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Glory to my bum ass proofreader: Solare.
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"Now then, my future Step-son… May we chat like adults?"
Margit's face did something spectacular.
It was not merely rage. Rage, John had already seen plenty of. Rage was the default setting on this man. No, this was something rarer. Something so severe that it temporarily punched straight through the Omen's carefully maintained aura of kingly condemnation and landed somewhere around spiritual whiplash.
His eye twitched, and his mouth opened, closed, then opened again. And then, from somewhere deep inside the projection of the Fell Omen, there came a sound so offended it almost qualified as holy.
"What."
Marika fared little better.
Actually, that was a lie. She fared worse.
Far, far worse.
For one impossible heartbeat, the Eternal Queen of the Lands Between simply stared at Johnathan Pendragon as though he had reached into her very soul, seized decorum by the throat, and strangled it dead in front of her.
Then gold flared around her spectral form.
"What in mine name didst thou just call him?!" She barked, voice ringing through John's mind with enough force to make his ears ring. There was outrage there, yes, a great deal of it, but beneath it sat something warmer and far more dangerous to her dignity.
Fluster.
Bashful, humiliated fluster.
Which, naturally, made it ten times funnier.
"Mother…" Margit muttered, and the word came out rough. Not soft, never soft, but uncertain in a way John had not yet heard from him. "Wouldst thou truly…?"
He did not finish.
He did not seem physically capable of finishing.
Marika wheeled on John instead. "Clarify thyself at once, thou abominable little beast!"
John broke as laughter tore out of him in one sharp bark, then another, and before he knew it he was doubled slightly over the Commander's Standard, shoulders shaking, swamp water dripping from his clothes while Morgott and Marika both glared at him from opposite directions like he had personally declared war on the concept of family.
"Okay, okay–!" He managed at last, lifting one hand in surrender while still wheezing. "Relax. Fuck... That was just wishful thinking on my part."
Margit's expression darkened.
Marika's did too, though hers was complicated by the fact that she looked almost offended that relief had reached her before she could kill it.
John straightened, still grinning. "I'm saying that's what I'd like to accomplish by the end of all this. Y'know. Ideally, aspirationally. If I'm allowed to manifest a little."
The silence that followed was profound.
Margit's face settled first into a scowl so dense it looked load-bearing.
Marika slowly dragged one hand down her face.
"I loathe how casually thou says such things."
John shrugged. "I'm a goal-oriented man."
That did not improve either of their moods, but it did, at least, prevent immediate aneurysm.
Margit took one slow breath through his nose, the projection around him flickering with old gold as he forced his composure back into place. When he spoke again, his voice was once more harsh and kingly, though the earlier disruption had left hairline cracks in it.
"Get rid of that accursed thing," he growled, glaring at the Shackle still hanging loose in John's hand. "Then perhaps I shall hear whatever filth thou meanest to speak."
John looked down at it, then back up at him.
"Fair."
He gave the Shackle a little toss in his hand, saw Morgott's eyelid twitch, and smirked.
"I won't use it again unless you try to kill me."
Margit's grip tightened on his cane. He very obviously wanted to say something violent.
Instead, after a moment of visible effort, he forced out, "...Very well."
Marika let out a tired, ancient sigh that suggested she had survived godhood, betrayal, cosmic imprisonment, and childbirth, only to end up mediating whatever in the actual hell this was.
John flicked the Shackle back into his inventory.
The moment it vanished, some of the raw tension in the air bled off, though not all of it. Not even close.
Smarag still watched from the island beyond with one ruined eye. The Academy still loomed over the flooded expanse to their right, cold and aloof. The red and blue scarabs still drifted lazily overhead, as though the world had decided this was too weird to interrupt.
John rested the butt of the Standard in the shallows and regarded Morgott for a moment, his smile fading slightly.
"You wanna know why I was such an asshole?" He asked.
Margit's lip curled. "The answer is likely because thou art one by nature."
John snorted. "I mean, yeah, partly. But I had a point."
That made Morgott still.
Marika did not interrupt.
John rolled one shoulder, feeling bruises knitting under his torn shirt. The heat of battle still sat in his blood, but beneath it something gentler had risen. It wasn't pity exactly. Pity was too simple, and Morgott would spit in its face anyway. This was something heavier. Sadder.
He looked at the Omen King and, for once, did not grin.
"You piss me off, a lot." He said plainly. "You're stubborn, self-righteous, catastrophically repressed, and you've got all the emotional coping skills of a medieval landmine."
Margit's brow twitched.
"But…" John continued, voice quieter now, "I also feel bad for you."
That landed harder than any insult had. Margit looked almost insulted by the possibility itself.
John kept going before he could respond.
"You've never had a real family of your own, have you? Not really. Not in the way people are supposed to. You've never had brothers who could roughhouse with you, say awful shit to your face, then drag you up by the collar when you got in your own head. Never had friends who could poke at your weak spots, teach you to laugh at yourself, help you grow thicker skin and stop acting like your own existence is some kind of crime."
Margit scoffed and turned his face slightly away, though not enough to leave. "I never asked for thy help."
John's expression softened. And that, somehow, struck deeper than if he had mocked him again.
