Dragon Core: The Dragon-Girl Evolution & Princess-Collecting Dungeon Core Isekai LITRPG! (+ Comic!)

The whole territory thing had got away from her, frankly.

That was the only honest way to describe it. Barjuchne had initially set out to claim only a meagre, humble ten cities, really for the sake of the system quest and had managed eleven, including Jaesowen Vale. The dragon recalls having then gone back to her mountain, fully intending to let things settle just like that. She didn't need anything more. She was content.

But that was before the twin saintesses knelt before her and the world flashed white, enchanted by some sort of magical vision that she didn't quite fully understand.

Things had, since then, in fact, not settled.

The Holy Church's conversion to belief in her moved faster than most of the armies on the way to the dragon's lair did. Where soldiers needed roads and supply lines and the cooperation of local lords to progress, the faith needed only its voice and the existing networks of every cathedral, chapel, and way-shrine that had been quietly built into the fabric of the nation for hundreds of years.

And even for those who were not believers, the twin saintesses were known everywhere. Their surrender was legendary within a week.

And for those who were, many seemed to have been affected by some manner of divine insight. To them, the dragon was heaven-sent.

Cities that had armed their walls against Barjuchne sent tribute caravans before the month ended. Towns that had never even seen the dragon, had no reason to fear her directly, and had no army left to resist anyway flew her banner because their bishop told them it was holy to do so. Regional lords who had been waiting to see which way the wind blew looked at the map of claimed territory, looked at the church's endorsement, looked at the failure of Lord Parsmuth and the silence from the kingdom's capital, and made the calculation themselves.

They bent the knee and sent some gold toward the black mountain. It was better to bow one's head to the dragon and continue living as they had than be eaten like the former lord, Parsmuth, had been.

Of course, the fact that she really didn't intend to eat anyone was unknown to them. Her image was pretty frightening in popular conception.

By the time Barjuchne noticed what was happening, she owned the entire regional state.

The dragon girl stood in the hoard room with Rou-ya's updated territorial map spread across the treasure heap between them and stared at it for a long, quiet moment.

One hundred and then some cities.

Hundreds of thousands of souls.

The numbers sat in Barjuchne's chest with a quite uncomfortable weight. Not that she wasn't happy to own more things, but she had made promises to those she already owned. She had said the words to every city she'd personally visited: protection in exchange for tribute, safety in exchange for fealty. Those words had been sincere when she said them. She had meant every one.

She still meant them, but that was the problem. These same promises applied to these new places as well; they had to.

This much land, these many territories, required an equivalent's worth of management.

Barring the usual management of their socioeconomic issues, she would need to arrange for real patrols to keep them all safe from the dangers of the world. She would need to organise real responses to real problems in those regions. There were bandits on roads she would have to handle. There were the forces of the kingdom, who would look with displeasure at those they might consider traitors. There were monsters drifting in from untamed lands. Hell, there were even just minor disputes between the settlements themselves that could fester into violence if left alone and would need to be handled.

By her. This was her job.

But how? She was just one dragon.

"The lizardmen are already running the outer circuits," Rou-ya said, reading her expression. The goblin princess traced a nail along the map's eastern edge. "The fairy circles cut their travel time to nothing. A patrol can be on Durinas' border and back before midday."

Barjuchne looked at the eastern routes, then at the web of mushroom circles F.P. had helped her map. The fairy had complained through the entire process and yet then produced the most comprehensive network diagram any of them had ever seen, which told Barjuchne everything she needed to know about how much F.P. had been holding back.

What a little troublemaker.

Across the nation's roads, pairs of lizardmen moved through the fairy rings, stepping out into morning air far from the mountain, their black scales absorbing the sun's early heat. They walked the roads in pairs, well out of place anywhere outside of the black mountain. At first, the townspeople they passed had retreated behind shuttered windows and bolted doors, peering through gaps in the wood with expressions of naked terror.

Slowly, over days, that had changed.

A lizardman patrol had driven off a pack of feral wyverns from a farming settlement's outer fields. Another pair had found a child who had wandered from a village into the forest and returned her to her family without a word, leaving before the parents finished processing what had happened. A third patrol had stood between two merchant caravans heading toward a confrontation over a disputed road toll and simply stared down both groups until everyone decided that today was not the day.

The townspeople still weren't comfortable. But they had, after many weeks, stopped bolting their doors and hiding their children at the sight of them.

Soon enough, the sight of the dragon's forces throughout the kingdom became normal and accepted.

From the border of the township, the sea smell hit one before the tavern came into view: salt and fish oil and the sourness of rotting wood that permeated the underused harbour. The building sat at the end of a waterfront street where the cobblestones gave way to salt-bleached planking, its sign hanging crookedly from a single remaining nail that had held on long enough for an entire generation to live and die. Inside, whale oil lanterns burnt low over crowded tables, and the noise was the comfortable roar of people who had stopped caring about being overheard several drinks ago.

At a table near the far wall, three figures hunched together over mugs that had been nursed considerably past their natural lifespan.

The orc was the largest. The elf was contrastingly narrow-shouldered. The fairy, being a fairy and obviously the smallest, just sat on top of the table with crossed legs, leaning against a human-sized mug of ale. They didn’t make fairy sizes this far down south.

The three of them were the very same former bandit troop that Barjuchne had first encountered and then subsequently chased away from her territory.

The orc had long since turned on his stool while looking at the innkeeper behind them, trying to converse with her instead of the other two at his table. Although she seemed unimpressed. He straightened his back and pointed at his own chest with his thumb. "You know," he said, trying his next manoeuvre, his voice carrying considerably further than he intended, "I met the dragon before she became famous."

