The Dragon Heir

The dreamscape didn't dissolve the way it usually did. Something else was happening.

I expected to wake up back in that strange rock stasis, sealed inside the golden obelisk with Dorrusk still dying against my chest. My plan had been simple. To use whatever leftover divinity he had in his body, try to mutate myself with whatever consciousness I still had left. It would be hard. It might not even work. But it was the only option I had.

Mutate, reconnect to the system, and finally evolve so I'd have a fighting chance against opponents that my current form didn't stand a chance against. Opponents who were prepared for me, stronger than me, outnumbering me. The kind of odds that sucked all the fun out of battle. The odds that were just deeply, profoundly unlucky.

But I didn't feel like I was waking up in that stasis.

A different scene was slowly forming in front of me. Hazy at first, like looking through frosted glass. Then the details sharpened, bleeding into focus one at a time.

I was looking over a city.

Not one I recognized and definitely not anywhere from this continent. But the architecture tugged at something in the back of my mind. The bones of it, the way the buildings had been shaped before they were broken. It resembled the architecture of ‘Earth’ from my dreamscape.

The sky above was the colour of ash. Drifting soot caught the dim light, and in the distance, fires still burned, probably had been burning for days, unattended, consuming whatever was left to consume. Skyscrapers that had once stabbed at the clouds were now crumpled to their steel bones, pummeled into the ground like a child's toys after a tantrum. It was the stillness after the chaos of an ongoing battle.

As for myself, I didn't quite think this was my body.

I was looking down from the tallest remaining building, perched on a ledge that barely held together, but I had no control over the limbs I was seeing through. No ability to turn the head or shift the gaze. I was just... watching. Riding along behind someone else's eyes.

Those eyes were strangely familiar too. A set of shifting lenses that focused and refocused on different distant points, independent of each other, tracking movement with a predatory precision. They were younger eyes, too. Fresher. The body I was inhabiting was much smaller than my current form, I could feel it in the way the perspective sat lower to the ground, and in the overall lightness of the frame.

I watched through these alien eyes as my host's gaze landed on her own body. Small paws tipped with sharp talons, too large for the frame they were attached to. Scales that still seemed unused to wear and tear, they were pale and almost translucent. She looked like I had back in the dungeon, when I was barely past my first evolution. A hatchling trying to survive in a world that wanted her dead.

Except she was already bleeding. A gash along her ribs that should have been fatal for something her size, the edges of it dark and crusted but still weeping at the center. She'd been carrying it for a while it seemed.

Below, the streets swarmed.

Humans. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, packed into a makeshift camp that sprawled across the ruined district. They'd built walls out of overturned cars and shattered debris. Set up watchtowers manned by people clutching guns with white-knuckled desperation.

And then the thoughts started bleeding through that definitely didn't belong to me.

Pathetic humans. Clinging to their little guns like they'd do anything except make the things from the rifts angrier. Look at them down there, herding their useless spawn, the ones that don't do anything but wail and leak and consume resources that should've gone to fighters. And they're still shielding those dead weights instead of throwing them away. Still dragging them along. Still pretending they matter. Inferior worms. They had two full weeks to adapt to this, fourteen days since the sky cracked open and everything went to hell, and they're still wandering around so... gullible. How very pathetic.

The words came with a cold and dismissive sneer I could feel in the back of my host's throat.

I didn't know how I understood what was happening, but I had an inkling. This must be the apocalypse my doppelganger had talked about. The integration she'd survived. I was experiencing her memory somehow, seeing through her eyes, feeling the edges of her thoughts without controlling any of it.

I didn't understand why. But this didn't feel like someone called ‘the Overlord’ Not yet. This felt like a memory from when she was just a hatchling, like me in the dungeon.

From the thoughts that continued to drift through, I finally pieced together what was happening. She'd been watching them for two days. She knew the count: four hundred and thirty-seven survivors. Sixteen awakened warriors, none above Low E-rank, which probably mapped to the core colours I knew, though I didn't have enough information to be sure, and I couldn't control the eyes to check their mana directly.

