Chương 230: 39. Scorched Earth 2

Ignicia stared at me, stunned. She clearly hadn't expected me to end up saying something that could only come out of a man who'd already thrown his brain out a window. Then her face went red. Not the exaggerated kind. Not the practiced, decorative flush a noble lady puts on when presented with jewelry or sweet words.

Hers looked like it burned its way up from somewhere deeper — rising first from beneath the dampness at the corners of her eyes, spreading across her cheeks, until even the tips of her ears looked as though the firelight had burned straight through them, nearly translucent. Her lips parted, like she meant to say something. Not a single word made it out first. she took a step forward and buried her face straight into my chest. I froze completely. I mean it — total system failure.

If someone had swung a blade at me right then, I probably would have looked down at her first and dodged second. Her forehead pressed against the fabric over my chest, her hands gripping my collar, as if she was afraid that the instant she let go, I'd do something even stupider — like flagging down another wagon and bolting again. The contact was light. And yet I suddenly had no idea what to do with my own hands. I've run into my fair share of trouble in this life. Dragged into murder cases.

Glared at by a dragon princess. Outmaneuvered by Vixenfolk. Strapped to a dragon's back and sent to bomb ships. Forced to watch an entire harbor rot to pieces in real time. Honestly, add all of that together, and none of it left me half as lost as I was right now.

"You..." I'd barely gotten the word out when a muffled voice answered from against my chest.

"Shut up."

"... Understood." Fair enough. If I opened my mouth again right now, the odds were excellent I'd shatter whatever fragile thing had somehow, miraculously, managed to grow between us in the middle of all this fire and blood. So I just stood there, stiff and awkward, and slowly raised one hand, letting it come to rest, very lightly, on her back. She didn't pull away. That was enough. And then— BOOM!!! A massive explosion in the distance tore the moment clean out from between us. The ground shook.

We both looked up at the same instant, toward the source. Along the eastern warehouse belt, a line of fire had already speared into the night sky. Then a second point ignited. Then a third. It wasn't the chaotic, random pattern of enemy arson. It was precise. Deliberate. As if someone had lined up the entire warehouse district like a row of firecrackers and was lighting them one after another, straight down the line. Whatever moisture had still lingered in Ignicia's eyes was crushed back down in that same instant.

She stepped back from my chest, raised a hand to wipe away the trace at the corner of her eye that no one was supposed to see, exhaled once, and put that composed, unreadable mask — the one I'd nearly forgotten she was capable of wearing — back on her face. Only this time, it was obvious the mask had already cracked once.

"... Looks like it's time," she said quietly. I followed her gaze deeper into the harbor, toward the chain of fires lighting up one after another, and it clicked.

"Those warehouses—""I already had them dealt with," she said. I turned to look at her. She kept her eyes forward, her voice flat again — colder now than before.

"The deep-storage vaults. The supply depots. The fire-oil reserves. The pilings at several of the main piers. The transfer lines connecting the inner and outer harbor. I had blast-crystals and charges buried in all of them beforehand." She said it the way you'd read off a perfectly mundane inventory list.

"Drake Tower was the eye. Those places are this harbor's stomach, its limbs, its veins." I understood. No — it was more than understanding. For the first time all night, I actually found myself feeling something close to sympathy for the Yanxia Empire. Because this woman had never intended to simply get everyone out. From the very beginning, she'd meant to turn the entire Port of Isca Apubra into something that, even if captured, would leave the enemy with nothing but a mouthful of ash and blood on both hands.

"You planned to blow up the whole port too?"

"What else?" she said, flat and unbothered.

"Would you rather I leave them a perfectly intact commercial harbor — warehouses, cranes, supply lines and all — so they can open for business here by morning?" Fair point. So fair that I genuinely couldn't decide whether to admire her or hold a moment of silence for the enemy fleet. Another blast rolled in from deeper in the harbor. This time, from the docks. The tall loading cranes tilted against the firelight, then came down in a row, dragging out a chain of snapping timber and collapsing stone foundations.

Deeper in, the warehouse belt kept going one building at a time, as if some invisible fire-dragon were biting its way down the line. Blast-crystals detonated in sequence at each buried point, throwing column after column of flame into the night. Ignicia turned abruptly and walked toward an unremarkable storage building off to one side.

"Follow."

