The Dragon Heir

I waited for a response from the girl in front of me. She’d been the only one who’d shown even a sliver of empathy, after all. I had questions— several of them, all burning— but I wasn’t about to charge in headfirst. I already had a rough idea of what was going on.

This was just an introduction. A gentle one. Friendly.

I was, after all, magnificently gifted at collecting friends!

Maybe if I eased her into it, she’d volunteer to tell me whatever strange mess she was caught in herself. That was the plan, anyway.

A few moments passed. Nothing.

Her face remained turned away, her posture stiff, utterly uninterested in acknowledging my continued existence.

Hmm.

“Well, don’t fret,” I said, my voice flat and ceremonial, perfectly suited to the stone-faced priestess expression I was currently wearing. “I’ve no intention of pelting you with difficult inquiries. I merely wish to introduce myself to the only person who has treated me like a human, and to learn my benefactor’s name.”

Formal tone deployed.

This was how priestesses spoke, right? Or was I mixing workplace etiquette into a religious role? Lysska would probably know. Bah. Later problem.

“My name is Jade. What’s yours?”

Silence again. Then, finally—

“Name’s Avena,” she said quietly, still refusing to look at me. “Y-your e-exellency.”

…Your excellency?

Ah. Right. Probably a priestess thing. A bit stiff, but who was I to judge local customs?

“Just call me Jade,” I said. “I’ll address you as Avena as well.”

That did it.

She froze completely. No reply. Just a visible shudder running through her like I’d uttered a curse instead of basic politeness.

Ah. Right. Superstition. Priestess of a so-called tyrant dragon and all that. I’d probably just committed some grievous cultural faux pas.

I decided not to push it.

Still, hey! I talked to someone. My first actual conversation here. The relief was pathetic, a shallow, sad little pool.

I really hoped it wouldn’t come to the point where I’d have to start talking to my clones out of loneliness.

Though, on second thought, that didn’t sound too terrible.

Depending on the clone.

For now, I left Avena alone and focused on the lingering thrill still buzzing through me from last night.

Ahh…

I couldn’t believe I’d actually done it. I’d hunted a lowgold demigod entirely on my own. No help. No interference. And I’d won.

Every successful strike, I kept waiting for everything to go wrong in the most catastrophic way possible. For the leviathan to pull something absurd. For the world to intervene.

But nothing did.

For once, nothing interrupted the fight. No outside variables. It was just a clean, relentless battle.

It felt like I’d stumbled upon one of ice’s rare weaknesses, its inherent stability when faced with Quantum’s disruptive nature. And in doing so, I caught a glimpse of what real battles between powerhouses must look like.

It was no longer a contest of who could throw the heavier punch. It became a battle of will, of judgment, of timing, and of the intent behind every spell. In that brief interval, I felt something shift deep in my core. A state where every strike I made was fueled by raw willpower, wrapped and reinforced by the concept of Quantum itself.

I’d found a crack in elemental certainty and pried it wide open. It was… illuminating.

The result was… exhilaration.

A deep, sated sharp and overwhelming pleasure had surged through me. Amost threatening to tip straight into madness. For that moment, I wasn’t merely existing within the world. My will knuckled its rules. I bent the Leviathan’s imposed law of static Ice, that crushing pressure of absolute stasis, and shattered it with my own destabilizing Quantum heresy. I countered its reality with mine.

Maybe I got lucky.

No— scratch that. I definitely got lucky.

To shatter the stasis the Leviathan imposed, I doubt any other mana would have sufficed. My innate affinity just happened to be the perfect contradiction to its existence.

Every wound I inflicted went unanswered. Its defenses didn’t resist them. They didn’t heal. They festered and bloomed under my assault, each one being a propagating anomaly, until the only possible end lay before me. It… died. Just like that.

A part of me, the cynical dragon in the back, still refused to believe it. If the me of yesterday had been told I’d successfully hunt a Lowgold Leviathan, I’d have cackled myself sick at the absurdity.

And yet.

I did it.

I DID IT! I FUCKING HUNTED A DEMIGOD! IN A HOSTILE ARENA, NO LESS! TAKE THAT, FATE! TAKE THAT, COLOSSEUM! I BET YOU’D SAVED THAT LITTLE CHALLENGE FOR THE FINALE, AND I CHEWED THROUGH IT BEFORE THE OPENING ACT!

…Or maybe not. I had no idea.

