Chương 79: Zone Transition: Denied

[Time]: Day 48, Friday, 10: 05 AM [Location]: Royal Rosas Hunting Reserve · The Novice Zone The environmental storytelling was getting less subtle. Deep, three-toed claw marks stamped into the dark loam, already filling with brown water. Thick vine curtains not cut— ripped, snapped ends still dripping milky sap. A cracked pale-gold scale snagged on a thornbush like someone's discarded earring. The boss room aggro radius, Hathaway registered, tightening her grip on the dark-wood handle of the Gun-Axe.

We're inside it. The birds had gone quiet. The insects, too. The jungle held its breath. Then the canopy opened up. A small crystalline lake. Banks carpeted in deep crimson—Wine-Fruit blossoms by the hundreds, heavy, nectar-swollen petals drooping toward the soil. Spectacular. Breathtaking. The exact kind of high-calorie vegetarian salad that certain carnivorous drakes genuinely could not resist. And standing waist-deep in the crimson field, calmly chewing, was the Palebone Dragon. Hathaway held her breath.

It didn't look like a wild animal. It looked like something that had been carefully bred for ceremonial cavalry, then gifted to a very important general, then pointed at a very unlucky army. Six meters of pristine pale-gold scale trimmed in ivory-white. Powerful reverse-jointed hind legs balancing a frame that massed like an adult rhinoceros, yet moved with the coiled, unhurried grace of a massive cat.

Two sweeping horns catching the filtered jungle light and throwing it back at you, polished and imperious and entirely unconcerned about being observed. Visual design: endgame raid mount, Hathaway's internal taxonomy noted. Actual stat block and market value: level 10 wild boar. The developers clearly blew the entire budget on the majestic 3D model and completely forgot to assign it a decent loot table. Her heart was hammering. Adrenaline spike, instant and brutal.

Then Rhode, still half-concealed in the brush's shadow, casually snapped her fingers. Snap. A dark grey ripple of mana crossed thirty meters in silence and sank into the dragon like ink into paper. The beast paused mid-chew. Let out a low, uncertain rumble. The golden horns dipped.

"Armor broken," Rhode said around her lollipop, her voice conveying approximately the same urgency as someone reading a grocery receipt. Immediately, Bella stepped up behind Hathaway. Her single visible eye swirled with deep crimson light. She pressed a gloved hand to Hathaway's spine. Hathaway felt the mana instantly pool at the point of contact—a compressed, silent payload ready to deploy in a fraction of a millisecond.

Instead of releasing it, Bella deliberately clamped down on the spell, took a deep, theatrical breath, and initiated an entirely unnecessary verbal casting sequence.

"Spirits of the untamed earth, lend your fury to the Eclipse." The words came out low and certain, the cadence of a verdict being read aloud.

"Let the blood of the bear fortify your bones, the wrath of the bull guide your strike, and the shadow of the cat direct your steps." Three rings of magical light detonated beneath Hathaway's boots and surged upward. Hathaway stared straight ahead at the chewing dragon. I see, Hathaway thought, feeling her bone density magically multiply. The practical clothes weren't a tactical shift.

She just swapped her cosmetic preset to the 'Dark Hunter' set and is now forcing me to sit through her unskippable pre-boss voice lines. Her physical baseline skyrocketed. The steady, continuous trickle of mana she had been routing into her right arm just to support the massive Gun-Axe was instantly rendered obsolete. She cleanly severed her internal mana-feed to her muscles, letting Bella's external buffs carry the physical load entirely. Zero sustained upkeep cost, her optimizer brain noted.

She turned her head and looked at Rhode leaning lazily on her greatsword, and Bella tapping her halberd against the dirt with the quiet, expectant look of a family elder watching a promising kid's first real test. Translation, Hathaway thought, her mouth doing something involuntary and possibly reckless. You're fully buffed. Go feed—wait. Go get 'em. She bit her lip. Stepped out of the tree line. Took a breath that tasted like petrichor and adrenaline. And initiated.

[Greater Mage Armor] flared around her in overlapping geometric hexagons. [Amora's Analytic Vision] engaged a heartbeat later. The Palebone Dragon dissolved into a wireframe: bone density, muscle groups, and the faint blue pulse of a mana organ tucked behind the sternum that glowed like a bullseye, freshly debuffed and presenting itself with considerable optimism. She didn't open with the axe.