"I know." John said.
The words came easy after that. Not because they were simple, but because once he started, the shape of Morgott felt obvious to him in the worst possible way.
"You grew up begging for help and never getting it. Not once." John said quietly. "Your prayers weren't answered. Your pain wasn't eased. Nobody came. So eventually you stopped expecting anything at all."
Margit's jaw tightened.
Marika had gone utterly still.
John looked at him and thought, not for the first time, that the man in front of him felt like something starved and sanctified all at once.
"So you never learned to look up. Never learned you could actually want more." John continued. "You're like a fly that spent its whole life trapped inside a jar. Then one day the lid comes off, and even though it's free, it still doesn't know how to just leave."
Margit's mouth opened sharply.
"That is not—"
"It is, and you know it." John cut in, still soft.
The Omen sputtered then, too angry to stay composed and too hit to answer cleanly. Golden light trembled along his projection, flaring at the edges like a candle guttering in the wind.
Marika looked between them both and, for once in her long and terrible life, did not seem to know what to say.
John exhaled through his nose.
"I'm sorry, Margit."
The name, the false name, hung between them. He corrected himself.
"You and your brother might've escaped those accursed sewers. But Morgott is still down there. Still holding the keys to his own freedom and refusing to use them."
That shut him up.
Not because John had won some great rhetorical victory, but because for a moment there was simply nowhere for Morgott to put those words. No doctrine to sort them into. No pious self-denial that neatly answered them. No immediate condemnation broad enough to cover the specific hurt they struck.
So John did the only thing Johnathan Pendragon ever did when a moment got too emotionally loaded.
He turned around.
"Come on." He called out, as if this were all perfectly normal. He jerked his head toward the island ahead, where Smarag had retreated among the rocks.
He started walking, hands folded behind his back. "Walk with me, Son."
John heard the distinct sound of teeth grinding against each other.
Water sloshed around his boots. The ruined marsh squelched beneath each step. He did not check whether Morgott followed at first, because he already knew the man was too bewildered not to.
Behind him, there was a long, strange silence.
"What is it thou wants?" Margit asked quietly after a few seconds.
John glanced back over one shoulder, grin returning by degrees.
"It's time to play ball."
Margit stared at him. Then he looked past John toward the island where a wounded glintstone dragon lay coiled among stone and grass, one eye bright with vengeful hatred.
His face did not change.
His soul, however, very clearly did.
"...That is a Glintstone Dragon, not a ball." He said slowly,
John's smile did not lose a single inch of its cheery charm.
"I know!"
Margit kept staring.
Then, after a few long seconds, he let out the kind of sigh only a man already exhausted by someone else's existence could produce. It was not the sigh of surrender, exactly. More the sigh of a king realizing the cosmos had made a clerical error and assigned him the worst possible conversation partner.
Still, he followed.
And Marika, much like she had in the past few minutes, said absolutely nothing at all.
John did not slow as he strode through the shallows toward the island with the Commander's Standard resting across one shoulder and all the confidence of a man who had never once in his life learned the lesson a normal person ought to take from the phrase wounded dragon.
Behind him came Margit, cane in one hand, spectral gold still flickering around his battered projection in irritated pulses. Between them drifted a silence so fresh and strange it still had the shape of that earlier conversation pressed into it.
Ahead, Smarag waited among the rocks.
The glintstone dragon had withdrawn only far enough to nurse its pride and its eye. It crouched on the island's uneven rise like a sorcerer's nightmare made flesh, blue-gray scales slick with marshlight, crystal growths around its crown and spine glimmering with cold internal luminescence.
One side of its face was bloodied where Margit's barrage had chewed through scale and crystal. The damaged eye was ruined, a wet ruin of red and glintstone-streaked fluid.
The other eye fixed on them both.
Its maw opened slowly. And a grinding, resonant growl rolled out from its chest, and this time, for the first time, John felt more than sound in it.
He heard the shape. He didn't hear any words, or anything resembling human speech. But meaning bundled into instinct and ancient draconic dominance. Something in his blood answered it, ugly and immediate, like an old key turning inside a lock he had not realized was there.
Usurper!
Carrion-heart eater!
False scale! False heir!
John blinked once, then grinned.
"Oh, I can kinda understand you now!" He said, delighted. "That is so cool~!"
Smarag reared its head back and snarled again, crystal-light gathering in the back of its throat.
John did not let it finish.
He hit the ground hard with one foot and shot forward in a blur of splashing water and broken reeds. The dragon barely got its neck around before John was already there, vaulting off a stone outcrop and driving a fully draconic fist straight into the side of its face.
The impact rang with a deep metallic-crystal crack that burst across the island as John's fist smashed through scales and into the glintstone plating around Smarag's jaw. The dragon's head snapped sideways with enough force to drag the rest of its body after it.
Smarag went flying.
And Margit was already there.
A golden spectral hammer bloomed into being over the Omen's shoulder, dense and brutal and enormous. He stepped into the swing with all the dry, offended authority of a man who had not wanted to participate in this nonsense and was now going to overperform out of spite.
The hammer met Smarag's hurtling skull in a blast of golden force.
