Chương 146: 08. Crash Landin 3

I drew a slow breath and mentally filed every useless instinct—shame, etiquette, anything unrelated to immediate survival—into a folder labeled deal with later.

"One condition, Your Highness." I had my sleeve rolled, looking at the layered armor that continued to project its do not proceed warning.

"If your fire-veins cook my arm, you owe me a respectable epitaph."

"Shut up and reach." Good. Still had enough energy for curtness. Still alive. I knelt beside her neck and tested the temperature with the back of my hand before committing. The heat reached me before contact—not dry flame, but something organic and rhythmic, like pressing against something with a very large, very agitated heartbeat. She was a volcano under strict orders to hold together, and the interior was not cooperating.

"Which one?" I asked quietly. Ignicia didn't answer immediately. She turned her head aside, apparently finding the ocean preferable to watching what came next. After two measured breaths, she forced it out.

"Third scale on the left. The seam underneath." I found it immediately. Every other scale was dense, interlocking, unyielding—architectural certainty designed to refuse entry. But this one was different. Its edge lifted slightly, and beneath it, the fire-veining ran brighter and deeper than anywhere else, like a door placed directly over an artery. My fingers paused. She noticed instantly.

"Don't tell me you've lost your nerve."

"I haven't lost my nerve." I looked at the inverse scale.

"I've just developed a new appreciation for why dragons would rather die than let anyone near this." She didn't respond. But the fire-pattern along her neck flickered visibly out of rhythm. No more hesitation. I set my jaw and slowly worked my fingers into the seam. Heat. Not ordinary heat—the kind that confuses the brain into expecting damage that somehow doesn't arrive. Like reaching into the center of a forge and finding it occupied by something alive. And beneath the heat, the surface wasn't smooth.

There was a pulse down there—slow, enormous, dangerous—pressing against my fingertips with the cadence of something massive and barely restrained. The moment I made contact, Ignicia's entire body went rigid.

"Don't move!" I said sharply.

"If you flinch now and I slip, neither of us is going to enjoy what happens next."

"... I'm not flinching."

"Your tail is about to level the beach." She said nothing. The tail stopped. Reluctantly. I forced my focus back to my hand. The fire-vein beneath the inverse scale was pulsing erratically, throwing off irregular surges of heat—and woven through it, something that had no business being there. Cold. Viscous. Like something poisonous that had learned to move through fire without being consumed. There. The curse.

"I've found it," I said, barely above a whisper.

"Next?" Ignicia's breathing had gone noticeably shallower.

"Grip it."

"That's functionally identical to telling me to wrestle a venomous snake bare-handed."

"It's essentially the same thing," she said, voice gone hoarse.

"Grip it and drag it outward. Don't let it burrow deeper." I had several choice words about that instruction. I kept them to myself. I pushed deeper and made contact with the curse corruption directly. The cold hit like crushed ice and iron filings injected into the bloodstream—a numbing, nauseating sting that shot from fingertip to shoulder in an instant.

"Hss—""Don't let go!" she snapped.

"I know!" I clamped down on the wave of revulsion, closed my fingers around the thing—it felt like gripping something alive and objecting—and pulled. Ignicia's entire body arched like she'd been struck by lightning.

"Just—hold on—" This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Her voice had lost all its architecture—raw sound forced up from somewhere deep in her chest. The shock nearly knocked me backward. I braced my free hand against her scales and held position.

"Stopping now is what gets someone killed!" I shouted back.

"Hold on!"

"You—" She tried to curse me. The words didn't make it out because the curse corruption had shifted, peeling away from the fire-vein like rot torn from living tissue. The wound responded immediately. The blue-green markings flared with hostile luminescence, and the flow of violet blood accelerated. My scalp prickled, but my grip didn't waver.

"It's moving!" I forced the words through clenched teeth.

"What's next?!" Ignicia hauled in two sharp breaths before she could answer.

"A little more... drag it to the wound's edge..."

"You'd better be certain this step doesn't kill both of us."

"Shut up and keep going!" Right. Even half-destroyed, the Fire Dragon Princess's mouth was harder than the rest of her combined. I ignored the deepening sting and dragged the corruption outward inch by inch. It clung like something that had decided it belonged there permanently. Every fraction of progress made Ignicia's body pull tighter against itself. Low sounds started escaping her throat—sounds she was clearly fighting to suppress. Her tail carved erratic furrows through the sand.

Her claws raked deep gouges into the beach. Under any other circumstances, I would be the target of that destruction. The fact that she was destroying the sand instead told me everything about how much this was costing her. And it told me I was doing it right.

"There!" I called out.

"It's at the edge—now what?!"

"Move—" She got the word out on her last available breath. I yanked my hand back and threw myself clear. Before I'd even found my footing, the wound erupted. Not the uncontrolled overflow from before. Something precise—a thread of concentrated crimson-gold fire, needle-thin and burning with absolute intent, driving directly into the mass of corruption I'd dragged to the surface. Tss. One small sound that went through my entire spine. The sound of something being burned alive from the inside.