But my doppelganger believed their defenses were worthless. And in the edge of the camp, a dungeon rift was forming. From what I gathered from her thoughts, when it finally broke open, it would flood the entire district with monsters. Currently the rift was weak, so the monsters would be below E-rank. But even those could spell disaster when you were actively protecting people. And my doppelganger had no intention of protecting anyone.

In fact, she was eagerly waiting for it to open.

Her heightened mana sense had allowed her to detect the rift before it even fully formed, it was something the humans below had no idea was coming. Her thoughts sharpened.

If the rift breaks at the predicted rate, the mana density spike will attract the Stag Archer within half an hour.

She'd faced this monster before. It was the thing that had given her the chest wound. It had appeared from a previous rift and was now wandering the forest surrounding the city, too strong for her to take head-on. But she was ready for round two. And she would be using all the humans below as bait.

Just like they deserved to be used. They were inferior. It was only right that they serve someone superior. When the rift opened, they'd panic like the pathetic flies they always were. The chaos would peak. And in that peak, when the new monsters and the older ones that had yet to be killed arrived to feast, they would inevitably challenge each other. Two predator groups tearing each other apart over a buffet of screaming civilians.

And she would wait. When both groups were weak enough, she would descend and devour them both. Enough experience to push her into her next evolution. Enough to make her something that didn't have to hide on rooftops and bleed alone.

She'd been waiting for this for almost a week.

She looked down once more, toward the powerless humans and their pathetic spawns, and a final thought drifted through.

At least this way, they'll be useful.

It happened soon enough. A blue-black tear split the air near the camp's edge, ragged and violent and spilling wrong coloured light into the street. One of the monsters, something lupine with extra limbs, rushed out and tore into a woman before anyone even registered what was happening. The screaming started a half-second later, spreading through the camp like fire through dry grass.

My doppelganger ignored it. She climbed higher, settling into a perch with a better vantage, and tracked the forest's edge with those shifting lenses. The Stag Archerwas exactly where she'd expected. She watched its head perk up as it caught the scent of new mana, watched it begin moving toward the camp with the patient gait. Her mouth curled into a smile.

She settled deeper into her perch and waited.

But the new rift monsters had issues with the stag stealing their prey. A battle broke out, the wolf-creatures and the stag colliding in a cacophony of antlers and claws and inhuman shrieking. The camp below dissolved into chaos as she was watching the fight, tracking every wound, every stumble, every moment the balance shifted.

The battle lasted twelve minutes.

When it was almost over, all creatures were wounded enough. The camp itself was a charnel house. The four hundred and thirty-seven survivors had been reduced to fewer than forty and those who remained too shell-shocked to even notice the small pale dragonling descending from the rooftop.

She started with the awakened warriors. They had the highest chances of survival, and they were doing exactly what she would have done. Hiding, waiting for the monsters to wear themselves out before moving. Too bad they were her prey. She dropped on them from above, one by one, killing them with a single claw to the neck before they even knew she was there. She baited the remaining ones, separated them, picked them off with ruthless, methodical precision. Each kill sent a rush of power through her veins that she savored like the first proper meal she'd had in weeks.

By then the monsters were even more wounded. It made it easy, one final rush, a few well-placed strikes, and all of them were dead. She stood over their corpses, panting, bleeding from fresh wounds, but alive and victorious.

When it was over, she looked at the survivors.

The forty-something people who had watched her descend from nowhere and claim the kills. Who had seen the intelligence in her eyes as she moved. One man, still shaking, still clutching a child behind him, bowed his head and asked her to spare him and his daughter. His voice cracked on the word please.

There was no hesitation.

She lunged and tore them both apart.

