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

The hoard room held its sweltering heat, the warmth rising off the coin slopes in slow, comfortable waves, a quilt folded at the chamber's heart over the warmest bank of red gold that a shape sat on top of.

"Are you sure about this?" asked a deep voice.

The dragon's voice came out low. Barjuchne rested there, watching the girl below her. Bruschetta's head rested on the claw beneath it, and the claw moved, left, then right, swaying the princess's head with it in a slow rhythm. The head followed of its own accord, desperate to never leave the touch.

"Think carefully," said Barjuchne.

"I..." Bruschetta started and did not finish. She sat on the floor between the gold slopes, freshly washed and bathed in the hot springs, her coat trimmed and oiled until the remaining wool shone. Veliah knelt behind her, holding her, gently brushing.

"You know what I am," the dragon went on. "I will take everything. I will make mine, everything."

The claw kept its rhythm, left, then right. Bruschetta stared up into those red eyes and found nothing in them but her own small reflection.

"The legacy of your family. The generations that came before you. I will steal it from you. I will erase the work of centuries of your bloodline and replace it with my designs."

Bruschetta swayed with the claw, feeling Veliah squeeze her from behind. "So soft..." said the elf, happily, pressing her arms into the woollen princess, her chin hooked over a fleecy shoulder.

The Consumption still lived deep in Bruschetta's lungs, but Barjuchne's breath had beaten it back for months now, and it showed in her: the colour in her face, the steadiness of her hands.

"Do you really mean it?" asked Bruschetta. "When you say that... we're... that I'm important to you?"

"Yes," replied Barjuchne, without hesitation. Her long tail wound up past Veliah's back and around Bruschetta, binding the two of them together in a light coil. Its tip snaked up the princess's torso, through her wool, and stroked once past her forehead. "More than anything else in the world."

"More than gold?"

"Yes."

"Would you kill someone if I asked you to?"

Veliah's brush stopped for a second. Then it silently continued.

Barjuchne considered it for a moment, genuinely. "Yes. If I found them deserving of it, or if they were a threat to you or to our safety."

"And if they weren't?" Bruschetta's voice dropped low. "What if I asked you to hurt someone just because I wanted them hurt? Would you do it?"

Barjuchne watched the girl's eyes for long enough that Bruschetta had to look away, overstimulated, her cheeks flushing dark.

"No," she replied, simply. Her claw slid away from beneath the princess's head and came up to hold her chin instead, turning her face back up again. It was hers to look at for as long as she wanted. "And I know you. You are only testing me. You would never ask it, because you know unjust pain. You have only ever struck out for my sake, never for cruelty."

Quietly, Bruschetta reached up and took the hand in both of hers. She lowered her face and nuzzled it against the fingers, breathing against them. Then she opened her eyes and nodded.

"Okay," she agreed.

She looked up at Barjuchne, and her eyes were wet, and they were steady.

"I'm sure. I want you to do it."

Veliah sighed behind her. "I'll prepare the paperwork," said the elf. "It will be a large integration." She set the brush down and ran her fingers through the wool a few final times, and the princess shuddered at the gentle drag of her nails. "Will you be gone long? It is a whole nation, after all."

“Thank you,” said Veliah quietly back to the elf behind her.

“Of course. You’re one of us now,” replied Veliah.

Bruschetta looked away again, her head tilting from the doting kiss she received behind her ear.

Barjuchne sat back upright, pulling her hand free to rest her head on. Bruschetta chased after it for a moment before she caught herself. The dragon looked down at the two of them, and something in her chest settled, content.

"We’ll be back by tonight," said the dragon, sure of the matter.

The redwoods stood in their thousands, each one the size of castle towers stacked, their crowns lost somewhere in the grey cloud of snowfall. Deep winter held the whole region in its fist, the needles rimmed with frost, the forest floor buried in blue-white, and the strange pinewood smell of the place came up sharp through the cold even at altitude.

A shape flew by them, and the massive trees bowed in the afterwinds.

Bruschetta, wrapped in shawls and drapes until only her face showed, clung to the base of a spinal ridge with both mittened hands. The dragon's wings beat, pulled in tight, and they soared through a clutch of trees so narrow that the branches scraped frost from her scales.

The people of the forest watched from their elevated platforms, built in rings around the giant trunks, standing at their rope bridges in confused awe. The bridges swayed in the gusts behind them.

"Over there!" yelled Bruschetta, pointing, and the dragon arced.

"Hold on," said the deep voice beneath her.

They barreled toward a criss-crossing weave of bridges and platforms that stitched the forest together, ropes and timber and lantern-lines. Barjuchne wove a spiral through it, pulling her wings in entirely, her tail threading the gaps ahead of her body, dancing through the makeup of the structures while Bruschetta screamed.

Then, with a loud crash, she landed on her feet.

The forest shook. The snow let go of the high crowns all across the region, one tree after another, a collage of small avalanches sifting down through the still air.

Bruschetta exhaled. She slowly sat back upright and unwound her fingers.

"...Flying is scary," she said to herself.

Then she looked around at where they were, and her eyes came forward and stopped.

A castle sat ahead of her, small against the trees. Her old home.

It was a ruin in truth now, as it had always been. The roof of the east wing had caved sometime in the last months, and the snow layering the whole structure probably did more to insulate it than any of its actual walls ever had.

"P-princess!" called a voice.

Bruschetta climbed down the dragon's wing, finding the holds in the scales.

One of her former guards peered out of a ramshackle outbuilding on the grounds, and he stepped into the open when he saw her face.

"You're alive!" he said, sounding genuinely thrilled, though his eyes were locked on the dragon and not on her at all.

Bruschetta smiled, seeing him. He had always been kind. Most of her personal guards had been. They had been limited by their stations rather than their hearts.

