Chương 81: Evolutionary Capsaicin Dependency

[Time]: Day 48, Friday, 18: 00 [Location]: Royal Rosas Club · The Revolving Restaurant The loot distribution phase was the absolute peak of the entire experience. No debate. By the time the trio had showered, changed into civilized clothing, and descended from the extraction bay, the Reserve's logistics team had already processed everything with a level of ruthless, automated efficiency that brought a genuine, appreciative tear to Hathaway's eye. She didn't sort a single drop herself.

She just stood there while invisible hands partitioned her kill into a clean manifest. The pale-gold Palebone Dragon scales—immaculately separated by quality tier, the ivory-white gradient trim along the edges preserved with surgical precision—were boxed and dispatched to the Artisan wing alongside a very specific, very underlined commission order for a custom defensive cloak. The dragon blood, too thin for direct application, went into stasis flasks, queued for refinement into high-grade spell-ink.

The marrow-bones were reserved for broth. And then there was the matter of the meat.

"We shall harvest only the deepest essence of its serpentine form—the resilient core of the tail and the unblemished flesh of its underbelly," Bella declared. Her white-lace-gloved finger traced two clean lines across the holographic butchery schematic like a dark priestess sealing a pact.

"The remaining corrupted vessels and profane organs may be cast into the compost abyss, or offered as alms to the lowest of familiars." She wrinkled her nose, maintaining her dark-fantasy aesthetic while expressing profound culinary disgust.

"And as for those false stags... their flesh is tainted by the chaotic embers of fire-poison. To consume them is to swallow the ashes of industrial damnation. Let them be purged in the incinerator." Extract only the SSR-tier drops. Discard the rest. Hathaway had never felt so spiritually aligned with another person in her entire life. Rhode contributed for completeness, translating the Chuunibyou into biological reality.

"Their cellular structure is roughly eighty percent localized wildfire and concentrated spite. Eating it is functionally identical to consuming lit charcoal briquettes dipped in battery acid." She gave Hathaway a preemptive look.

"And no, I am not exaggerating." Hathaway was already nodding with the energy of someone confirming a decision she had made the moment she first saw the deer's face. So: dragon tail. Three ways. It wasn't the pinnacle of draconic cuisine. But it was the loot from her first hunt in this world—the first Boss she had personally brought down since transmigrating—and she was going to eat every bite of it with the appropriate solemnity. Some things deserved to be treated as ceremonies even if no one else was watching.

The trio stepped out of the spatial elevator and into the Royal Rosas Club's Revolving Restaurant. Hathaway was already familiar with the venue—the slow, imperceptible rotation, the panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows, the absurdly plush velvet booths. But the atmosphere tonight was entirely different from her previous visit. Last time, it had been a quiet, almost empty sanctuary. Today, it was prime-time Friday night. The restaurant was packed.

The ambient hum of overlapping conversations, the clinking of enchanted crystal, and the sheer concentration of high-level magical signatures casually dining together made the air feel thick and electric. It was a sea of bespoke evening wear, dangerous artifacts worn as casual jewelry, and the occasional glowing pupil cutting through the warm ambient lighting.

Rhode handed their logistics ingredient tags to a sous-chef who accepted the draconic order with the bored, unimpressed efficiency of someone who regularly prepared Abyssal Kraken for brunch. She nodded, then led them through the crowded floor toward the inner VIP ring. Hathaway was carefully navigating between two tables of boisterous Witches when her peripheral tracking system flagged a massive visual anomaly. Two tables over. She had never met the first woman in person. She only needed one glance.

Anastasia von Milan'thirskaya. Second Princess of the White City. Position 4 Ace of the Royal Rosas Club. She had the signature spun-gold hair and pale grey eyes of the Milan'thir bloodline—but where the 3rd Seat Ash's grey was a thick, cold fog hiding unimaginable monsters, Tasia's was a freshly rain-washed sky: luminous, crystal-clear, and utterly untroubled by any molecule of responsibility. Resting on her head: a massive, branching crown of dragon horns like a stag's antlers.

Silver dragon wings, folded lazily across the booth back. A long tail arranged across the velvet cushions with the unconscious elegance of something that had never once been used to do manual labor. Her entire body radiated the terminal, weaponized relaxation of a creature who had not, not once in her entire biological existence, clocked in for a single shift. She was punchably serene. Sitting directly across from her was Alucard. Hathaway's body ran its automatic assessment without consulting her.

