The Dragon Heir

Alexei woke with a groan, hands clamping to his head as a sharp jolt tore through his temples. By the sacred Wolves, it still hurt like hell. Pain aside, clarity came instantly. He knew exactly what had happened. He had seen something, and the moment he did, it felt as though a whip had cracked straight across his skull.

The worst part was that he had been using his magic to sense it. That made the punishment steady rather than merciful. From what he had managed to piece together before he regained enough control to shut his magic down and stop the relentless mental lashes, the cause was insultingly simple. It was happening because he was observing it. Nothing more. There was no attack or hostility. Just the act of looking.

He rubbed his head again and tried, carefully, to recall the image. The pain was gone now, but the afterimage remained. Whatever it was, it had been painful enough to knock him unconscious through observation alone. Horror should have followed that realization, yet it did not. He had felt no malice from the thing itself. Bio-sense did not lie about that. It had carried intent and emotion, yes, but none of it hostile.

As he stood, he realized he was inside a tent. That discovery finally earned him a long, slow breath of relief. He stepped outside soon after and found the camp already alive. People moved between bodies, scavenging the remains of the fog dwellers that had attacked them the night before. His senses spread outward again cautiously. There seemed to be no casualties. Not a single one.

The relief was real, but the disbelief came right after. They had faced an entire school of fog dwellers and survived. Miracles, it seemed, had not gone extinct just yet.

Maksim stood near the erected tent, wrestling with a massive slab of fish-monster meat. Those with Ice Affinities were already at work preserving it, while others cooked portions over a campfire. Two fires, of course. One for the group, and a second for the prisoners. Even the prisoners stared wide-eyed when fresh cooked meat was handed to them for breakfast.

All except one.

The priestess did not react at all.

Alexei turned away with a sigh. It was not as if they had been starving the prisoners for sport. Supplies were limited, and while it might have looked cruel, there were people Alexei cared about who needed that food to stay alive. Still, that problem was partly solved now. They had more meat than they could possibly carry home. More than enough to deliver to people who actually mattered, rather than these ignorant fucks.

The memory of the night still burned at him, but he forced himself to calm down. Whatever fate had caught up with them, they deserved it. Every last bit. Especially her.

His gaze drifted back to the priestess and the hollow look carved into her face. A chill ran through him. And as an unpleasant thought surfaced, he stiffened. The shape he had seen before the pain had taken him had been unmistakable.

It had been the shape of a woman.

He could not see much, obviously. That tended to happen when your head was being whipped raw from the inside. Even so, his senses never shut down completely. They stayed active, stubborn things that they were. And after reaching Red Core, there was one change no one ever failed to notice. The body was reforged stronger, yes, but the mind followed suit. Memory sharpened and thoughts aligned. Recollection stopped being a struggle and became a weapon.

Alexei leaned into that.

He focused on the moment itself. Phantom pain flared in protest, but he ignored it. Slowly an image began to take shape in his mind.

It was still unclear, blurred around the edges, but it was enough. Enough to send a chill straight down his spine. It had been a person. Or at least something shaped like one. A woman, by the outline of it. She wore rags. Chains hung from her wrists, unmistakable, the kind meant for prisoners.

His gaze drifted back to the group seated around the campfire. The prisoners. His stomach sank as he counted. Nearly eight of them were women.

The thing that had saved them, that had slaughtered an entire school of fog dwellers like vermin, had been one of them.

That made no sense. None at all.

None of the prisoners had mana. The chains bound around them were designed to drain it dry. Even without those restraints, none of them were strong enough to face him, let alone the fog dwellers he himself had learned to fear. He scanned them again, cores and all.

The result did not change.

Low yellow at best. No active mana. Not even a flicker.

Then how?

Maybe it was something that could wear another face. The thought slithered into his mind, uninvited but it was smooth. If it was that powerful, playing with you and hiding its true form would be trivial.

Alexei frowned. The idea was… uncomfortably good. Too good to dismiss. A being like that having the ability to mask itself made perfect sense. Maybe it had only allowed him to see that image because it wanted him to. Maybe that shape was bait.

His head throbbed again, with the familiar ache. He still could not grasp the why of any of it, and at this point, he was not sure he cared. It was not as if he could do anything about it even if he did understand.

