The Cosmic Starfield of the Material World resembled a black curtain studded with diamond fragments.
Deep, beautiful, vast.
Countless stars lay scattered through it like dust. Their light had set out billions of years ago, crossed the endless void, and arrived here and now, merely to add a faint speck of brightness to this canvas.
Riiip!
The Red-Iron Claw, hotter than flame and harder than steel, savagely tore through that curtain, leaving a shocking, enormous rift against the backdrop of the stars.
This had already become the Red Iron Dragon's signature entrance.
As the world rift appeared, the dragon leaped out of it.
At that instant, the surrounding starlight dimmed briefly, as though it, too, feared his might.
With nowhere to set his feet in the vacuum, the dragon stood upright in a humanoid posture. His enormous, thick tail hung slowly behind him, and the stars all around were reflected in his mirrorlike scales, their light flickering and shifting with his breath.
From afar, he looked as though he wore an entire galaxy.
There was little expression on his draconic face. The corners of his mouth neither rose nor fell. His bearing was composed, yet he naturally conveyed an overwhelming sense of invincibility, as though the Cosmic Starfield of this Material World had always been his territory.
Garos surveyed his surroundings.
A single glance was enough to lock onto his target.
Carefully selected, it was another shepherd planet of the living-planet variety.
Seen from afar, the planet was blue and green, its oceans interwoven with continents, its clouds slowly drifting around it. It seemed brimming with life, all things flourishing. Anyone merely looking at it would never have imagined that every inch of this beautiful planet's land was steeped in the bloodshed of the strong devouring the weak.
*The fourth