When they arrived at the royal capital, they were still a step too late.
Just as they walked through the city gate, a silver “star” began to grow larger in the eyes of the gathered citizens, as if it were falling from the sky.
“What’s that? Is it a shooting star?” someone in the royal city asked, raising his head curiously.
His answer came quickly. Arrows shot from the city wall, glimmering with magical cold light, flew straight at the “star”, but merely grazed past it.
That was definitely no “shooting star”. As it drew nearer, its silhouette became increasingly clear.
It was a mythical creature—a dragon!
A silver dragon blotted out the moon, its hundred-meter-long body covered in white scales that reflected the moonlight, and its flapping wings stirred up a howling wind.
In this world, dragons stand at the pinnacle of power, their numbers few, born of myth.
“That’s…a dragon?!” The maid’s face showed astonishment, fear written all over her expression.
Both Greene and Dolores showed shock as well, while the flustered maid turned to look at Dolores, who had poked her head out.
“Your Highness! We must hurry to the shelters! Let’s… let’s return to the palace first!”
The royal palace housed the elite Royal Knights and the Land Kingdom’s guards, who could fight using Battle Formation. Their presence could at least hold back the dragon.
“No, we won’t make it. Get out and head for the alley to the right!”
Greene interrupted the maid, seized the reins from her, and brought the horse to a stop. At the same moment, the dragon spread its wings over the center of the city, directly above them and the palace.
The dragon opened its maw to the sky, and the magic in the air above the capital grew chaotic, frenzied, then began to swirl in a vortex toward the dragon’s mouth.
“Move! It’s about to breathe Dragonfire!”
Greene shouted anxiously, pulling Dolores off the carriage and, gritting his teeth, also tugged the purple-haired maid down.
In Dolores’s memories, the dragon calamity was just background noise; she didn’t even understand why this disaster would spiral out of control and end in such tragedy.
But Greene had already lived through this terrifying catastrophe in his previous life.
The dragon in the sky unleashed Dragonfire in an instant, drawing a wall of flame thousands of meters long across the city as if it were divine punishment.
Even quick-reacting Magicians, casting spells across the vast distance, saw their attacks splash against the dragon with no effect, nothing more than fireworks blossoming in the night.
The dragon kept flapping its wings and, in the next moment, drove its claws through the foundation of a high tower. Several meters below ground, a vast hollow chamber was revealed, its blood-colored Ceremony Runes destroyed.
Of the three present, only Greene knew the true beginning of this catastrophe. Simply relying on the dragon alone, such large-scale destruction would be impossible.
The attacking dragon had a purpose, destroying parts of the city with its claws and tearing up the ground in certain areas to destroy hidden Ceremony Runes.
At one node where a Ceremony Rune was broken—
In an instant, several areas of the royal city collapsed several meters into the ground. Numerous buildings came crashing down, and among the ruins, in the layers of earth where old and new met, the remains of buildings from another era lay buried.
Along with Monsters…
The Land Kingdom, founded in the Suland region by the first king of the Land people, had once been annexed by the Rhodes Empire, only to regain independence during an imperial civil war.
Now, it occupied about forty percent of the seventy thousand square kilometers of Suland.
The Suland region had nurtured many nations, witnessed countless dynasties rise and fall, and under certain areas, cities buried by sand and stone slept undisturbed.
The newcomers built new cities atop the sands, but the disasters left behind by past kingdoms were never fully dealt with—most were merely sealed and slowly cleansed.
But once the dragon broke these Seals, amidst the collapsing, burning buildings, the panicked citizens, and the chaos in the city…
Some lost Undead and mindless Monsters began to crawl out from below, slaughtering the living.
The disaster began with the dragon’s attack.
But it would not end with its departure.
Dolores, caught off guard, suddenly lost her footing. Greene quickly caught her in his arms. In his embrace, the petite Dolores felt like a breathing bear cub.
A two-story stone building, its foundation gone, toppled toward them. Greene held Dolores and shifted aside, dodging in time, while the maid also reacted swiftly, skewering an ugly Monster with an arrow.
“That dragon… destroyed the Ceremony Runes sealing the old ruins beneath the city?”
The maid, stunned at first, quickly became both terrified and furious. “If that’s the case, the entire royal city will become a living hell!!”
