Chương 144: 08. Crash Landin 1

After Ignicia delivered that flat "I'm informing you," she gave me absolutely no opportunity for a rebuttal. Her wings snapped open and the night sky tore apart like ripping canvas. The capital's lights vanished behind us in seconds. I flattened myself against her back, fingers locked around the ridge of her scales, operating under the singular professional objective of not becoming the world's most undignified piece of diplomatic debris plummeting from three thousand feet.

The darkness over the eastern territories was heavier than what we'd left behind. The wind sharpened as we flew, and the scattered lights below grew sparse. Farmland, roads, and isolated villages soon dissolved into vast stretches of wilderness swallowed by the night. She wasn't flying with the erratic speed of a tantrum—this was the focused, terrifying velocity of a predator with a specific destination in mind. Which meant the sense of impending doom in my gut was only getting worse.

"Your Highness!" I shouted against the wind.

"Please tell me you didn't drag me out here at this hour to admire the eastern stars!"

"What's worth looking at in stars?" she replied without turning.

"You humans are obsessed with staring at things that refuse to fall on you."

"Funny you mention that! Right now I'm considerably more concerned about the thing that might fall—specifically, me!" She made a sound that could have been amusement or dismissal. With her, the distinction was academic. I was about to press the issue when she began deliberately losing altitude. That's when I knew this wasn't something that could be written off as a midnight sightseeing expedition. She wasn't wandering. She was hunting for confirmation.

A few miles further, it materialized out of the blackness ahead. Not a mountain ridge. Not natural elevation. A massive wall stretching across the border like the spine of some dormant leviathan. Watchtowers and beacon stations punctuated its length, extending into the dark in both directions until distance consumed them. The Blazing Scale Wall (熾麟金牆). The Yanxia Empire's most heavily fortified eastern defensive line. The name had barely formed in my mind when the wall reacted.

Almost the instant we crossed into visual range, the nearest tower ignited its signal fire. Then the next. Then the next. Flames cascaded along the wall's length in rapid succession—not the panicked scramble of surprised sentries, but something smooth and practiced, like a rope soaked in oil finally meeting its match. I cursed under my breath. That wasn't the response time of soldiers improvising after spotting a dragon. That was a drill.

A system worn into muscle memory, waiting for the night it would finally be needed. Instead of pulling up, Ignicia angled lower.

"Your Highness!" My heart slammed against my ribs.

"You're going closer?!"

"Open your eyes and look, human." Her voice cut through the wind with absolute clarity.

"Tell me that looks like a garrison at rest." I braced myself and looked down. My stomach dropped. She was right. The interior showed none of the relaxed positioning of a standard night watch. The braziers between towers were too densely packed. Supply roads behind the wall showed heavy traffic patterns. Positions that should have housed grain storage or rotation barracks instead held the massive silhouettes of siege equipment.

Even the staging grounds behind the inner gates weren't configured for infantry rest—they were cleared and measured for the rapid pivoting and firing of heavy weapons. This wasn't defensive positioning. This was active combat readiness. And they weren't preparing for neighboring cavalry. They were preparing for something massive that came from the sky. The first volley arrived. A dense curtain of arrows launched from towers and battlements simultaneously, catching firelight like frozen rain.

I instinctively ducked, but Ignicia didn't bother evading. She let the volley break against her scales. Sharp, metallic impacts rippled across her back—the sound of iron nails striking a master-forged anvil. Not one arrow found purchase.

"Wonderful," I said through gritted teeth.

"At least this part follows normal logic." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

"Normal?" She laughed coldly.

"You consider shooting arrows at dragons to be normal?"

"From my perspective, anything that doesn't immediately result in us plummeting to our deaths qualifies as cause for gratitude!" She seemed ready to respond when the second wave arrived. These weren't arrows. A massive shadow tore past my shoulder, close enough that the pressure differential left half my face numb. I twisted around just in time to see it vanish into the night behind us, trailing a sound like splitting stone. Heavy ballista bolts. My scalp went cold.

"They've escalated to siege weapons!" I flattened myself and shouted forward.

"Your Highness, I think we've seen enough! We're about to provoke a major incident!" Even as the words left my mouth, I knew the incident was already underway. But I could hardly add: Congratulations, we're currently someone's fastest ticket to a military promotion. If Ignicia heard that, her pride would demand she demonstrate what a real military incident looked like. She didn't respond to my warning. She didn't have the bandwidth. Because she'd realized the truth.

The ballistas below hadn't been hastily deployed from storage. The troop and equipment positioning wasn't improvised panic. We hadn't triggered an emergency response. We had flown directly into a pre-existing, fully operational anti-air doctrine, and they had simply fed us into their firing sequence.

"Cedric." Her voice dropped to a different register entirely. Not the sound of anger building. Something colder—the quality of a hypothesis clicking into place with terrible precision.

