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

Deep below the black mountain, the brooding chamber breathed its low, volcanic warmth up through the stone, and the magma in its circling moat moved with sluggishness. The island at the chamber's centre held them all as the princesses gathered around the egg.

Rou-ya stood with her arms crossed, her goldenrod eyes moving between the egg and the glowing magma with an expression of mild surprise. "I've gotten used to the heat, I think," she muttered. She looked around herself. "Is that weird? I feel like that’s weird."

Nobody answered immediately. It was, in fact, somewhat weird.

Weeks ago, this chamber had been comfortable only for Barjuchne and the lizardmen who patrolled its deeper passages. Now all of them stood on the island without visible distress, the ambient heat that should have been punishing washing over them without much effect.

The egg sat in the chamber's centre. Black as obsidian. Large enough that Veliah had to lean slightly to reach the top of it with her palm. Its surface had developed the faint, shifting quality of dragon scales, catching the magma's light and returning it in deep, iridescent panels.

F.P. tilted her head at it, studying it from her perch on a nearby stone with her hands folded over her knee.

"It looks kind of strange," she said.

Veliah's hand stopped moving on the shell. Her head turned with a slow, deliberate quality. "You shut your mouth," said the elf, her voice quiet and sharp, "when you're talking about my egg."

F.P. lifted both hands. "Easy. Easy. How about we take a moment to really stop and consider that sentence you just said?"

Veliah's eyes narrowed. She turned back to the egg and resumed her slow, stroking movement along the shell.

"I think it's pretty!" announced Blibli.

The slime princess was crouched at the egg's base, one pseudopod extended, carefully poking at a pronounced ridge along the shell's lower curve. Each ridge had a slight sharpness to it, a miniature version of the spines that ran along Barjuchne's own spine, and Blibli was examining each one in sequence.

Rou-ya shifted her weight. "So." She looked at Veliah. "You feeling better?"

Veliah nodded, her eyes still on the egg. "I feel great, actually." She paused, her fingers tracing the curve of the shell. "I was wondering why I was so tired and sick for so many weeks. I suppose it was the dungeon just using my energy to..." She trailed off, her brow creasing slightly as she worked through the logistics of it. "- Make this."

"Good thing the dungeon handles it," said Rou-ya. She was quiet for a moment. "I won't lie. I was worried there for a while."

A chittering sound came from the far side of the egg. Mandibles.

"Princesses too weak to handle what must be done have no business here," said Ei, the ant princess, her compound eyes fixed on Rou-ya. All four of her arms were folded in layered disapproval. "You wouldn't last a day in my old hive."

Rou-ya's expression sharpened. "Your old hive wouldn't last a day if I poured a bucket of water down it," she replied, her voice carrying the clipped satisfaction of someone landing a prepared remark. "But we're not talking about that, are we?"

"STOP FIGHTING NEXT TO MY EGG!" barked the elf next to them, taking an unusually sharp and loud tone.

Both of them went quiet.

After glaring for a second, Veliah then sighed, a long and very soft exhalation, and leaned her forehead against the shell. Her palm continued its slow circuit of the surface.

The chamber settled back into its warm quiet.

Around the chamber walls, the alcoves Ei had carved months ago stood in a curved row. Most were empty. But in three of them, faint shapes had begun to manifest. Not solid yet. Not even fully present. The edges of them shimmered and shifted, fed by the dungeon's passive energy and something else, something that moved between the egg and the women around it in currents too subtle to see directly.

More of them were coming, being manifested from the energies of the earliest princesses in order.

Veliah straightened from the shell and looked at nothing in particular for a moment, her expression moving through something private. "I think I have to go talk to my father," she said. "Tell him the news. He’ll want to know he’s going to be a grandfather."

"That's definitely going to be a conversation," said Rou-ya, tilting her head. "Is this weird? I feel like this is weird."

Veliah looked down back at the egg. "You get used to it."

Now it wasn't.