The dragon was sent careening across the island, crashing through a cluster of black boulders in an eruption of crystal fragments, shattered stone, and furious draconic noise.
John landed in a crouch, shook out his fist, and laughed.
Margit stared at him for one flat second. "That was thy grand strategy?"
"Open with violence." John shrugged and spun the Standard once in his hand. "It's a classic."
Smarag surged back out of the wreckage with a roar that made the nearby scarabs scatter in brilliant arcs of red and white.
Its wings spread wide, half menace and half balance, and glintstone fire began building in its throat again, not pure flame this time but a sorcerous torrent of blue-white starfire dense enough to melt stone and magic both.
Margit moved first. "Down!"
John dropped on instinct just as Margit's arm swept out and a fan of spectral blades screamed overhead. They slammed into Smarag's exposed neck and shoulder, forcing the dragon's aim off by a hair.
The glintstone breath erupted sideways in a catastrophic beam that sheared across the marsh rather than through them, vaporizing a line of reeds, blasting apart two ruin-columns, and gouging a glowing trench through the distant waterline.
John looked over his shoulder at the devastation.
"Damn. That would've been inconvenient."
"Thou thinkest?!" Margit snapped.
Smarag charged.
And the island shook under its weight. Great claws tore into stone. Its damaged face and bleeding eye only made it look angrier, less regal and more personal.
John ran to meet it.
Margit did too.
For one deranged, glorious moment, a Tarnished Shardbearer and the King of Leyndell sprinted shoulder to shoulder toward a glintstone dragon as though this were the most natural thing in the world.
John barked out a laugh. "So... How's fame treating me in the capital?"
Margit shot him a look that strongly implied he ought to let the dragon kill him on principle.
Smarag's tail came scything across the island like a battering ram. John ducked under it. Margit vaulted it with far more grace than a massive cursed king had any right to possess. The tail shattered a chunk of stone behind them into dust.
"The capital is irritated." Margit answered at last, voice dry with contempt. "The nobles are panicked. The knights whisper of your stories. And the common folk pray."
John planted the butt of the Standard and used it to vault up onto Smarag's forelimb, sprinting along the dragon's scaled arm as it tried to shake him off. "That sounds healthy."
"It is not."
Smarag snapped at him with a roar. John drove the spear-end of the Standard down between scales and held on while the maw missed him by inches.
Margit was under the dragon now.
Golden weapons flashed into being around him in a savage ring and drove upward into Smarag's underside, punching between belly scales in a series of wet, cracking impacts that made the dragon rear and scream. John ripped the Standard free and leapt clear as Smarag stumbled backward.
"What're they saying?" He asked as he landed and rolled. "In the rumors."
Margit twirled his cane once and stepped aside from a descending claw that cratered the earth where he'd stood. "That thou art a half-white-haired fiend with a dragon's hunger and a fool's courage."
"Accurate."
"That thou didst storm Castle Morne and leave with its loyalty."
"Also accurate."
Smarag lunged for Margit, perhaps deciding the smaller of the two targets was less annoying. John came in from the side and drove both draconic claws into the dragon's neck, hauling himself up while its attention shifted.
Margit did not thank him.
"That thou ridest storms of violence from one impossible victory to the next," the Omen continued, cane smashing into Smarag's wounded eye ridge with enough force to burst more blood and glintstone slurry outward. "That thou laughest while butchering things that should not fall."
John braced a foot against a crystal growth, grinned, and hauled himself up onto Smarag's back. "HAH! That one's going on the propaganda posters~!"
Margit's mouth twitched with clear disapproval.
"And…" He added as he conjured another hammer. "...that thou art insufferable!"
John barked out laughter as the hammer slammed into Smarag's shoulder and nearly folded the dragon sideways. "Now that's just truth in journalism."
Smarag bucked violently.
John was thrown free, flipping through the air as the dragon twisted to bring its jaws around on him again.
For a moment he saw all of Liurnia behind it, the drowned ruins, the high blue arrogance of Raya Lucaria, the far-off sweep of marsh and forest. He then twisted midair, caught hold of one of the red scarabs buzzing too close, and immediately let go.
"Sorry, little guy."
He dropped feet-first onto Smarag's snout.
The dragon's remaining eye widened in pure offended disbelief.
Then John punched straight down through crystal and scale and launched himself off before the dragon could recover.
He landed beside Margit in a spray of water.
"You know, I've had worse family outings." John joked, breathing a little harder now.
Margit nearly hit him with the back of his cane right then and there.
Smarag roared again, this one more coherent to John's half-awakened draconic senses.
Heart-thief!
Abomination!
Blasphemous whelp beneath no proper brood!
John tilted his head with a mischievous smirk. "Buddy, I ate your extended family. You're gonna need more material than that."
Margit looked at him sharply. "Didst thou just insult the dragon?"
"I think it insulted me first."
"That was not the troubling part of that sentence."
John's grin faltered for half a heartbeat as another thought rose up from the churn beneath all this nonsense.
He shifted the Standard into one hand.
"Hey!" He ducked under a glintstone-charged snap from Smarag's jaws and came up on the other side of Margit. "You know anything about the Frenzied Flame?"
