Chapter 71: 71. Leah the Lioness

The miasma trail led northeast for forty kilometers before it turned into the mountains.

Owen had been flying high enough to stay above cloud cover, tracking the corruption through his Mana Sense the way a predator tracks a scent. Faint. Intermittent. But unmistakable — the same wrongness he had felt when Rogers’s smoke bomb detonated at his feet, the same fingerprint of something that didn’t belong in this world.

The dungeon gate was hidden in a canyon so narrow that human hunters would have had to enter single-file.

Owen spotted it from three hundred meters up. The blue-white shimmer of a stable portal, unmarked and unregistered, tucked between two rock faces like a secret kept by the mountain itself. No Hunter Association tent. No monitoring equipment. Just a bored-looking guard who was currently staring at his phone.

Owen folded his wings and dropped.

His wings spread wide and caught air at the last second, landing without a sound on the canyon ridge above the guard’s position. His full body of black scales absorbed ambient light in a way his humanoid form didn’t.

In the shadow of the rock face, he was nearly invisible.

He watched the guard for thirty seconds. Standard patrol pattern. Rotating check of the gate perimeter, then back to the phone. No communication device beyond a simple earpiece. One person.

At this moment, Owen transformed.

The humanoid form settled around him like a familiar coat: his scales receding, wings folding away, golden eyes dimming to something closer to normal human luminosity. He dropped from the ridge, landing in a crouch twenty meters behind the guard, and approached with quiet footsteps.

The guard didn’t hear him until Owen’s hand closed around his earpiece and crushed it.

“Don’t,” Owen said quietly, his other hand gripping the man’s shoulder with enough pressure to make the point clear. “I have questions. Answer them, and you walk away from this canyon under your own power. Lie to me, and we find out how far I can throw you.”

The guard — young, frightened, clearly hired for presence rather than capability — chose the smart option.

—

The dungeon interior materialized around Owen with the familiar sensory shift of portal transit.

Rolling grasslands. A distant river. And directly ahead, built into a field that had no business existing inside the dimensional pocket of a dungeon, the most obscene display of wealth Owen had ever seen.

Glass. Steel. Manicured gardens. A compound that looked like the architect had been told to design something that screamed ’I am untouchable’.

Owen stood at the portal’s exit point and took in the wall — twenty feet of reinforced magical steel, electrified wire at the top — and felt something cold settle in his chest.

He had come here following a miasma trail. Following the thread that connected Rogers’s smoke bomb to whoever had supplied Outer-Divinity corruption as a tactical weapon.

He had expected a more tactical base of operations.

He had not expected this.

His Mana Sense swept the compound in a quiet pulse, reading what was behind those walls.

Dozens of signatures. Most of them weak — suppressed by something, shackled beneath their natural level. Non-human, most of them.

And one signature that burned even through suppression runes. Something that felt like a coiled spring under pressure, furious and alive and refusing to go quiet.

Owen stared at the compound for a long moment.

“his isn’t just about the miasma” he thought.

He walked toward the gate.

The two guards at the entrance had their weapons raised before he had covered half the distance. Their eyes tracked him with the trained wariness of men who had dealt with threats before.

“Stop right there,” the left one said. “Who are you? What’re you doing here?.”

Owen stopped. He looked at both of them with an expression that was almost polite.

“I’m going inside,” he said. “I’d prefer you both step aside. I don’t have a quarrel with hired help.”

“Last warning—”

Owen’s Dragon’s Aura released at a fraction of its capacity. Not combat output — just presence. The weight of something genuinely other pressing against their nervous systems, bypassing rational thought and speaking directly to the part of the brain that recognized predators.

Both guards stepped aside without consciously deciding to.

Then Owen walked through the gate, Through the villa, down the stairs and into the lower underground chambers.

The smell hit him before anything else.

Blood. Old and new, layered over each other. Fear-sweat that had soaked into stone over a long time. The particular chemical signature of magical suppression runes burning continuously against organic tissue.

The opulent villa above was window dressing. The real facility was below.

Owen descended more stairs without hurrying. He passed the biometric door by ripping it off it’s hinges after it refused to open for him after he simply held his hand against the scanner.

He walked through the corridor of more cells without looking left or right, though his Mana Sense catalogued every occupant.

He stopped at the door at the corridor’s end.

Through it, he heard a woman’s voice — low, guttural, still fighting despite everything — cursing someone in a language he didn’t recognize. The words didn’t matter. The tone did. That was someone who hadn’t given up.

Owen pushed the door open.

The room registered in pieces. Chains. Implements on a table that he didn’t examine closely. And against the far wall, a lion-girl in suppression shackles who went still the moment she saw him — not out of fear, but out of the focused attention of a predator sizing up something unfamiliar.

Her amber eyes tracked him from head to toe.

“You’re not one of his people,” she said. Her voice was rough from screaming, but the assessment was precise.

“No,” Owen said.

He walked to the shackle mounting points in the wall and examined the suppression runes. Complex work. Expensive. He traced the circuit with one finger, feeling the pattern.

Then he pressed his palm flat against the stone and pushed a pulse of mana into the runes.

The magic unraveled and the shackles fell open.

The lion-girl caught herself before her legs gave out, gripping the wall with both hands, her mane falling forward as she took the first full breath she’d had without mana suppression pressing down on her lungs. Her claws extended reflexively, the natural reaction of a beast finally unshackled.

She looked at her own hands. Then at Owen.

“Who are you?” she asked looking at the faint scaly marks across his body, his folded wings and tail. “What are you?”

Owen considered the question. But Outside, somewhere in the compound above, someone was going to notice the guards at the gate had gone very quiet. He had maybe minutes before this became a fight.

He thought about Yuki waiting back in Nexus Prime. About the Hunter Association arriving at a District Five massacre scene. About Dominus’s warning that every move he made in the real world was a move the Will could potentially read.

He thought about the numbers of victims within these cells and how they could get caught up if a fight broke out, as collateral damage.

“Someone who’s going to get you out,” Owen said. “Can you walk?”

The lion-girl straightened to her full height. Even malnourished and beaten, she was impressive , a Predator’s grace in every line of her body, amber eyes burning with something that had survived everything Eckstein had done to it.

“I can do more than walk,” she said.

Owen nodded once. “Good. There are others in the corridor. We’re taking all of them.”

Her expression shifted — something complicated crossing her face. Not gratitude exactly. More like the recalibration of someone who had stopped expecting help and was now having to revise that expectation.

“You’re going to have a problem,” she said. “There are guards. The compound above has more than you probably saw, spread across the dungeon”

“I know,” Owen said. “That’s not your problem right now. Your problem is getting everyone in those cells moving.” He stepped back into the corridor. “I’ll handle the rest.”

A pause.

“His name is Geo Eckstein,” she said. “The person behind all of this. He’s somewhere in the compound with a demon and two bodyguards who are—”

“A Demon!?” Owen finished with a shocked expression on his face.

“First it was the Outer-divinity Miasma that no living human should have access to now, then now it’s a demon who should not be able to be outside their sealed continent!?” Owen thought to himself.

Owen glanced back over his shoulder. Looking at the lion girl and decided to think about all of this later.

“Start moving.” He said as he turned back.

“I’m Leah!” The lion-girl told him as he began walking away.

“Owen” Owen responded without even turning back.

He walked toward the stairs that led up to the villa and as he gradually approached the exit bove him, the voice of someone screaming into a radio that the gate guards weren’t responding started coming through.

Owen then rolled his neck, feeling the familiar anticipatory loosening in his shoulders. Ready to Fight whatever Vonn, Rogers and Eckstein had prepared for him.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep