Chương 25: Reborn as the Dragon: — Chapter 25 - Black Dragon's Blitz on the Silver Mine

How do you handle something so soft and adorable you just want to eat her up? Asking for a friend. Urgent. Anna's Favorability hadn't shifted much, but Su Nian felt himself dangerously close to being completely conquered. She was this young and already this charming. What was she going to be like when she grew up? Such a cute little elf girl, right in the middle of a growth spurt — her nutrition had to keep up. Spending a good chunk of reward points on fresh milk for her wasn't excessive, was it?

He decided it wasn't. He'd just have to wait a bit longer. He still hadn't figured out where to source milk, and the cows hadn't matured yet anyway. The Lolita Dress didn't seem completely out of the question either. Just a little pricey. The thoughts flickered through his mind and were gone. Su Nian pushed down a small, inconvenient flutter in his chest. His pitch-black dragon face stayed perfectly composed as he gently picked up the soft, well-behaved Anna in his jaws and settled her onto his back.

His back was broader now than it used to be. He'd specially shaped a seat-like hollow up there, ringed by raised spines with a slight depression in the center. Anna was small and light, soft in all the right ways. She fit inside it perfectly. He could flex the cartilage along his spine to tighten around her, locking her in place so she wouldn't fall. She could also grip the spines for extra security. It wasn't ideal, conditions were what they were.

Otherwise, he'd have installed a full fighter jet cockpit and gone full Gundam Dragon on the whole thing. Then he could pack Anna, his gold coins, and his storybooks inside, sealed up with 360-degree coverage. What? You think a giant dragon marching off to conquest while dragging along dead weight is just plain stupid? Su Nian disagreed entirely. A loli was nothing but a combat multiplier. If he couldn't keep her safe, that was his problem for being weak. What did that have to do with Anna?

[Hehe, sitting on the dragon gentleman's back is so comfortable. So warm.] [Anna really wants to be protected like this forever.] [It's a pity... Anna's body...] The little loli had started wandering into her own thoughts again. Su Nian caught her inner voice and the corner of his dragon mouth curled. He thought to himself: he was a transmigrator. Wrestling someone away from Death, wasn't that basically just a handshake and a nod?

He looked down at the Kobolds still prostrate on the ground, waiting for his order. Right. It was time. Time to take the mine back from the Ettercaps. Whether it was the punitive force the Anlius Kingdom would inevitably send, or the players who could drop in at any moment, the answer was the same: push his own power as hard as it would go, and bring more monsters under his banner. He felt very good about where he currently stood. This novel is published on a different platform.

Support the original author by finding the official source.... Deep in the Silvermoon Forest, in a stand of broadleaf evergreens, spider webs lay thick across the trees and ground like snow on a winter night. Most of the trees had long since died. Their bare, skeletal trunks twisted around each other in tangled, grotesque shapes, layered and grasping, like devils reaching out of the dark, sinister in the faint haze of filtered light. Ettercap territory. Impossible to mistake for anything else.

Within their range, almost nothing lived. The webs and venom seeped into everything, rotting the forest from the inside out, stripping what had once been green and alive down to a silent wasteland strung with cobwebs and desiccated corpses. The Ettercaps never cleaned any of it up. They let it decay at its own pace, from bloated wreckage to stinking rot to bare white bone. Today, though, something far more dangerous had walked into this dead zone. A ferocious, towering Black Dragon.

And behind him, a cluster of very nervous Kobolds.

"By Kurtulmak above, great master — this place is absolutely terrifying!" Bolikri swept wide eyes around the gloomy tangle of dead wood. When they had fled from here before, the forest had been full of life, flowers, green canopy, birdsong, insects. Now it looked worse than undead territory.

"There is nothing to fear," Su Nian said, casual, unbothered.

"I will stand beside you." Terror? What was terror? He was terror. Anna was tucked up on his back and she wasn't scared at all, that said everything.

"Pick up the pace. We go straight for the mine. No time to track them down individually — make enough noise, and every Ettercap in range will come to us." Su Nian gave the order and the group pressed forward. They hadn't even reached the mine entrance when a mass of giant spiders surged out of the dark, shrieking, cutting off their path. The spiders had actually been trailing them for a while.

Their instincts ran toward ambush, and the Black Dragon's presence had kept them hesitant, circling at the edges of their own courage. So they'd hung back, keeping their distance, right up until Su Nian was nearly at their nest. Now they had no choice. Any further and the invaders were inside. Honestly, this was the first time they'd ever been on the receiving end of this level of sheer audacity. Su Nian watched the swarm come at him. His eyes went cold.

"Barely past level ten. Garbage." His chest swelled. His throat bulged. A sickly green light blazed to life in his gullet. BOOM! A sound like a jet engine igniting. Sickly green dragonfire poured out in a wave, wall to wall, swallowing every spider in the path. The whole swarm had time for maybe a handful of shrieks before the breath reduced them to ash. [Killed: Giant Spider x57. System Points gained: 312.] Clean. Completely satisfying. Su Nian exhaled a slow smoke ring that reeked of sulfur.

His old acid breath never could have done that. The burn-and-corrode combination had taken his breath weapon to a whole different level of lethality. Even the dead, dry trees around them caught from the green flames, but that was fine. They were already dead. This whole place needed to be cleaned out.

"Forward!" Su Nian spread his wings and gave the order. The Kobolds marched after him, chests out, chins up, reverence for their Black Dragon emperor radiating off every single one of them as they stepped back into what had once been their home. A short while later... Inside the mine, webs packed every surface like a spider's palace. Dark green fire burned in scattered patches across the cave. Spider corpses blanketed the floor, and the air was thick with the smell of charred protein.

Three Ettercaps were pinned beneath Su Nian's claws, one under each foot and a third crushed beneath another, all of them howling. Burn marks covered their bodies. Dark green blood seeped steadily out, pooling with the scattered limbs and broken pieces of spiders across the stone floor. It was a grim sight. There had been four more besides these, but they were ash now. The last surviving Ettercap crouched in front of Su Nian. It had curled itself into a ball on the ground, shaking.

Su Nian had kept this one alive deliberately. A test subject. He raised his head, all fangs and cold authority, and ground his thick claw slowly against the Ettercap's skull. The pressure produced a long, wet creak of bone under stress. He exhaled a short burst of scorching white steam directly into the cowering creature's face. The Ettercap screamed, clapped its limbs over its face, and thrashed across the floor in agony. That was enough data. Su Nian's eyes dropped. His tail swung.

Steel-hard, whipping fast, it came down on the rolling Ettercap like an iron bar hitting a watermelon. The Ettercap did not fly through the air the way a ball would. THUD! It simply burst apart where it lay, spraying across the stone in every direction. ➤ Next: Who Is Playing with Life?