Maksim approached soon after, finally noticing Alexei stepping out of the tent. It was early morning as the light was still thin and cold, so the first thing he asked was how long Alexei had been out.

“Last five hours.”

“Damn.”

“Almost thought there was an unknown assailant,” Maksim said, frowning. “What the fuck happened to you?”

“I would not call it an assailant,” Alexei replied. “Aren’t you curious about what saved us?”

He explained what little he had observed. Maksim was co-leading the expedition alongside him, and leaving out details like this would have been idiotic. Arcane theory was not Maksim’s strong suit, but experience had its own weight. Another perspective never hurt.

“So,” Maksim said slowly, “just trying to observe it knocked you out?”

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“Yes,” Alexei answered. “I would call it a trap, but from what I managed to tell, it felt less like an attack and more like a feature. Part of whatever stealth that thing was using.”

“A kind of stealth that punishes observation,” Maksim muttered. “That’s… terrifying.” He did not need long to grasp the danger. “How do you even counter something like that?”

“By being just as powerful, I suppose,” Alexei replied. “And if it wanted us dead, we would already be corpses. Whatever it was, it did not radiate hostility. If anything, I sensed something closer to amusement. Maybe I am reaching, but invoking the Sacred Wolf that many times might have dragged in some unknown protection. It is a stretch, I know, but my head keeps clinging to it because it is the only explanation that does not completely insult reality.”

They talked for a while after that, but nothing came of it. There were no answers and no neat conclusions. The only sensible choice was to stay alert until they made it back home. Thankfully, it was not far now.

Before long, the camp was dismantled and packed away. The expedition caravan prepared to move again. Alexei summoned his familiar wolf and reached down to pat its head. The beast immediately whined and lunged at him with anxious energy and concern.

“I’m fine,” Alexei said through the whining. “Just got knocked out. Nothing dramatic.”

It took some effort to calm the wolf down. Only after Alexei handed over a slab of fish meat did the animal finally settle, tearing into it with enthusiastic, oversized bites. Watching it eat was oddly endearing. Alexei almost smiled.

Almost.

He felt eyes on the wolf and frowned, turning toward the source. The priestess. She was staring at his familiar with unsettling focus.

Alexei frowned, then shrugged it off. She still creeped him out a fucking lot, and he was well past pretending otherwise.

He could also understand why the others, even Maksim, were hostile enough to even deny her food sometimes. They had lost four people because of that damned temple she had been staying in. The only reason she was still breathing was because she had not been directly responsible, merely affiliated with those who were.

Anything tied to the Tyrant Dragon made Alexei cautious. For very good reasons.

He did not have time to dwell on it. The caravan finally moved, now burdened with more supplies than they had originally set out to scavenge. It was almost laughable how close this expedition had come to disaster, only to turn itself around at the very end. He felt blessed, in a quiet and wary way.

Alexei climbed atop his familiar as they moved, bio-sense fully active and probing for danger. The only regret gnawing at him was that none of them had landed killing blows on the fog dwellers. No kills meant no system rewards. And fog dwellers were at least Red Core. That meant Red-tier weapons or equipment.

That would have strengthened them nicely.

Pity.

Alexei steadied himself and summoned his staff. The moment his grip closed around it, the system overlay slid into view.

Name: Verdant Sepulcher

Type: Staff

Rank: Crimson II

Affinity: Nature

Description:

A staff grown in the heart of a treant and torn from her corpse. Traces of her will still cling to it, stubborn as rot, bound to the cycle of bloom and decay.

Attributes:

[Verdant Circulation]

Increases Nature mana regeneration in proportion to the surrounding life.

[Bloom of Restoration]

Amplifies all healing magic cast through the staff.

[Inevitable Withering]

Amplifies all decaying magic cast through the staff.

He’d earned it back when he was barely a high yellow core, by killing a treant that had already been half-dead. It was plain and simple dumb luck. Since then, his luck with weapons and equipment had been nonexistent.

The staff itself was fine. More than fine, really. It matched his class cleanly and never fought him. Still, an upgrade wouldn’t hurt. He wouldn’t complain if fate stopped fucking around for once.

