Chương 185: 22. Traitor Within 1

The moment Ignicia landed on the Breakwater's deck, what I heard first wasn't the thud of her boots hitting the planks. It was the sound of release. A soft whoosh—like an invisible giant finally unclenching its fingers from our throats. That crushing pressure that had been grinding my chest flat, making my knees want to fold backward—gone. Clean as a blade through rope. The instant her feet touched wood, it simply ceased to exist. What followed was a cascade of collapses. Crew members went down one after another.

Those leaning against the mast slid straight to the deck. Those gripping lines let go and toppled backward. Two didn't even bother with the dramatics—eyes rolled up and they dropped like stones. … Honestly, I wanted to laugh. The prerequisite being that my own legs weren't currently the consistency of noodles fresh out of boiling water. I used my sword as a crutch, fought my breathing back toward something resembling order, and looked toward the center of the deck. The crimson dragon was gone.

In her place stood Ignicia in human form. Her damp hair clung to her shoulders, that ridiculously conspicuous cloak lifting in the sea breeze to reveal the practical clothing beneath—fitted but unfancy, everything trimmed for movement rather than display. She still carried a trace of pallor from blood loss, but those gold-red eyes burned bright enough to be unsettling. Especially when she curved the corner of her mouth. That wasn't the serene smile of a princess finally safe on home soil.

That was the smile of someone who is constitutionally incapable of letting anything go, finally collecting on a very old debt. She looked at Marro and spoke with deliberate slowness.

"Now do you believe that Twilight Dragon scale coin was real?" I nearly choked on the spot. … This woman. She really is pathologically vindictive. After everything—the assassination attempts, the auction block, the Yanxia Empire's Ravens hunting us across open water, the running battle all the way to Dragon Kingdom seas—she still remembered exactly how Marro had tried to fleece us over that coin.

The one-eyed captain in question was currently half-kneeling, half-sitting on the deck, one hand pressed to his chest, one braced against the planks. His face looked like it had personally received about fifteen slaps from the open ocean. He stayed quiet for two full seconds. Then he raised that single eye, looked at Ignicia, glanced down at the small leather pouch at his hip where the dragon scale coin had once lived, and—against all reasonable expectation—grinned.

"…I've squeezed quite a few people in my time, Your Highness."

"But trying to fleece an actual Dragon Kingdom princess and still being alive to breathe about it—" He coughed, spitting a mouthful of salt-tinged blood to the side.

"That ought to keep me bragging in hell for thirty years." It sounded like a joke. But what I heard underneath wasn't lightness at all—something seasoned and clear-eyed, the kind of reckoning that comes not from fear but from recalibration. He wasn't panicking about having offended someone powerful. He was doing the math. Figuring out, with cold precision, exactly what tier of absolute disaster he'd just waded into.

While that exchange was settling, the lead dragon cavalry rider was completing something that had been pulling at my attention. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. His mount—which had landed on the water's surface—had no business staying there by any biological logic. But I watched him crouch along the dragon's flank and fasten what appeared to be a harness apparatus: bronze rings threaded with deep-blue crystal stones.

Half bridle, half flotation device. The moment it locked into place, the previously agitated creature simply... stabilized. Floating there, patient as a breathing ship. … The Dragon Kingdom's engineering occasionally made me want to file a formal complaint with the universe. Exactly how many more game-breaking innovations were they hiding? Once his mount was stable, the rider vaulted onto the Breakwater in a single motion.

The crew—who normally projected the collective energy of men who would absolutely stab someone in an alley—had gone as quiet as seabirds struck by lightning. The rider's gaze swept us: the severed lines, the scorched planks, the blood not entirely scrubbed away, the overturned barrels. Then it settled on Ignicia. Ignicia simply stepped forward.

"I am Ignicia Dracunia," she declared.

"Daughter of Albatros Dracunia, the Twilight Dragon." She didn't recite the full string of titles—the one that could wallpaper half a cathedral if you wrote it out. She didn't need to. The rider's expression shifted in a way that had nothing to do with surprise. It was the look of someone receiving confirmation of his worst-case scenario while leaving no room for doubt. Without hesitation, his knee hit the deck, right hand across his chest, head bowed.