A phantom taste of ghost-skull peppers flooded her mouth. The ghost of a 30, 000-Solar credit charge materialized in her left palm like stigmata. They were twins. Ninety percent of the same facial architecture. The atmospheric gap between them was the Mariana Trench. Alucard's dragon horns shared Tasia's branching stag-antler shape, but they were smaller, and dull—the oxidized silver of old metal.

Inside the semi-transparent keratin, deep crimson capillaries pulsed faintly with each heartbeat, visible through the horn itself like a living anatomical diagram. Weeks of mandatory academic reading had upgraded Hathaway's brain from complete biological illiterate to has strong opinions about cladograms. Her taxonomy module booted without asking permission. All draconic life in the Witch ecosystem was classified into four primary phyla.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Plumed Dragons: feathered flock-hunters, and the universally despised biological trolls of the ecosystem—a species genetically hardwired for house-breaking, laundry-spitting, cat-slapping, and dive-bombing explorers with literal dung balls. Tidal Dragons: aquatic finned variants, the ones that flew low over the oceans to trawl for krakens.

Terra Dragons: ground-bound brawlers who had traded flight for absurd physical density, like someone had looked at a tank and decided it needed to be angrier. And finally, the Prime Dragons. The apex. The magic-weavers. The undisputed peak of the family tree. Within that absolute peak sat an even more exclusive clade: the Deer-Dragon sub-branch, a lineage to which both Tasia and Alucard belonged.

The textbooks explicitly described them as possessing an "innate, sovereign nobility," often recorded performing a characteristic slow, imperial survey of their surroundings. Right on cue, Tasia paused mid-sentence, sat rigidly upright, extended her elegant neck, raised her chin, and swept the bustling restaurant with a slow, majestic, imperious gaze. Several junior Witches at the next table visibly swooned. Hathaway squinted. Wait. Her eyes locked onto the base of those branching horns. Those aren't decorative.

Those are scale-covered elven ears. They're twitching. She is physically aiming them at that conversation near the bar. The textbooks' "innate sovereign nobility" was, in biological fact, explained entirely by Deer-Dragons having their ears located immediately adjacent to their massive horns. Aiming their acute hearing to eavesdrop on distant gossip physically required them to extend their necks and rotate their heads like a radar dish. Romanticized. Catastrophically. For three centuries.

It's literally just them being nosy. But while the twins shared the same SSR gene pool, their expressions of it were violently opposed. They were a textbook case of Divergent Twins—a congenital split from the exact same source material. Tasia was born a Kingdom Silver-Helm Dragon —maxing her defensive and survival stats into absolute, impenetrable physical armor.

A fitting biological design for someone whose primary function in life appeared to be sitting behind the lines and looking spectacular while other people filed the paperwork. Alucard was born something else entirely. A Blood-Thorn Dragon. Hathaway watched the Archon ladle from the small, heated stone pot at the center of their table—a bubbling, deeply crimson, aggressively aromatic liquid, with a heat shimmer rising off the surface that was less "culinary ambiance" and more "structural hazard."

Blood-Thorn Dragons, the taxonomy module supplied helpfully, are documented in the field for a specific post-hunt feeding ritual. They carve a shallow depression into a rock, drain their prey's blood into it, apply a micro-dose of dragon breath to bring it to a precise simmer, and add whatever spicy wild vegetation they can harvest from the surrounding area—effectively creating what field biologists technically classify as Spicy Dragon Blood Curd. Hathaway looked at the bubbling pot.

At Alucard, eating it with the deep, serene contentment of a creature doing something completely, biologically natural. Oh. It's not a personality disorder. It's not a coping mechanism. She's not eating Ghost Skull Peppers because municipal governance destroyed her capacity for normal human feeling. She is DNA-level, evolutionarily, racially hardwired to eat spicy blood stew. The hotpot addiction is a species trait. This hit with the force of a very small, very accurate projectile. Everything made sense now.

Including—especially—the names. Anastasia. Resurrection. Royalty. Life returning in spring. The beautiful, untouchable princess who floated through existence on a river of other people's labor, occasionally extending a gracious wing to accept a glass of fruit wine. Alucard. Dracula, reversed. The ancient nocturnal blood-drinker.

Or, in the context of modern Witch civilization: the creature who stays up all night consuming spicy blood-curd because she is personally holding the entire municipal GDP of the White City together through sheer spite and capsaicin poisoning while her siblings attend parties and eavesdrop on bar gossip. Staggeringly accurate nomenclature, Hathaway thought. Whoever named those two deserves a tenured position in applied prophecy. Speaking of names.