That changed the air between them, though the battle didn't slow in the slightest. Smarag still wanted them both dead with great enthusiasm. But something in Margit's expression tightened in a way John had learned to recognize.
Smarag reared and brought both foreclaws down.
John and Margit split apart in perfect, opposite arcs. The island floor exploded where they had stood. Mud, water, and rock rained down around them. John came up from his roll already inhaling.
A stream of dragonfire blasted across Smarag's chest, forcing the glintstone dragon to cross its wings and neck against the torrent. While it did, Margit moved low and fast through the steam, spectral greatsword in hand, and hacked a deep glowing line through one hind leg.
Only then did he answer.
"I know enough." His voice had gone rougher, less performative. "I know what festers beneath Leyndell. I know what was done to the nomadic merchants trapped there."
John cut off the fire and looked at him.
Smarag stomped down with the wounded leg, nearly collapsed, then took to wingbeats instead, half-jumping and half-hovering backward to make space.
"The merchants?" John asked.
Margit's jaw tightened.
"It happened during the chaos after the Shattering. Before I had secured full control of the capital. Before the noble houses had been beaten back into obedience." Every word seemed dragged out through old anger. "They feared rebellion. Feared contamination. Feared the spread of what they did not understand."
Smarag unleashed a blast of glintstone fire again. Margit planted his cane and threw up a wall of hardlight at the same instant John exhaled frost. Blue-white sorcery and white dragonice collided against the gold barrier in a shrieking cloud of steam and crystal crackle.
"Cowards…" Margit finished, voice carrying through the noise. "Fools in silk and office. They buried them beneath the capital alive out of fear and desperation for control."
Marika's outrage detonated in John's mind so hard it nearly made him miss the next dodge.
"...What?"
The single word held more fury than most men's final speeches.
John twisted aside from a claw and drove the Standard up under Smarag's wing-joint. The dragon screamed.
Marika's voice did not soften.
"They did what to them? Beneath mine city? In the madness following my absence?" She sounded sick, furious, and heartbroken all at once. "Those craven parasites! The moment I am indisposed, they all act out?!"
Margit's mouth became a hard line. "I learned too late. By the time I knew the full measure of it, the damage had already rooted."
John ripped his weapon free and sprang back as Smarag's wing smashed a boulder to dust where he'd been.
"Shit…" He muttered.
He met Marika's silent, blazing presence inwardly for a moment and felt just how deeply that revelation hit her. Not merely as ruler. As a mother, and as architect of an Order twisted by smaller, pettier, crueler hands the moment her own stopped steering it.
Smarag's tail came around again.
Margit caught it with a spectral chain-hook and dragged the sweep just enough off-angle that John only had to duck rather than lose his spine.
"Okay…" John said, breath heaving now with effort and adrenaline. "What about the Frenzied village in northeast Liurnia? The one with the tower."
Margit swore under his breath.
So he did know it.
They split again as Smarag lunged between them, wounded and increasingly savage. John vaulted up onto the dragon's shoulder while Margit ran straight up a rising slab of shattered stone to get height on the other side.
"I know of it!" Margit called back. "That Frenzied Flame Village, and the accursed tower above it."
John punched through a crystal outgrowth and used it as leverage to scramble along Smarag's spine. "Then why's it still standing?"
Margit leapt from the slab and drove a spectral spear down through Smarag's back like a lightning rod of gold. The dragon bellowed and nearly folded in half under the impact.
"Because we cannot approach it in force!" Margit roared back. "That tower's eye maddens all who near it. Men break by the hundreds, and they slaughter one another before ever reaching the base. Even disciplined knights are reduced to screaming things with foam on their lips."
John's expression darkened.
Smarag thrashed wildly, trying to throw him. He clung on for one second longer than was sane, then shoved off as the dragon rolled. He landed in the water beyond the island's edge, knee-deep and skidding.
"Yeah…" He muttered. "That does sound like a problem."
Margit landed a few strides away, projection breathing harder now, golden light flickering where the projection-stress and battle damage were starting to accumulate.
"It is…" His tone had lost nearly all of its earlier heat. What remained was old frustration and the particular bitterness of a king forced to leave a rot in place because every tool he could spare broke on contact. "There are battles I can win with steel, judgment, or numbers. That place is not one of them."
John thought about the frenzied tower. Thought about the madness, the lines of sight, the game logic he remembered, the real-world horror Margit was describing.
He nodded. "I'll do something about it when I can."
Margit looked at him.
John met his gaze evenly while, behind them, Smarag hauled itself back upright one more time, ruined, furious, and still stupid enough to keep trying.
"When I go, I'll let you know."
Margit held his stare for a few long seconds before letting out a resignated, but resolute sigh.
"Do so. I can offer support, if not direct advance. Men. Supplies. Containment." He muttered solemnly.
John's mouth curled into a grin again. "Look at us~! We're communicating!"
"Do not ruin the moment."
"No promises."
Smarag roared as he came at them desperately. John and Margit moved at the same time without discussion or needing a count.
John shot left, sprinting through the shallows and up onto the island's lower stones with the Standard held low behind him. Margit went right, spectral knives appearing around him in a bright crescent before hurling themselves at Smarag's face to force its head high and away.
