Chương 12: Maximum Power, Wrong Direction

The Launch Array screamed when the Zubras unlocked the wrong lever. Meno stood on the platform edge while the little striped engineers swarmed the base, hammering pins, kicking wedges, hauling chains, and chirping at each other. The whole frame jerked one notch away from the capital, locked, shuddered, unlocked, and dragged itself across its stone track with a sound like a ship being murdered. Chief Mechanist Venk watched with one hand on her chin.

"That noise normal?" Meno asked.

"Absolutely."

"That sounds like no." Unk stood several paces back, far outside any possible launch radius. Smart. Annoying. His dark coat barely moved in the hot wind coming off Emberhollow, and his face said he had already prepared several versions of "I warned you." The Array turned another notch. Metal scraped stone. A bolt shot loose, pinged off a wall, and made one Zubra clap with both hands before sprinting after it.

The catapult arm dipped, rose, dipped again, then settled facing the sealed steel gate and the pass beyond it. Wrong direction achieved. Chat loved it. zubras are sick maximum power when this is how you become patch notes again Venk lifted two fingers.

"Power." The Zubras hit the pump. The meter climbed from green to yellow fast enough to make Meno's chest tighten. Yellow to red took longer. Red arrived with a shrill little bell, a locking clack, and steam venting from both sides of the frame. The Zubras kept pumping. Meno pointed at the gauge.

"That's red." Venk did not look away from the meter.

"Red is a warning, not a measurement."

"That sounds dangerous."

"Only for the inattentive ones." The Zubras pumped harder. The red needle bent past its markings. Steam hissed through the joints. Small blue-white flames licked along the launch rails, then snapped orange where the wood bracing caught heat. A Zubra ran up with a bucket, considered the flame, and poured the water onto a different valve instead. Meno stared at the launch cradle. It was glowing. A sane person would step back. A healthier ego would say the machine was clearly entering an explosive phase and decline.

Meno had chat watching, Unk judging, Venk measuring, and Zubras practically vibrating with worship around the phrase maximum power. Unk said, "This is how characters get bricked."

"Characters get bricked by bad planning," Meno said.

"You are climbing into a burning siege machine pointed at a locked zone." The cradle spat sparks. Venk snapped her arm down.

"Now!" Meno jumped in because backing out in front of everyone would have required a life with better internal wiring. The Array fired the instant his boots hit the cradle. There was no countdown. No strap check. No helmet. Only an experimental parachute on his back and the cooling liquid the Zubras had splashed over him in their rush. The fortress dropped away. The steel gate flashed beneath him, then the pass, then the road he had been denied. He cleared all of it in one screaming arc.

Black water spread through a marsh cut by reed beds and pale fog. Half-submerged ruins leaned from the mud. Broken stone roads vanished under pools. Long shapes moved beneath the surface, crocodile-shaped or worse, leaving wakes between mats of floating green. Torch lights glimmered near a distant causeway. A watchtower sat tilted in the fog like it had been losing a slow fight for years. He had bypassed the gate. For half a second, victory made itself available. Then the anti-fire gel began receding.

The coating peeled back from his sleeves in thin smoking streaks, eaten by speed and heat. His health flickered once as the first burn touched through.

"Not yet," Meno said. He wanted distance. Map info. Maybe another shrine. Maybe a landmark. Sensible behavior knocked politely, and he told it to wait outside again. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. The marsh fell behind him. The world changed hard. Black earth replaced wetland. Lava rivers cut through ash fields. Burned stone rose in crooked rows like grave markers.

Fire elementals moved below as bright, crawling sparks with bodies that formed and broke inside their own flames. The air shimmered. The sky above the zone had gone the color of old smoke. At the center rose one enormous volcano. Meno's arc did not curve around it. It aimed straight in. His HP began draining in real ticks.

"Not yet," he said again, then heard how stupid that sounded even before the next burn hit. He yanked the parachute cord. Nothing happened. He yanked again hard enough that his shoulder barked. Still nothing. [Experimental Anti-Fire Parachute] Status: Deployment Failure Reason: Excessive Thermal Load"Oh, come on!" The volcano filled his vision. It came up fast, brutally fast, the crater swelling from a distant wound in the mountainside into a red, roaring mouth beneath him. Heat punched through fast.

It hissed off his skin and clothes in pale bursts. The experimental parachute snapped open for half a second, caught a violent updraft, then twisted sideways with a sound like fabric tearing underwater. The sky disappeared behind smoke thick enough to chew. The rim of the volcano rushed past in a blur of black glass and burning orange veins. For one absurd instant, he was inside the mouth of it, swallowed by the mountain itself, surrounded by firelight and stone teeth. Then he hit. Fire and rock took him together.

[Death | Environmental Hazard] [Respawn: Ashen Crown Shrine] [Dropped: Useless Festival Token x1] Meno woke in darkness hot enough to feel crowded. For one humiliating second, his first thought was that at least he was not falling anymore. The shrine under him glowed dim red around the edges, with blue light struggling inside it like a cold thing trapped under glass. The air carried sulfur, hot metal, and mineral dust.

