Chương 134: 04. Dragon Princess 3

After considerable effort, I had three bags reasonably sorted. One for His Majesty. One reserved for additional border negotiations. The third specifically for Margrave Frank. I even found clean paper, wrote a brief explanatory note, and tucked it into Frank's bag—so our eventual meeting wouldn't feel like mutual funeral attendance. I had just sealed the final bag when Ignicia spoke behind me.

"Do you know why I attacked Black Dragon Pass?" I set down the rope and looked at her.

"I'm afraid I don't." She leaned against treasure sufficient to trigger cardiac events in three minor kingdoms, but her expression had gone cold.

"My idiot father decided to marry me off to the Sea Dragon King's son." The rope went still in my hands. Taken alone, this sounded like royal family business. The way she said it told me otherwise. Ignicia continued without pause.

"The Sea Dragon King's lineage has been working for the Yanxia Empire for years." Her voice stayed low but carried increasing weight.

"Port operations, shipping, fisheries, munitions—nearly every ocean chokepoint runs through them." I frowned.

"So you suspect the Sea Dragon King is controlling sea routes for the Yanxia Empire?"

"Suspect?" She glanced at me with undisguised contempt.

"Whether it's manipulation or cooperation, labels are irrelevant. What matters is that I cannot allow their reach into Dragon Kingdom territory." She straightened and stepped forward. Firelight caught her eyes, turning those golden pupils into something painful to look at directly.

"That eastern power already holds the oceans." She fixed her gaze on me, expression approaching genuine seriousness.

"If they acquire our aerial corridors—sea routes combined with sky routes—every chokepoint in the world runs through them. Then whether it's Eckhaus or the Dragon Kingdom, we all live at their discretion." Cold sweat formed along my spine as she finished. Not because it was alarmist. Because it was too plausible. The Yanxia Empire's abnormal expansion wasn't exactly secret.

If the Sea Dragon King had genuinely locked down their maritime logistics and weapons supply, then added Dragon Kingdom air routes and dragon cavalry coordination— This wasn't a marriage arrangement. This was a blade being positioned to run from ocean straight through sky. I forced my thoughts back to the immediate question.

"But Black Dragon Pass?" I asked.

"Even granting all that—it's still just a border fortification."

"Just a border fortification?" Ignicia looked at me as though I'd said something breathtakingly dense.

"Behind Black Dragon Pass stands the Dragon Kingdom's largest northern drake tower." She indicated height with visible impatience.

"Fifteen thousand dragon cavalry stationed permanently. Small drakes—but fast, and lethal." Something settled heavily in my chest. She didn't stop.

"Marriage envoys. Sea Dragon representatives. Transit documents. Aerial route charts. Supply manifests. Recently, all of it has been accumulating around Black Dragon Pass." Her tone dropped another degree.

"I didn't burn the drake tower. I burned the people and materials outside it that had no business being there." The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. I looked at her, and the full picture finally connected.

"You're saying... someone used this engagement to slip their hand into the drake tower's operational sphere?"

"Not trying to." She corrected me, cold and precise.

"Already had." She paused, then added one final sentence.

"The northern, central, and southern drake towers—tens of thousands of troops each. I will not hand that kind of power to the Sea Dragon King and whatever eastern mongrels stand behind him." This time, I truly understood. She hadn't burned Black Dragon Pass because she didn't want to get married and decided to take her tantrum out on a convenient piece of geography.

She had discovered that the marriage arrangement, the Sea Dragon envoys, the aerial route charts, and the drake tower's operational logistics had all converged at a single critical node—and she had burned the node. My throat tightened slightly.

"But things escalated beyond what you intended." Ignicia's expression darkened at that.

"I only meant to burn the handover zone outside the tower." For the first time, her tone carried genuine displeasure—not explosive rage, but the cold disgust reserved for spectacular incompetence.