They gave her no experience. They were too weak to be worth anything. But she didn't want the world to know of her existence. Not yet. She'd reveal herself when she decided it was right. When she was strong enough that no one could stop her. Until then, there could be no witnesses.

Even if it meant standing atop a mountain of corpses.

The memory faded. The city bled into darkness, the ash and fire swallowed by a rising tide of black that crept in from the edges of my vision until there was nothing left.

So. I'd just witnessed a fragment of memories from my old self.

Was it damning? I didn't think it was. Not really. She'd been a hatchling trying to survive an apocalypse. I'd been a hatchling trying to survive a dungeon. The only real difference was the scale of the corpses involved, and I wasn't about to pretend I had clean claws either.

But I could finally feel the barrier between us more clearly now, feel what separated me from her. I wasn't a judge of morality by any stretch. I wasn't about to get snot-nosed and condemn her for what she did to survive. That would be hypocritical, and worse, it would be boring. Who was I to throw stones? I'd eaten people. I'd enjoyed eating people. My moral high ground was a sinkhole.

Still. She was fundamentally different from what I was, even if she was my past life. The way she'd looked at those humans, not as threats or as food, but something akin to… waste. As things so far beneath her they weren't even worth acknowledging except as bait. I didn't look at people like that. I looked at them and thought about whether they'd make good friends or good snacks, and sometimes both, but never nothing.

Lotte was keeping us apart. Making sure I stayed me and she stayed her. And for the first time since that conversation started, I felt a little grateful for it.

The darkness around me finally solidified.

I was back in the obelisk. I could tell immediately by the way my thoughts started struggling again, suspended in that awful golden stillness where even breathing had been a fight. Where time turned to sludge and thinking felt like dragging my brain through wet cement. The seal was still active, still pressing down on me from all sides, trying to smother my mind back into that half-dead crawl.

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Only difference was that I wasn't alone anymore.

Honestly. My doppelganger's dry and thoroughly unimpressed voice echoed in my skull. This is what they sealed you with? A basic bitch containment lattice? A disdainful sniff. Pathetic. It's not even reinforced with sacrificial anchors. The Depth Dwellers slit their own throats to power this, and the best they could manage was a prison a child could escape.

I didn't know how she was here. Was this what Lotte had meant— if I "became the Overlord" for a while? I couldn't move my mouth. Couldn't think properly, for that matter. Everything was still syrup-slow and half-paralyzed, but her voice cut through it cleanly.

Well, whatever. I can work with this.

I felt a prompt bloom in my head, like a formal request for permission to enter, like the system prompts I used to get before everything went offline. I guess this was what Lotte had meant when she said "if Jade agrees." I needed to let the doppelganger in.

I felt my crawling thoughts grind against each other and gritted my teeth, or tried to, anyway. As much as I wanted to do this all myself, I knew I had little time. I could feel Dorrusk's limp body still clutched in my claws. It would take me ages just to get used to the seal's suppression before I could even think of ways to draw the divinity out of him. Time I didn't have.

I accepted the prompt.

My claw twitched on its own. A terrible pressure descended from somewhere but it vanished the moment it appeared, leaving my heart trembling like a bird trying to escape its cage.

Well. That was certainly an experience.

And my thoughts were returning to normal. The sluggish pace was burning off, replaced by my usual racing cognition. The only difference was that now there was someone else capable of controlling my body with me. And it was me. Well, past me. Which was a sentence that made perfect sense and didn't make my head hurt at all.

Still, the prompt was still there, hovering in the corner of my awareness. I could banish her as easily as I'd let her in. I heaved a mental sigh of relief. So Lotte thought it would be entertaining to allow... whatever this was. I'd think about Lotte's true nature later. I had better things to worry about right now.

After a moment, my doppelganger's voice echoed again. This time it was closer, like she was speaking to me from just beyond a thin fabric.

Hmm. I suppose it wasn't designed to hold someone like us. It was designed to hold long enough for that leviathan to finish whatever she's doing.

