The Dragon Heir

The [Core Stabilization] skill demanded that I sit still and cultivate an almost monkish depth of meditation, which was irritating in principle but impossible to argue with in practice. The mana recovery it provided made the inconvenience worthwhile, and once the passive bonuses from [Mana Shaping] began stacking on top of it, the numbers stopped being polite and started being convincing.

By the time my three clones were due to expire, I would be back at a full tank regardless. It was efficient and dependable.

And when I said I intended to kill a Gold Core monster, I meant that quite literally. I had never truly tested the outer limits of what my clones could do. In the waking world, the scale of destruction available to me was carefully leashed, because any excessive mess had a way of inviting the wrong sort of curiosity.

Attention, after all, is rarely benevolent. Here, inside this trial, that leash simply did not exist. There were no consequences that mattered beyond whether I lived or died.

Which meant I could finally lean into the more destructive aspects of my kit without restraint. Now that I had a way to move without being heavily impaired within the fog, the problem of positioning was solved, even if the eel form itself lacked my personal abilities. That hardly mattered.

The clones retained their innate traits, and those alone were more than sufficient. I was not hunting that leviathan out of arrogance, because I had none to spare. I was cautious to the point of paranoia.

I would not face it with my main body. I would feed it clones instead, expendable, suicidal me’s designed to inflict maximum damage before being annihilated. Experience had already taught me that my clones were destructive enough to make even a Gold Core threat hesitate, and hesitation was all I needed.

The proof was waiting for us in the fog. When the three eel-shaped clones reached the point where the leviathan had devoured me earlier, the aftermath told a satisfying story. Massive fragments of broken teeth lay scattered through the murk, mixed thickly with dark blood. The clone that had detonated inside its mouth had done exactly what I hoped it would. The damage was substantial, visible, and deeply encouraging. Perfect.

There were several reasons I wanted that thing dead. The first was simple arithmetic. I was close to my next evolution, and killing a Gold Core should push me up several levels. The morphogen payout alone would be worthwhile.

But with Quantum Devourer added to the equation, the prospect became far more interesting. Consuming a leviathan of that size would require obscene patience, transfiguring its body down to something I could swallow in a single bite, but I was confident I could manage it. The real question lay beyond that.

If— and it was a very large if— I obtained its Imprint, would I then be able to wield the power of a Gold Core creature?

I did not have an answer yet. The eel forms were weaker than me, but I still had full access to their entire toolkit. By that same logic, assuming the form of a Gold Core leviathan should grant me access to its abilities as well. In theory, at least. Reality has a habit of correcting theories with violence.

There was only one way to find out.

The clones exchanged a brief, wordless acknowledgment before slipping forward, following the thick trail of black blood deeper into the fog. The leviathan could be anywhere within that suffocating expanse, and I would only get one clean opportunity to execute this properly. I had a plan, and I had one night to make it work.

The most pleasant surprise was how little strain I felt while maintaining Observer’s Suggestion and Mark on my clones. Not only was I not taxed, I had the distinct sense that I could cast nearly a dozen more without issue.

The increase in intelligence from leveling was unmistakable, even without access to my stat screen. I could feel the difference in the way my thoughts aligned, sharpened, and moved. Judging by that alone, killing those eels earlier had likely pushed me up at least two levels already.

Not bad progress for a night’s work.

Running the numbers in my head, I arrived at an estimate of what my stats should look like now:

Level: 55

Strength: 1959

Durability: 1301

Intelligence: 3084

Willpower: 1296

Mana (MP): 877 / 877

Stamina (SP): 3156 / 3156

Skill Points: 123

Morphogens: 282

None of my stats had been anywhere near a thousand when I first stepped into the colosseum. Intelligence was the closest, sitting at around eight hundred and change, but now it had blown past three thousand.

That alone explained why everything felt so disturbingly smooth, from my thoughts to my movements, and why tearing that eel apart with my bare hands had felt less like a struggle and more like an inconvenience. I had been strong before, undeniably so, but this was an entirely different tier of violence.

With that kind of gap, I felt confident I could successfully hunt the leviathan.

I began mentally reviewing what the eel was capable of. Without a system screen, I had to rely on experience, but after using my own skills for so long, I had a solid grasp of how everything functioned. Understanding its abilities might also explain why that particular physiology was so unnervingly compatible with the fog itself.

