I should’ve seen it by now.
I was flying at the fastest speed Ju could handle, my mind already overflowing with dreadful scenarios.
Did I miss it?
What I wouldn’t give for proper directions! A barony for a GPS signal!
How anyone could lose track of such a monstrous structure was beyond me—but apparently, I had managed just that.
“You’re too far east,” Ju’s voice came from behind me—barely audible, but carefully channeled through mana to reach my ears.
Where is east?!
Left? Right? In front? Behind?
I was starting to lose it. Panic was slithering into my chest, wrapping tighter around my heart. I’m going to arrive too late. Too late to do anything!
A flood of horrible visions overwhelmed me. In one, I descended through the clouds to find her already dead—and I burned them all in rage. In another, I arrived just in time to save her, fire blazing as I cut down everyone who stood in my way. But in most of them… I found her mid-execution, screaming, being skinned alive—and again, I burned everything. The executioners. The guards. The audience. All of them.
Every path my mind wandered down ended in fire.
“Turn right!” Ju called.
How does she even know that? I wondered, but I followed her instruction anyway, banking in the direction she said and climbing higher.
“The other right!” she added sharply.
With a frustrated growl, I turned a full one-eighty—her version of "the other right."
I’d always had a bit of a problem with left and right—but Ju didn’t seem much better.
Where’s the game map when you need one?
How did they get that to work in the game, anyway? There had been a map… but now was not the time to dwell on that.
“Yes! I think I see it!” Ju said, her voice suddenly full of hope. “A little more to the left now—do you see it?”
“Where? Where?!” I growled, twisting midair to follow where she was pointing.
And then—finally—I saw it.
There it was: the monumental castle, shaped like a giant T.
And in that moment, I understood why I’d missed it.
It was completely dark.
I’d been scanning the horizon for some blazing beacon of overcompensated architecture—when instead, the castle had gone nearly pitch black. Only the sacrificial fires flickered around its base, small orange halos glowing like watchful eyes in the night.
Now I just needed to find Elenia—somewhere down there.
I slowed my flight and focused on the castle’s surroundings, trying to make sense of what was unfolding below.
As we drew closer, more details came into view.
There was a crowd down there. No, a multitude! Thousands upon thousands of people were gathered across the hills surrounding the castle. Many held torches, and scattered throughout were small fires that cast long, twitching shadows.
The flickering light only deepened my frustration—how had I missed this? Of course—when your mind is primed to find one enormous glowing beacon, you tend to overlook the faint gleams at the edges.
The people were spread across several hills and slowly moving—some part of what looked like complex processions weaving between… what was that?
There—on a smaller hill—a line of tall poles stood, each topped with what looked like twisted double crosses. As I got closer, my breath caught in my throat.
People. They were hanging from the poles—suspended by their feet, upside down. Around a dozen of them, forming a grim row. And they were alive.
Elsewhere, people were locked in pillories. In another spot, a group crawled on their knees across a rough stone surface, their progress agonizingly slow.
Near the center, a large group stood swaying in trance-like unison before a massive fire, their voices blending into a steady chant. They moved like windblown grass—mesmerized, eerie.
The smell hit next. A sickening blend of burned meat and something sharp and sweet—pine, maybe—clearly meant to mask the stench beneath it.
It still reached me, even up here.
The closer I flew, the more details emerged—and the worse the macabre scene became.
On a marble sledge at the center of it all, a body lay limp, blood dripping down onto a kind of ceremonial stage. Around it, a group of robed figures in ceremonial garb—hooded and ghostlike, disturbingly reminiscent of Ku Klux Klan outfits—were moving in exaggerated, ritualistic gestures.
A faint blue sheen shimmered around the stage and extended outward toward the chanting crowd. A magical aura, probably. Protection? Amplification? It was hard to tell.
To one side of the stage, a queue had formed—but I couldn’t see what was happening there.
“That’s Elenia,” Ju said suddenly.
I blinked, trying to process what she was saying, scrambling to identify her in the chaos.
“There, on the stage. That body!”
She pointed, then shifted her aim toward a small mound at the edge of the gathering.
“I’ll wait for you there. Bring her to me!” she shouted—and jumped from my back.
What?! What is she doing? Why now?
My brain almost broke, not understanding what was happening.
I twisted in the air just in time to see her on my left, drifting gracefully toward the mound. She must have cast
On my right—hundreds of meters below—the stage blazed in torchlight. The hooded priests were still gesturing, still holding something high before the crowd.
A skin suit. My breath caught.
And the skinned body beneath... that must be Elenia. Ju must have recognized her.
A shiver ran down my spine. We’re too late!
Could she still be alive?
I was still circling, trying to get into position, when Ju’s voice whispered into my ear—channeled through mana.
“Shadowmeld. Put her in your inventory and come to me. She’s already dead… she’s fresh… hurry.”