I'd guessed as much. Since that bitch had accounted for everything else, it would make no sense for her not to account for my unpredictability too, or some kind of ace up my own sleeve. The issue was just that breaking out was going to take time. So she'd slowed me down further by trapping me in this cage that made my thoughts crawl and completely fucked my perception of time. She truly was devious.

Now. My doppelganger's voice sharpened. Your body in its current state lacks the tools to break this conventionally. You're still Red Core, and most of your mana channels are… mostly constricted from the sealing process. But everything has a weakness. Especially cages built by lowlife mongrels.

A vicious satisfaction bled into her tone.

And this cage? I've already found seventeen. Pick one.

I wondered what exactly the plan was here.

Same as what you were thinking. We'll be breaking some constraints of this cage to make the next step easier. I already broke one without collapsing the entire structure, you must have noticed.

Yes. I had noticed that. I was thinking clearly again. That was... fast. And I had no idea how she'd done it. Having a thousand years of experience clearly wasn't without its perks. My mind boggled at how she'd even identified the spell structures that must have come out of that ritual, let alone tweaked part of it without collapsing the entire thing.

Do you truly want to know? The only way is... to directly experience it.

I sent her a firm negative. No need to tempt me. I wasn't ready to lose what I was by becoming her. Not when it was quite clear we were different.

She just chuckled a dry sound and shrugged mentally.

This time I slowly felt the sensation of mana running through my veins return. I also felt a twinge of mana leave my tail just before that, which must have been what my doppelganger used to break the second constraint.

So. Thoughts back to normal. Mana back to normal. And the cage was still there?

How the fuck did you remove two vital moving parts of a seal made by a damn ritual without it collapsing to pieces?

I still couldn't believe it, even though I'd just witnessed it with my own two eyes. Well, not eyes. Senses. Whatever.

But this made the next part much, much easier. The seal was still intact, anyone outside wouldn't know we'd essentially been freed within. So even if they were expecting what was coming next, they wouldn't expect it to come this soon.

I still couldn't move, but I didn't need to. With my mana back, I felt my spatial sense snap into place like a rubber band releasing. Dorrusk's heart was still beating. A bit faster now, but steady. He'd been sealed in here with me, so his thoughts and mana channels had gotten blocked too. Now he was feeling it all return, and I could sense his panic spiking as his mind came back online.

My claw twitched, not my doing, runes formed and vanished before I could even look at them and I felt a link form between me and Dorrusk.

The sensation was similar to Observer's Mark, but refined. It was deeper. I could gauge far more than surface thoughts. It was like Dorrusk's entire head had been laid bare in front of me. He was scared. Terrified. A bit indignant and deeply ashamed that he hadn't been able to help me. Scared of this place that had sealed us together. Scared we'd never get out.

Through whatever link my doppelganger had set up, she spoke first.

"Supplicant!" The authority in her voice was unmistakable. It immediately snapped Dorrusk out of his spiral.

"MASTER! Is it you?!" His mental voice cracked with relief, the terror that had been eating him alive momentarily eclipsed by desperate joy. "I knew it! I knew you would find a way! This lowly one never doubted—"

“Silence!”

He silenced instantly.

"You carry sacred energy," she said. "Divinity, in other words. I require all of it. Every last drop."

"Of course, Master! Whatever you need, I—"

"Let me be clear, supplicant." Her voice dropped cold. "I will be drawing the divinity directly from your core. All at once. The process will not be gentle. There is a significant chance your body will not survive the extraction. If that happens, your death will serve a greater purpose. Are you prepared to die for me?"

"YES!" The word came out before she'd even finished, I was baffled how there was no hesitation. "To die in service is the greatest honor I could—"

Stop.

The word cut through our shared mindspace.

We are not killing him! I pushed the thought forward. Can't we just extract the divinity bit by bit instead of all at once?

A pause. I felt my doppelganger's attention shift inward, toward me.