The elf and the fairy moved simultaneously. Four hands found the orc's arms, his collar, and the back of his neck and pulled him sideways off the stool with the coordinated efficiency of a team that had done this particular manoeuvre before.

"Sorry, sorry," the elf said to the innkeeper, his laugh landing in the nervous register. "My excitable friend likes to make up stories when he's been drinking." He pulled at him. "You know how it is."

The innkeeper watched them drag the orc toward the corner and rolled her eyes.

Once they reached the corner, the fairy rose to nose-height with the orc and gripped his ear with two small hands. The orc winced.

"Are you stupid?!" The fairy's voice dropped to a furious whisper that still somehow carried the full weight of his outrage. "Shut up!" He released the ear and hit the orc across the nose with a closed fist. For a fairy, it was a surprisingly solid impact.

The orc blinked. "What?"

"What?!" The fairy's wings flared. "'What'?! You idiot. If anyone finds out we have been inside the mountain, they're going to lock us in a cell until they finish drawing a siege map of the layout in our blood," he explained, grasping his own head in exasperation. "Keep your pants on, you animal."

"Don't call me an idiot!" The orc pushed the fairy away with one extended finger, sending him spinning backward through the air. "My mama said I could make it in the east. The Academy." He narrowed his eyes. "You calling me ol' mam a liar?"

The fairy stabilised himself mid-air with an irritated buzz of his wings. "No. I'm sure that you could make it as a brick in the entryway wall. Maybe." He crossed his arms and looked between the two of them. "Keep your lips shut. Do you want to go anywhere near her again?"

The question landed without a name attached to it. It didn't need one. The three of them shared a brief, wordless conversation with their expressions, one that contained the full memory of dark scales and burning red eyes and the specific quality of silence that precedes something permanent.

Although they did, at the same time, think about the wicked fairy princess.

None of them were sure who they feared more.

Neither the orc nor the elf answered.

"We said we're leaving that chapter behind us," the fairy continued, landing on the edge of the table and sitting with his legs crossed. "That is what we decided. All of us."

The orc grunted, settling his bulk back into his chair. "And now what? We're running out of coin. We gotta get back to work soon."

This was true.

Their two human companions had separated from the group weeks ago, drifting toward their own solutions with the easy adaptability of people who had more options. The three of them had watched them go without argument, because there was just nothing to argue about. Some partnerships ended when the circumstances that made them necessary resolved themselves.

The remaining three of them were bound in a different kind of partnership.

The elf held up both hands, his voice dropping to the conspiratorial register they all defaulted to in public spaces. "Woah now. We agreed that we are done with that sort of work." He looked left, then right, then leant in. "She made it very clear what would happen if she caught us stealing again."

The orc raised one finger, the gesture of a man making a technical point. "Caught us 'stealing something in her domain'," he corrected. "Way I see it, she doesn't own this place yet. Fair game."

"We could get honest jobs," the elf offered.

He said it the way a person says something they already know the answer to but feel the need to propose anyway, in case the universe has changed its position since the last time they checked. There was a sad hopefulness in it that was genuine enough to be slightly painful.

The suggestion sat between them for a moment.

The fairy looked at the table. Then at the elf. Then at the orc. "With what?" he said finally. "Between the three of us, we do not have enough apprenticeships or education to put together a single working skill set." He shook his head. "You two could go to the mines, I suppose. Swing pickaxes."

He let that sit for a moment. He did not include himself in the suggestion, and none of them addressed the omission, because it didn't need addressing. The human world had courier positions for fairies, messenger routes and errand runs that suited their size and speed. But those positions went to people with clean records and references and the kind of background that could survive a basic inquiry. None of those described him. And manual labour wasn’t in the cards for a fairy.

For someone without training or education, he had nothing else left.

"It's fine," the fairy said into the silence. His voice lost the sharp edge it usually carried. He rubbed the back of his head, his wings settling flat. "I have an uncle back east. Maybe he can take me in."

That was completely untrue. The other two knew it was completely untrue. The fairy probably knew they knew, but he wanted to give them an out.

"You stupid?" The orc leaned forward, reaching out to set one enormous finger on the fairy's shoulder like a hand. The gesture was absurdly gentle for someone his size. "Ain't leaving my lil' pal by himself. Stook by you with a dragon. Gonna stay by you without one."

The elf put a hand on each of their backs, bridging the gap between the fairy on the table and the orc in his chair. "We survived worse," he said. "Poverty is nothing. We spent years sleeping in forests before. We'll do it again." He looked between them. "Together."

They had been arguing thirty seconds ago. This was simply the nature of them.

The fairy looked away. He wiped his eye with the back of his forearm and directed his gaze at the far wall with great determination.

"You guys…" he said to the wall.

A shadow fell across the table.

A large one. From something significantly bigger than the average tavern patron. Two hands descended and wrapped around the group, encompassing all three of them in a grip.

The three former bandits looked up at the giant stranger who had taken control of their group hug by inviting herself into it.

The naga woman was tall even by naga standards; her lower half coiled loosely on the floor just so she could fit in below the ceiling. Her arms were the kind of arms that came from hauling rigging in rough weather, and her sharp, sharkish teeth were smiling with the easy confidence of someone who found everything interesting and feared very little.

Her serpentine tongue flicked.

"What's this about a dragon?" she asked, with loud interest that quieted the entire room.

Around them, the tavern had gone silent. The crowd of bodies that filled the room to its walls turned, mug by mug, toward the corner table. They were all looking. Every one of them wore the same expression of alert interest, the unified attention of a group that had been in the same place long enough to become a single organism with a single appetite for new information.

They were all sailors from the same boat. Pirates.

The three former bandits looked at each other.

They gulped. Together.

That’s just what friends did.