Now it was scored with blackened ravines where dragonfire had cut through the summer grass in long, sweeping lines that still smoked at their edges. The wild scents of charred soil and hot stone mixed with the primal smells of fear-sweat from several hundred men who had decided, simultaneously and without discussion, that this particular military campaign was not for them.

The nation's primary vanguard had been vast. Organised. Composed of the most capable forces the crown could muster from every region under its banner. They had cavalry and siege equipment and more mages than any force fielded in fifty years. They had marched with confidence and good supply lines and the kind of righteous momentum that comes from a king's direct order. With or without the church's blessing, these men had felt that they had a purpose.

They had also almost reached the mountain as the first of the grand legion to come to try and stop the dragon.

A sign had been trampled into the mud at the meadow's near edge, its words worn and muddied by the boots that had run over it in both directions.

Past it, soldiers scattered in every direction, clearly having had revised their professional ambitions.

Lashes of fire cut across the meadow in broad, sweeping arcs, scorching the ground and sending men diving sideways into ditches and behind siege wagons that were not, it turned out, adequate cover.

The wyvern Barjuchne banked hard and came down.

The impact sent a shockwave through the ground that knocked men off their feet thirty yards in every direction. She hit the soil with both front claws and drove her wings down in a single, massive buffet that became a wall of moving air. Siege engines tipped and rolled from the force of it. Anqas reared and threw their riders, barely managing to claw their balance afoot. Fairies who had been circling overhead in support formation were simply swept from the sky like leaves and deposited in a hedgerow hundreds of yards to the east.

The wyvern rose to her full height and scanned the field.

Arrows came first. They hit her and fell uselessly. Spells followed, most of them washing across her scales without purchase, fire and lightning rebounding with nothing to show for their effort.

Then the black bolts of dark energy hit her from the side.

They came from a different direction entirely, angled from a position she hadn't tracked, and they bypassed her scales the way nothing else had today. The pain was sharp and immediate. She looked at the wound and saw the flesh there had taken on a dark, seeping quality that sent a cold recognition through her.

Necromancy.

She turned her head toward the source.

A man stood with white hair and black robes at the far edge of a formed line of casters, his hands still raised and his expression calm. The casters around him were positioned in tight formation, their combined output feeding whatever dark magic he had just used on her.

Something began to build in Barjuchne's chest.

It wasn't fire. It was brighter than that. Prismatic fractals formed behind her teeth, geometric and radiant; the holy energy she had absorbed through the twin saintesses was pressing up through her body with a quality that felt new and still slightly unfamiliar.

She exhaled.

The spear of Heaven pierced the horizon. The beam of holy magic hit the necromancer directly.

He, quite literally, vaporised.

The holy light spread outward from the impact point and washed over the casters around him in a warm, radiant wave. They stumbled. A few fell. Then they stood back up and looked at themselves with the confused expressions of people who had expected to be dead and found themselves instead free of the lower back pain they'd had for several years.

With that blessing in place, they ran. Faster than the others before, if anything.

Holy magic couldn’t hurt anyone who wasn’t afflicted by dark energies. It would only heal them.

Barjuchne stood on the smoking field, her wings spread, and roared at the backs of the retreating army until the last of them disappeared over the far rise.

The meadow went quiet.

Smoke drifted. Something burnt at the field's edge. In the distance, the sounds of boots on the road faded into nothing.

She breathed for a moment.

Then she walked to the edge of the meadow where the sign had fallen, wrapped the end of her tail around it with careful measure, and pushed it back into the soil at the same angle it had been before. She patted it once. "One day it'll work," she muttered, studying the faded words.

Content that she would have at least one quiet evening tonight, the dragon began to turn back toward the mountain.

The air cracked.

Not as a sound, exactly. The cracking was more of a physical quality of its texture. Confused, she stopped, looking around. The sky above was clear, the summer sun broad and warm.

Then the temperature dropped.