She could feel the growl building in Barjuchne's chest behind her. "It's okay," said Bruschetta, holding a hand back against the warm scales to settle her. "Are you well?"

"Yes! Princess, you look... in good health," he said, not daring to come closer, so she stepped to him instead.

"I am," she replied. "Where is everyone?"

"That's wonderful news. After you sent us away, I'm the only one who came back. The others... I don't know," he said. "They couldn't stomach it any longer. I don't blame them."

Bruschetta nodded.

Voices came from the side of the grounds. A hastily thrown-together commotion. A young man ran out with a long trumpet, put it to his lips, and blew a note that scattered the last of the lingering crows from the trees. Then her father and her brother, who she was certain had been lurking and watching from the windows the whole time, came out his way.

She narrowed her eyes.

Bruschetta took a small purse of coins from her cloak and pressed it into her former guard's hands. "Find the others. Bring them to me," she ordered, quietly. "You know where."

"Y-yes, princess," he said, looking up at the dragon behind her.

Barjuchne growled once. He flinched and ran off into the woods and did not look back.

"My girl!" Her father's voice preceded him down the way, warm and rounded and rehearsed. "I don't believe my eyes! Why, when I heard you were the consort of our new queen, I could hardly fathom it," he said, staring up past her at Barjuchne. "That I should be so lucky, so honoured, that her majesty herself would—"

"Brother. Are the servants here?" Bruschetta asked, looking past her father entirely.

She could see a vein popping in her father's forehead at the very notion of being cut off mid-sentence. She found she did not mind it.

Her brother froze at being spoken to. He looked offended for a moment, and then he reconsidered, glancing at the size of the thing standing behind his sister. "It is just us," he said. "The servants were sent away for the winter."

"I see," she replied.

Then Bruschetta looked up at the dragon, and her voice went small and polite, a child asking for a sweet.

"I know you like lightning now. But can I have fire?"

The ground shook. The snow and ice rattled on every branch around them, and a pressure built inside the dragon, a gathering heat that made the whole clearing pull inward toward her.

Then her neck struck out, her maw opened, and a wave of flame crashed over the castle entirely.

The whole structure went up at once, bathed in red. The timber caught in a breath. The old stone spat and cracked. Centuries of slate slid from the roofs into the fire below and burst, and the smoke column went straight up through the falling snow, black on white.

Bruschetta stood in the glow of it.

She stared, and a smile formed on her face, wide. The fire reflected in her eyes, and the two little lanterns of it made her look, for once in her life, exactly the way she had always wanted to have felt inside.

The entire castle disappeared. All of it burnt, and while it went, something in her core came unclenching, a fist she had carried clenched inside herself for her entire life.

Her father's and brother's cries filled the air somewhere behind her. The panic in their voices faded into the background hum of the fire, because Bruschetta was listening to something else. Something in her heart had come to life for the first time.

She shuddered. A quake ran through her whole body. She stood there clenching her fists in her mittens, and she laughed to herself while it all burnt down.

The dragon's breath slowed and ended. The ancient castle crumbled and melted in on itself, wall sliding into wall, and the last bricks fell, leaving a smouldering, destroyed heap. Next to nothing remained. Only ash, falling, mingling with the snow all around them, settling grey on white.

"Wh- wha- What—" stammered her father.

Bruschetta had her arms out, her tongue sticking from her mouth. A flake of ash fell onto it, and she let it melt there.

"Bleh," she said. She spat and looked back at her family, who stood paralysed with shock, their faces lit orange from the ruin of their lives.

Then she straightened her back, clasped her hands in front of her, and became, briefly and completely, a princess.

"As the royal princess of this nation, I am relieving you of your titles, Father," said Bruschetta. "You are no longer the ruler of this territory. You have been conquered, in the name of the dragon queen."

"Wh-What?! You can't do this!" yelled the man, and he turned toward her, and he took one step.

A massive tail spike landed between them, driven into the frozen ground deep enough to crack it in a spreading ring.

Bruschetta smiled and simply leaned around the spike.

"Brother. You'll be the new head of regional affairs, answering directly to us," she said. Bruschetta wagged a finger. "Don't let me down."

Her brother looked from the spike to her face and back and swallowed and nodded.

Bruschetta turned her head. The boy with the trumpet still stood where he had blown it, frozen, holding it in both hands. She walked over, took it from him gently, and threw it into the fire with a massive swing of her arm. It spiralled up through the snow-light and vanished into the red.

She stood there and dusted her hands off.

She gave the boy another little coin purse, of which she had brought a few, and waved him off. He went running and did not stop.

Bruschetta sighed, content, deeper than any breath she had ever taken. Then she climbed back up Barjuchne's wing, nestling onto her back between the ridges, and leaned down and wrapped her arms around a huge piece of scale in something that was, in its way, a hug.

Beneath her, the dragon rumbled, pleased.

"Thank you," said Bruschetta warmly. "I'm done."

Barjuchne aligned herself, buffeted her wings, sent the last of the rubble flying off across the grounds, and took off. The titan trees bowed them through. The burning ruin of the castle fell away below into the snow.

"Feeling better?" asked the dragon, over the wind.

"So much!" replied Bruschetta, honestly, breathlessly, her wool whipping back. Then: "Hey. Can we stop at one or two other places on the way? Please? There are some nobles I'd like to visit!"

Barjuchne's eye turned back toward her.

"No princesses," said Bruschetta quickly, reading the look exactly right. "Just some countesses and such."

The dragon's eyes turned back forward in visible disinterest.

A duo of system windows bloomed against the winter sky.

The dragon banked off to the side, making an angle toward some distant cities, where certain countesses lived, and where, by nightfall, a great many carefully rehearsed welcomes were about to go very badly.