Chương 132: 04. Dragon Princess 1

"Human." She looked down at me, her tone carrying the kind of arrogance so deeply ingrained it had stopped bothering to perform itself.

"This Princess permits you to look upon me. Raise your head." I raised my head. And for the first time, I saw her clearly. She wore a fitted cuirass in dark brown-black, the plates conforming closely to her body—yet nothing like the rigid deadness of ordinary metal. Because between every seam and joint, orange-red light moved in slow, continuous flow, like molten rock forcibly sealed inside iron, perpetually threatening to find the nearest crack and erupt through it.

Spiked dragon-scale vambraces covered her forearms. Heavy leather boots on her feet. Every piece of it was functional—designed to break things, not impress anyone. But the most striking element wasn't the armor. It was the dark crimson battle skirt. The hem had been torn to ruins—ragged edges carrying scorch marks and rips that had nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with recent violence.

It looked less like attire chosen for a diplomatic meeting and more like she'd been dismantling monsters with her bare hands somewhere out back, decided her claws were getting ashy, and thought she might as well stop in to hold a conference. This was my first time facing a great dragon at this distance. Even one currently wearing a human shape. She leaned slightly forward. Dense crimson hair—dark enough to be almost black—fell forward and nearly brushed my face.

Between the loose strands, a pair of pointed ears shifted slightly—a small motion that communicated impatience with unusual clarity. What actually sent a chill down my spine, however, were her eyes. Those were not human eyes. Golden vertical pupils, narrowed to near-slits, fixed on me with an expression that contained neither anger nor the boiling violence of imminent killing intent. Which was, if anything, worse—because what they contained instead was something far more fundamental. Pure condescension.

She wasn't looking at an envoy she might speak with as an equal. She was looking at a small animal that happened to still be alive, weighing whether it was worth another few seconds of her attention. Then the corner of her mouth lifted into a grin that was less smile and more declaration of intent—and I saw, in that moment, the particular sharpness of a canine tooth that no human mouth had any business containing. Right.

At least now I knew with certainty that the charred beam embedded in the hillside outside Typhon Fortress hadn't flown there on its own.

"... Acceptable." She finished her assessment of me with the air of someone evaluating a newly acquired horse for its likelihood of collapsing mid-journey, and arrived at a verdict that was, generously speaking, lukewarm.

"What is your name?"

"Cedric Rosa, Your Highness." She didn't respond immediately—only tilted her chin slightly upward, as though filing the name somewhere. Beside her, Randolph looked as though he had witnessed something that defied his understanding of natural law, his jaw positioned in a way that suggested it had forgotten how to close. Honestly, I was somewhat curious what had shocked him more: that I hadn't been incinerated yet, or that Her Highness had actually bothered to ask my name first.

The next moment, she delivered her own introduction in a voice that made the furniture consider whether it wanted to remain structurally intact.

"Listen carefully, human—this Princess is the Terminal Flame of Popocatépetl, Sovereign of the Obsidian Rift, Sun that Crosses the Volcanic Belt, Heir of the Ancient Obsidian Bloodline, Supreme Ruler of Dracunia's Seat of Power—Dragon Princess, Ignicia Dracunia." She finished and looked at me with the expression of someone who had just delivered an objectively correct statement and was awaiting appropriate acknowledgment. With notable self-satisfaction. I was silent for a moment.

I could hardly applaud and praise the magnificent scale, structural integrity, and oral endurance requirements of her honorifics. Taken at face value, they sounded exactly like someone had combined a dynastic genealogy with a natural disaster assessment report and read it aloud at full volume. What I actually wanted to ask was whether the full recitation was designed to intimidate foreign dignitaries, or specifically engineered to torture anyone meeting her for the first time.

Randolph, to his credit, had fewer surplus thoughts than I did. He appeared to suddenly recall that he held the position of Ambassador, went visibly pale, stepped forward and dropped to one knee, voice stretched tight as a bowstring. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

"Your Highness, please—please stop attacking the towns." Ignicia glanced down at him with the expression of someone regarding a stone they couldn't be bothered to step on but found aesthetically objectionable, and produced a contemptuous sound.

"Look at the lot of you." She didn't even raise her voice when she said it. And somehow that was worse than shouting—because that particular flat, effortless dismissal communicated something that volume never could: She wasn't performing. This was simply how she saw people. All the way down. By this point, I had assembled a fairly complete picture of this fire dragon princess. Domineering. Unyielding. Zero patience. Absolute contempt for anything that went in circles.

And she was not the kind of person who banked her fire and waited for you to guess. If she decided to burn something, she burned it. In other words, the figure standing before me was not a diplomatic counterpart suited to methodical reasoning. She was a volcano that had put on clothes as a loose formality and had absolutely no intention of pretending not to be a natural disaster.

"Good." Ignicia looked down at me with the air of someone who had completed an evaluation whose criteria only she understood.

"From now on, this Princess speaks only with Cedric." She said it with such complete naturalness—as though she wasn't removing an entire room of people from the negotiating table, but simply sweeping a collection of inconvenient furniture into a corner. The room went quiet for exactly one beat. Then every face in it cracked simultaneously. Fornal stared. Randolph stared.