It fell fast, dropping far faster than if it were simply losing it to the coming of night. Something was actively stealing the warmth from all around her. The fires she had left burning in the meadow guttered and went out. The smoke stopped rising. The sweat on her scales cooled and crystallised into small pinpricks as it froze on her body. A blue quality spread across the air, subtle at first and then not subtle at all. The grass nearest her became frosted at the tips. Then frosted completely. Then froze in a rapid wave that moved outward from some point she couldn't yet identify, the green turning to pale silver in seconds. Steam poured from her nostrils with every breath.

A blizzard opened overhead in the middle of the blazing summer day.

Snow came in sideways, dense, driven by wind that had not existed seconds ago. Her vision collapsed. Her senses, which relied on heat signatures and air movement, suddenly found themselves navigating an environment that was actively hostile to both.

"What the hell?" Barjuchne gathered herself to leave.

The smell of magic was everywhere, but beneath it, something else. Familiar. A signature she had learnt to read without understanding she was reading it.

A princess.

She hadn't finished placing that recognition when the ice bolts hit.

They came from multiple angles, fast, and they went through her as they seemed to strike the necromancy-weakened scales with almost impecable precision. It wasn't just dumb luck. She tumbled forward, catching herself on one hand and one knee, the cold ground rushing up to meet her. Blood ran from four separate entry points, steaming where it hit the frozen grass.

The dragon girl exhaled holy energy across the worst of them, watching the wounds close. Her eyes swept the blizzard for the attacker.

There.

A shape in the white. Standing still while everything moved around it.

The very low-proportioned silhouette with a streamlined torso had a wide-brimmed hat, giving her the appearance of being a winter mushroom from afar. The howling winds moved the hat's brim back and forth, but the figure beneath it stood in place. It seemed to be looking downward. Writing something.

Barjuchne strained to hear across the storm.

"As hypothesised", the silhouette said, quietly enough that she almost missed it, "cold slows its reaction time. Subject appears to have an innate weakness to low temperatures."

A pause. Pages turning.

Barjuchne's body made the decision before she did. The shift from full draconic form to her demi-human state came with a lurch she still hadn't entirely gotten used to, her mass compressing inward with an unpleasant surge that left her smaller and lower to the ground and significantly colder.

"- Aaand multi-stage transformations are confirmed, as reported."

The dragon girl hit the snow on hands and knees. Her vision swam. The cold was thorough at this scale in a way it hadn't been in her larger form, pressing against her through her scales and making her extremities register the complaint loudly.

"The hell are you?" she yelled across the storm.

Wind. Snow. A vague scratching noise.

"- Demonstrates expected hostility," said the silhouette, without looking up as she dictated to herself. "Verbal aggression is noted, indicating a high capacity for non-animal intelligence."

Cold or not, Barjuchne pushed herself upright. Her legs worked. She crossed the distance between them in four strides, her claw extended, her eyes fixed on the hat and the shape beneath it as she instinctively aimed for the throat.

She made contact, but instead of the expected flesh, the impact was hard. She hit something solid and transparent a foot from the figure's face.

Ice.

A wall of it, smooth and thick and completely invisible in the blizzard conditions, was already positioned precisely between them well in advance. She had been looking through it for the entire conversation without knowing; the blizzard's white was making the distortion invisible. The silhouette on the other side of the barrier had been exaggerated by the refraction, giving it its unusual shape.

A pair of eyes looked up from behind the ice. They were sharp-edged, and for one brief moment they met hers directly before cutting sideways in a rapid, involuntary shift that had nothing to do with the assessment of physical danger.

The figure was certainly afraid. Barjuchne could smell that. But it was not a fear of her, personally. Rather, the stranger seemed afraid of the eye contact itself.

"I'm Ze-Zera," said the mage, her voice carrying a stutter, but not from the cold. She fluttered back in her notebook, looking for a line in there, as if she had to proofread her own introduction. "Of the Eastern Academy." The mage paused, looking at her journal rather than back up at Barjuchne. "I'll be studying you, so please do not resist. Thank you."

Ice began moving up Barjuchne's legs, freezing her in place.