She raised her left hand, pointed two fingers at the beast, and let a slightly generous pulse of mana slip from her 42, 000 M-Unit reservoir into the most fundamental spell model in existence. [Magic Missile]. The Tier-1 introductory spell. The academic equivalent of basic arithmetic. But she wasn't running the legacy code anymore. Hathaway had already refactored this specific matrix to safely handle variable Arch-Witch output. When the crushing density of her core hit the spell model, it didn't buckle or misfire.

It scaled dynamically. Instead of hard-capping at the standard three ethereal darts, the updated architecture instantly duplicated its firing pathways to accommodate the massive payload. Dozens of brilliant blue projectiles tore into reality in perfect algorithmic symmetry, forming a dense, humming halo of completely stable arcane artillery around her arm. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. She swept her hand forward. RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!

The barrage carpet-bombed the flowerbed. Massive columns of dirt, crimson petals, and pale-pink blood erupted across the dragon's flanks. The sheer overcharged volume hammered through its naturally high—and freshly debuffed—magic resistance like buckshot through wet cardboard.

"ROAR——!!!" The dragon whipped around. Golden slit-pupils locked onto Hathaway with the specific, personal fury of a creature that has just selected someone to destroy. It violently flexed its torso. Fast, Hathaway clocked, one fraction of a second before a volley of pale-gold neck scales tore through the air directly at her face. Scales capable of cleanly severing tree trunks. Aimed at her throat. [Cat's Grace] had already made the decision. Her body executed a microscopic sidestep and a slight dip of her waist.

The scales hissed past her afterimage—close enough that she felt displaced air on her cheek—and buried themselves deep into the brush behind her. The sharp, metallic tang of the dragon's blood saturated the jungle air. Hathaway froze for exactly one microsecond. Her Earth-born rational brain prepared its expected response: nausea, knee-wobble, fight-or-flight overload from the alien blood of a six-meter carnivore. It had prepared a whole script. The response never arrived.

Instead, the moment that scent hit her olfactory receptors, something deep and pre-verbal in her Witch biology reached up, grabbed the wheel, and floored it. It felt like a cat getting a hit of pure catnip. It smelled like premium barbecue to someone who hadn't eaten in three days. It smelled like concentrated caloric energy. It smelled like prey. Oh, Hathaway thought, a feral thrill racing down her spine and arriving somewhere south of professional. I understand now. I understand everything.

She brought the Gun-Axe's heavy frame to her shoulder, aligned the Analytic Vision's glowing bullseye over the weakened mana organ in the dragon's chest, and pulled the trigger. BOOM! The detonation rolled through the jungle like a thunderclap and scattered a thousand birds out of the canopy half a kilometer away. [Bear's Endurance] ate the recoil without giving an inch.

The armor-piercing slug crossed the clearing instantly, punched through pale-gold scales that had been deflecting arcane energy since before Hathaway was born, and the secondary payload detonated in the chest cavity. A muffled crump sounded from inside the dragon's ribs. A horrific crater blown outward through pristine scale. Clack. No wonder Witches hide guns under their skirts, Hathaway thought, breaking open the breech and reloading with mechanical smoothness. Zero spell-slot overhead.

In terms of mana-to-damage ratio this is practically an exploit. Infuriated, bleeding heavily, and rapidly computing that a ranged firefight was not going to resolve favorably, the dragon made its decision. Its hind legs coiled. The ground beneath it shattered. It crossed thirty meters in less than a heartbeat. Too close.

"The threads of fate bind the wicked!" Bella's voice rang from the tree line. THWIP. A massive glowing net of arcane fiber shot out from the flank, intercepted the airborne dragon's momentum perfectly, and pulled taut. It bound its limbs, anchored to surrounding trees, and slammed the beast into the mud five meters from Hathaway's boots with a crash that shook the clearing. Flawless CC support. Hathaway looked down at the heavy serrated blade of the Gun-Axe. Then up at the furiously thrashing, net-pinned boss.

The dopamine entirely overrode rational thought. She gripped the long handle in both hands, bent her knees, and her legs fired like pistons. Three meters of air below her. The axe arcing high overhead. Gravity and enchanted muscle mass doing the rest. Lok'tar Ogar, some deep, gamer-core region of her soul contributed. Witches never slave!! CHOP. The serrated blade caught the dragon squarely on the side of its skull.

