The Hydra tried to flee. Lukas saw it in the frantic way its legs had turned, its great mass straining to retreat into the endless dark.

For the first time in its wretched existence, it turned its back on what should have been prey.

But Lukas would not allow the Hydra to run.

The seas themselves bent to his will, his Divinity thrumming through the waters like a commandment. From the depths surged vast hands of water, colossal and merciless, wrapping around the Hydra's limbs with unbreakable grip. The beast writhed, screamed, tore at the currents, but the ocean was not a thing it could bite or rend. The waters dragged it back, thrashing, screaming, towards the dragon it now understood it could never overcome.

Since the moment he had committed to facing the Hydra alone, there had always been a method to Lukas' madness.

Every bite the Hydra took, every strip of flesh it tore from him, had not been mere brutality but part of a design—a grim offering to weaken the Hydra by focusing on what it was at its core. The Hydra was driven by one thing alone: hunger, the ever-gnawing desire to consume everything in its path. It had never hesitated to devour its own kind if it meant satiation, and in its blind gluttony it had carved away at Lukas as though he were nothing more than another meal.

Now, Lukas' flesh weighed heavy within its belly.

Now, the edge of its savagery had been dulled.

The Hydra's snapping jaws no longer moved with the same frenzy. Its strikes lacked the same venomous urgency. Where once it had been a predator overwhelmed by bloodlust, now it was sluggish, its appetite sated and its hunger quelled. And with that hunger removed, Lukas had stolen from it the very thing that made the Hydra so fearsome a foe.

But Lukas had done more than just take away the source of its drive and motivation.

He had also taken away the source of its magical energy.

The ceaseless ripping of neck from neck had been no reckless act of violence. Every time a head was severed, two more grew in its place, a grotesque multiplication born of unnatural magic. That regeneration was no simple trick of flesh and bone—it was fueled by power, drawn from the Hydra's own Pool of Mana. Just like any being touched by the weave of the world, the Hydra's might was not infinite. Every new head came at the cost of the beast's dwindling magical reserves.

And Lukas had forced it to bleed that power dry.

Head after head that Lukas had torn away had drained the well from which this monstrosity sprang from.

The Hydra had fought with unrelenting fury but each new head it birthed only chained it further to exhaustion. Its Pool had grown shallow and now its magic was spent.

In this moment, the only thing left to the Hydra was fear for what was before it. And there, amidst the storm of his own making, stood Lukas Drakos.

His body was a ruin, a canvas of wounds that were still regenerating through the Kraken's magic, yet his presence was undeniable and unshakable. The Hydra's many heads turned to him, and what reflected in each pair of its monstrous eyes was not hunger, not rage, but terror. For they were staring into the face of the Dragon Lord of the Seas, and they knew that this was the end of the line.

The creature howled, a sound so guttural it seemed to shake the very essence of the earth, as the pulled it back toward the dragon it had once thought prey. For all its many fangs and for all its monstrous size, it understood there was no victory here. No matter how many times it had torn into Lukas, he had not fallen.

Torn, battered, bleeding—yes. But broken? Never.

While Lukas had taken away its hunger, it could never take away the Hydra's sheer instincts. The will to survive, to cling to the wretched spark of life, now took command of the beast. Its mass of heads—hundreds now, perhaps more, a writhing abomination of unnatural flesh—arched back and struck forward in unison, a storm of snapping jaws and venomous fangs hurtling at Lukas with desperate speed. It was no longer an attack but a frenzy—a last, hopeless attempt to live.

But Lukas was prepared for what the Hydra wished to throw at him.

Through the Divinity of the Seas, he saw everything—the flow of the waters, the weight of the currents, the very rhythm of life that moved through Hiraeth itself. And through that clarity, he knew: not a single fang would touch him.

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The ocean obeyed.

Water surged at his command, flowing into form as though guided by invisible sculptor's hands. In an instant, the waves solidified into vast arms, translucent yet unyielding, that lashed out and coiled around each of the Hydra's lunging necks.

Hundreds of constructs, each precise, each inevitable, seized the monster before it could reach him, before it could come near Rysenth or Erandyl. Shaped in the form of humanoid limbs, the jaws clamped shut against nothing but air as the arms yanked them away, redirecting strike after strike with effortless control.

The Hydra writhed violently, its many necks thrashing against the binding of liquids that had formed around it. Muscles bulged, teeth gnashed, yet no physical strength could match the force of Divinity and no desperate flailing could undo the power of the Seas. In this world of Hiraeth, magic was the law of the land. Now, its strength was only the raw bulk of its body and that was not enough compared to the strength Lukas wielded through the magic of House Drakos.

