his limbs. "Taishin Gate Open." Muscle density locked, breath tunneled, every tendon sharpened. He charged like a battering ram, forging through the monster's thrashing flank with a shoulder that smashed bone and made the beast re-coil.

When he collided, the dock bent and shuddered. Juno's frame took the impact and didn't fall, he held the portion of the beast like an anchor, giving the others a fixed point to work with.

Kaen screamed and threw himself along the exposed side where Juno had held the flesh open. His flame-hands were a molten torrent now, sharpened into needles by hatred and years of practice. "Echo Art: Soulfire Spines!!" He drove columns of living flame into the creature's seam where shadow and bone met. The toxin-void hissed; half a dozen voidworms writhed and popped, turned to steam.

"Burn it! Burn through its rot!" Kaen's voice was a furnace. The heat made steam like ghosts.

Ceyla slid like thunder. She braided speed into technique no wasted motion, only cutting arcs. "Echo art: Lightning Lash!" Her bolts arced, not for raw damage but to sever tendons, to snap the turning muscles beneath the creature's scale armor. The storm clipped the leviathan's swing, narrowed its range, turned wild thrashing into clumsy swings at the empty sea.

Lira ran the seam, a silver-pink blur; her Bloom Shinrei flowered into quick, luminous knots that knotted around men's wounds and Unbound fractures. "Hold him. Breathe. Don't go hollow." Each knot was a stitch and a prayer, mending tendon shears and keeping the Taishin Gate from over-slipping.

Between Rael's Lumen Cage and Juno's physical anchor, the beast's head snapped like a trapped predator. It sprayed void-salt, but it couldn't dislodge the law-bound light. Momentum shifted.

Khael moved then not as a berserker, but like a wind pulling all those winds together. Scales ran along his arm, an articulate armor of memory. He called to the old bloodline not to sear the world but to shape it.

"Echo Art: Dragonwind Barrage!" His voice was quiet, and the answer was a cyclone of emerald air and scale-honored Shinrei. The wind didn't just cut; it whorled foundations free of rot. It carved clean channels along the beast's underside where the teams had opened seams. It did not burn. It revealed.

Rael's Lumen Cage tightened as Khael's cyclone forced the creature's head low. Juno planted hard, and Kaen's fire slipped into the revealed breach like a blade into a scabbard. The sound that rose was half-rupture, half-roar and then the monster convulsed as if something inside it had been severed at the root.

It was then that the leviathan showed another trick: a throat of shadow that was not merely animal but a wound-riff of stolen souls a small chorus of voices that tried to twist the defenders' hearts with doubt.

"You'll break. You'll fail. Why mend a world that devours you?" The whisper slipped like salt.

For a second a rusted silence hovered over the line. Even Captain Roan's jaw worked. Men glanced at their shackled spears. The monster's whisper was a poison: the kind that eats at the edges of resolve.

Kaen's sweat stung his eyes memories of flames that once wanted to consume him but he shoved them down and screamed back, "Not today! Not ever!" He poured the fire into the wound without mercy.

Juno's gate creaked, muscles burning, but he pushed on because his fists were not merely weapons but oaths.

Ceyla let lightning carve away her doubt. Rael's Seraphis flared with a mirrored law that ate the whispers like sunlight swallows fog.

When the chorus died, the monster took one final, gurgling rotation. Then, like a reef torn from tired hands, it collapsed in slow waves. The sea swallowed the carcass, and for a moment, nothing but the hiss of cooling scales and the breathing of survivors filled the night.

Silence folded itself over Pearlbay. Lantern flames quivered. Men and teenagers who had been terrified seconds ago now rose, shaking, laughing, crying raw with the obvious fact that they had not died.

Captain Roan looked at Khael and then at his team. His voice, small and gruff, carried more respect than the old village had perhaps intended to give. "You fought for us. We will not forget."

Children on the docks pointed at the Dragon Knight statue's shadow and whispered, "He's real… he's real." Old women crossed themselves. The rumor of a legend hardened into something warmer: proof.

Khael looked at each of them Kaen with ash-streaked cheeks, Rael with the faint smirk of blood-logic still burning, Juno with a cracked grin, Ceyla sparking with quiet laughter, Lira already moving to check a wounded Guardian and felt a small, steady pulse of something like home.

"(Three years aren't only for one man's deeds.)" His thought was not loud, but it held all the weight of what they had built. "(We grew because we stood together.)"

On the quay, Kiro and the twins stumbled close, faces upturned and bright as lanterns. Toren said in a small, fierce whisper, "They're the Dragon Knight… and his friends. They saved us." Kiro didn't speak; he only watched, something like a decision settling in his small jaw.

Farther back, Elder Neria lifted her chin and blessed the fighters in an old Tidehold prayer. "May the Vein keep your hearts steady."

The night did not end the war. The Balance still hissed in the dark, and other tides would come. But for this hour, Pearlbay stood. For this hour, children slept because strangers had held a dock with their bones.

Khael let the quiet wash over him and in a voice meant for only the ones nearest said, "We'll be ready when the next tide rises."

Juno snorted, Ceyla rolled her eyes, Kaen grinned like a furnace, and Rael's smirk softened just a fraction into something like a promise. Across the docks, the lanterns kept their watch; the statue of the Dragon Knight caught the moon and gleamed, and for a while the world felt a little less complicated.

To be continue

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