That is feasible. But it's inefficient. Why do you want to do it that way when we can take it all at once and mutate everything together? It would save us a significant amount of time.

He's my friend. The words came out simpler than I expected. Just a fact. I made him my friend. You don't spend your friends.

Another pause. I felt concepts shifting behind her silence. It was the mental equivalent of a head tilt.

Friend?

Yes. Friend. Even if he was fanatically devoted and ready to die just now without even knowing what I was asking. I had still grown a little fond of the small guy. Why do you think I saved him in the first place? That's what you do with a friend.

Hmm. Her tone was genuinely contemplative now. You've grown attached to this mortal.

Well, maybe? You agreed to my way. I'm not letting you kill him for convenience.

It would be faster and cleaner, though. We could take all the divinity at once, force the mutation immediately, and break this cage before the Water Leviathan even realizes we've moved. He's offering. He wants to die for you. Why refuse a willing sacrifice?

Because I don't want him to die.

What had happened so far had me thinking about something. One might even argue I was being naïve for not using this obvious "simulation" to do whatever I wanted. Dorrusk might not even be real, for all facts and purposes. But what if there was a small, small chance he was? He certainly felt like it—just like everyone else in this trial.

It changes nothing, whether it's a simulation or reality. You're really telling me you'd trade efficiency for sentiment?

Yes.

She went silent for a while. Long enough that I wondered if I'd offended her. Then her voice returned.

Fine. We do it your way. I'll draw the divinity in increments, small enough that his body can recover between extractions. But it will take longer. The mutation will be gradual instead of immediate.

How much longer?

Hard to say. The seal is fighting back passively. But if we're careful... I felt her running calculations, we can have you fully mutated within a few hours instead of minutes. Assuming the leviathan doesn't check on us before then.

That's acceptable.

It's inefficient, she corrected, but there was no real heat in it. Sentiment is inefficient. But I suppose you've earned the right to be inefficient. This once.

I felt her attention shift back to Dorrusk, who was still waiting in anxious silence.

"Change of plans, supplicant." Her voice had lost none of its authority, but some of the coldness had receded. "I will be drawing your divinity slowly. In increments. You will survive this. My current self demands it."

"Master...?" He sounded almost confused now, like the concept of not being sacrificed had short-circuited something in his brain.

"Don't thank me. Thank her." A pause. "And prepare yourself. This will still hurt."

Begin with the eyes, I suggested silently, eager to change the subject before things got uncomfortably sentimental. My fire gland mutated with very little divinity. Let's start there and work inward.

A sensible approach. There was a note of grudging approval in her voice. You're not completely hopeless at strategy, at least.

No, it's just that eyes itch and hurt too much when mutating. Like you want to claw them out and scratch them off your face! I want it over with first.

She paused.

Hey! You'll know when you feel it too!

She just snorted and got to work. I felt the link between Dorrusk and me pulse once, then steady into a slow, controlled drain. His divinity trickled into my body like molten gold, and my doppelganger guided it with a precision I could feel but not quite follow. Her control was immaculate, threading the divinity through my constricted mana channels like she'd done this a thousand times before. She probably had.

The warmth of it reached me slowly, spreading through my frozen limbs.

...Reaching my eyes first.

The next part was expected.

The divinity immediately responded by changing my eyes on a fundamental level, and I immediately felt the sharp, searing pain and maddening itch of mutation, like thousands of hot, sharp daggers being constantly stabbed into my sockets while someone poured salt and fire and pure spite directly into the wounds.

...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIFUCKINGHATEMUTATIONSIFUCKINGHATEMUTATIONSIFUCKINGHATEMUTATIONSIFUCKINGHATEMUTATIONSIFUCKINGHATEMUTATIONS—

Somewhere in the background of our shared mindspace, I could feel my doppelganger experiencing the echo of it. Her presence went somewhat rigid and her thought processes briefly stalled.