He pressed down, unrelenting, his will carried through every drop of water he commanded.

The water shifted once more. The constructs tightened, reshaping with fluid precision until every last one of the Hydra's heads was ensnared in a perfect chokehold. Rear naked chokes, hundreds of them, locked in place with crushing force. The beast convulsed. Its necks twisted, its bodies bucked and its claws raked uselessly at the ground as it sought to break free. Yet no air would come. The arms of the sea were merciless, cutting off all oxygen, drowning out its shrieks in silence.

Lukas' gaze was cold and resolute.

The Hydra had feasted on his flesh, tried to drag him into the abyss of its hunger. Now it would know the same suffocation its fumes had brought upon so many before him.

Within minutes, the Hydra's reign of terror came to its inevitable end, choked into silence by the unyielding hands of the Dragon Lord of the Seas.

Lukas held the Hydra in his grip, water coiled into a thousand strangling arms, and he watched the life drain slowly from its many eyes. The beast's thrashing had stilled, its violent spasms dwindling into pitiful shudders, and yet Lukas still did not let go.

Magical energy coursed through his veins, the Divinity of the Seas roaring within him, but his gaze was fixed not on the creature, not on the kill, but on Erandyl Telaryon herself. And the look on her face shattered his heart into a million pieces. The Dragon Lord of the Earth stepped forward, but her strides were halting and hesitant, as if each and every one of those steps required the weight of a mountain to be lifted. Lukas saw the tremor in her body, the battle she fought not with an enemy of flesh, but within herself.

Even if the Hydra had become an abomination, though it had been nothing but a monster to Lukas and Rysenth, to her it had once been something else.

It had once been someone else.

She had once been Hydraria Telaryon.

The name lingered in the air, unspoken yet deafening.

Hydraria had been Erandyl's own great granddaughter, a dragonborn with a great future ahead of her, a youngling that she had helped raise. After the Lady Kaitlyn had left the Earth behind and became the Royal Consort of Linemall's Seas, it had been Hydraria who carried the spark of succession. In another world, in another time, Hydraria Telaryon could have stood where Erandyl now stood—succeeding her as the new Dragon Lord of the Earth, leading Linemall into a brighter future.

But this was not that world.

All that remained was the Hydra, a twisted reflection of what had been lost to the worlds within the Crest. Hydraria was gone but the youngling she had once been still lived in Erandyl's heart and those feelings could never be erased. In the Hydra, Erandyl still saw the child she had loved, the girl she had cherished and the dragonborn she had been so proud to call her own.

But Erandyl knew what had to be done. She had known it from the moment she first laid eyes upon the monster. She was Head of House Telaryon and Dragon Lord of Linemall's Earth, her duty was to her people.

To leave the Hydra alive was to abandon the very lives entrusted to her care.

Duty demanded the monster's end. But duty could not silence the grief Erandyl now as she neared the creature.

The Hydra's many heads hung limply, the last of its struggles spent as Lukas' constructs continued to choke the life from its lungs. Rysenth lowered his gaze, unable to bear witness to the sight.

Yet Erandyl did not look away.

Instead, the Dragon Lord of the Earth stepped forward at last and she sank to her kees before one of the Hydra's massive heads. Slowly, she reached out with an open hand and her palm touched the coarse flesh, a gesture both tender and final. And the tears finally came.

Lukas had seen her as unshakable, a figure of stone, her strength older than his father's lifetime. Yet now, before the corpse of the one she had loved as her own kin, she let that mask fall away. Erandyl Telaryon, the Dragon Lord of the Earth, allowed herself to cry. Sobs wracked her frame as she pressed her hand to Hydraria's head, watching as the rise and fall of the creature's chest slowed, stuttered, and finally…ceased.

Silence filled the battlefield, broken only by the quiet sound of a grieving heart.

"Rest now, my child." Erandyl whispered, her voice trembling. "Now and forever."

Beneath them, the ground stirred faintly, as if in mourning. Stones shifted, soil loosened, and from the cracks in the battered battlefield, small vines crept forth—fragile green tendrils that coiled gently around the Hydra's fallen form. It was as though the Earth itself had heard her farewell, and reached out to cradle the child she had lost.

The child that they once called Hydraria Telaryon.

And so their fight ended not with the clash of monsters, not with the roar of Divinity, but with a farewell to the one who might have been, to the one who never was.

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