"I have no intention of getting back on a wagon this time, for the record." She didn't slow down. She only threw back: "Keep talking and I'll bury you here along with everything else."

"... Somehow, that's the most reassuring thing you've said all night." Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. We rushed into the storage building together. It should have held harbor maintenance supplies. Now it held only a handful of small crates that hadn't made it out, two long-handled ignition staffs, and a narrow staircase leading underground.

Heat and the sharp bite of saltpeter drifted up from below, as if something down there had already been lying in wait all night, ready to breathe fire. Ignicia grabbed one of the staffs and tossed it back to me without looking. I nearly fumbled it.

"Wait — don't tell me you're about to—""The last main fuse on the south side hasn't been lit yet." She was already heading down, not looking back.

"What you just heard was only the opening sequence. If we're taking the harbor's core with it, there's one more thing to finish." I watched her back and felt a strange urge to laugh. Not because any of this was funny. But because not long ago, I'd genuinely believed the peak of tonight's job description was high-altitude explosive delivery boy. Apparently my portfolio had since been expanded to include: personally assisting a princess in blowing an entire harbor off the map. Life really is full of surprises.

The underground vault was deeper than I'd expected. The walls were stacked with opened powder crates and blast-crystals threaded through with dark red veins. Fuses of varying thickness ran along the floor and up the base of the walls, branching off in every direction — like a nest of sleeping vipers buried beneath the harbor, waiting for someone to wake every last one of them at once. Ignicia crouched and quickly checked the thickest of the main lines.

"Still good," she said. I stood beside her, ignition staff in hand, keenly aware that this did not resemble any standard working environment for an ambassador of any nation.

"I'm suddenly starting to understand why you didn't want me wandering too far away earlier." She glanced up at me.

"Because you're still useful."

"... That may be the least romantic thing anyone's ever said to me, and yet somehow I feel genuinely comforted." The corner of her mouth moved. Very small. Very brief. Like a flicker of amusement had tried to slip out before she caught it and dragged it back into line. Then she pressed a spare fuse into my hand.

"When I light the main line, you light this one beside it. If the main line gets cut, the secondary will still take the southern warehouse district and the lower sub-vaults with it." I looked down at the accelerant-soaked cord in my hand and swallowed.

"I genuinely think the one person who least belongs here tonight is me."

"Only just figuring that out?"

"I've always known. I just haven't had the spare time to regret it lately." Another explosion rocked the surface above us. This time the vault itself shuddered, fine dust sifting down from the cracks between the stones. Ignicia stood. The tip of her ignition staff glowed dull red in the dark.

"Ready." I took a long breath and lit my own. Two small flames flickered in the underground dark. For a moment, the sheer absurdity of it all hit me at once. One moment she'd had her face buried in my chest. The next, we were standing in an underground vault, one ignition staff each, about to jointly reduce a world-renowned commercial port to a footnote in a history book. Absurd as it was, though, I had never felt more certain of anything. Staying had been the right choice.

Because she could do this alone was never a good enough reason to let her.

"Light it." Her voice was low and sharp. We touched fire to the lines at the same instant. The fuses woke almost immediately, flame racing along the blackened cords in every direction, like countless glowing serpents unleashed into the dark beneath the harbor. Main line, secondary line, branch lines — one after another, all of them racing toward the exact points that most needed to burn.

"Move!" Ignicia seized my wrist and bolted. We tore up those stairs with our own lives riding on every single step. The passage was narrow, fire already thrashing along the walls behind us, as if the entire underground had turned into a single storm chasing us toward daylight. The instant I burst out through the storage house doors, the harbor outside lit up again. This time, it wasn't just one warehouse. It wasn't just one warehouse this time.

It was the entire harbor core, section by section, detonating all at once. First, the southern main warehouse belt. Then, immediately after, the supply depots and fire-oil reserves along the inner harbor. A heartbeat later, the blast-crystals buried along the pier pilings and transfer walkways flared to life in unison, as though a single hand had pressed every trigger down at once.

Timber cranes, stacking platforms, half-ruined jetties, mooring facilities, the military depots and transfer hubs running the length of the coastline — all of it ruptured in the same unbroken chain of death. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom— It was as if someone had shoved a maddened fire-dragon into the ground beneath the Port of Isca Apubra and simply let it thrash. Columns of flame speared into the night sky, one after another. Shockwaves rolled outward in overlapping rings until the stone beneath my boots trembled.