The first thing was its perception. It was strange and difficult to describe, but it seemed to span at least three hundred meters in every direction. Any movement within the fog was relayed through subtle disturbances, like waves propagating through a medium, granting me a crude but reliable form of spatial awareness. It was less sight and more intuition, like a living radar stitched directly into my senses.

The second was its movement within the fog. The body treated the mist as if it were water, allowing it to flow through the space with absurd speed and control. I temporarily named the effect Mist Glide until something better occurred to me.

These eels could move frighteningly fast while using it, and more importantly, the movement generated no disturbances that other eels could detect. That advantage cut both ways. While it made for excellent stealth, it also meant I could not rely too heavily on the perception ability, because other predators might be using the same trick.

The third was a masking ability layered on top of that stealth. One thing I had learned from the fog’s denizens was that they could sense killing intent when it was directed at them. The eel not only suppressed that intent entirely, but paired it with near-perfect stealth, making it an exceptional ambush predator. It was efficient, patient and deeply unpleasant to deal with.

Its scales were another notable feature. They were unusually resilient, shrugging off blows that should have done meaningful damage. It hardly mattered to me given my current strength, but I had seen my clones take repeated hits from other fog creatures only for the scales to absorb the impact without complaint. That felt less like a learned skill and more like a mutation.

Offensively, the eel specialized in ice and poison. The combination was designed to slow prey down, then finish the job at leisure. It could freeze mana itself within a chosen area, impose a creeping poison corrosion, and fire long-range, piercing projectiles from its mouth. Those bolts carried both venom and cold, slowing targets while actively freezing them from the inside out.

On the surface, the ability was unimpressive in direct combat. That changed the moment I realized I could overcharge it by forcing additional mana through the skill. When pushed to its limit, it became the strongest option available to me while inhabiting the eel’s body. Since my clones shared my mana pool, they could easily charge it to full capacity while lying in wait, perfectly concealed by their stealth.

All they had to do was be patient.

And patience, I had learned, was something I could afford.

Finally, there was the Shedding ability. By expending a large amount of mana— large by eel standards, laughably cheap by mine— it could instantly discard an outer layer of mucus-laced ice, vanish on the spot, and reappear anywhere within a twenty-meter radius. What it left behind was a convincingly dense mana residue, a decoy good enough to fool anything in the fog that relied on senses other than sight. For those creatures, it was as close to guaranteed survival as one could reasonably hope for, at least until the mana ran dry. In hindsight, catching the thing outside the fog had done me a tremendous favor. If it had been able to chain that trick repeatedly, the fight would have turned into an exercise in irritation rather than execution.

Stolen story; please report.

And now, that same irritating ability was mine to use.

I mentally arranged everything I had learned into a rough, system-like list, just to keep it clean in my head.

While my clones expired one by one, I continued experimenting. Over the next hour, I repeated the same routine with persistence. I sent the clones along the Leviathan’s trail, dismissed them as their timers ran out, then reconstituted them back within the fogless circle. Each cycle refined the path further. By the tenth repetition, the trail was clean, the last of the fog’s lesser denizens along it already hunted down and removed.

With my increased stats, I found I could forcibly extend the clones’ duration through sheer will alone. The strain on my mind intensified rapidly in a grinding pressure that would have crippled me not long ago, but I had more than enough capacity to spare. Three additional minutes per clone was easily sustainable before I was forced to release them. Three minutes was an eternity when measured correctly.

I repeated the process again and again, letting the rhythm settle in, letting patterns emerge.

After an hour of this, I finally felt it.

A sharp spike of awareness came through the link, and I felt it immediately. My clones had found the leviathan. I grinned despite myself. I was sitting far away from it, comfortably removed from immediate danger, but the connection was clear enough to taste.

The curious clone’s earlier detonation inside its mouth had clearly left a lingering impression, along with a mouthful of its own blood. Even so, the aura pressing through the Observer’s mark was unmistakably terrifying.

It noticed the three approaching eels the instant they entered its range.