I understood immediately. Her plan made perfect sense: I just had to retrieve the body and bring it straight to Ju for resurrection. The cleanest, fastest option.
My own instinct had been a bit more dramatic—Scenario Three: descend like a fire-spitting dragon, burn everything in sight—priests, guards, maybe half the crowd—and grab Elenia in my claws before taking to the sky in a blaze of vengeance.
Far more satisfying. But slower.
So I went with the plan. I slipped into Shadowmeld—and in an instant, I was on the stage, right beside that damned priest — and then it happened.
It was like short-circuiting a high voltage line.
Lightning exploded all around me and through my shadow form. Crackling arcs of energy raced all over me. This must have been the blue aura around the stage and it forced me out of the shadow directly into my demon form.
I hadn’t used this form since that day.
The day of the first dragon transformation.
Of course the form was distorted—but not as badly as I feared.
I still had hands and legs, though there was an extra tail—not a majestic dragon’s tail, but something thin and twitching, more like a rodent’s. My wings were a mismatched blend: leathery dragon wings crossed with Flo’s delicate dragonfly structures, flickering oddly as they caught the firelight.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
I had no time to study the full horror of my appearance. I had a mission to complete.
I focused, tried again to Shadowmeld—
—and that’s when one of the priestesses hurled something at me. A cup, filled with a liquid that hissed and sizzled the instant it hit me. Sanctified water, or something just as vile.
Had I been fully solid, it would’ve just scorched the skin.
But I was phasing in and out—half-merged with the shadows—and the cursed liquid fizzled inside me.
It burned through my organs, sharp and relentless.
I screamed.
The sound that left my throat wasn’t human. Being in demon form twisted it into something feral, vicious—wrong.
The scream rose like a beast’s war cry, and every hooded head on that stage turned to me in horror.
I started coughing, snorting, spitting as that vile water fizzled inside my lungs. It felt like I was boiling from the inside out.
With a kick, I sent the priestess flying—she launched backwards like she’d been shot from a catapult.
But another priest stepped in immediately, hurling another cup of the same cursed liquid straight at me.
Bubbles were forming under my skin—horrible little sacs of pain—and when the next splash hit, it burst some of them with a hiss.
A foul stench rose around me—like sulfur.
I hadn’t known my insides smelled like that. Or maybe it was some kind of magical reaction. Either way, it was awful.
The sizzling didn’t stop. It was inside me—deep inside. My organs, my intestines, my everything.
I bobbed the next idiot off the stage with another kick—just as the boiling pressure inside me reached a whole new level of hell.
And then it happened.
Shit hit the fan. Literally.
The bubbling inside me exploded downward, and I crapped myself—right there on the stage.
Not that I was wearing pants. The shadowmeld hadn’t left me any.
This was, without a doubt, one of the most humiliating moments of my entire life.
I would love—love—to erase it from memory, but no. Unfortunately, it’s the memory my brain insists on serving up every time I think about embarrassment.
And still, the damn hissing continued.
The blue magical sheen around the stage flickered weakened.
It even started reacting with the mess I’d made—my own crap steaming ominously as if it, too, had something to say in this magical nightmare.
With another kick, I knocked over the container of that cursed water sitting near the edge of the stage and at the same moment, a cloud drifted across the sky, covering the blue moon.
It felt like an omen.
If the crowd had been yelling and screaming before, now it was an explosion of chaos.
Fear tore through the masses—screams rising like waves across the hills.
The blue sheen around the stage flickered once again — then vanished with the moonlight.
And just like that, I could
I looked around. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure which body was Elenia’s. So I grabbed all three from the stage— all relatively fresh, though one seemed the freshest. I wasn’t about to take chances.
The priests had begun to gather, casting something. It looked like the preparations for some big, slow spell—but by the time the first syllables were spoken, I was already gone.
I reached the mound Ju had pointed out just as she landed with her Feather Fall, her robes catching the torchlight.
As she glanced at me her eyes went wide. Even though I was back in human form, the damage still showed—and besides, she must have seen at least some of what had happened.
“What happened?” she asked, worried. “You don’t look good.”
I didn’t even answer. I just spat the three bodies out of my inventory onto the grass, gasping and blinking.
“Don’t worry about me,” I said, breath ragged. “Which one is her?”
She raised a brow but didn’t comment. Instead, she knelt beside one of the bodies.
“This one! Nohekhta, help me!” she cried, eyes lifting toward the sky. Then she turned to me.
“Place some illusions around us—this will take a while!”
I blinked. That… might have been the first time I ever heard Ju invoke a god by name.
As she stood, her form began to glow—subtly at first, then brighter. She was diving deep into her magic, deeper than I’d ever seen anyone go during a resurrection. Was Elenia really that far gone?
My worry deepened as Ju’s entire body began to shimmer, her outline softening until I could see through her.