The dragon followed the knives.
And that gave John the opening.
He planted one foot on a jut of rock, launched upward, and drove the spear-tip of the Commander's Standard deep into the underside of Smarag's jaw. It wasn't enough to kill, but it was, however, enough to force the head back and expose the neck.
Margit was already there.
Golden hardlight bloomed along his cane, extended, thickened, and became a cruelly elegant executioner's blade.
John hung there for a single impossible moment, dragged partly upward by his weapon lodged in dragonflesh. Smarag screamed. Its throat glowed with glintstone fire building toward catastrophic release.
John met Margit's eyes across the dragon's exposed neck.
The Omen understood immediately.
John ripped the Standard sideways with both draconic arms, tearing scales and sinew open in a brutal horizontal line.
Margit stepped in and swung.
The hardlight blade sheared through the already-opened wound, cutting deep enough to lodge in the spine and glint-crystal.
Smarag convulsed.
But it was not enough.
The dragon reared harder, trying to throw them both clear, glintstone breath rupturing from its mouth in a half-formed scream of blue flame.
John bared his teeth.
"Again!"
Margit snarled something that might once have been a curse and might, in this exact context, have counted as agreement.
John let go of the Standard, landed hard on the dragon's forelimb, and ran upward along its neck in three crashing steps. Each step cratered scale under his weight and strength. At the same time, Margit dismissed the lodged hardlight blade and conjured a massive golden hammer instead.
Smarag's one good eye found John.
The dragon understood, at last, that this was the end.
It tried to snap at him but John drove a draconic fist into the hinge of its jaw and held it open.
Margit brought the hammer down.
The blow landed on the side of Smarag's neck exactly where John had torn open the line and where Margit's blade had already bitten to the spine.
Bone shattered and crystal burst as the dragon's head was driven half off in a spray of blood, glintstone slurry, and broken scale.
John roared with effort and, with both hands, grabbed the wounded crown of the neck and twisted with all the monstrous strength his body possessed.
Margit's spectral greatsword flashed into existence one final time.
Together, in one savage, perfect motion, they finished it.
Steel, hardlight, dragon-strength, and hateful teamwork met in the same instant.
Smarag's head came off.
It tore free in a ruin of blue blood and shattered glintstone, hit the ground once, and rolled down the island slope into the shallows below while the rest of the dragon's body crashed the other way with enough force to shake the nearby ruins and send red and white scarabs scattering in a storm around them.
For a few moments afterward, there was only the sound of water rushing back into disturbed earth, the fizzing crackle of dying glintstone energy, and the ragged breathing of two men standing amid the corpse of a dragon.
John was the first to laugh. It started low, breathless, and a little disbelieving, then rose from there.
Margit stared at him as dragon blood and marsh water dripped from both of them.
Then, against all reason, against all kingly dignity, against every defensive wall he owned…
The corner of his mouth twitched upwards.
The Dragon's corpse then began to change.
It started at the edges.
The great wound where the neck had been parted flickered first, as if some invisible heat had reached into the dragon's dead flesh and loosened its hold on reality. From there the change spread quickly.
Scales dulled, then fragmented. Glintstone embedded in the hide cracked with soft, crystalline pops. The enormous body began to slacken and collapse inward into ash, dust, and residual mana.
John watched it happen with the now-familiar, deeply satisfying wrongness of his System processing a kill. Great sheets of Smarag's body sloughed away into drifting blue-gray motes, the dragon becoming less a corpse and more a disassembled answer to a resource request.
Margit watched too.
There was something strange in the Omen's face while he did. It wasn't approval, exactly. And it certainly wasn't delight. But an odd, private satisfaction sat there all the same, as though he found something deeply fitting in seeing a glintstone dragon denied even the dignity of remaining a carcass.
Then the notifications hit.
[GREAT ENEMY SLAIN]
[56,000 RUNES ACQUIRED]
[Glintstone Dragon Heart Acquired]
[30x Glintstone Crystal-Scale Fragments Acquired]
John blinked, then flicked one of the new prompts open with a thought.
A smaller pane expanded in the corner of his vision.
[GLINTSTONE CRYSTAL-SCALE FRAGMENT]
[A rare alchemical and sorcerous material formed within the bodies of glintstone dragons. It contains an unusually dense concentration of refined mana and starborne residue.]
[It can be consumed for mana replenishment far exceeding common Starlight Shards.]
[It is highly valued in grand alchemy, advanced glintstone apparatus, catalyst refinement, and top-grade sorcery equipment creation.]
[Market Value: Extremely High]
John's grin widened. 'Oh, that's neat. New loot drop?'
That was the kind of loot drop that made old RPG-brain fire off like a machine gun.
Beside him, Margit's gaze cut toward him as the last of the dragon's corpse loosened into drifting ash and cerulean motes.
"What manner of process is this?" The Omen asked, voice still rough from battle. "The beast's whole carcass is... gone."
John glanced at him, then shrugged one shoulder loosely. "Side effect of my pact with Marika, more or less."
That was not an answer.
Margit knew it was not an answer.