The fog shifted and rolled as if disturbed by a massive, submerged body. The pressure surged, multiplying itself several times over, and with it came an all-encompassing cold. For the first time, I did not merely feel low temperature. I felt the concept of Ice itself. It felt detachment from all aggression or destruction, a sort of stasis, an absolute insistence on preservation through stillness. More than just freezing under its influence; it felt like things were told to remain exactly as they were, to stop changing, to endure forever in a single, unyielding moment.

Even through the Observer’s mark, I could feel time itself beginning to drag. The leviathan’s will seeped into the connection, slowing perception, dulling momentum.

Its presence alone was enough to overwrite the behavior of the world around it, imprinting its authority directly onto reality. If its suffocating mass had not already made the point, the way the part of fog bowed around it certainly did.

That sensation stirred an old realization. I had never felt anything like this when facing that Gold Core elf. The contrast made the flaw in their ascension painfully obvious. They possessed the raw power of a Gold Core, but lacked the Will to embody the concept behind it. Power without authority, energy without meaning.

As for Flameclaw’s Gold Core elders, I could not say much, having never faced them directly. Still, I was certain of one thing. If they truly carried this level of will unrestrained, the world itself would begin behaving strangely simply from their continued existence.

This was different.

This felt like standing before a true demigod.

A demigod with a massive hole torn through its mouth, bleeding freely into the fog. A demigod that would die by my hands.

If my eel clones had been capable of grinning, they would have. The curious clone in particular was practically vibrating with satisfaction at the idea of revenge, given that it had been her body the leviathan had eaten. And despite the crushing pressure, despite the cold that gnawed even at thought itself, I felt no fear.

Not even close.

The Leviathan itself resembled an eel only in the loosest sense, as if the concept had been taken, exaggerated, and then refined into something far more obscene. Its black scales interlocked like polished metal plates, each one dense and resilient, catching what little light existed in my eel perception in dull, predatory sheens. Its fins stretched for over a dozen meters, framing a massive, sinuous body that had to be at least a hundred meters long.

It was… glorious.

The fog rolled around it in slow, deliberate waves, almost nurturing it, as though responding to a familiar will. It felt like an intimate component of the ecosystem itself.

The Leviathan lifted its head and released a sound that crawled through the mist. It was a warped, underwater howl that carried no emotion yet managed to feel deeply wrong. There was no reason to delay any longer. It was time to begin.

Terrorist and Curious scattered instantly, peeling away in opposite directions, while Lazy shifted back into my half-dragon form. She had a far more critical role to play. The moment the two eel clones closed in, the Leviathan looked down at them the way one might regard insects crawling toward a boot.

The overcharged projectiles fired straight into the torn wound along its face.

Before either clone could follow through, ice erupted beneath them in titanic spikes, each one the size of a building. They impaled what appeared to be both eels in a single, decisive motion. Only it was not flesh that shattered and froze, but discarded mucus and ice. The real bodies had already vanished. No matter how clever the concealment, the Leviathan’s omnipresent senses found them regardless. The ground exploded again, once, twice, three times, skewering the space they occupied with merciless precision.

I had anticipated this.

Terrorist and Lazy were both me, after all. Given the right tools and enough fuel, survival was inevitable.

Their objective was simple. Reach the Leviathan’s mouth before the timer expired.

The exchange unfolded within fractions of a second. Ten more activations occurred in the span of a heartbeat. There was no escaping an apex predator like this, but escape had never been the goal. They pressed closer, deliberately drawing its attention, forcing its focus outward while Lazy’s fingers moved with surgical precision. She wove the construct for Observer’s Mark and cast it directly onto the Leviathan itself.

I felt my mana drain sharply even as I remained locked in the meditative trance of Core Stabilization, forcing recovery as fast as my body would allow. The clones’ timers were burning down just as quickly. With mounting mental pressure and a deliberate imposition of my will, I could sustain them for perhaps another minute at most. That was the absolute ceiling.

The Leviathan, however, showed no intention of granting them even that much.

Then Observer’s Suggestion finished forming in Lazy’s grasp.

The instant it connected, I felt it.

I was linked to something vast.

Words failed me when it came to describing the sensation of skimming the surface of a demigod’s mind, but I knew immediately how different it was from a human’s. There was no single stream of thought. There were thousands, colliding, overlapping, folding into one another in a rising cacophony of noise. It was calculating trajectories, directing force, intercepting threats, reacting on layers upon layers of instinct and reason interwoven into a single, relentless process.

