Chapter 137: Chapter 137: The Punishment

THUDDD!

The Primordial Chaos Dragon landed on the mountain ridge above the garrison with an impact that sent a shockwave through the snow in every direction, triggering three simultaneous avalanches on the surrounding peaks and cracking the stone of the ridge itself in a spiderweb pattern that spread outward fifty meters from the point of contact.

The translucent blue dome of the protective array flickered, then dissolved. Because it was no longer necessary.

“It is the King!” The youngest dragon inside the garrison looked up at his King and stopped shaking.

Adonis looked down at Thrax’s broken form in the snow. At the torn wings. At the peeled scales still scattered across the white ground like discarded things.

His dragon face turned cold at once.

He looked at Agniel, his purple eyes very calm.

[ Sky Serpent Agniel | Level 67 ]

[ Rank: Beast King ]

Despite his impressive level, Adonis was completely unbothered.

“You have made a significant error in judgment today,” he said.

Agniel was initially intimidated by the aura and the golden dragon’s overwhelming presence. However, soon his serpentine features arranged themselves into a brave front.

“Are you the new King everyone has been talking about?”

Adonis did not respond. To him, Agniel was already dead, and dead men needed no answers.

“Hiss. Is their king also as spineless as they are?” a serpent muttered disdainfully.

“Hiss, hiss. All that bark and no bite,” another added.

“Let us catch him, Sire. Bring him to the Serpent King. He will decide whether to skin him alive for wedding the Dragon Queen, or corrode his body for daring to come here alone.”

“My King, please flee,” Thrax said painfully, twitching with unbearable agony. “You do not have to risk your life to save us. Cough. Please, flee!”

Adonis replied calmly:

“Flee? You think I came here to flee? Hahaha.”

His laugh rolled across the mountain without warmth.

Agniel hissed in disdain,

“Foolish King! You are being far too noisy. Since you do not wish to cherish your own life, we shall seize it from you.”

Agniel signaled everyone to move.

Whoosh, whoosh, swish…

Agniel’s signal echoed through the ranks of three hundred Sky Serpents and they moved simultaneously.

Their white serpentine bodies charged forward from every direction like a tide of living rope. Their venom glands were already active, as the air around them turned deep green with the particular toxicity that had neutralized dragon defenses for centuries.

Adonis watched them come. There was no urgency in him whatsoever. It’s as if everything was under his control.

“Hissss!”

The first Serpent reached him.

Grip!

He caught it by the neck with one clawed hand, mid-lunge, the impact stopping its momentum entirely with the particular finality of a wall stopping a thrown stone.

He looked at it, and it looked at him back, terrified.

“H-how, arghhhh!”

Before it could finish hissing, he threw it away like disgusting slosh.

The serpent crossed the mountain horizon and disappeared from sight.

BOOM!

A distant impact sound arrived three seconds later from somewhere far below the tree line.

“Who’s next?” he said, turning to the shocked Serpents.

“HISS! Move, you fools!” Agniel growled. “Kill this fiend who killed your brother.”

“Hisss!”

They came in waves after that.

But Adonis moved through them in a way weather moves through a landscape, precise and minimal, as if the battle was just child’s play.

Wherever he went, his claws found scales and his tail found bodies, and his wings sent serpents spinning off the mountain peak in arcing trajectories that the garrison dragons watched with disbelief and stunned relief.

“Our King is this strong?”

“Look at him. Their venom is doing nothing!”

They were right. Three hundred Sky Serpents with toxicity that had neutralized dragon defenses for generations pressed against Primordial Chaos Dragon scales and simply failed to penetrate, the way rain fails to penetrate stone, not dramatically, just factually and without discussion.

“His scales,” one of the garrison dragons whispered. “The venom is not even reaching his skin.”

“Nothing reaches his skin,” another replied, swallowing hard.

Agniel reorganized what remained of the first wave and sent the second with more coordination, the Sky Serpents working in the combined formations that had dismantled dragon garrisons before, three attacking from above while two drove upward from below while the remainder coiled and struck from the sides in overlapping sequences designed to overwhelm any single point of defense.

Adonis let them complete the formation.

While his own draconic expanded.

BUZZZ!

The expansion of his aura outward hit the formation the way a shockwave hits everything in its radius. The serpents flung away like loose sandbags.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Agniel watched his carefully organized force come apart from his position at the rear.

“Hiss, what’s going on? How can this new King be so strong?”

For the first time since Thrax had charged him, something foreign was seen in hisbeyes.

Fear.

“Retreat,” he hissed, trembling.

“Too late for that,” Adonis rumbled, cold and absolute.

He had not moved from his position. His voice simply arrived at Agniel’s location the way Primordial aura arrived everywhere, without requiring proximity.

What followed lasted only four minutes.

Not because the Sky Serpents were putting up meaningful resistance. It’s because Adonis was thorough and merciless.

Each serpent received his full attention for exactly as long as was required, and not a moment more.

The mountain, which had been white with snow and white with serpent bodies circling in patient formation twenty minutes ago, was a considerably different landscape by the time he finished.

300 Sky Serpents. All reduced to torn corpses, creating a gory, disgusting scene. Internal matters spread everywhere, along with their white bloods.

“Cough—you are a demon! You killed everyone! The Serpent God will mete out justice to you.”

The curse came from Agniel, who was tormented just the way Thrax was.

He had not managed the retreat like he had ordered.

The distance between a Beast King rank and a primordial bloodline was not a gap that personal courage or serpentine venom could meaningfully close.

“You spoke ill about my Queen,” Adonis said quietly, looking down at him. “About taking her. About forcing her to carry offspring.”

Agniel couldn’t say anything. The serpentine eyes that had looked at the garrison dragons with limitless contempt were now dimming completely.

“For your offense, this is light punishment. Consider me benevolent,” Adonis said emotionlessly, delivering the last crushing paw.

“Booom!”

Agniel’s body was reduced to meat and bones.

Adonis shook away the gooey stuff with disgust.

The mountain went eerily silent after that.

The garrison dragons stood inside what had been their dome, in the snow, looking at their king standing at the center of what had been three hundred Sky Serpents, and nobody said anything for a long moment.

The youngest dragon, the one who had been shaking, was not shaking anymore. He was staring with his mouth slightly open and his eyes at full capacity.

“Cough!”

Then from somewhere behind him, the sound of something wet and exhausted and deeply relieved.

Thrax, wingless and broken and bleeding in the snow, had pushed himself up onto his front legs.

He looked at Adonis with tears in his eyes.

“My King, you have won.”

Adonis walked to him, crouched to his level, and looked at the torn places where his wings had been.

“We will fix those,” he said simply.

Thrax stared at him.

Then the garrison captain, who had held the line alone against 300 Sky Serpents with nothing but an array and his own stubbornness, pressed his forehead to the snow before his King and said nothing more because there was nothing left that words were adequate for.

The youngest dragon looked at his Captain on the ground and his King crouching beside him against the backdrop of a mountain that would not be troubled by sky serpents again for a very long time.

Then he smiled, crooked but genuine.

And one by one, the rest of the garrison smiled with him.

—

[ EXP +1,000 ]

[ EXP +1,200 ]

[ EXP +2,500 ]

[ EXP +2,200 ]

296+ more.

[ EXP +25,000 ]

[ You have leveled up! ]

[ Received: +300 Attribute Points ]

[ You have leveled up! ]

[ Received: +300 Attribute Points ]

[ You have leveled up! ]

[ Received: +300 Attribute Points ]

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