But it was apparently answer-shaped enough to work for now, because after a moment he only grunted and looked back over the place where Smarag's body had been.
"Convenient…" He muttered. "If it truly doth extract all worthy materials from the corpse."
John's eyes flicked back to the System panel.
It is very convenient.
Inwardly, he prodded at Marika with pleased curiosity. 'I swear it didn't always vacuum stuff up this efficiently?'
Her answer came with the faint rustle of regained composure. "No. The retrieval of my Great Rune hath improved its workings. The collection feature appears swifter now, and more discerning. It gathers not only the obvious spoil, but what is important."
That made John absurdly happy.
He loved progression systems. He loved hidden upgrades. He loved quality-of-life improvements unlocked by boss kills. This was spiritually nourishing.
Marika made a sound that suggested she regretted having spoken.
John, of course, was too pleased to care as he reached into his inventory, pulled free the Glintstone Dragon Heart, and immediately bit into it.
Margit turned just in time to witness the act. The Omen recoiled in naked disgust.
The heart was enormous in John's hands, still warm in a way it absolutely should not have been, blue-veined and faintly luminous from within. When his teeth broke the outer layer, pale azure fluid welled out alongside darker dragon blood, and the interior glimmered with threads of crystal residue like veins of mana embedded in flesh.
Margit's face twisted as though John had just started chewing roofing material and grave dirt at the same time.
"Foul creature…" He said flatly. "Thou truly art a carrion-eating vulture."
John chewed thoughtfully.
The texture was bizarre.
It was denser than an ordinary dragon heart, less like meat and more like someone had blended tendon, hot copper, and a starry mineral aftertaste into something only technically edible. There was a crunch to parts of it that made him deeply aware he was probably biting through glintstone-infused arterial deposits.
But honestly?
He couldn't say it was his worst meal here. That honour went to Ekzykes' Heart.
He swallowed and pointed the half-eaten heart at Margit. "Says the sewer king who came to jump me over a grudge."
Margit made a low, offended noise and turned away before John could continue chewing at him with both teeth and words.
"This is not the last thou shalt see of me…" The Omen called out, planting his cane and squaring his shoulders despite the visible strain beginning to flicker through the edges of the projection. "I shall keep mine eye upon thee. I will judge whether thou remainst worthy of that Great Rune... and of any others thou somehow stumbleth into."
John smirked and took another bite.
He chewed for a second, swallowed, then spoke around the lingering taste of crystal-blood and cosmic offal.
"Then keep an eye on your own backyard first."
Margit's head turned slightly just as John's smile sharpened.
"Check out Dominula village in person when you get time."
Margit gave him a side glare, his expression tightening with the particular irritation of a man who had just been told something both inconvenient and probably true. He very clearly wanted to ask more. He equally clearly refused to give John the satisfaction.
After a few moments, he let out one long, tired breath through his nose and nodded once.
"I shall."
Golden light had begun flaking off him now in slow, tired motes.
The projection was reaching its limit as the edges of his body blurred faintly, especially around the shoulders and weapon hand. His injuries no longer held cleanly; cuts and impacts flickered as if the spell maintaining them had begun forgetting exactly where he had been struck.
John saw it, and so did Morgott.
The Omen straightened as best he could, gathered up what remained of his kingly dignity, and let the projection begin to dissolve.
Gold peeled away from him in ribbons and drifting fragments, wind-lifted and solemn.
He was gone in mere moments, only a few fading sparks remained above the wet island stones before those too vanished into the Liurnian air.
For the first time in several minutes, the world felt quiet.
Marika let out a breath she seemed not to have realized she was holding.
"...Thou art an asshole."
John snorted softly around another bite of heart. "That's fair."
There was no real venom in her voice, though. Only fatigue, fondness, and something softer still hiding under both.
A few moments passed before she continued, quieter now.
"...Thank you." The words were small by her standards, clearly hard-won. "For going out of thy way to help my son when I could not."
John did not answer immediately.
He stood there amid dragon ash and broken marshlight, chewing slowly while the strange, metallic taste of glintstone heart bled across his tongue. The scarabs drifted overhead. The Academy watched from its distant rise. Somewhere out there, Millicent and Melina were still heading toward their own trouble.
After a little while, he let out a soft chuckle.
"Don't worry about it."
He looked toward the place where Margit had stood a moment before, then down at the half-eaten heart in his hand.
"That's what I'm here for."
Marika did not speak for a beat.
"Still... Thank you."
John smiled softly as he heard her whisper so quietly he could barely hear her in his mind.
Then he bit into the heart again. This time the reaction came immediately.
His whole body shuddered.
Azure light flared in his chest, deep beneath bone and blood, and for one disorienting moment it felt like he had swallowed a star that had decided it preferred his ribs to the sky. The sensation was not painful, not exactly, but it was invasive in a way only dragon communion and divine power had any right to be.
It spread through him in branching currents of cold fire, flowing up his spine, out through his shoulders, and down into the pit of his stomach where it began to coil.
A system prompt slammed into his vision.
[GLINTSTONE DRAGON HEART CONSUMED]
[+15 INTELLIGENCE] [+10 MIND] [+5 ARCANE]
John's eyes widened as another notification followed immediately after.