The problem was that I’d been forced to reveal everything. The people in the Colosseum— Flameclaw Elders, house heads, possibly all of Varkaigrad— might have watched the entire thing. That depended on what the Colosseum chose to show.

The fog was blinding and suffocating to ordinary senses. I could only traverse it after shifting into a biology compatible with the fog-dwellers that inhabited it.

But again, the Colosseum built this stage. If anyone could pierce its own veil, it would be its creator.

That thought threatened to spiral into a far more uncomfortable question of what the Colosseum actually was.

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I shook my head before the line of thought ran away with me, my gaze drifting back to the camp that had sprung up at the edge of the massive crater formed as a result of—well. Me. Last night.

Once again, I found myself baffled by how much destruction my clones’ explosions could cause. Left unchecked, I could probably flatten an entire district of Varkaigrad.

Well. Maybe.

Varkaigrad was massive. But the possibility was there.

My attention snagged again on the wolf beside the Elegant Waryn. WHY WAS IT SO UNSPEAKABLY FLOOFY? I meant it— every other war-wolf here was a scraggly peasant compared to this regal plume of fur. A coat that gleamed with obsessive grooming, the largest of the pack, even its toe-beans were polished where it sat. It keeps hijacking my attention, making my breath hitch on instinct. AAAA! I wanted to burrow into that fur, steal it away from its utterly useless master, and abscond into the night!

…I shut the thought down. Hoh. Deep breaths. Where was I? Right. I’d learned their names by now. Elegant Waryn was Alexei. The arrogant one who’d whipped me was Maksim.

He’d get his reckoning soon enough. After I understood the full scope of my predicament.

They were the leaders of this expedition. And more importantly, I’d confirmed something else. We were indeed prisoners.

I still couldn’t place where the hell in the Vraal’Kor I was. Or whether I was even there at all. The only thing I knew for certain was that wherever I’d ended up, it was isolated, dangerous and cut off.

Alexei and Maksim were both tagged with Observer’s Mark and Suggestion, tools I was using to gently shape their thoughts so they wouldn’t question my anomalous existence too closely, especially after what happened last night. Alexei, unfortunately, came dangerously close to seeing through my stealth. That earned him a series of very direct mental whips until he shut his observation magic down, though not before the pain knocked him unconscious. I had to apply a few carefully placed Suggestions afterward to smooth things over and make sure no inconvenient suspicions took root.

Also, in return, I got glimpses of emotions, surface thoughts and loose impressions, stuff that let me start piecing things together.

It wasn’t mind-reading. Not really. More like collecting puzzle fragments and pretending I knew what the picture was supposed to be.

The expedition had started from “home,” as Alexei called it. He never named the place, which meant I still didn’t know what it was, only that it existed. The expedition itself was driven by necessity— resources. That told me enough. Whatever “home” was, it lacked what they needed badly enough to justify raids elsewhere.

Second, there was a sense of familiarity between the prisoners and the Waryns. Not kindness or comfort. Familiarity. The kind born from shared history that had soured and split them into opposing factions.

Third, Alexei spoke of this place with a particular kind of hatred. Not the irritation one had for hostile land such as this, but the bitterness reserved for something resembling a cage. Every time he thought of somewhere else— some before— there was warmth and nostalgia. And every time his thoughts returned here, they hardened into resentment toward this frozen prison he couldn’t leave.

Which cemented my creeping suspicion: these people weren’t just here by choice. They were… trapped.

I didn’t have enough information to draw firmer conclusions about it or about the fall of the so-called “tyrant dragon” tied to this place. But the way they thought and spoke of him was telling. He wasn’t remembered as a divine being, the kind dragons were once revered as in history. They regard him more like a terrifying mortal warlord than that.

I was missing far too much context.

Still, I didn’t act. I had time. For now, I’d taken on the role of observer.

And, apparently, conspiracist.

For the first time in a while, I was enjoying it.

It wasn’t even the first time I’d played chained and powerless. This was the third, actually.

The first time, I’d been completely clueless and solved the problem by letting Barn eat an entire cultist group.

The second time, I was less clueless, and things got… murder-adjacent. (That episode did rather justify the existence of my Terrorist (and Curious(?)) clone, to be fair.)

This time, I was clueless again, and I hadn’t committed any murders!

Yet.

It was… refreshing.

I’d still had an exhilarating battle, though. One I walked away from completely unscathed. The ability to remotely detonate my clones with catastrophic Quantum damage was, without question, the most absurdly broken tool in my arsenal.

