Grand Ancestral Bloodlines

Dragon's Roar.

Ryu's head tilted up to the skies, and for a moment, it seemed impossible to see a human in his place at all. It felt like a Dragon Emperor had lifted his head to the clouds. A thunderous, booming, throaty sort of roar rose up from the depths of a black abyss, piercing through the veil of the Heavens and shattering the dome above.

The Beasts froze for just a moment.

And then Ryu moved.

Chi.

In one moment, Ryu was pincered between a claw and a wing. In the next, a Phoenix claw flew, and a Roc wing peeled across the skies, its silvery, metallic wings splaying out, its feathers fluttering down below in a heavy rain of blades.

Ryu appeared high above the Phoenix, which still had yet to register the loss of its claw, his two fists coming together in a hammer above his head. His silver eyes slit down the middle, separating into a demonic hue as he smashed.

His fists deformed around the head of the Phoenix, practically tearing through the layers of its flesh and bone at the same time.

The Roc was falling through the skies by the time the Phoenix's head shattered into a rain of blood.

White scales reflected across Ryu's body, crimson liquid seeping through its crevices as though it was greedily swallowing it all up.

With a flash, Ryu appeared at the gaping wound of the Roc's torn wing.

BANG!

A violent attack smashed against Ryu's side, practically turning half of him into a meaty pulp, but it was like he didn't notice at all.

With one of his arms out of commission, his teeth bore down instead, his canines glistening through the air as he ripped into the flesh of the Roc with his jaw while his only working arm gripped the other side.

Like a savage that had lost his mind, he bit and ripped, yanking his jaw to one side and his arm to the other.

He tore the Roc in two.

Screams filled the air, and the skeleton of an Ancient Beast was twisted into a mass of gore in the skies.

Ryu bounded through the rain of blood, all of his actions more savage and erratic than the last. It didn't feel like they were facing off against a human at all, but rather a Beast even more gutturally primal than any of them.

He leapt and bound, scratched and clawed, using every bit and piece of his body without regard for what might be hurt or what already was.

He leapt through the skies like an ape, using the back of a Griffin with a hole right through where its heart had just been as a springboard.

His body bent in an arch, his arms and legs reaching back as though a powerful coil about to unwind a great amount of strength in a single bound.

BANG!

His arms smashed against the head of a Dragon, deforming and melding it into a completely new shape.

The black-brown dragon from earlier swiped right at Ryu, disregarding the safety of his own kind.

Blood flew, and the dragon was blinded in an instant, a deep trench being torn out of its skull in an effort to chase after Ryu.

Ryu bent and twisted out of the way, grabbing onto a long whisker of the now-dead dragon and swinging from it. He curled through the skies, reached back with two claws to his hips, and erupted with both of their strengths at the black-brown dragon's chest at the very same time.

BANG! BANG!

The two layered on top of one another, the chest of the dragon deforming for just the briefest instant before it popped back into place.

Ryu was sent flying backward, but so too was the dragon.

In the brief instant Ryu lost control of his body, a savage stomp came from above, the billowing flames of a qilin and their mighty momentum falling like a meteor.

Ryu's skin spontaneously combusted before the hoof even landed, and then came the physical form of the hoof itself.

Fire bent and twisted, and for a moment, it seemed like Ryu was going to be swallowed whole.

Without his Bone Structures, his Bloodlines alone couldn't generate enough power. Otherwise, that double claw just now would have shattered the black-brown dragon into a rain of blood and gore.

Now, he was facing off against a hoof before his body had even fully recovered.

There were too many of them, and he was far too suppressed. It was the logical conclusion anyone would have come to.

Except seemingly Ryu himself.

There came a second roar, this one from the very depths of Ryu's soul. It carried a heavy defiance and a Dao Heart that overshadowed mountains and blanketed the skies, replacing the dome of the Heavens themselves and shaking the Gates of the Heavenly Courts.

Red-black Flames erupted across Ryu's body, peels of radiant blue lightning coming soon afterward.

He had said that he would show them what it truly meant to be the ruler of an Ancient Beast Race.

Rage Flames.

Tribulation Lightning.

Death Flames.

Ice Flames.

Rebirth Flames.

Emperor Flames.
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To use mere Qilin Flames to try and suppress him…

It was nothing short of foolish.

The heat that Ryu was experiencing seemed to vanish into thin air. His body burst with its own fires instead.

The hood descended, and yet it was ash before it even touched Ryu. The qilin didn't even understand what happened when Heavenly Patterns began to cut across the skies, crawling up the length of where its leg had just been.

Ryu's claws lengthened as he flexed his torso. His body, flying downward parallel to the ground, suddenly twisted, his back arching and his arm swiping up with vicious momentum.

A Dragon's Claw can split the world in five.

"—I do it in six."

Five scythes of black and red tore through the skies.

Ryu vanished, not even watching as the qilin was split into pieces. It didn't end up mattering. Why would it when it fell into odd bits only for those very bits to turn to ash moments later?

Ryu appeared before the black-brown dragon again, his eyes blazing, flames and lightning dancing around him.

"Storm."

He grabbed at the skies, a lance falling down from above. It slammed into it rather than falling into his palm, deforming into an armor that coated him from head to toe.

BANG! BANG!

He smashed against the chest of the dragon once again, knocking it down below.

With a flash, he disappeared in a stream of lightning that appeared before the dragon, knocking it upward with the same two blows to its chest.

BANG! BANG!

Roars filled the skies, echoes of a relentless barrage leaving the black-brown dragon rebounding every which way like a ping pong ball.

Streaks of lightning fell from the skies, forming its cage as though the world itself was responding to Ryu's call.

BANG! BANG!

Ryu drove a knee up the black-brown dragon's snout, appearing above and driving a heel down from the skies.

Scales and blood flew, the crunching of bones as dense as the cores of worlds echoing time and time again.

BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!

"I'll show you what a true beast looks like."

The wrathful tempest billowed up from Ryu. He seemed truly infuriated that these people wanted to question him.

Ryu had never seen himself as a beast, would never see himself as a beast. But who were they to tell him what he could and couldn't be?

A spiraling pillar of black and red flames tore into the skies above Ryu, swirling into a mass of raging clouds.

Heavenly Phoenix Patterns peeled across them, and all of a sudden, the booming cadence of thunder rippled.

Ryu reached up and grabbed.

Lightning God.

"[— Judgment]."

Ryu's chest expanded, his head tilting to the skies as he inhaled. His roar continued to echo through the world as Tribulation clouds for hundreds of miles were sucked into his body.

Silence fell for just the briefest of moments before Ryu looked down at the sparse enemies that remained.

There wasn't a single stage in existence that he didn't have the right to stand on.

Ryu unleashed a final roar, a Dragon's Breath of fire and lightning falling in a spiraling mass of death and destruction.

Black, red, royal blue. Space shattered, the skies overturned, even the pillars themselves swayed wildly back and forth as though they might collapse at any moment.

At that instant, even the Dragon's Prince slowly opened his eyes, his swaying pillar too much for even the likes of him to ignore. And for that brief instant when he looked at Ryu, he thought he was seeing his father unleashing an almighty breath that encompassed the world.

Slowly, the skies fell into silence, and a lull fell over the battle.

There, Ryu stood alone high in the skies. And the beasts…?

They were nowhere to be seen.