Chapter 113: Chapter 113: The Dragon Queen, Sapphira

Adonis fell.

While falling his Primordial Dragon form dissolved as the Ether sustaining it simply gone, and he returned to his human shape somewhere in the descent, small and bloodied.

Marian also transformed back into his embrace.

He adjusted the position to bear the full impact.

“BANGGG!”

He hit the ground hard.

He did not get up.

Above the ruins, in the settling dust and the strange purple-tinged silence that followed the Chaos Ultima, the assembled powerhouses of the Royal Guardians and Gratis Kingdom circled slowly, looking down at the motionless human figure in the crater below.

Then the laughter started.

“HAHAHAHA…”

It began with one of the Gratis Kingdom’s powerhouses.

He was a broad man in battle armor who had taken three direct strikes from the Primordial Dragon and was still bleeding freely from all three but was, undeniably, still alive and still hovering.

“That, was almost impressive.” he said, wiping blood from his jaw with the back of his gauntlet.

More laughter followed, scattered at first and then collective, the particular laughter of people releasing the tension of genuine fear now that the source of it was lying motionless in a crater.

“I expected more from a noble Dragon Bloodline,” someone else said.

“He is just a child,” another replied. “A talented, catastrophically destructive child. But a child nonetheless.”

One of the Gratis Kingdom men descended toward the upper platform where King Magnus stood amid the ruins of what had once been his palace’s outer terrace, the only section of elevated ground that had survived with anything resembling its original form.

He landed with a respectful bow, one fist pressed to his chest.

“Your Majesty,” he said, delivering an apology they had prepared in advance. “In the heat of the engagement, your daughter was struck. It was not our intention to harm the Princess. We ask your forgiveness for this error.”

King Magnus said nothing.

He stood at the edge of the broken terrace and looked down at the crater below, at the motionless figure of Adonis Kingsbane lying in the ruins of everything this fight had cost, and his expression revealed nothing of what was happening behind it.

The Gratis man waited.

The silence stretched.

And then, from somewhere beyond the broken outer walls of the Capital, beyond the fleeing civilians and the collapsed market districts and the fractured roads leading away from the city in every direction, something changed in the air.

It was not a sound at first. It was a pressure.

A presence. Something so vast and so deeply, fundamentally old that the atmosphere itself seemed to adjust to accommodate it, the way a room adjusts when something fills it that was not there before.

Then the sound arrived.

It was a single wingbeat.

Flap.

And the shockwave from that single wingbeat flattened the remaining smoke above the Capital into a perfect circle and sent every airborne figure in the sky spinning involuntarily sideways, powerhouses and guardians and Gratis Kingdom veterans alike, all of them caught off balance by a force they had not anticipated from a direction none of them had been watching.

They turned.

She came from the east.

250 meters of the most ancient and terrifying form of life that the world had produced in the last ten thousand years. Her scales were akin to burning Sapphire, something that predated kingdoms and the concept of warfare entirely.

BUZZ!

Her wingspan blotted out the eastern sky from horizon to horizon as she approached, each beat of those colossal wings sending atmospheric pressure rolling outward ahead of her like the bow wave of a ship the size of a mountain.

Her eyes were open.

They were the color of the void between stars, deep and absolute and carrying in them the particular quality of a gaze that had watched civilizations begin and end and had formed no particular attachment to either process.

“The Dragon Queen! Why is she here?”

She did not roar. She did not announce herself. Her arrival was its own announcement, written in the suddenly pale faces of every powerhouse in the sky and the involuntary backward movement of beings who had not retreated from anything in decades.

She descended toward the crater where Adonis and Mariana lay, slowly, with the unhurried certainty of something that has never once in its existence needed to hurry.

Her voice when she finally spoke was not loud.

It did not need to be loud.

It simply was, in the way that mountains simply are, present in the air and in the ground and in the chest of every living thing within range simultaneously.

Her ancient gaze fixed on the motionless figure below with something that, in a being of lesser age, might have been called tenderness.

{This one is under my protection.}

She looked up then, and let her void-deep eyes move across every face in the sky above her, one by one, with the patience of something that had all the time in the world and knew it.

{Who would like to discuss this further?}

No one moved.

No one dared to speak.

The smoke drifted in the air.

And the Dragon Queen folded her wings slowly around the fallen Progenitor and human girl, already knowing her identity.

“Dragon Queen, would you break the Treaty of Garcia over this boy?” King Magnus spoke. “Do you not fear the backlash of the world?”

{ The world? } The Dragon Queen’s massive sapphire eyes turned toward him mockingly.

{ Human King, you still do not know just whom you have hurt. He carries the bloodline of the Progenitor Tiamat herself }

The name struck the powerhouses like a tolling bell.

“Tiamat? This boy is the Progenitor’s successor?” one of the Guardians muttered, horrified.

“This is impossible. We thought he was merely a Noble Dragon.”

{Just a Noble Dragon?} The Dragon Queen sneered. {Even Imperials such as myself would have to bow before him. Your ignorance is truly very amusing.}

“Stop your useless bluffing, Dragon Queen. We all know that Tiamat was killed by the hands of humans seven thousand years ago. Even if this boy is her successor, he will never be able to reach her level of power because of bloodline stagnation. And if he cannot reach her level, he will amount to nothing. He will be slain, just like her.”

{You may live in your delusional dreams, ignorant human. But remember, the entire Dragon Kingdom will support this boy from henceforth. He is the key to our rise. If you dare to lay even a single hand on him, your pretty kingdoms and their pitiful people will be turned to ashes.”

After that she turned to leave, but Claudia stepped forward and stood before her.

“I am with them, Dragon Queen. Please allow me to follow you.”

The Dragon Queen’s gaze pierced through to her heart and found no falsehood in her words.

And thus, they flew away. Far, far to the east.

No one moved to stop them. Because everyone present knew what she was. A transcendental being. One who could wipe away everyone below level 100 with ease.

Queen Lysandra stood fuming with anger, and King Magnus felt a unsettling clarity on his eyes.

“What? What just happened?”

Even this fleeting clarity disappeared by a shade of darkness.

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