Chapter 198: Slave
The next morning, Ethen exited his private room, white steam visibly fuming from the crown of his head. The intense heat radiating from his body was a clear sign of heavy energy circulation throughout the night.
He walked straight into the open courtyard area where the twelve Dragon Knights stood waiting in perfect formation. Their silver armor gleamed sharply under the rising sun, giving them an incredibly imposing and disciplined appearance.
"You guys are all Tier 5 Dragoneers, right?" Ethen asked, looking at them closely as he stopped pacing.
He inspected their heavy equipment and the subtle draconic aura constantly leaking from their physical bodies.
The Dragon families weren’t full of traditional summoners who relied on contracted beasts to fight their battles. In fact, families with special bloodlines like these focused much more heavily on their innate bloodline classes.
Their inherited genetic abilities gave them massive physical advantages that ordinary summoners could never hope to replicate.
The group of armored warriors nodded in unison, their movements synchronized down to the exact second. Their eyes shakily tried to catch a glimpse of Ethen from the lineup without breaking their strict military posture.
No one else in the entire encampment knew, but when they had been deployed, they received a full report. Before taking their posts to guard him, command had handed them a highly classified dossier on this person.
It detailed exactly how he had entered the Bastion and violently disrupted the established hierarchy of the border. It listed his massive, ongoing blood grudge with Duke Ao, a legitimate God Almighty of the Dragon Clan.
It even outlined his brand-new, terrifying status as one of Karth’s twelve divine Messengers on the continent. They knew exactly who they had been assigned to protect, and the sheer weight of it was terrifying.
"Good."
Ethen nodded slowly, a faint, calculating smile appearing on his face as he gauged their nervous reactions.
"Then I doubt anyone in this entire base will be able to stop you outside of an actual Demi God?"
He asked the question casually, but his tone sounded exactly as if he was about to do something highly secret.
The twelve elite Dragon Knights could only sigh internally, maintaining their stoic expressions despite the heavy dread settling in their stomachs.
It seemed like they had been assigned to guard an absolute troublemaker who didn’t care about military rules. They had hoped for a quiet diplomatic escort mission, but Ethen clearly had other chaotic plans in mind today.
.....
About thirty minutes later, near the rocky, desolate outskirts of the massive military base, a dark ship crashed hard into the dry earth.
Large, smoking holes covered its sleek hull as rapid ion blasts from the sky repeatedly struck the battleship. The automated defense grid had locked onto the vessel, forcing it lower and lower with every consecutive strike.
It completely lost altitude until it finally slammed violently into the jagged ground, kicking up a massive dust cloud that obscured the entire impact zone.
From inside the ruined, burning wreckage, a young, heavily built, brutish man with sharp horns on his head stepped out. He coughed away the thick, toxic smoke and looked anxiously toward the distant horizon.
Almost immediately, a pair of unmarked military ships descended from the low clouds and landed not too far away from him.
"Get it."
Without even landing the vessel fully, a heavily armored Dragon Knight reached out from inside the ship’s open entrance. He extended his gauntlet toward the brutish man waiting below, keeping a careful watch on the hostile sky above.
Their hands clasped tightly together, the sound of metal grinding against thick scales echoing over the loud engine noise. The Dragon Knight pulled him inside the hovering ship with a single, massive heave of his enhanced strength.
The moment the target was securely on board, the two ships immediately broke their tight formation and went in completely separate directions to confuse the tracking systems.
They executed the extraction maneuver flawlessly, leaving absolutely no time for the base’s radar operators to track their exact path.
Some thirty minutes later, one of the decoy ships was aggressively stopped by a set of official military patrol ships. The heavily armed interceptors boxed the vessel in and forced it to halt for a strict, mandatory inspection in the middle of the sky.
"You approached the crashed ship and just took off?" the patrol officer asked, looking sharply at the Dragon Knights.
The military border forces had noticed an unregistered ship illegally entering their restricted airspace earlier that morning. It looked suspiciously similar to the stealth transport ships commonly used by the enemy Dragon Clan for smuggling operations.
As such, they had repeatedly attacked it with the base’s ion cannons until it crashed into the canyon outskirts. But before their ground teams could intercept the crash, they noticed this specific ship approach the area and leave.
The timing was far too suspicious for them to ignore, prompting this aggressive mid-air interception by the patrol. They wanted to know exactly what had been retrieved.
All they knew at that point was that aside from a few dead Demi Human guards, there was nothing in the wreckage. There was no high-value target or sensitive intelligence cargo left behind in the burning hull of the crashed ship.
"It’s not part of our assigned mission," the Dragon Knight in charge answered, his expression forming a deep, irritated frown beneath his silver helmet.
"By the way, this entire inspection is very inappropriate. We are the personal guards of the newly appointed envoy."
The knight stepped forward, his heavy armor clanking loudly as he stared directly into the eyes of the patrol officer.
"We vastly outrank you. I wonder why you think it’s appropriate to stop and search our vessel like common criminals in our own sovereign airspace."
His tone became incredibly menacing, daring the lower-ranking officer to push the issue any further than he already had. The Dragon Knights were widely known as the most elite, unquestionable military force the Dragon Council had to offer.
Every single one of them was seriously vetted and brutally trained before being selected for this prestigious unit. An unproven accusation of treason or smuggling against them was a very serious matter that could result in immediate executions.
"I apologize. We were just being cautious," the officer in charge nodded, quickly swallowing his previous arrogance and backing down.
He hastily scanned the official diplomatic plates on the battleship before ordering his men to turn back and leave the airspace without further incident.
The Dragon Knights waited patiently in the air until the military patrol ships completely left their visual range. Once the coast was clear, they continued their journey, performing a standard sweeping pattern to avoid drawing any further suspicion.
A few hours later, after completing a brief patrol route, that very same ship rushed back toward the Dracontis quarters to rejoin the main fleet. It parked completely openly beside a very similar-looking ship that had already returned from the split extraction maneuver.
Several heavily armored Dragon Knights stepped out of the vessel, moving with brisk, purposeful steps across the busy courtyard. They completely ignored the curious stares of the surrounding soldiers and immediately went toward a room on the far side of the massive living quarters.
One of them even flicked a middle finger toward the sky with a tinge of intense annoyance at the patrol ships. He cursed quietly under his breath before following the others inside the highly secured, soundproofed living quarters.
Inside...
"Is that all you found out during your time there?"
Ethen sat casually on a wooden table in the middle of the room, swinging his legs back and forth. He was looking down directly at the brutish man with horns who was kneeling submissively before him.
The man kept his head bowed low, showing absolute deference to the summoner. This battered, disguised man was none other than Ao Lorn, the twenty-fifth royal son of the Almighty Duke Ao.
When they had initially captured him at the border, Ethen had Morgana repeatedly use her Will Break ability. She had relentlessly assaulted his mind as they traversed the long stretch of land toward the Bastion.
It was a brutal, agonizing process that slowly chipped away at the incredible pride and resilience of a true dragon. Thankfully, despite him being a Demi God, she had been able to succeed with a little outside help from him.
Breaking the will of someone at that high of a cultivation stage was supposed to be completely impossible for her to do alone. But with Ethen providing absolute suppression and constant spiritual pressure, the dragon prince’s mental defenses finally shattered completely.
At that exact breaking point, this once-proud Dark Gold Dragon had completely surrendered his autonomy and became Ethen’s loyal slave forever without resistance.
"What’s about the news of the blood serpent gods corspe?" Ethen asked with a bitter smile on his face as a line of text appeared infront of him.
[Consume 500kg of the blood serpent gods flesh]
It was the summoning ritual he had been assigned.