Chương 119: Reborn as the Dragon — Chapter 119 - The Arena

[Li Chen, Li Chen?] [Li Chen, what's the situation on your end?] [Li Chen, respond!]... Li Chen opened the team channel. Line after line of old messages filled the screen. The most recent one was from half an hour ago. He stared at all that urgency. Took a slow breath. The stench of blood and rot hit the back of his throat. He gagged. He lowered himself onto a chunk of broken wall, looking at the devastation around him. Then he switched to the message bar, picked his words carefully, and typed:"Report.

The mercenary group is heading toward Saint Augustus Royal Capital. There's no need for me to keep lying low." [Why? What happened?] [Have you been exposed?]"It's not about exposure. The entire Black Beast Mercenary Group just got hit by a Black Dragon. Heavy losses. And it'll be back."

"My read: Gus can't afford to stall anymore. He'll go straight for the capital — no more stopping at villages along the way." Li Chen pushed to his feet and started picking through the wreckage. It took a while, but he finally found it in the ruins of the troll chieftain's tent, a necklace, warped by heat, the metal blackened and misshapen. Hao Na's. Her mother had given it to her. The troll chieftain had snatched it away while he tormented her, wanting to watch the despair on that poor girl's face. [Black Dragon?] [You mean one of those big winged lizards?] [Interesting find. Any chance we can tame it?]"Tame it?" Li Chen nearly laughed. More likely the other way around.

"Let me send you a video. See for yourself who tames who." He pulled the recording, clipped the key segments, and dropped them into the team channel. At the same time. Two thousand kilometers from Saint Orist, at what was once the Celestial Dynasty No. 3 Starter Village, now the Celestial Dynasty No. 3 Town, the pavilion at the center of town was occupied. A ring of people sat around a square table, documents piled across the surface. Their expressions were serious. The discussion had been running for a while.

"It's here." One of them, a middle-aged man, well-dressed, posture precise, noticed a new file pop into his field of vision. He didn't open it himself. Instead he turned to the man at the head of the table, an elderly figure with graying hair, and said respectfully:"Elder Li. Codename Tiger Warrior has sent the video."

"Mm." Elder Li gave a nod.

"Put it on projection. Let's all have a look." The System's built-in projection function was genuinely impressive. It rendered recorded footage in full 3D at one-to-one scale, you could make out almost every detail, right down to individual textures. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. Human visual range had its limits, though.

So the middle-aged man compressed the projection down to roughly washbasin-sized, small enough that everyone at the table could take in the whole image at once. The shot was from a low angle, looking up. It captured the Firinell Holy Wall and just enough of the surrounding terrain to establish the scene. Sharp-eyed observers had already picked out the ground below, scorched into a glassy, vitrified crust. According to Tiger Warrior, that entire stretch of ruin was the Black Dragon's doing.

The atmosphere in the pavilion went heavy before the dragon even appeared.

"ROAR—" A piercing cry split the recording's audio. A few shoulders went rigid. Even through the video, the pressure carried. That aura, the sheer weight of it, bled through regardless of distance or medium. Everyone straightened. Nobody looked away from the projection. Then a Black Dragon swept overhead above the Firinell Holy Wall. It didn't attack immediately. It just circled, slow, almost leisurely, gliding once around above the wall while the humanoid defenders scrambled to rotate their cannons.

Then it dropped. Fast. Clean. Like the slow circle had been an act all along.

"What is that?!" Someone in the pavilion blurted it out. Every cannon port on the left side of the Firinell Holy Wall vanished under a blinding white flare. The viewing angle was distant, and it was still painful to look at. It felt like staring directly into a welder's arc, and then someone had cranked it up several times over. The effect matched a flashbang. In terms of raw duration, it outlasted every model any of them had encountered.

ROAR, The dragon cried again, sharper this time, more compressed, almost a scream. The Celestial Dynasty players caught it: the Black Dragon had opened its breath attack under the cover of that white-out. And under that cover, without taking a single hit, it carved through the entire left wall of the Firinell Holy Wall. Then the right wall. Until the whole defensive line was gone. The final frame showed the Black Dragon perched on the spire. Enormous. Built like a fortress with wings.

Rough wingspan estimate: twenty meters. The jet-black surface wasn't scales, it looked more like plating, like armor that had grown from the body itself. Across its chest and belly, veins of crimson magma spread in dense, branching webs, and they made the creature look exactly as dangerous as it was. The footage cut. Silence settled over the pavilion. Everyone exhaled at the same time.

"What level did Tiger Warrior say this thing was? Thirty-two? Just broke into the fourth tier."

"That's right." The middle-aged man nodded. The wariness behind his eyes was plain. Even Elder Li, who had sat with a composed expression through the entire viewing, couldn't keep the weight off his face.

"You've all seen it," he said.

"Someone earlier suggested taming it."

"Let's bury that idea."

"I've heard that two of the Sakura Country starter villages have already been wiped out by dragons. At this point, it seems we've been underestimating this world's native strength."

"Particularly its legendary creatures." Elder Li's brow furrowed. His tone was measured, but heavy.

"Isn't that overstating it?" someone pushed back.

"It took out the Firinell Holy Wall, sure. But according to Tiger Warrior's intelligence, the defenders were just cannon fodder." Elder Li shook his head. His withered hand tapped the table once, pulling the room's attention.

"Fierce magical beasts aren't the real threat," he said.

"Fierce magical beasts with human-level intelligence, that's the threat."

"Especially dragons."

"Look carefully at what Tiger Warrior's footage actually shows. You don't have to look hard."

"This dragon left and came back deliberately. It used a feint. It deployed that flashbang magic specifically to blind the defenders before its attack run."

"Powerful. Cautious. Ruthless."

"If the legendary creatures of this world all operate at that level, I'm afraid our position in this wager becomes very difficult to hold."

"Because it means we don't only have to subdue this world's native humans. We have to contend with its magical creatures as well."

"And that's not even everything. Conflict between the different regions of our own Shuilán Star is inevitable, this is fundamentally a war over resources."

"Calling it a wager flatters the situation, frankly. We and these otherworld natives are both being sacrificed. How's that for bleak?" Elder Li exhaled. The lines on his face seemed to have deepened.

"Then what do we do, Elder Li?" The gravity in the old man's voice had become everyone's gravity. Expressions around the table darkened.

"The being who controls the fate of both worlds has given us no specific mandate," Elder Li said.

"But 'rule' doesn't require war to achieve it. The ancients understood this. True governance is the balance of hard and soft, force and persuasion working in tandem."

"War is the worst option available to us." He stroked his beard, and something sharpened in his eyes. War wasn't the only path. Sometimes a conciliatory hand won what a sword couldn't.

"The Celestial Dynasty's cultural depth is not a small thing. Befriend the distant powers; pressure the near ones. The highest form of strategy doesn't strike the enemy's forces, it strikes the enemy's plans."

"And don't forget — every gladiator who steps into the arena is innocent."

"But there is one person in that arena who is absolutely not innocent."

"The one who built it."

ps: Contact with the Celestial Dynasty won't be coming too early in the story. Some readers have been asking about their angle, so consider this foreshadowing. To summarize in one sentence... You guess. (; v;) Extra chapters incoming, let's go! ➤ Next: Wife