The curse corruption convulsed—actually convulsed, writhing with the desperation of something that understood it was being evicted permanently. Part of it tried to retreat along my hand. My instinct screamed to pull away, but I looked up and found Ignicia's golden slit-pupils contracted to razor lines, every fragment of her remaining concentration driving that fire-thread deeper.

"Burn it..." she said. Not to me. To herself. An order issued inward. The corruption contracted, blackened, and shattered with a dry, brittle crack. Then ash. Then silence. Nothing but waves and two sets of breathing that had completely abandoned any pretense of composure. I looked at my hand first. From fingertip to palm: red, raw, like skin that had been introduced to a forge. The cold sting lingered beneath the surface like something had left a residue. I had a powerful urge to bury the whole thing in sand.

But what made me exhale in relief was the wound on Ignicia's flank. The blue-green was fading. Not gone. But the first wave of corruption had been stopped. She lay against the sand like something from which a great deal had just been removed. The erratic fire-veining along her neck was settling by degrees—dimmer than before, but no longer the cascading collapse it had been moments ago. I wiped cold sweat from my forehead and discovered my entire back was soaked.

"... If I'd known it would go like that, I would have stuck with the virgin—""Cedric." She didn't lift her head. Her voice was precise and cold.

"Say that one more time. I don't care if I only have half my strength left. I will bury you on this island."

"Understood, not saying it." I raised my uninjured hand.

"How do you feel?" A pause.

"Terrible."

"Which means you're still alive."

"Is this how humans comfort people? Because it's deeply punchable."

"Only when the person I'm talking to still has enough energy to punch me." She made a low, dismissive sound. But there was more familiar fire in it than anything I'd heard in the last hour. She was climbing back. I moved carefully closer and examined the wound. The blue-green had receded, but fine curse-lines still threaded through the interior like mold that hadn't finished being burned out. The violet blood was still flowing, though slower.

"First wave contained?" I asked.

"Contained." She closed her eyes, as though the admission cost her something.

"Not clean. Part of it went too deep—I can only hold it for now. Keep it from spreading."

"So we're still not out of trouble."

"You're only realizing this now?"

"I wanted to hear you say it."

"Get away from me." Good. She was definitely coming back. I was about to make another observation when the fire-veining across her body shifted—not the erratic surge from before, but something slower, more deliberate. Heat finding its proper channels again, moving beneath her scales with something approaching purpose. I went still.

"Your Highness?" She didn't answer. Her claws pressed deeper into the sand. Her breathing steadied through two long cycles. She looked less like someone about to act and more like someone gathering the last of what they had. Then I understood.

"You're changing back?"

"... What else?" Her voice had dropped to barely above a murmur.

"Did you want to keep having this conversation while I look like this?" Honestly, her dragon form wasn't the core problem. The core problem was that if she stayed like this, hiding her before daylight became a logistical nightmare that would send me into the ocean before I'd started trying. I stepped back immediately.

"Go ahead. Change. I'm not stopping you."

"Obviously." She gritted her teeth and let the fire-veining begin its recession. It moved from her neck outward to the wing roots, then down along her underbelly in slow, laborious stages. This wasn't the clean transformation I'd witnessed before. Every point of light moved like it was dragging an injury behind it. Every flare was followed by a catch in her breathing. The massive dragon frame contracted by degrees through what looked like pure force of will. Heat rolled across the sand.

I raised my arm to shield my face. Wings folded first. The tail shortened. Crimson-gold and black scales drew back into shadow like embers cooling, and the vast shape that had dominated the beach compressed itself down until what remained was a single curled, unmistakably fragile human silhouette. When the light cleared, what I saw wasn't a Fire Dragon Princess. It was a woman kneeling in the sand, one hand braced against the ground, shoulders trembling faintly with the effort of staying upright.

Her long hair fell loose and disheveled across her back. Her face had gone pale enough to be alarming. Cold sweat clung to her temples. The wound in her side had contracted to human scale—still ugly, still weeping violet at the edges—but on a human frame, it looked even more serious. She looked up at me. The look said, very clearly: Show one unnecessary expression and I will find the energy. I relocated my gaze to a neutral point and threw my coat over.

"Put that on," I said.

"Congratulations, Your Highness. At minimum, we no longer have to figure out how to hide an entire dragon in the tree line." She caught the coat and pulled it over her shoulders. The movement was slow, stiff.

"Cedric."

"Yes?"

"You had better pray this never leaves this island." I looked at the pale grey beginning to bleed into the horizon and exhaled with genuine feeling.

"Your Highness," I said, "given the state we're both in, whether we survive until sunrise is still very much an open question." She looked at me with the expression of someone who wanted to say something cutting and simply didn't have the reserves. In the end, she just let out a long, quiet breath.