The journey went on without trouble for a couple hours. Two minor skirmishes with local monsters, both dealt with quickly. Most creatures that survived the fog in this region were burrowers. They dug deep into the frozen ground and waited it out whenever the fog rolled in. That habit had turned the land beneath them into a sprawling underground maze. The problem was that it was crawling with things that wanted them dead.

Most of what surfaced were yellow cores, with the occasional red mixed in. Gold cores were said to exist, but only in stories passed around late at night. Alexei hadn’t seen one himself. He hoped it stayed that way.

Then the shouting started.

One of the scouts had spotted something. Maksim gave a short nod and moved ahead. When he came back, the color had drained from his face.

“What’s wrong?” Alexei asked.

“Better if you see it yourself.”

Snow was already drifting down, thin but it was steady, blurring the distance. As Alexei approached with the rest of the caravan, it became clear that even perfect visibility wouldn’t have helped. If they could see properly from where they’d been, they would have noticed the problem long ago.

His eyes widened.

Enormous pillars of ice jutted from the ground like spears driven in by a furious god. Each one had to be at least dozens of meters tall, and ahead of them stood an entire forest of the damned things. Beneath it yawned a massive crater. Parts of the underground tunnel network had collapsed into it, their edges exposed like broken bone.

But the crater itself was new. That much was obvious.

They had passed through this exact stretch of land almost three months ago, at the start of the expedition. There had been nothing like this then.

Alexei stared at the frozen devastation and felt a cold knot settle in his gut.

What the fuck happened here.

It was then that the last piece from last night finally snapped into place.

There had been explosions. Not distant thunder or shifting ice, but repeated concussive blasts that made the ground tremble under their feet. They had been far away, sure, but looking at the jagged edges of the crater now, the rawness of it, the way the land looked freshly torn apart, it was hard to deny the connection. Whatever caused that chaos last night had happened here.

“We might need to take a detour,” Alexei said. His voice stayed even, calm enough to pass, while he stuffed his unease down hard. Something had done this. Something obscene in scale. This reeked of a clash between Golds. One of them almost certainly a Fog Leviathan. As for the other… he didn’t like how blank his thoughts came up.

“We won’t reach the valley by the end of the day if we detour,” Maksim replied, frowning.

And he wasn’t wrong to worry. What they’d done yesterday was nothing short of gambling with their lives. They’d nearly been wiped out, and if not for that random, merciful thing intervening, they’d be corpses frozen into the snow by now. But that didn’t change reality.

They couldn’t just abandon the supplies and sprint for it. Starving to death in the cold was still dying. Alexei clenched his jaw and stared ahead.

“Then we take one of the subterranean caverns,” he said. “It’s dangerous, but it’s still less suicidal than dealing with fog dwellers, or something worse, after dusk.”

A brief meeting followed. No one argued for repeating yesterday’s stupidity. The decision was quick and unanimous.

They were just about to move when Alexei’s gaze drifted back to the ice spear forest. He stiffened.

Something was shining down there, deep in the crater, right at its center.

****

It was her!

The thought slammed into Avena’s mind so hard it nearly made her flinch. She forced herself not to react. When the explosions had been tearing through the night, everyone else had looked terrified. The priestess alone had felt a rush of something dangerously close to delight.

She’d masked it well, though. Years of living with eyes that could see things no one else should had taught her how to lie with her face.

Right now, that was the only reason she was still breathing.

Her expression stayed neutral, empty even, but inside her thoughts were screaming. What would that priestess do if she realized Avena knew? If she understood that someone had seen through the act?

Avena remembered her, casually devouring that eel, and suppressed a shudder. She could easily imagine herself next. Being eaten wasn’t on her list of preferred deaths, so she kept the façade intact, even as dread gnawed at her. She knew it wouldn’t last forever.

And yet, some treacherous part of her couldn’t look at the massive crater without feeling awe. The scale of it was undeniable. The priestess had done this. Avena was sure of it. What she couldn’t understand was why someone with that kind of power would hide it, play the captive, and let others talk down to her like she was nothing.

She was still lost in that thought when a voice spoke right behind her.

“Hey. I’ve got a few questions for you.”

It came from the silent priestess.