“We should… be almost there.”
Silently calculating his escape route and position, Green emerged from an upward underground passage, returning to the surface, using the burning clock tower to orient himself.
“Hey, over here!”
The dragon followed him into the underground, and Green promptly raised the flute to his lips once again.
Although the Dragon Summoning Flute had lost its original effect, it had instead become something that could influence the opponent’s sanity—he didn’t know why, but the mysterious connection behind it was now a resource for him to exploit.
At the center of Golden Square, the Hero’s Statue and the stone pedestal with the embedded sword still stood in their original places.
The dragon stretched its claws out from the bottom of the pit, brute force shattering the stone and kicking up clouds of dust that looked like a gloomy sky below.
“I hope your intel is real, Albeco.”
Green approached the statue and placed his hand upon it.
In his previous life, no one in the Kingdom of Rand had found the Stone Sword; even as the Hero, all he could discover was everything but its location.
Albeco knew that the Stone Sword was inside the statue.
But that had only been a spur-of-the-moment addition on her part; the missing details had since been filled in and completed in this world.
So, she didn’t know about the presence of a Magic Lock inside the statue, but in Green’s past life, someone had told him, and he had verified it.
It was an extremely dangerous Magic Lock, so Green, without adequate preparation, had never truly intended to retrieve it.
The dragon rose again, roaring Vulcan’s name, its eyes filled with a violent madness.
Green blew the flute once more; this time, a real wave of heat surged into his lungs through his throat.
But the effect was striking.
The dragon was utterly enraged, charging toward Green. Between them stood the statue of Rand’s very first Hero.
Less than a hundred meters away, facing the furious dragon, Green found himself with no retreat.
“Don’t lie to me…” Green muttered.
Actually, he probably wouldn’t die. Maybe.
But he hated the feeling of being deceived—especially by someone like Albeco, a woman with her own “special” nature.
The dragon smashed through the statue in passing—was it about to reach Green…?
The dragon did smash the statue, the stone fragments tumbling down, but inside was not the expected “Stone Sword”—instead, it was a metal Shield shimmering with silver light.
But—
The surrounding magic rapidly went haywire, golden ripples carrying force that reached for the statue’s destroyer—the dragon.
A Hero who had surpassed the limits of mortals and stood at the peak of the extraordinary.
The defensive Magic Lock he left behind was enough to injure a dragon.
The dragon had not surpassed the pinnacle of the extraordinary either. Golden chains bound it to the ground, and as the dragon’s head struggled in rage, it was unintentionally grazed by the golden Shield. Beneath the broken Dragon Scale, a wound several meters long appeared.
The dragon continued to roar at Green, but perhaps because of the Magic Lock, this time, even Green, over thirty meters away, was not harmed by the roar.
From the accidental cut by the Shield, searing and mighty dragon blood was slowly seeping out, hissing like roasting fire as it touched the ground.
Albeco hadn’t lied to him—the “Stone Sword” he’d never found in his previous life really was inside this conspicuous statue passed by countless people.
Though for some reason it was a Shield, well, the Stone Sword was always more a symbol than a specific object.
Given that it could harm a dragon and tear through Dragon Scale, this Shield was at least close to a legendary artifact.
Green stepped forward to take the Shield. Its edges glimmered faintly with gold. He swung it hard at the dragon’s immobilized neck, driving the wound another several centimeters deeper.
But as the Shield’s golden edge effect faded, the next strike couldn’t even pierce flesh.
“I will kill you, mortal!”
This time, the bound dragon used human language to warn Green, but all it got in return was a disdainful look.
“You’ve always wanted to kill me. Is it because of this flute in my hand?” Green showed the Dragon Summoning Flute in front of the dragon, then quickly put it away.
He had no strength left to play the flute; if he forced himself, his lungs would probably burn through.
Green realized that, while this Magic Lock was terrifying in terms of control, its lethality was rather lacking against a creature like the dragon.
Restraint, power drain, strangulation—against most beings, it would be a death sentence, but against the dragon’s Dragon Scale, it was woefully insufficient.
By his estimation, this Magic Lock could at most keep the opponent under control for another five minutes.
To be safe, he planned to leave with two minutes to spare, heading toward Mercury Street to await the dragon’s pursuit.
Deep down, Albeco had earned a small measure of credibility with him. One way or another, the Shield now in his hands was the genuine “Stone Sword.”
The Fake Sword on the stone platform broke into several pieces as Green took the Shield.
Green could not kill the dragon before him. So—
What else could he do in these few minutes when the opponent was immobilized?
A sudden wind blew nearby. The dragon saw the human in front of it stow his clothing into a Space Artifact, standing stark naked in front of it in the blink of an eye.
It felt confused, but in the next moment, it suddenly realized what Green intended.
“Stop! Mortal! I said… stop!”
Naturally, the naked Green ignored its words and walked toward the dragon, whose only wound was still oozing scorching, crimson dragon blood.
“You should have known you’d pay the price for this.”
Green kept moving, now just a few steps away.
He was certainly no exhibitionist—he only meant to seize power and symbolism from his foe.
The legend of the Bathing in Dragon Blood Warrior stretched far back; dragon blood could make a person invulnerable to blades and arrows. The legend of a mortal slaying a dragon had been passed down for millennia.
That symbol would grant the bather in dragon blood terrifying resistance to both physical and magical harm.
But a single dragon could only correspond to one Bathing in Dragon Blood Warrior, and the price was that the dragon’s strength would be permanently diminished by more than half.
Either the dragon had to be alive and cooperate in letting itself be wounded for the ritual, or it must be killed, and then its still-warm corpse would be cut open and bled.
These harsh conditions meant that the bathers in dragon blood were almost always dragon slayers.
Hardly any dragon would willingly see its strength forever reduced, just for a human.
Once these strict conditions were met, the well-known legend and its symbolism would permanently steal a portion of the dragon’s power.
As Green neared the dragon’s wound, a gust of wind blew by, and a young girl appeared at his side.
She still wore the voluminous academy uniform and blue robe. Her appearance gave the naked Green quite a shock.
But she quickly explained her reason for coming through her actions.
The wind had carried a leaf, which happened to land right between Green’s shoulder blades. Green hadn’t noticed.
Albeco picked the leaf off his back and said,
“I can more or less guess what you’re about to do. If you hadn’t noticed this leaf, it could have become a fatal weakness for you in the future.”
“That wouldn’t make for a good story.”
Bathing in dragon blood carried a heroic symbolism.
However, Albeco couldn’t just stand by and watch—such a coincidence might foreshadow “tragedy” for the other party.
Though the dragon before them was not Fafnir.
And Green was not Siegfried, either.
Premium Chapter
Login to buy access to this Chapter.