Chương 58: Reborn as the Dragon: — Chapter 58 - Wishful Thinking

A mouthful of Blaze Rabbit phlegm hit Hana full in the face, tobacco, sulfur, and pure biological horror all at once. She nearly vomited on the spot.

"Damnable dead rabbit, gulp — I'll tear you apart!" Rage detonated somewhere deep in her chest. Strength flooded her limbs from nowhere. She tore free of the Blaze Rabbits piling on her in one violent burst and lunged at Bugs Bunny with murder in her eyes. The harpy leader's claws and fangs, sharp enough to shear bone, closed the distance fast. A cold glint passed through Bugs Bunny's eyes. In the back of its mind, its Black Dragon master's teachings surfaced. [A gentleman who is not heavy lacks authority.] As a gentleman rabbit, one must strike heavily. Insufficient force meant insufficient respect. Case in point: right now. It had pulled its punch. And look — the harpy leader was still fighting back. Outrageous. It was time to educate these magically-stunted monster races about the true meaning of the art of benevolence, which Bugs Bunny defined, quite simply, as the art of splitting the enemy in two.

In the span of a single heartbeat, its exquisite combat instincts had already mapped the harpy leader's entire attack trajectory. Too slow. Not even half of Grey Wolf's speed. Bugs Bunny moved second, but its rabbit paw arrived first. It caught Hana's claws mid-strike. CRACK CRACK, the sound of hardened talons scraping dead callus. Its eyes went wide. A savage light erupted in its gaze. It planted its feet, torqued its hips, seized Hana's outstretched arm, and swung. A textbook shoulder throw.

Hana slammed into the ground hard enough to rattle the earth. She felt the force tear through her claw, felt the world flip upside down, and then her chin hit something and white-hot pain detonated through her skull. Her head rang like a struck bell. Gold sparks swam across her vision. It wasn't over.

"ROAR—" Bugs Bunny launched itself skyward, hung in the air for half a breath, and came down elbow-first onto Hana's back. CRACK! Something broke. The harpy leader's vision went black. She didn't feel herself hit the ground.... She didn't know how long she was out. When Hana came back to herself, every part of her body felt like it had been run through a millstone. That, and cold, a faint, seeping chill that pricked at her skin and forced her eyes open. She looked down. Her feathers were gone.

Every last one of them. The gorgeous plumage she had tended for decades, preened and groomed and protected, stripped clean. Not a single feather remained on her body. Those Blaze Rabbits were animals. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Hana clutched her bare wings to her chest, grief and humiliation caving in on her at once. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes. The light around her was dim.

The air was thick with something vast and suffocating, an aura like standing at the edge of an abyss. She understood immediately. This was the Dragon's Nest. Every muscle in her body clenched. She curled into herself and pressed as far under her own wings as she could manage. Her Inherited Memories were screaming. Once a dragon had you, even if it didn't kill you, you weren't walking away whole. That much every monster race knew without being told. As for why, it didn't need explaining. Dragons.

The entire magical creature community understood what dragons were. They could find something beautiful in virtually any female creature alive, and when they did, they followed that instinct to its natural conclusion without a second thought. Hana had once watched a white dragon and a female sandworm. Together. She had carried that image ever since, burned permanently into her memory as a warning. After that, she had given every dragon on the continent a very wide berth. And yet here she was.

Her tribespeople were huddled around her, every face swollen and bruised, every body shaking like a leaf. Their beautiful feathers had been plucked just as bare as hers. The Blaze Rabbits had apparently been very thorough with their hospitality. Heavy, rhythmic panting filled the air from all directions. She tracked the sound. Across the Dragon's Nest, a pack of gnolls was training. Some were working wooden stakes with low kicks, over and over.

Some were jumping through the corridors with heavy spear-pigs braced across their shoulders. Some were whirling a pair of black water pythons through the air in patterns too fast and dense to follow. A few kobolds crouched near a fire, boiling something, she caught a glimpse of egg whites and yolks in the pot. A deep, rolling rumble swept through the cave.

Hundreds of Blaze Rabbits stampeded past in a dense wave, and above them, a clutch of cockatrice moved along the ceiling, feet planted against the stone overhead, perfectly at ease. At the center of it all, on a wide flat platform of bedrock, a massive Black Dragon lay coiled. Its dark wings were wrapped around a beast-eared elf girl cradled against its chest, its enormous tongue dragging methodically across the girl's face. Hana stared.

Everything she thought she knew about monster hierarchies was falling apart in real time. She had assumed the kobolds and Blaze Rabbits were simply the gnolls' slaves. But that wasn't it at all. These creatures weren't enslaved to each other. They all belonged to the Black Dragon, every single one of them, and they were living together like some kind of deranged commune. That alone was baffling enough. But even within a dragon's followers, there were supposed to be ranks. Power structures. Clear lines of dominance.

So what was she looking at right now? A gnoll had just carried a basket of radishes over to a Blaze Rabbit. The Blaze Rabbit was curled up in the gnoll's arms, pressing its face against its chest, making soft demanding noises. The gnoll was looking down at it with the expression of a besotted parent. They were both male.

"Harpy leader?" The Black Dragon's voice rolled over her, hoarse, low, unhurried. Hana snapped back to herself. She turned. The Black Dragon was no longer on its platform. It was directly in front of her. She hadn't even heard it move. She pulled her neck in, pressed her bare wings tight against her body, lowered her head, and shook. What did it want? Was it going to, A cold wave of dread moved through her. Dragons had barbs, if the old stories were right. Terrible ones.

Whatever came next would be nothing short of torture. And yet. She risked a glance upward. This Black Dragon really was ferocious. The kind of ferocious that meant something, the kind that radiated power from every scale, every angle, every coil of its body. For a creature of the chaotic evil alignment like her, that kind of terrifying power had always carried a certain undeniable pull. The stronger and more monstrous, the more compelling. The Black Dragon in front of her was exactly that kind of existence.

When she framed it that way, enduring some measure of pain for the sake of producing offspring with a creature this formidable... didn't seem entirely out of the question. A strange warmth crept up through her chest without permission. Heat rushed into her face. What would a harpy-dragon hybrid even look like? Dragon-harpy? Harpy-dragon? Would it have wings? Scales? Would it breathe fire or, Hana's imagination began unspooling in directions that made her featherless cheeks burn....

Su Nian gave Anna a couple more licks, received a grumpy little fist against his snout for it, and turned his attention to the harpy leader. She was sitting there, hormones radiating like a malfunctioning alchemy furnace. He stared at her, genuinely baffled. Is something wrong with this creature? She gets beaten half to death and goes into heat early? What is she thinking right now? Su Nian shook his head, disgusted, and swallowed the impulse to solve the problem with a single blast of dragon breath.

Setting aside everything else, the harpy leader was hideous. She looked like something out of a hedge witch nightmare. What level of self-confidence did it take for a creature like that to sit there and assume it could move a dragon? The only creature in existence that moved him was Anna. Every other monster in this Nest, female or male, was a soldier. A laborer. A crop waiting to be harvested. Nothing more. ➤ Next: From Now On, Your Name Is Ji Taimei