A few weeks ago, her mothers had casually suggested naming her unhatched baby sister "Alucard." To them, it was an aspirational blessing—naming the egg after the [Apex of Dominion], a Hive Lord whose single signature could bankrupt a colonial galaxy. The suggestion had survived exactly three seconds. In Hathaway's private lexicon, the name didn't evoke supreme political power.

It evoked permanent stress-induced insomnia, clinical capsaicin dependency, and the grinding spiritual suffering of being the sole Designated Adult in a family of walking catastrophes. She had instantly vetoed it. Naming a pulsing egg after the Archon of the White City felt less like a blessing, and more like cursing the child to a lifetime of gastric ulcers and administrative torture. But today—today—Alucard looked different. Gone were the dead-fish-bowl eyes and the bird's-nest hair.

Gone was the tail lying flat on the floor like a downed power cable. The dark circles under Alucard's eyes had receded from "bruised plum" to a mild, manageable lavender. Her horns pulsed with a steady, healthy rhythm. Her posture was upright. There was, improbably, actual color in her face. She looked like an overworked employee who had finally gotten her PTO approved, slept fourteen hours without interruption, and just completed a full-body deep-tissue essential-oil spa treatment. By Alucard standards: radiant.

"Her hearing is excellent right now, by the way," Rhode said conversationally, already walking toward the twins' table with the casual, purposeful stride of someone who had never once been intimidated by a dragon in their life.

"Just so you know." Hathaway immediately became aware of every word she had thought in the past two minutes. Rhode pulled out a chair at the twins' table, dropped into it, and aimed a lazy two-finger salute at the pair.

"Tasia. Alucard." Hathaway stopped two paces behind Rhode, her boots suddenly feeling like they were bolted to the floor. It was one thing to psychoanalyze them from two tables away. It was an entirely different thing to be abruptly thrust into the personal space of the White City's co-rulers. Every residual Earth-born instinct in her nervous system was suddenly screaming the plebeian panic of a newly signed bench player shoved into the direct, blinding orbit of the team's star starters.

Tasia tilted her head—those scale-tipped ears swiveling fractionally—and offered a smile that was effortlessly, professionally beautiful. Alucard's grey gaze lifted. It drifted past Rhode. It landed on Hathaway, who had not moved. The corners of Alucard's mouth curved upward. Slow, genuine, and rare as a solar eclipse in a city under permanent cloud cover.

"Ah." The Archon of the White City lifted her teacup—the one that Hathaway now recognized, biologically, as containing something much more specific than just "spiced tea"—and took a small, contented sip. Her voice was quiet. Warm. Faintly raspy from what Hathaway assumed were decades of voluntary capsaicin-based vocal seasoning.

"If it isn't my absolute favorite Humanitarian Hero." she remembered. Hathaway had paid off the Archon's entire municipal tab with a 30, 000-Solar black card on her first day in this world, after a woman hovering measurably close to cardiac arrest had extended her dragon tail to hand a glass of cold milk to a complete stranger who had eaten an ungodly piece of spicy dragon meat and immediately started crying.

Then, within thirty seconds of that act of mercy, pulled out the municipal legal codex, demanded payment for the ruined pavement outside, and threatened them with seventy-two consecutive hours of hamster wheel electricity generation. She had called Hathaway a Humanitarian Hero with absolute, formal sincerity. Of course she remembered. Hathaway looked at Alucard. Then her gaze shifted to Tasia. Because seeing them up close simply solidified her earlier deduction.

And the reality was violently offensive to her ex-corporate soul. They supposedly ruled the city together. Yet Tasia was just sitting there looking flawlessly expensive, completely untroubled by any molecule of responsibility. While her twin sat across from her, radiating the aura of a wet cat who held the municipal GDP together with capsaicin and spite.

It was psychologically impossible to maintain any awe for royalty when you were staring point-blank at a cosmic-tier slacker forcing her sister to do the entire group project. Hathaway's shoulders dropped approximately two inches. Right. Not unapproachable VIPs. Just her eccentric teammates. One was a majestic freeloader, and the other was a tragic victim of administrative torture biologically documented to extend milk to strangers in distress before invoicing them.

She slid into the empty seat beside Rhode, picked up the menu, and reviewed it with the settled focus of a player about to cash in their First Kill loot. A player who also, critically, had not been assigned as anyone's Designated Adult or municipal administrator in the current story arc. Life, she decided, was very good.