[+1 INSIGHT]
He felt something behind his eyes first like a slight widening, or a pressure shift. As though the world had, for half a heartbeat, become one degree deeper than it had any right to be.
The scarabs overhead looked just a little stranger. The Academy in the distance seemed to hum with a more complicated geometry. Even the glintstone residue left in the marsh from Smarag's death glimmered not merely as mana, but as the fossilized idea of mana.
The final notification appeared. It was larger, more ornate, and infinitely more exciting.
[NOTICE]
[The User's body and soul are gradually forming a personal MANA CORE.]
[This process is unique to higher-borne races and greater bloodlines such as Dragons, Demigods, and other legendary creatures.]
[When completed, the User's passive Mana regeneration will increase drastically.]
[As a side effect of this developmental evolution, the User has met the conditions to gain access to a new Unique Draconic Rite.]
[UNLOCKED: {GLINTSTONE DRAGONBREATH}]
For one glorious second, John just stared before his grin turned demonic.
It was all teeth and hunger and delighted insanity. He clenched one fist hard enough for the knuckles to crack and gave himself a savage little pump of triumph.
"Yes- Haha~!" The laughs came out low and reverent before he bellowed out louder in excitement. "FUCK YEAH!"
Azure light pulsed once more beneath his sternum like the first beat of some embryonic second heart, colder than the crimson force of his Immortal Heart, cleaner, stranger, and infinitely more magical. He could already feel the difference. More room. More depth. More potential.
Behind him, Marika stared at the notifications only he could see through the shape of his reactions and sighed like a queen forced to watch a favorite disaster evolve.
The azure glow in John's chest had only just started to settle when Marika appeared beside him.
She did not simply manifest this time. She arrived in a wash of soft gold with the morning sun at her back, her silhouette outlined in radiant fire so clean and warm that for one absurd moment she looked less like a hidden goddess in his soul and more like dawn itself had decided to take the shape of a beautiful, haughty woman just to personally congratulate him.
Which, frankly, tracked.
Golden hair spilled down her back in bright waves. The light caught along the edges of her face, her throat, the pale line of her shoulders, and traced every regal angle into something almost painfully lovely. Her dress shimmered faintly where it met the drifting air above the marsh, and the small, proud tilt of her chin said she had already decided this was at least partly her achievement.
Which, to be fair, it also was.
"Well done, mine champion…" She muttered, voice smooth with approval and only the slightest undercurrent of lingering annoyance. "Thou hast grown once more."
Then her lips twitched, and the approval soured just enough to become bitterly amused.
"It remaineth deeply unfair, of course." She added, glancing at the place where the dragon had turned to dust as though personally offended by the economy of his progress. "I had to ascend unto true godhood ere I formed mine own Mana Core. And all thou wert required to do was devour a few overgrown lizards and shamelessly piggyback upon the remnants of my divine power."
John stared at her for one beat, burst out laughing.
It hit him hard enough he actually had to brace one hand on his knee while the other still held the last damp remnants of dragon-heart gore. The laugh bounced across the ruined island and out over the swamp, bright and uncontrolled and utterly delighted.
"Am I sensing an iota of jealousy~? You're jealous of me, aren't you, my Goddess~?" He grinned up at her.
Marika's eyes narrowed. "It am not."
"It absolutely is." He stood straighter, still chuckling, and pointed at her accusingly with one clawed hand. "You should be happy for me. I'm your champion, after all. Future husband too, if we're being honest~!"
She huffed at once and crossed her arms beneath her blessed chest with a motion so sharp it nearly had its own weather system.
"Acquire a few more Shards of my Ring ere thou growest so uppity." She said primly. "Then, mayhap, thou mayest begin entertaining the notion that I would even consider accepting such a title from thee."
John only laughed harder.
The expression on her face at that moment was lethal in all the best ways. Proud, offended, impossible, radiant, and just a little flustered under the surface if one knew where to look.
He knew where to look.
So, naturally, he got worse.
"Sure, sure~!" He shrugged with all the confidence of a man who had just eaten a dragon's heart for breakfast and gotten rewarded with a Mana Core. "I'll get you to admit you love me soon enough."
Marika tilted her head.
The haughty little smirk that curved across her mouth right then belonged on her so offensively well that it almost made him forget the words themselves.
"Mayhap over thy deathbed…" She said silkily, flicking her hair back over one shoulder. "As thy final, dying wish."
John barked out another laugh.
"That's cute." He pointed at himself with his thumb. "Counterpoint: I'm immortal. If all it takes to make you admit it is dying a few times, I should probably find Morgott again soon and ask for help."
Her eyes widened for the tiniest fraction of a second. A blush threatened the edges of her composure like a lit match near dry paper. Then, with visible effort and all the tyrannical force of will that once held an entire Order together, she crushed it flat.
What remained was a hot, dangerous little smirk.
"Impudent creature…" She murmured, fading out in a spill of gold before he could press his advantage any further.
John stood there grinning like a bastard for a second longer, then rolled his shoulders and stretched. His whole body still hummed faintly with the new additions under his skin; the Mana Core was not finished, not yet, but the shape of it was there now.