The warehouse blocks collapsed first. The piers followed. The moment the shipyards and supply platforms along the water — already battered raw by the earlier fire assault — took the second wave of detonations, the entire outer ring peeled back as if someone had flayed a layer of skin clean off the coastline. Distant, panicked shouting rose from the Yanxia troops. Some screamed for water. Some screamed to fall back.

And some, probably only in this instant, understood at last that what they had seized wasn't a harbor at all. It was a trap, and it was already biting. Ignicia looked back once. There was no satisfaction in her eyes. No lingering regret, either. Only confirmation. Confirming that the fire had bitten into everything it was meant to consume. Confirming that the warehouse district had been taken out as a whole.

Confirming that the docks and supply lines were ruined so completely that not even tomorrow's sunrise would help anyone piece them back together. A moment later, she exhaled.

"Enough." Those two words rang out like the final toll of a funeral bell for this harbor. The fires burned. The tower had fallen. The warehouses were gone. The port had collapsed. Everything that could be carried out of this place tonight, she'd had carried out. What couldn't be moved, she burned with her own hands. What wouldn't burn clean, she blew apart. She hadn't been retreating. She had been leaving the enemy the most exquisitely composed curse she could manage: You're welcome to come in.

All you'll find beneath your feet is ash. Ignicia stood beside me in silence for two breaths. Then she raised a hand and pressed it to the side of her own neck. The fire-crests along her body ignited. From her throat, along the molten seams running through her armor, across the back of her hand, down the curve of her waist — the light spread outward, like magma clawing its way up through cracked stone toward open air. The air around her heated almost instantly. Even the drifting ash nearby seemed to catch the glow.

I stepped back to give her room, and couldn't stop myself from muttering:"I'm starting to think the hardest-working organ here tonight was my own heart." She turned her face slightly in the firelight and threw me a sideways glance.

"If you're still breathing, shut up."

"Understood." The next instant, the flames rose. A great crimson dragon unfurled within the blaze, her wings spreading wide like a sheet of superheated night given form. Dark red and molten gold rippled along the scales of her spine; her tail swept through the rubble; her talons drove deep into the stone. Even the fires still burning around us seemed to draw back half a step from the sheer weight of her presence.

I'd seen her like this more than once by now, but every single time she let that particular weight — the weight of being, unmistakably, a dragon — roll fully out into the open, it delivered the same reminder: the creature standing before me wasn't merely a princess with an especially foul temper. She was a fully qualified natural disaster, entirely capable of peeling a battlefield open if she felt like it. She lowered her head, breath scorching.

"Get on, Cedric." I looked up at her, and found myself remembering, of all things, what I'd said to her not long ago — and the sight of her face burning that unreasonable shade of red right afterward. In the end, I couldn't stop the corner of my mouth from twitching upward.

"If I ask again right now, does that make me look like a man who's learned absolutely nothing?" One golden, slit-pupiled eye narrowed, just slightly.

"Yes."

"I'm asking anyway." She let out something that might generously be called a snort, then lowered her foreleg just enough to give me an angle to climb.

"Get on. Now." Right. Still every bit as tyrannically efficient as ever. Very on-brand. I hauled myself up along her foreleg and the base of her wing. The instant my palm met her scales, that familiar heat sank straight through my skin — not the wild, out-of-control kind that burns, but a pressure of life too vast and too present to ignore. I pulled myself onto her back, found the saddle and the ridge of spines, and settled in.

The muscle and bone shifting beneath me with every breath she took felt as steady as a mountain that had spent a very long time quietly storing up its own strength. Below us, the last chain of detonations was still spreading through what remained of the harbor. We had sent it to its grave with our own hands. And now, it really was dying, right beneath our feet. She beat her wings. A wall of heat and night wind slammed into me at once.

The shattered Port of Isca Apubra dropped away fast beneath us — fire columns, thick smoke, broken bridges, a sea slicked black with burning oil, and out past all of it, the silhouettes of enemy ships still trapped between the wreckage and the dead harbor — all of it shrinking into a single map that had been burned clean through. I flattened myself against her back and threw my voice into the wind.

"So where exactly are we flying?!" She cut forward through the smoke, her voice carrying back clear enough to carve itself directly into my ear.

"The capital of the Dragon Kingdom. Latpan."