"I underestimated the Yanxia Empire." Ice formed in my chest. For Ignicia von Dracunia to admit that aloud meant the situation was infinitely worse than I'd calculated. Before I could lean over for a better look, the third attack launched. Not a ballista bolt. A spear—but wrong in every way that mattered. It didn't look fired; it looked pushed into the sky by invisible force. The shaft was thicker than any war lance, its tip pulsing with sickly dark-red veining.

As it cut through the air, the wind around it seemed to warp and scream. I didn't have time to shout a warning. The spear punched directly into Ignicia's flank, just below her right wing root. Not a glancing blow. Not a scale-gap catch. A clean penetration through her natural defenses, buried deep. Her massive frame convulsed in midair. The shock nearly launched me off her back—I caught myself only by locking my legs around her spine and driving my fingers into scale seams.

"Your Highness!" She drew a sharp, ragged breath. For the first time since I'd known her, there was unmistakable pain in her voice.

"... Wrong. This spear carries a curse." The words came out ground and precise, her voice dropping half an octave.

"Dragon-Cursers. The Yanxia Empire actually stationed them on the border wall." I didn't have time to ask what Dragon-Cursers were. One look at the wound told me everything I needed to know. Where the spear had struck, the natural fire-traced patterns flowing beneath her scales had been severed—cut clean like interrupted current. The surrounding armor plates were blackening at a visible rate, as if something was burrowing inward through the wound channel.

I wanted very badly to start swearing with complete disregard for diplomatic protocol.

"Hold on," Ignicia said quietly. Two words that I'd learned to translate perfectly. That wasn't her I need to maneuver voice. That was her someone has made a fatal error in judgment voice. She snapped her wings wide, arresting momentum with violent midair torsion. Instead of retreating, she banked hard and dove directly toward the Blazing Scale Wall. The towers below clearly realized their firing sequence had gone catastrophically wrong. More ballistas pivoted frantically.

Even through the altitude and wind, I could hear orders being screamed from the battlements. Then she opened her jaws. In that moment, I realized my previous understanding of the word "hellfire" had been embarrassingly quaint. What poured from her throat was white-hot bleeding into molten gold—not simply flame, but the visual equivalent of liquefied starlight. It struck the wall not as a stream but as a collapse, as though someone had wrung out the sky itself.

The fire detonated along the fortifications in a sustained wave. Towers, battlements, weapon mounts, and the silhouettes manning them simply ceased to exist upon contact. The soldiers caught in the epicenter were, grimly, the fortunate ones—vaporized before their nervous systems could register what was happening. The entire section blazed with eye-searing brilliance against the night. Like a mountain range set on fire.

And the first thought that crossed my deeply compromised brain wasn't about the horror of war or political consequences, but: If I tossed a barrel of seal oil into that right now, the color gradient would be absolutely spectacular. I sat with that thought for a moment. Perfect. Spending time with this woman was corrupting more than just the geopolitical situation. My sanity was going with it. But the moment that breath ended, something was clearly wrong with Ignicia.

Her flight pattern wavered, altitude dropping sharply. I could feel the massive muscles beneath her scales trembling—not with rage, but with sudden, catastrophic weakness. The curse in that spear hadn't just pierced her defenses; it was suppressing something vital inside her. That breath hadn't been calculated retaliation. She had forcibly purged her own fire channels to power it, overriding the curse through sheer, destructive stubbornness. And now the invoice had arrived.

"Cedric..." Her voice was different. Smaller. The absolute authority from moments ago was gone. My stomach plummeted. I pressed myself flat, trying to distribute my weight.

"I'm here."

"I'm losing it," she gritted out, breathing shallow.

"That spear... something's wrong with it."

"I can see that!" I nearly roared over the wind.

"Could you maybe try not falling out of the sky quite so honestly?!" She ignored my commentary. She lacked the energy to process it. We were losing altitude rapidly. Her right wing had developed a stiff, unnatural drag. The burning ruins of the Blazing Scale Wall were shrinking behind us, but that didn't mean safety. If the Yanxia Empire had fully integrated anti-dragon assets and Dragon-Cursers into their border defense, limping away at low altitude was the worst possible scenario.

I looked ahead into the darkness, then back at the burning wall, and felt something cold slam into my chest. Only now did I understand why she'd brought me here. She hadn't come to sightsee. She'd come to verify whether the Yanxia Empire had deployed anti-dragon warfare capabilities on their border. The answer was devastatingly clear. They had. Not only that, but the integration was earlier, more comprehensive, and more lethal than she'd anticipated.

Which meant every suspicion she'd voiced in the council chamber—about sea routes, Black Dragon Pass, the Yanxia Empire's infiltration—hadn't been paranoia. It had been reality discovered one step too late. My throat went dry. Because that also meant something else. We hadn't just been ambushed. We'd uncovered the truth, and now we were being shot down because of it. Ignicia spoke again. Just a few words.

"I'm going down." Wonderful. She wasn't asking for input. She was issuing formal notification that for the foreseeable future, I was entirely responsible for my own survival upon impact.