It missed the spine but sheared off one golden horn cleanly and carved a bone-deep gash from crown to eye socket. But the survival instinct completely overrode the webbing. The massive tail whipped out in a blind, desperate arc. CRACK. [Greater Mage Armor] flared white, distributed the kinetic energy across the barrier surface, and launched Hathaway backward like a baseball from an extremely inconvenienced pitcher.

She contorted in the air— Cat's Grace still running, bless it —and landed on her feet, sliding several meters through the dirt before stopping. The Gun-Axe had separated from her somewhere in the middle of all that. It lay in the tall grass nearby. Hathaway stood up. Brushed the dirt off her leather coat with one hand. Shield at 40%, she noted, with the detachment of someone checking a status bar. One horn down. Chest crater. Magic resistance debuffed. The mob is entering flee phase. She was right.

The Palebone Dragon had done its math. Half-blinded, hemorrhaging, missing a horn, and now nursing a deep personal suspicion that these two-legged creatures might actually be above its weight class, it wrenched through the remaining webbing, kicked off the mud, and bolted toward the tree line. It didn't make it three steps.

"You cannot outrun your sins!" THWIP. Bella's second [Web] swept the dragon's hind legs out from under it. The beast went face-first into the mud with an impact that shook the ground for thirty meters in every direction. Zone transition: denied. Hathaway didn't move from her spot. She simply raised her right hand, fingers loosely extended, and looked at the struggling, pinned, no-longer-roaring dragon with the calm expression of someone finalizing a spreadsheet. Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap. Snap. Five flicks.

The sound of heavy machine-gun fire echoed through the clearing. Not the opening artillery barrage, but five precise, merciless saturations of overcharged arcane payload. Each volley slammed into the exposed flanks of the pinned dragon faster than it could process the source. The roaring had become a whimper. The struggles had slowed to twitching.

It ate a forty-dart missile barrage, took a 17mm armor-piercer to the chest, survived an axe blow to the skull, tail-whipped me hard enough to launch me three meters, attempted a zone transition, and it's technically still breathing, Hathaway reflected, watching the golden slit-pupils dilate into blankness. Dragon vitality is practically a bug in the code. Someone should file a ticket.

She refreshed her [Greater Mage Armor] —because securing the last hit was a player's first virtue, full stop—walked over, and pulled the Gun-Axe from the tall grass. She stood over the Palebone Dragon. Raised the heavy serrated blade. Brought it down, blank-faced and absolutely final. SHING. The clearing returned to its oppressive quiet. Blood dripped onto crimson petals. The severed horn lay in the mud.

Semi-magical beast—the cross-section was still tethered to flesh, a pinkish network of blood vessels visible in the pale core. The dragon's blood, a strange watery pale-crimson, soaked into the pristine gold-and-ivory scales below it, staining something that had been genuinely beautiful into something genuinely dead. It was, objectively, an extremely striking composition. Brush rustled. Rhode walked out from the tree line, greatsword resting on one shoulder, lollipop occupying the other side of her jaw.

She surveyed the crater in the flowerbed, the scattered scales embedded in tree trunks, the severed horn, and the completely ruined Palebone Dragon in the mud. Then she looked at Hathaway—whose breathing was even, whose silver hair was barely displaced, and whose expression conveyed the quiet satisfaction of someone who had cleared a dungeon run slightly faster than expected. The wild Vanguard Witch broke into a massive, deeply approving grin.

"You didn't panic when you took the tail hit," Rhode said, walking over and kicking the massive carcass with the toe of her boot, more out of habit than malice.

"Trusted your shield, located your weapon drop, and transitioned straight to ranged execution. For a first-timer, that was clean." A beat.

"Pipsqueak." Hathaway let out a long, slow breath. The combat buffs were fading—that blissful, crystalline heaviness easing out of her muscles—and in their place came the familiar dopamine wash of a successful raid clear. She looked down at the economically worthless, but aesthetically magnificent carcass at her feet. The cosmetic harvesting was going to take time. She'd need a skinning implement, probably a container for the mana organ, and the steady hands of someone who actually cares about the loot table.

She didn't care about the market price of the severed horn. She cared about how to peel off those pale-gold scales without scratching the ivory-white trim. If she ruined the color gradient, her future cloak would be ruined. Loot phase initiated, her internal HUD noted. Finally. The part I'm actually good at.