"How was I supposed to know those idiots had been stockpiling restricted materials right there? The fire touched it, and the whole sector went up." She said it coldly and directly. Precisely because she was being so direct, I knew she wasn't making excuses. She had been the one to strike the flame. But the reason Black Dragon Pass had exploded into something capable of hurling structural beams across international borders clearly involved more than a single breath of dragon fire.

I looked down at the three bulging sacks at my feet and realized that the most absurd part of tonight wasn't sweeping coins with a broom, nor being hauled into the sky without warning. It was that I was standing in front of a fire dragon princess who had nearly detonated an international border, and I was earnestly, methodically beginning to understand her logic. This felt terrible. Because once you start understanding her, it becomes very difficult to keep treating her as a simple natural disaster.

But stop treating her as a natural disaster, and you become dangerously vulnerable to whatever she says next.

"Cedric." She spoke suddenly.

"Yes?"

"Finished packing?" I glanced at the three bags.

"Yes."

"Then let's go." The words had barely landed when she shifted back to dragon form in one fluid motion. No warning. No transition. No consideration for what humans might consider basic courtesy regarding psychological preparation. The massive crimson body unfolded within the cavern, scales catching firelight like an entire field of breathing molten iron. I looked at her silently and didn't bother asking where. Because I had a fairly good idea, and asking wouldn't make the answer any more reasonable.

I methodically secured all three treasure sacks to her hindquarters and saddle points, ensuring nothing would detach mid-flight and achieve terminal velocity on someone below, then climbed onto her back with the resigned composure of a man who had made his peace with gravity.

"Ready," I said.

"Let's go." The next instant, the cavern filled with the searing wind of her wings. When awareness caught up with me, I was airborne again. Wonderful. My stomach had apparently decided to pursue other career opportunities this evening. After some time aloft, Ignicia apparently remembered that fragile human specimens at altitude not only risk having their brains scrambled by wind, but also lose their basic functionality as negotiating partners if they can't speak.

She casually deployed a protective barrier around me, cutting off the worst of the gale. I tested my voice and found it was no longer being shoved back down my throat.

"Your Highness."

"Mm?"

"Are we flying the wrong direction?"

"No." She replied with complete authority.

"First we return the money to your border marquis, then I go apologize to your king." I fell silent. The night wind at altitude was freezing. I nearly broke into a cold sweat anyway. Is there any possibility that what she's describing isn't an apology, but a declaration of war? I drew a careful breath and calibrated my tone to avoid both immediate provocation and personal suffocation from suppressed anxiety.

"Your Highness."

"Speak."

"Could you allow me to handle this particular matter?"

"Why?"

"Because if you fly directly over Margrave Frank in dragon form, his first thought won't be that you've come to deliver compensation." I kept my tone earnest.

"His first thought will be calculating the optimal angle for his opening volley." She made a dismissive sound.

"I'm not going there to kill him."

"True. Unfortunately, humans generally cannot distinguish between a dragon landing on their walls to commit slaughter and one arriving to drop off a sympathy payment. The distinction tends to get lost in the initial panic." She went quiet for a moment—the particular quiet of someone reluctantly conceding that a point, however inconvenient, might contain marginal validity.

"You put the letter in the bag?"

"I did."

"Then there's no problem." She reached her conclusion efficiently.

"I won't land. I'll cut the rope from above, drop the bag, and we leave immediately." For a moment, I genuinely couldn't decide whether to appreciate her progress in grasping the concept of not pressing a dragon's face directly against a border marquis's battlements, or to begin mourning for Margrave Frank—who was about to watch a fire dragon materialize above his walls and receive a sack of compensation dropped from the sky.

"... All right." Even I could hear the absolute resignation in those words. At that point, I finally understood with complete clarity what my assignment had become. This was no longer simply negotiating a ceasefire on the Empire's behalf. I was now serving as emergency braking systems for a fire dragon princess whose decision-making operated exclusively on straight-line logic—specifically, the kind of brakes that stood between her and accidentally triggering premature war with the entire human world.

And the worst part— Looking at it honestly, I appeared to be the only person currently available for the job.