As expected of a Gold Core beast, its intelligence was oppressive.

I would have gone insane if I were not already acclimated to this sort of pressure. In a way, I suspected my own headspace would feel just as hostile and incoherent to an outsider, so the irony was not lost on me. Even so, I did not feel nearly as shaken as I probably should have. The noise was immense, yes, but it slid past me rather than tearing into me.

What surprised me was the sense of distance. No— superiority. I felt as though I were looking down on it.

Yes, the Leviathan processed thoughts and conclusions at frightening speed, its cognition undeniably gifted, but beneath all of that churn I could feel its core. Simple and direct. Bestial. There was something missing, something fundamental, that cleanly separated me from it. The same divide existed between it and someone like Gwen. I could sense it clearly, even if I could not yet name it.

For the moment, I did nothing with the link. I could tell the Leviathan felt something foreign intrude upon its existence, an alien pressure brushing against its mind, but despite its parallel thought streams, it lacked the framework to understand what was happening or why. The question itself lay outside its capacity.

So it defaulted to what it knew.

It hunted.

The insects that had dared to violate its domain were to be erased. Filthy, insignificant things. And yet, every strike it unleashed was being denied. Its thoughts churned faster, patterns colliding as it raced toward a conclusion. These were no ordinary insects. There was something wrong with them. Something familiar tugged at its awareness, a memory surfacing from not long ago, of consuming another such creature only for it to leave behind a wound that refused to heal. Along with that memory came pain, still present, still unresolved.

At the same time, I arrived at a realization of my own.

Wounds inflicted by the quantum detonation of my clones carried a lingering effect. They resisted recovery, clung to the target like a flaw etched into reality itself.

I grinned.

That was when Curious finally closed the distance.

The Leviathan was sharp, brutally intelligent, but the erratic nature of Ice Decoy made prediction unreliable. These were not common eels. They carried my intelligence, which now surpassed even the Leviathan’s. By reading its patterns, they slipped past its counters, dodging strikes before they fully manifested.

It was exhilarating. Empowering. This was not merely a contest of strength or will, but a battle fought on the edge of cognition itself.

I swayed where I sat beside the unknown girl in the fogless circle. My breathing grew heavy. Heat flushed across my face, and shivers crawled up my spine, the unfiltered pleasure of anticipation prickling my skin. I was outmatched in raw presence, fighting like an insect against a god, and yet here I was, locked in a struggle of mind, will, and force, an impossible confrontation between an immovable bulwark and a slimy, relentless eel.

It did not feel hopeless.

It did not feel blind.

Ah… how long I had yearned for something even remotely like this.

The surge of exhilaration that followed Curious’s final charge into the Leviathan’s wounded maw snapped my focus sharply back to the endgame. My toes curled against the frozen ground, and I nearly let out a roar of pleasure before catching myself, just as a massive explosion tore through the already-ruined flesh.

The sound echoed through the fog.

And I smiled.

At some point, I realized I had unconsciously shifted back into my half-dragon form. I noted it with a detached sort of amusement. Berating my instincts for acting on their own felt pointless, especially when they were clearly enjoying themselves as much as I was.

The rush did not fade. I was still linked to Terrorist when she finally reached the wound and detonated. The sensation hit me like a drug. My head swayed as sheer exhilaration flooded my system, my body riding a high so intense it felt borderline obscene.

The Leviathan reeled. It staggered and unleashed a roar that turned the fog violent, churning it into a storm so fierce I could feel the backlash even from where I sat in the fog-free circle. I did not waste the opening. I re-formed both Curious and Terrorist, then sending them back into the fog in eel bodies while my mind worked at full speed, layering Observer spells onto them as fast as I could weave them.

The Leviathan was not dead. I could still feel it through the link at its head. But it was suffering. Not superficial damage, not pain it could simply power through, but something deeper and irreparable. It gnawed at its very ability to think. Its cognition was fraying under the strain.

I barely had time to register that before a shrill scream ripped through the fog.

I had enough mental capacity to spare, so I extended my awareness toward the source. The sound came from the Waryn camp. It was sharp and panicked, and it was followed by the unmistakable disturbance of massive shapes moving through the mist.