...Ah.

YES! "AH"! IT SUCKS, DOESN'T IT?!

I had forgotten this part. Her voice was remarkably calm. The early mutations were always the worst.But it seems like you were right. It's efficient to get the worst part over with. A pause. I simply didn't remember it being this... vivid.

VIVID?! VIVID IS A FLOWER FIELD! THIS IS MY EYEBALLS BEING FLOSSED WITH MOLTEN GLASS—AAAAAAAAAAAA—

***

Just as the final mutation finished, a wave of relief washed over me so intense I almost forgot where I was.

Fuck eyes. No— scratch that. Fuck everything. Heart mutating was the absolute worst. No contest. And the mana veins. And the scales, which had to be done in batches because of my own insistence on keeping Dorrusk alive, which meant stretching a tiny amount of divinity across far too many agonizing sessions. My doppelganger had made her opinion on that very clear. Inefficient, sentimental, a waste of time! But she'd done it my way anyway. Grudgingly. With lots of mental sighing.

The divinity we were working with was heavily diluted, according to her. A pale shadow of the real thing. Which meant each mutation required more effort, more precision, more suffering. She'd wrung every usable drop from Dorrusk's core like water from a stone, and I'd felt every single one of them burn through me.

But it was done. Finally, mercifully, done.

Dorrusk was fully limp in my claws. He'd gone slack somewhere around the midpoint, his body finally surrendering to the strain of having his sacred energy siphoned out in controlled bursts. He was already wounded from the battle, already teetering, and the extraction had pushed him right to the edge. But his heart was still beating. So he was barely alive. I'd have to heal him later. Assuming we survived what came next.

For now, though... I felt the changes.

An extra pair of smaller wings had sprouted from my back, folded tight against my spine. My body had grown longer, more serpentine, the proportions shifting toward something sleeker and deadlier. I was bigger too, not dramatically, but enough to notice.

It wasn't a full evolution. More like a... pseudo-evolution. A half-step toward what I was supposed to be.

And the main thing, the thing that made my heart beat faster with something other than pain, was the divinity.

I could feel it. Pooling in my chest with every breath, like my body had finally remembered how to do something it should have been doing all along. Passive divinity storage. The system was complete now, a loop that had been broken finally closing. Every inhale drew in trace amounts of this… sacred energy, letting it settle into my heart, letting it build. It was somewhat like regenerating mana.

I was already feeling much more potent than before. Wait, potent might not be the right word. I was feeling… righter. Like a limb I'd never known was missing had suddenly snapped back into place.

Well. This is what you would have been like if those mongrels didn't steal your divinity in the first place. Much better than this.

My doppelganger's voice echoed through my head.

I still didn't know exactly what had happened in my past. But it made a twisted kind of sense. Someone had fucked with me before I was even born, robbed me of something fundamental, and left me a cripple who couldn't feel or control mana. If I'd been my true self from the very beginning… what would I have become? What kind of dragon would have hatched from that egg?

I guessed there was no point thinking about it. That path was closed. The only one that mattered was forward.

My objective was to get out of this cage and confront the bitch who'd trapped me here.

It was time for round two.

But first.

My heart beat faster, from the question I'd been afraid to ask this time. Had it worked? I was fully mutated now. Every part of me that had been locked away was now open. This meant my access to the system should be restored.

But what if it hadn't? What if the trial's restrictions or the obelisk's seal or some other bullshit interference kept me cut off? What then?

I mentally shook myself. Even if it hadn't worked, I'd figure something out. Like I always did. Assuming the worst had a habit of not surprising you.

I took a breath. Braced myself. And intoned mentally—

"System!"

Nothing happened. For one agonizing second, the darkness stayed dark, the silence stayed silent and I felt something cold and awful twist in my gut.

Then a giant screen materialized in front of me, blazing with light and text and beautiful, beautiful system notifications.

My eyes widened.