"Your Highness." His voice was tight.

"May I ask what has—" Ignicia didn't let him finish. She drew a letter from within her cloak. I hadn't seen it before. The envelope was deep crimson, sealed with wax bearing a dragon motif that radiated do not touch this under any circumstances from ten paces. When she held it out, her hand was perfectly steady—not the steadiness of someone who'd just survived a naval engagement, but the steadiness of someone stepping out of a palace corridor.

"Deliver this directly to the King," she said. The rider accepted it with both hands.

"No one else touches it. If anyone tries—" Ignicia's eyes narrowed fractionally.

"Tell them to come ask me first." I swear the sea wind itself paused for a beat. The rider bowed his head immediately.

"Yes, Your Highness!" No hesitation. No embellishment. Clean as a blade falling. It was only then—standing on a battered, smoke-stained deck with a dragon cavalry rider kneeling before her—that I fully grasped something I'd been circling around. The dragon who usually looked at me with that particular expression of how have you survived this long— She wasn't simply powerful. She wasn't simply difficult.

She was someone who could make her own kingdom's cavalry kneel on a stranger's deck, in front of a crowd of wanted outlaws, without a moment's hesitation. And she hadn't even fully deployed her authority yet. The rider left without another word. He rose, stepped back, bowed once more to Ignicia, then dropped cleanly onto his mount. The dragon exhaled a low rumble, beat its wings once, and lifted off in a wash of salt-spray. I watched until the silhouette disappeared entirely.

Then, from beside me, came a long, deeply unheroic sigh.

"Right." Marro braced a hand on his knee and hauled himself upright. He rolled his shoulders, patted his neck to confirm it was still attached.

"From this point forward—no one mentions whether those two dragon scale coins looked fake. That conversation is over. That was never about money." His voice still had that particular quality—dry, faintly mocking, like everything was mildly amusing. But there was something different in his posture. Straighter than usual. Not deference. More like a wolf that had been ambling along half-asleep and had just caught something dangerous on the wind—spine lifting, full attention engaged.

"Blake—drag those two dead-weight performers out of the way before they become a hazard."

"Nico—starboard damage assessment."

"Lov—any powder still functional, secure it. Anything compromised, douse it with seawater. I'd rather not be launched skyward by my own deck." The orders came without pauses, each one landing like a thrown weight. The crew who'd been pressed into the planks by dragon-aura moments ago moved on instinct. Someone groaned while hauling a body. Someone else cursed steadily while working a broken line. One man gave up on standing and crawled toward scattered tools. This was what made Marro genuinely dangerous.

He didn't need to become a knight. He didn't need to suddenly acquire dignity. He just needed to open his mouth, and every soul on this wrecked ship would understand—it was not yet time to lie down and wait for death. He turned and looked at Ignicia. No teasing in that look. No upward-angled flattery. Just the direct, practical inquiry of someone recalibrating a working relationship.

"Your Highness." He paused, testing how the title sat in his mouth.

"Going forward—how much do you want me to say, and how much do you want me to bury?" Ignicia reached up and pushed a strand of wind-tangled hair behind her ear. Her tone was as casual as deciding what to have for dinner.

"Handle it the way you normally handle trouble."

"Meaning?"

"Don't volunteer information." She glanced at him.

"But don't play dumb so hard that it raises questions." Marro actually laughed.

"That's a high bar."

"You're worth the rate."

"… I'm genuinely pleased by that, which is frankly disturbing." Standing slightly to the side, I experienced a bizarre sense of clarity. Two people. One a one-eyed smuggler captain who'd sell his own mother if the price was right. The other a Dragon Kingdom princess who'd just turned three enemy warships into floating bonfires. And they were talking to each other like two professionals who'd collectively decided there was no time for theater—just the fastest, cleanest way to establish who stood where.

The ease of it was reassuring. Which was exactly why it made me uneasy. Because that kind of efficiency between people who had no reason to trust each other usually meant what was waiting ahead wasn't small.