I gasped, shocked—and in my distraction, realized I’d completely forgotten the illusions.
By the time I hastily wove a veil around us, it was already too late to hide much. Ju was blazing like a beacon now, her head tilted back, her body arched with magic, arms stretched wide.
Then, it happened.
A pillar of radiant light erupted over Elenia’s body, lifting her gently into the air. For a few heartbeats, she hung there—suspended in that brilliance, motionless, weightless.
And then—a slow-motion explosion of white light burst outward, washing the entire hill in dazzling illumination for several long seconds.
At least the white light show was mostly contained by my illusions—mostly.
I still caught a few exclamations from the crowd below, those poor masses still trying to recover from my earlier… performance on their sacred stage.
As the light faded, Ju’s body crumpled.
She would have hit the ground if I hadn’t caught her in time.
Elenia, still floating in the wake of the spell, suddenly gasped—drawing in a ragged breath. Her arms closed protectively around herself as her body shuddered with violent frissons. A pained moan escaped her lips.
Cradling Ju with one arm, I knelt beside Elenia and slipped my other hand under her shoulders.
“Shhh,” I whispered. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. You’ll be fine. It’s okay…”
She started crying, clutching me tight, pressing into my shoulder like she wanted to crawl inside my chest and disappear.
I held her as best I could, trying to calm her trembling body—while my heart hammered with new panic.
Ju was limp in my other arm. Completely unconscious.
Blood ran from her nose. From her eyes.
No. No no no.
She hung in my grasp like a marionette with cut strings.
Should I try to heal her? But even if I managed to channel White Flower's mana that would make me drunk as hell, useless in seconds.
My ears strained, catching the growing commotion down the hill. The priests were barking orders.
Some people seemed to have had enough and were running away, but most seemed to have recovered after the shock and I heard angry shouts growing louder.
For a moment, Elenia tried to push me away, mumbling something incoherent.
“I’m Lores. You’re fine. I’ll bring you to Mike,” I said in Vynaian. That seemed to reach her—she stopped struggling, her breathing still shallow but less frantic.
It took every ounce of self-control not to explode. I was dead worried about Ju—she’d been bleeding from the eyes, damn it—and now I had to calm down a panicking girl on top of everything? But of course she was terrified. After what she’d just endured, fear was the most logical response.
“She resurrected you,” I said as gently as I could, guiding her attention to Ju’s unconscious form in my arm. “And now she’s passed out. I need to check on her, then we’re leaving, okay?”
“Re... re... resurrected?” she murmured, tapping her face with trembling fingers like she needed to make sure it was still there.
Even with the altar crowd shrieking like a wounded beast not far away, she looked... surprisingly calm. Agitated, yes—eyes darting as she tried to place where she was—but not breaking.
I turned my attention to Ju, heart pounding. I was immensely worried. Just as I pulled a potion from my inventory, her eyes fluttered open.
“Bleah... no potion, please. I get a headache from those,” she mumbled, feebly pushing my hand away.
I took a deep breath, filling my lungs like someone surfacing from deep underwater.
The noise reached me next—shouts and clanking armor. I turned and saw them: some soldiers with weapons drawn and curious onlookers were heading our way.
Ju's light show—despite my hastily drawn illusion mirrors—must have attracted more attention than I’d hoped.
My fingers twitched, magic coiling at the tips, ready to blast them into nothingness.
But then Ju’s hand landed gently on my shoulder.
“Take us out of here,” she said softly. “Ignore them.”
I hesitated. I was still damn worried about her—but the fact that she could speak gave me enough confidence that she wasn’t about to drop dead.
With a long sigh, I summoned my transformation spell.
A moment later, I stood as a towering monster, claws stretching wide and I scooped up both girls in my paws.
Elenia promptly fainted.
I’d often wondered why Sid could take off so easily, while I struggled like a collapsing siege tower every time. What was he doing differently?
One explanation I’d considered was the way we used gravity manipulation. Maybe I was spreading my altered gravitational field way too wide. Every time I tried to take off, I ended up dragging half the surrounding terrain with me—logs, rocks, sometimes entire sections of hill.
But Sid? There was never an avalanche trailing after his wings. Why?
He must’ve been concentrating his gravitational field into a much narrower zone—tighter, more focused. That would make it far more efficient from a mana standpoint, and likely let him generate a stronger pull, too.
So I tried again.
This time, I narrowed the field—focused it more tightly.
And suddenly, I wasn’t yanking the entire countryside along for the ride.
Another revelation struck me as I lifted off: I’d always cast the field beneath me—because that’s where I was looking.
Of course I’d been dragging everything up with me!
I spread my wings and launched skyward—and it was the smoothest takeoff I’d ever managed!
Sure, I took off from a hilltop, so I had a bit of help. But still—it was a performance worth remembering.
I almost let out a banzai howl in celebration.
Almost.