Even the Dragon Kingdom officials who had been quietly recovering from the earlier pressure lifted their heads, apparently questioning whether the dragon's presence had compressed their hearing into producing hallucinations. As for me— I genuinely wanted to ask on what grounds. Unfortunately, before that question reached my mouth, Jessi had already moved.

"Wait, young—" Her voice had barely emerged when Ignicia, without turning her head, glanced sideways. That glance was more direct than fire. The heat in the room spiked once. Several small sparks materialized silently at her fingertips, flared for an instant, and vanished—the most casual threat I had ever witnessed.

"Anyone with objections," she said pleasantly, "is welcome to take them up with my dragon flame." Every person in the room took a step backward in perfect unison. Not a step. More accurately—a deeply undignified collective retreat of approximately fifteen paces. Even Matthews moved instinctively forward to intercept, only to be pinned immediately by the pressure, the tendons on the back of his hand standing out as he held position by sheer determination.

Alvira hadn't retreated as badly, but her hand was already on her sword hilt, her expression carrying the cold calculation of someone estimating whether, in the event this dragon decided to carry me off, she could land a blade in its eye before dying. Jessi was the least restrained of all.

She stared at Ignicia with an expression that suggested she was approximately one second from launching herself across the room—and was only being stopped by the extremely practical recognition that at this distance, the result would be one very fragrant piece of charcoal. So she redirected that energy entirely toward me. The look she gave me translated, without ambiguity, to: —You had better come back alive, or I won't even bother selecting your coffin. Wonderful.

I hadn't even completed the mission yet, and I'd already received a pre-emptive funeral portrait reservation from my own people. Ignicia seemed to have finally seen enough of the room's collective reaction. She returned her gaze to me. Those golden vertical pupils contracted slightly—the look of someone examining something they'd just dug out of the ash and found marginally presentable.

"Cedric." She spoke suddenly.

"... Yes, Your Highness?"

"Does your bloodline carry dragon emperor heritage?" I blinked.... What? The question arrived so abruptly that for a moment I genuinely questioned whether the earlier pressure had deprived my brain of sufficient oxygen and I had misheard.

"Almost certainly not." I glanced down at myself honestly, then back up at her.

"As Your Highness can observe—no half-dragon characteristics whatsoever."

"Good." She actually seemed to release something—not quite relief, more like she had taken a suspicion that had been nagging at her and shoved it unceremoniously to one side. Then she reached out and closed her hand around my wrist.

"Come with me."

"Wait—" My wait made it approximately halfway to completion before I was already through the door. Behind me, the room detonated.

"Young master!" Jessi's voice, first and loudest.

"Lord Cedric!" Matthews, one step forward. Alvira didn't call my name. She said, in a voice like ice over steel:"Don't die." Three words. Short. Cold. Entirely her. I didn't have the opportunity to respond to any of it. Because Ignicia did not walk. She moved like fire that had decided on a direction—dragging me through the Embassy's half-ruined rear corridor, kicking open two doors, vaulting a low wall, and stopping only when she reached an open elevated ground where nothing stood between us and the night sky.

Wind hit us full in the face, thick with ash and char and the smell of scorched wood. In the distance, scattered fires still burned across the town—wounds in the earth that hadn't finished bleeding. I had barely found my footing when Ignicia turned back to face me.

"Cedric."

"... Yes?" She looked at me, and the corner of her mouth curved upward. Not a pleasant smile. A dangerous one.

"Hold on." A deeply, profoundly bad feeling rose in my chest.

"Hold on to wha—" The next instant, my scream was shredded by wind before it could form.

"—AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—" She launched. Launched was not the right word. What she did was closer to a declaration of war against the concept of gravity. In the instant she left the ground, Ignicia's body expanded—joints lengthening, shoulders spreading, dark-red light blazing up from beneath her skin before crimson scales covered everything in a cascade that took less than a second. This wasn't transformation.

It was more like she had been restraining something enormous inside a human-shaped container through sheer impatience, and had finally decided the container was no longer worth the effort. I didn't have time to observe the full process. I only felt a force of searing heat seize me and rip me off the ground, my entire field of vision inverting as wind came from every direction simultaneously like blades, very nearly separating my soul from both my body and my dinner.

When I finally managed to pry my eyes open, I was gripping a row of crimson neck scales with both hands and every ounce of strength I possessed. From below—or rather, from everywhere, because the ground was now an abstract concept—came her thunderous laughter.

"HAHAHAHAHA! Enjoying yourself, human?!" I was not. Not even remotely. I wasn't just convinced I was going to die—I was fairly certain my ancestors, my descendants, and every epitaph I hadn't yet earned were lining up in front of me to wave goodbye.

"This kind of thing—" I ground my teeth together, burying my face against the scalding scales along her neck just to keep the wind from evacuating my brain entirely, "—could you possibly warn me first next time—""I told you to hold on!" She said this with complete righteousness, even carrying a trace of genuine bewilderment at my complaint. Excellent.