A cold bright pressure low in his core, distinct from the brutal drumbeat of his Immortal Heart.
It felt fantastic.
It also meant he should probably get moving before Melina either found him or decided to set an entire region on fire out of stress.
"Right…" He muttered to himself as he started forward. "Time to go find where the angry sewer king rudely abducted me from."
He broke into a sprint and Liurnia blurred around him.
He ran across the marsh and through the wreckage of their battle like a man possessed, long strides devouring the distance while his boots and leaps kicked up sheets of water behind him.
Every landing sent swampwater bursting outward in wide fans. Every push-off launched him over broken roots, collapsed ruins, and the occasional gouged-out patch of earth where he and Margit had apparently decided trees were optional.
The collateral was, in hindsight, sort of impressive.
Half the forest they had fought through looked like it had been personally audited by multiple natural disasters. Trees lay split or uprooted. One stretch of water still carried floating chunks of crystal and blue dragon blood. The shattered remains of a giant crayfish mother floated belly-up not too far from where her child had last been weaponized against a king.
John ran past three more giant crayfish lurking in the shallows and gave them an assessing look as they raised their massive claws at him.
"You know…" He muttered offhandedly while vaulting over a sunken wall. "I should come back and hunt one of you for food later. I'm genuinely curious what giant crayfish tastes like."
Marika's voice returned at once, dry as old parchment.
"...Fatass."
John ignored her shamelessly.
A few minutes later he found what he was looking for. Or, more accurately, he found something he had absolutely detoured on purpose for.
The smell hit him before the sight did. Cooked crab.
Rich, savory, buttery-salty, with the kind of thick boiled spice and shellfish steam that cut through wet marsh air like a promise from a better world. It wafted over the waterline so distinctly that John's enhanced senses locked onto it immediately and reeled him in the rest of the way.
At the center of a patch of swamp wilds, perched on slightly raised ground beside broken stone and scattered reeds, stood a run-down shack.
It looked less like a proper home and more like a stubborn refusal to die uncomfortably. The structure had been pieced together from warped timber, scavenged planks, old tarped cloth.
A few crates sat stacked beside one wall. A half-broken barrel served as a table. There was fishing gear everywhere; nets hanging from nails, traps piled in one corner, coils of rope, an old knife stabbed into a chopping block gone gray with water and use.
And out front, beside a low firepit built from stacked stone, sat a gigantic iron pot.
It was full to the brim with boiled crab.
Steam rolled from it in thick, fragrant clouds. Shells the size of helmets and gauntlets had been cracked and piled nearby, and the whole scene looked like some glorious marriage between survivalism and culinary crime.
Marika's presence tilted with suspicion. "What couldst thou possibly want here? And surely thou art not here for crabs."
John smirked mid-step.
"Of course I am."
He landed from his last long leap several yards from the shack, splashing down into the shallows before walking the rest of the way with hands in his pockets like he had not just come directly from beating a dragon to death with a king.
The man by the pot looked up.
Blackguard Big Boggart was broad through the shoulders and thick through the gut, with heavy arms, rough hands, and the sort of practical strength that came from hauling, gutting, stabbing, and surviving rather than training for anyone's admiration. His face was hidden by a bulbous iron helmet, only letting his eyes be viewed.
In other words, John liked him immediately.
Boggart looked John up and down once; the torn clothes, dragon blood, white-streaked hair, and the general aura of "something very expensive just died nearby."
He scowled.
"What d'you want?" He asked flatly. "Scram, if you don't wanna get hurt."
Marika made a tiny sound of disdain. "And who is this clown?"
John ignored her and, without answering Boggart's threat at all, reached into his inventory and pulled out ten thousand runes' worth of glowing golden motes condensed into a fat soul-pouch.
He held it up.
Boggart stared at him blankly, John just smiled.
"I want all the boiled crab you've got, please."
There was a beat of complete silence.
Boggart's eyes moved from John's face, to the pouch, then back to John's face again as though trying to determine whether he was being mocked by a hallucination or blessed by divine seafood economics.
Then, very slowly, his mouth fell open.
"...Marika's tits! You must be 'ungry!" He blurted.
The sound Marika made beside John was indescribable.
It was not quite a gasp, a choke, and not even quite the audible collapse of a goddess suffering a sudden and violent brain aneurysm.
It was, however, close enough that John felt every scrap of his self-control immediately come under siege.
He did not laugh.
He did not.
It took every scrap of Johnathan Pendragon's willpower, every ounce of demigod-level restraint, every hard-won point of Mind, and possibly the intervention of several dead gods to keep from exploding into hysterics right there in the marsh.
But his shoulders still betrayed him a little.
---------------
Author's Note:
POWER STONES!
Marika's tits! We finally got to the crab goat!
Yeah, it's been a while fellas, sorry! I've been overwhelmed by a lot of shit IRL(Especially my new J*b). I couldn't really commit to writing anything with my whole heart
And I could never bring myself to write just for the sake of writing. You guys deserve better than that!
I'll try to do better from now on, promise!
…
Next Chapter Title: The Grand Academy of Raya Lucaria
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