Chapter 72: 72. One Vs one Hundred

Owen stepped back into open air.

The dungeon sky stretched overhead, false and perfect, the kind of blue that didn’t exist in nature. The manicured gardens of Eckstein’s villa spread before him, and beyond the compound wall, the rolling grasslands of the dungeon’s field environment.

But something was wrong with the air.

It pressed against his scales like a physical thing — thicker than it had been when he entered the compound, heavier with a familiar wrongness. Owen breathed it in instinctively and felt his system respond.

[Status Ailment Detected: Outer-Divinity Miasma]

[Sovereignty of the Dragon King resisting…]

[Resistance successful.]

The notification faded and Owen exhaled slowly.

He stepped through the villa’s front entrance and stopped.

Beyond the compound wall, past the electrified perimeter, the grasslands had changed.

They were moving.

His Mana Sense swept outward before his eyes fully processed what he was seeing — hundreds of signatures, low-rank but burning with the distinctive wrongness of miasma corruption, clustered in formations too organized to be natural monster behavior. He pushed the Sense further, past the first wave, past the second.

Goblins. A legion of them. Hundreds, packed shoulder to shoulder across the dungeon’s open field, each one radiating that same corrupted signature.

They had been enhanced by the miasma pumping through their systems like a drug. Their eyes, visible even at distance through his Dragon’s Eye, had gone the same hollow purple-black he had seen on the Shadowgrave’s hollow men.

Under someone’s control.

He pushed his Mana Sense further still, past the goblin horde, and found the humans behind it.

Guards first. A cluster of them positioned at the rear. Then two signatures he recognized — Rogers, calculated and steady, Vonn, hot with adrenaline and genuine fear.

Beyond them, two presences that radiated an ominous aura: Aaron and Paul, Eckstein’s personal bodyguards, standing apart from the others.

And then, at the very back, shielded by every layer between him and Owen, an ordinary man. Not awakened. Not enhanced. No mana signature beyond the baseline hum of normal human biology.

Eckstein.

Owen walked through the compound gate and stood in the open, between the villa and the goblin horde.

He breathed in once, expanding his chest, and when he spoke, he shaped his voice, pushing it outward on a current of mana.

“Eckstein.” The name rolled across the field like thunder, audible to every living thing in the dungeon. “You’re playing with powers you don’t understand. Give this up now. Release everyone underground, walk out through that portal, and face proper judgment. That’s the only offer you get.”

Silence.

Then a voice from the rear, amplified through some device,reedy with fury but trying for contempt.

“A beast telling me what to do? you think you have the right to make demands of me?”

Owen looked across the massed goblins, past the guards, past Rogers and Vonn, to the small figure standing at the very back.

He thought about the stairs he had just climbed. The corridor of cells. The smell of blood soaked into stone. He thought about the eyes he had catalogued with his Mana Sense as he walked through — not just beastfolk adults. But Small signatures too. Young ones. Children who had been chained in suppression shackles in the dark underneath a man’s luxury villa.

He thought about how none of this was in any Hunter Association database. How a man with no mana, no awakening, no system rank whatsoever had built a trafficking operation inside a pocket dimension and run it long enough for the stone to absorb layers of suffering. How much money. How many connections. How many people in official positions had looked somewhere else while this existed.

His human soul pulled at him in a way it hadn’t since the egg, since the first breath in a body that wasn’t his original one. Raw and unfiltered and furious.

It wasn’t just some pompous fury of an arrogant dragon this time.

This was different. This was the specific, nauseating anger of a person who had a naive belief that somewhere underneath everything, that the world had some basic floor beneath which it didn’t sink below.

“How,” he thought. “How does this exist and no one is talking about it.”

He looked at Eckstein across the distance between them.

“I’m going to kill you,” Owen said, quietly enough that only his Mana Sense carrying the words made them reach. “Slowly. Whatever you’ve done to every person in those cells, I’m going to take my time with you.”

He watched Eckstein shudder, visible even at distance, the involuntary full-body response of someone who had just understood, for the first time, that the thing in front of them was not manageable.

Then Eckstein raised his hand and dropped it.

Behind the goblin horde, Aaron moved his fingers in a precise gesture and the horde surged forward, towards Owen.

—

They hit Owen like a wave.

He let them come, activating Dragon’s Aura as the first wave closed the distance , not at full output, just enough that the pressure wave rolled outward and scattered the leading edge, bodies tumbling across the grass. But there were hundreds of them, and the miasma enhancement meant they were climbing back to their feet faster than natural goblins had any right to as they had now gotten minimal resistance towards Dragons aura.

Owen used Momentum Shift.

His body accelerated into the horde rather than bracing against it, counter-intuitive, the kind of movement that required trusting that his Indestructible Scales would handle the physics.

He hit the packed center mass like a thrown stone hitting water, the impact radiated outward in shockwaves, goblins launched in every direction by the transferred force. His wings snapped open mid-motion, the leading edges sweeping horizontally and clearing a ring of space around him.

A cluster of them came from behind, leaping for his back.

His tail moved before he consciously directed it, a hard horizontal sweep that caught three of them across their midsections and sent them spinning. He had been learning to trust the tail in combat. It had its own sense of threat direction, some draconic instinct that worked faster than thought.

More came from the left, a group of twenty moving in coordinated formation, Aaron’s suspected mind control visible in the unnatural synchronization of their charge.

Owen turned into them, letting the first wave’s weapons rake across his forearms without concern. The goblin blades sparked against his scales and achieved nothing.

He caught two of them by the throat in each hand, used their momentum, and threw them into the group behind them.

Then his Dragon’s Breath came next — a controlled burst, low temperature relative to his maximum output, directed at the ground in front of an advancing cluster rather than through them.

The flash and heat was the point. Miasma-enhanced or not, something in goblin neurology responded to sudden fire with the same panic it always had.

The cluster scattered. Owen moved through the gap.

He fought without elegance, each movement doing the maximum work with the minimum expenditure. A wing buffet to create distance. Momentum Shift to close it on his terms. His tail tracking threats from angles his eyes weren’t covering.

Indestructible Scales absorbing everything that landed while he dealt with the things that mattered.

The horde thinned.

It took longer than it should have, miasma enhancement meant each goblin required more damage to take out of the fight than its rank suggested. But the dungeon’s field was littered now, the grass torn up and scorched, and the ones still standing were losing whatever Aaron’s control provided as their numbers dropped below the threshold where coordinated tactics were possible.

The last of them broke and scattered into the dungeon’s further reaches.

Owen straightened and looked toward the rear of the field.

The guards were already running. He watched them go, a frightened sprint toward the dungeon entrance portal, their tactical professionalism evaporating the moment the odds shifted against them. Rogers was moving too, his expression unreadable even at distance, pulling Vonn by the arm in the direction of the gate.

“Get back here!” Eckstein’s voice rang through, raw and cracking. “I’m paying you! Get back—”

But no one came back.

In thirty seconds the rear lines had emptied of everyone except three people: Eckstein, standing alone in the open with his fists clenched, and Aaron and Paul on either side of him — the only ones who hadn’t run.

Owen walked toward them across the ruined field.

The dungeon sky remained perfect and blue above them. Somewhere below the villa, Leah was moving through a corridor of cells, opening doors.

Owen’s golden eyes fixed on Eckstein.

“Just the three of you remaining” he said.

But at this moment, a sweet female voice fueled with Appeal came through his ears.

“Not so fast”

The demon Appeared behind him, Stunning Owen as even his mana sense didn’t pick up on her approach.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep