Break

He threw up a dome of Divine Energy around himself to keep out the chimera's attacks as he thought about his situation. Every now and then he took a step or two to the side when it wanted to play dirty and attack from below, but for the most part he was left with his thoughts.

The walls wouldn't work, and he couldn't go at it from below. Should he go at it from above? No, he'd have the same issue he had with the walls.

'If only I could fly up there…'

While he could theoretically use his Divine Grasp for flight, he hadn't practiced nearly enough to warrant using it in such a hostile environment. He'd be clumsy in the air, unable to dodge any attacks levied against him.

Then he caught an eagle pecking at his barrier out of the corner of his eye, and it hit him.

'That's right. I'm a dragon right now, aren't I? Why don't I just grow wings?'

He was wondering what that persistent itch at his shoulders was. With a thought, wings burst out of his back, unfurling into a wingspan of six feet. The leathery extensions felt like a limb he had always had.

And thanks to his connection to Kravoss, he could fly as if he had had them since birth.

With a push of his telekinesis and a flap of his wings, he flew up to the core and stopped in hover in front of it. He maintained the barrier around him as he cocked his hand back, throwing forth another pierce with his claws.

Just like before, they bounced off without even leaving a scratch.

Fate growled in frustration, the sound of an actual dragon echoing from his throat thanks to his transformation. As the tendrils of flesh and claws and beaks of various animals whaled away at his barrier, his mind raced with a solution.

'Think, Fate, think. How do you break something as big as this?'

A memory surfaced in his mind, that of his enchanting professor. The words "How could the glass ball give in before my Pride did?" echoed again and again in his mind, steering him to a solution that made him smirk.

While dragons were not born with the power of Pride, their arrogance far surpassed the average aesh, so much so that many scholars often wondered why dragons were given the Elements instead of the Vices.

Fate had three whole lives of pride to draw from, even if one was nothing but fabricated memories. He had both of his own lives, as well as that of Kravoss.

Now that he was a dragon, why shouldn't he use this tool?

Drudging up the repressed memories of the whip and the Advanced's machines, his refusal to show weakness even in the face of excruciating pain, he mustered his Divine Energy and started drawing an Imprint on the surface of the core.

He traced not the professor's design, but his own, creating a brand-new Imprint entirely from scratch. In some ways, they were similar.

The deep curves represented his will, but they were joined by bolt-like lines representing not a rebuttal, but pain. The lines bounced off the curves repeatedly, hammering away at his defenses in an attempt to break them.

As he drew the enchantment, the chimera rallied its attacks, punching harder and faster until the dome Fate had was reduced to a small bubble a foot away from his skin. He was too busy to care, busy reliving the pain of having his back torn open and needles inserted into his spine.

The Imprint started small, only about the size of Fate's head, but was placed in the very center of the core and quickly grew to encompass the entire orb.

Its obsidian surface crackled with Divine Energy as the barrier around Fate's skin shrunk more and more, going from a foot of room to an inch, and then half an inch in the next second.

And then Fate finished the Imprint.

The battle between pain and will ended abruptly on the surface of the core, the bends finally counterattacking in the form of a sharp blade that sliced through the jagged lines, a hidden weapon kept concealed until the right moment.

This blade went from the center of the core to the edge, the very tip placed right in front of Fate, appearing as a glowing dot blacker than even the material around it.

Fate raised his fist once more, and stabbed forward at the same time he pumped the enchantment full of Mana. His barrier fell, the beasts' teeth clamping down on his skin just as his middle claw made contact with the dot.

And the whole world shook.

The orb shattered like glass, black shards flying in every direction and slicing the chimera's many limbs in pieces.

Fate used his Manifest Power to escape the brunt of the damage, but the sheer density of Divine Energy within the object meant he lost a chunk of his right arm in the process.

The chimera's rocky growls reverted to that ear-piercing screech from before as its flesh and bone started to sag and melt.

Three minutes later, Fate crawled and Solid Surfed his way through a lake-sized pool of flesh and gasped for breath upon surfacing. The insides of the decaying creature smelled like burnt hair mixed with charred meat.

He wiped off the blood and guts clinging to his scales with a look of disgust, stepping as far away from the corpse as he could before admiring his handiwork. He had long since retracted his wings to easier crawl out.

'Guess I needed claws after all.'

"First test, passed," rumbled the unseen Dracok.

The floor opened underneath Fate like before, plunging him into darkness and hitting him with vertigo. It was extremely disorienting, falling with no light to tell which way was up and which was down.

This fall was thankfully far shorter than the first. He appeared in a city of white, surrounded by men in lab coats holding futuristic firearms. They wore smug grins as their armored soldiers surrounded him.

"Kill the beast," commanded one of the scientists. "He must not be allowed to reach Subject Seven."