The caravan came to a halt at the edge of the crater, which was filled with an entire forest of towering, gigantic ice spikes buried deep into its basin. They jutted upward at every angle, dense enough that the crater looked less like a hollow and more like something impaled repeatedly and left to freeze.

Alexei had noticed something glinting within and was now discussing with Maksim whether it was worth investigating. There was a chance they might find something valuable.

“But the subterrain caverns are opening within this crater,” Alexei said. “If that’s the case, monsters could come up from below. That increases the danger.”

Despite being the first to notice the shiny thing down there, he was still trying to stay pragmatic about it.

“I get that,” Maksim replied, “but there must have been a massive battle between two fog leviathans here yesterday. Two Golds, at least, and one of them must have lost. There could be valuable materials inside. Blood, scales—just getting those from a Leviathan would be massive. And that’s not even mentioning more exotic body parts if one of them actually died there. This is a prime opportunity.”

“But again,” Alexei pressed, “if one of them truly has its body scattered within the crater—which we can’t confirm because of that ice lance forest—then chances are it would’ve already attracted scavengers from the subterrain caves.”

“But we’ve already dealt with the local monsters,” Maksim shot back. “It feels like the risk is worth it.”

“And what if a random Gold decides to crawl out?”

“Those are rare enough to be a myth,” Maksim scoffed. “Do a divination if you’re that worried.”

I decided to help things along. Just a subtle push through Suggestion, feeding enough greed into their thoughts to tip the balance without making it obvious. Alexei stayed defensive for a while longer, but eventually he relented. The decision was passed along to their Waryn brothers by Maksim while Alexei performed a divination on the danger within.

Predictably, it came back as mildly dangerous. Not enough to alarm anyone.

Camp was properly established. Nearly a dozen were left behind to guard the caravan, while more than a dozen formed a squad and ventured into the crater.

Their composition alone told me how hardened they were by the hostile environment. They were disciplined and alert.

Not that it mattered.

Any monsters still lurking within had already been converted into Morphogen by my clones. Letting Terrorist Clone loose on the area hadn’t spared them even the slightest chance. I couldn’t cover the entire crater because of how limited the clone’s existence window was before resummoning became necessary, but I’d done enough.

There was a reason I wanted Alexei and his team to reach the center of the crater, right where that “shiny” thing was.

The truth was, I couldn’t devour the Leviathan in one go. Its size was massive, spanning over a hundred meters. Even when I divided its body between myself and my clones and tried to transfigure entire sections into unstable, edible, single-swallow spheres— with a lifespan of ten seconds before violently reverting to their original mass— it still wasn’t enough.

The flesh of the Leviathan still carried a heavy, resistant will of its own. Transfiguring it was a hundred times more difficult than dealing with simple eels, and I was forced to work with far larger sections at that.

Needless to say, I failed spectacularly. I didn’t even manage to get a chance to obtain its Imprint for the Quantum Devourer ability.

It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

I did eat parts of it. Some of the more exotic organs I managed to dig out, hoping my evolution might cough up something worthwhile in return. I also devoured its massive monster core, and I could feel the effect of that almost immediately. My maximum mana climbed by a noticeable margin.

I also felt like I gained something else from that entire battle. Something subtler. But I didn’t have access to my system screen right now, so there was no helpful list spelling it out for me. Which meant I’d have to figure it out the old-fashioned way, without the system holding my hand.

There was one more thing I got out of the whole ordeal.

Something I couldn’t interact with at all.

It had erupted out of the Leviathan’s body after I killed it, a golden sphere that constantly swirled in on itself. It didn’t feel physical, not in any way that mattered. Cautious, then curious, then frankly annoyed, I tried everything! Magic slid off it. Transfiguration refused to take. Terrorist attempted to ingest it whole, like a particularly luminous oyster.

Nothing.

It just… was. An inert trophy from a demigod.

That was why I was sending the Waryn squad after it. I stoked Alexei’s curiosity about the crater until his gaze snagged on that glowing anomaly at its heart. Then I fed their collective greed until it overruled their caution, and an “investigation” was born.

I cleared out the more dangerous monsters ahead of time, leaving a few weaker ones along the path so it wouldn’t look too clean. Suspicion was a weed that grew in sterile soil. Now they were advancing steadily, inching closer to the center.

After all, they knew this place far better than I did.

If anyone could tell me what that infuriating golden orb was… it would be them.