As the dragon soared through the sky, it kept unleashing flames. Its terrifying breath set anything it touched ablaze in an instant, swallowing anyone nearby and turning them to ash.
Cries of agony and shrieks rang out everywhere.
Logically, being held in Greene’s arms, Dolores should have felt something stranger—shyness, discomfort, or perhaps resistance.
Yet, the wailing around her drowned out all of Dolores’s sensations.
Those were people—companions—crying for help, sharp and desperate.
Burned by flames, chased by Monsters, the city descended into chaos in the blink of an eye.
Climbing out of a pit, Dolores finally realized clearly that the royal city—no, the world she lived in—had become a living hell.
The dragon began assaulting the palace. That white silhouette, the intertwining spells rising to the sky, all declared its position, its existence.
Someone buried under rubble reached out to them, but the next moment fell silent—his lower body had long since been crushed to pulp.
Others, chased by Monsters from the depths, called for help and ran until they fell, blood splattering.
Dolores had never seen such a bloody scene before. The most gruesome thing she’d witnessed until now was the bodies of those attackers killed not long ago.
But then, the distance had been great—she couldn’t see clearly. This was nothing like that.
Most important of all, here there were screams and cries for help that she could neither ignore nor escape.
Each cry was like a sharp needle piercing her ears.
Dolores forced down her nausea and instinctively looked up. Her gaze fixed on the dragon in the sky.
It was deep in the night, and the dragon soaring among the spells created a beautiful illusion.
But the burning city beneath it, the splattered blood, all made that white armor seem a pallid shade of death.
“That dragon is attacking the palace. Only the army can quickly resolve the chaos now…but that silhouette is a Battle Formation, the army is fighting the dragon!”
“Hey…Your Highness, where are you going?!”
Dolores lowered her head, managed not to vomit, and walked a few steps forward. The anxious maid called after her.
But Dolores only walked a little farther. When she turned her head again, the scene was still so hideous.
Suddenly, Dolores grabbed Greene’s hand.
“Greene, please, help them…I believe you have the power to do something about this disaster.”
Dolores knew Greene wouldn’t be completely unprepared for the dragon calamity. She was weak—so weak that if she were alone, there was nothing she could do.
Her rationality made her want to run away when faced with such a scene.
But her morality, the simple values of her previous life, made it impossible for her to ignore the surrounding tragedy, and a desire to help naturally arose.
Yet she knew she was weak.
That weakness and rationality led her to the only choice she could make—to ask Greene for help.
Because Dolores knew.
Greene probably had secrets, and even if he had the power, he might not act—because Greene was likely no longer the kind Hero he had been in his past life.
He would most likely demand something in return, targeting her. But no matter what—Dolores still hoped that there would be fewer cries of anguish around her.
Dolores didn’t have the resolve to be called admirable, but she couldn’t bear to stand powerless and watch others suffer.
Greene looked down at Dolores.
Her eyes were filled with fear and panic. She’d even bitten through her lip, blood trickling down her chin.
Rather than a request, her petite form seemed more like a desperate plea.
Greene had seen this kind of scene many times in his past life. Hilberu was like this, Lily was like this… but Dolores had never begged him like this before.
Dolores was a kind person.
That’s why, surrounded by all this, she would feel pain.
She was also a princess of this country.
All the more reason she could not stand by as her homeland fell into disaster.
Greene believed that as long as he agreed at this moment, as long as he told Dolores she could do it, that he could help—
Then, no matter what conditions he demanded in return, Dolores would not refuse.
This would be very much to his advantage in everything that came next. Besides, this was something he would have done anyway.
After all, his mission still required him to challenge the dragon himself.
If, in the process, he could take advantage of Dolores’s kindness and extract an excessive promise from her, it would cost him nothing.
Greene saw tears well up at the corners of Dolores’s eyes. Her small body trembled weakly.
He took her hand, gently pried her fingers from his clothes, and finally let out a long sigh.
“I have a way to influence the dragon, so I’ll go join the battle at the palace next.”
“I’ll make sure many who shouldn’t die will live. I promise you that.”
In the end, Greene strangely did not demand anything unreasonable from Dolores as the “price” for her request.
Greene felt he shouldn’t have said that.
The outcome of playing the Hero… In his past life, he’d been hurt so deeply by them.
So, was it just because she was—
Dolores…
Or… because of her kindness?
Well this is a disaster.