Sweat prickled down his avatar's back, and his real body answered with a phantom heat under the rig. He pushed himself up. No sky. A huge volcanic cavern opened around him, its jagged floor broken by haphazard clusters of stone spires jutting from the ground, each roughly his height. Magical torches lined parts of the far wall, burning with steady red-white flames. A lava waterfall poured down one side of the chamber, lighting the stone in slow pulses. Heat warped the air over black rock shelves.

The shrine sat in a recessed alcove, carved into stone rather than placed on it. He searched for an exit. The only obvious archway stood across the cavern. Behind the dragon. It slept in the center distance, massive and ash-black, ember veins glowing between plates of scale. Its body curled through the open space like the cavern had been built around the shape it chose. One wing lay folded along the ground like a collapsed roof. Claws dug into stone. Each breath pushed faint red light between its teeth.

Meno inspected it. [Sleeping: Ashen Crown Dragon | Type: Dragon | Threat: %!? %! | Trait: Territorial Cataclysm] The threat field was not Lethal. It was not question marks. This was not "try harder" danger. This was the UI reaching for a number and coming back with a nosebleed. Chat moved in a blur. WHAT IS THAT %!? %! dragon viewer count higher than Meno softlock any% Unk warned you territorial cataclysm wtf Meno kept to the shrine wall and moved left, choosing the route farthest from the dragon's head.

The cavern floor sloped down, cracked but passable. Heat rolled under his boots. The dragon did not wake. One eye stayed closed. Its chest rose and fell with a slow pressure that made dust tremble near its ribs. He made it twenty steps. The dragon exhaled. Hot air rolled from one nostril across the cavern floor. It was not a breath attack. It was not a cast. It was sleeping. Meno's health vanished.

[Death | Ashen Crown Dragon — Sleeping Breath] [Respawn: Ashen Crown Shrine] [Dropped: Bent Spoon Head x1] He sat up on the shrine stone. Chat was already a crime. DIED TO BREATHING dragon AFK killed him sleeping boss OP report dragon for spawn camping PrayerBeadGod vs Nap Lizard"Shut up," Meno said. He tried again immediately because shame had always been a fuel source and his tank was apparently full. This time, he avoided the head completely. Right side. Tail route. Wide arc.

He hugged the cavern wall so tightly his shoulder brushed warm stone. The dragon remained asleep. Its massive tail lay coiled near the far side, thick as a bridge, ember lines pulsing under black scales. He waited through two breaths. Then moved. The tail shifted. A lazy dream twitch, like a cat moving in sleep. The world became black scale and pressure. [Death | Ashen Crown Dragon — Tail Shift] [Respawn: Ashen Crown Shrine] [Dropped: Broken Statue Fragment x1] Meno respawned and stopped moving.

The room changed once he understood it. Death brought him back to the same shrine. The exit sat behind the dragon. The dragon killed him while asleep. The volcanic zone outside was probably Level 40-plus, assuming the marsh had been the thirty-to-forty step beyond Emberhollow's twenty-to-thirty mess. The dragon itself was raid-class, or zone-class, or whatever came after the UI gave up and started swearing. He reconstructed the route with the cold part of his brain that still worked.

Volcano death had respawned him at a shrine inside the mountain, behind or beside content he was supposed to reach after doing something else. After defeating the dragon. After bypassing it. After earning a checkpoint. After anything except being fired through two zones by Zubras at maximum power.

"Why is the shrine here?" he said. The cavern gave him heat and silence. He looked at the magical torches. That bothered him most. Natural cave, fine. Volcano shrine, fine. But maintained torch lines, carved shrine alcove, exit arch, lavafall illumination, and a sleeping dragon placed like a gate. The room had purpose. The dragon was not random decoration. It guarded something. A faction maybe. Ancient. Fire-aligned.

Smarter than orcs, less interested in fair combat, and probably annoyed by red-name idiots appearing at their post-boss shrine. Chat kept offering solutions with the confidence of people risking nothing. logout fixes it? throw junk dragon breath has cone maybe tail timing need fire resist Meno searched the shrine side of the cavern. He kept as far from the dragon as the space allowed. He checked torch bases. Carved seams. Loose stones. Heat cracks. Shrine markings. The lavafall side.

The shadows behind two black pillars. He crouched beside a wall and ran his hand along a line that looked deliberate until it ended in natural fracture. Nothing opened. The shrine itself had old markings around the base, but touching them did nothing except warm his palm. The torches did not move. The wall cracks led nowhere. The lavafall killed any thought of climbing that side before it formed fully. His inventory had lost three pieces of garbage. Gear survived. That was good.

It also meant death could keep chewing until it reached something that mattered. He was stuck. Logout would pause the problem. It would not move the dragon, or convince the world he had made a mature choice. Meno stood at the edge of the shrine alcove and looked across the red-lit cavern. The dragon slept. The exit waited behind it. The shrine waited behind him.

"Okay," Meno said.

"This is worse than the shirt."