Chương 252: Black Dragon Rampage

Vale's eyes widened sharply, wide enough that they seemed to hit their limit. The apple in his hand suddenly felt insignificant in contrast to the weight of what he had just heard. Then, as the meaning finally sank in, something in him snapped. His jaw clenched so hard it ached, teeth grinding together, and his fist closed violently around the fruit. It shattered instantly, juice and flesh spilling through his grip as pressure alone reduced it to pulp. He looked up at Drago with a sharp, almost furious glare.

"Why did nobody stop him?!" Vale demanded, voice tight with restrained anger. Drago studied him for a long moment, expression unreadable in that same unsettling calm. Then he exhaled slowly.

"The boy wished to leave," he said evenly.

"Who are we to prevent him?" Vale's anger flared immediately.

"Do you have any idea how easy it is to die out there?" he snapped. Drago didn't flinch. His gaze remained steady, detached in a way that made the room feel colder.

"Believe me," he said quietly, "I know better than anyone." Vale stepped back slightly, suspicion threading through his frustration now.

"Then why would you-" Drago cut him off before the sentence could form fully.

"That boy," he said, tone firm but not unkind, "has lived his entire life seeking the approval of others. I will not be the one to deny him the first real decision he has made for himself." That landed differently. Vale's expression tightened, anger still present but destabilized, shifting into something more conflicted. His hands flexed at his sides as he forced himself to breathe.

The silence that followed was heavy and less empty, more compressed, as if both of them were weighing opposite truths against the same outcome. Vale finally exhaled through his nose, shoulders loosening slightly as he wrestled his tone back under control.

"I'm sorry," he said at last, voice lower.

"I'm just worried about him." Drago's expression softened a fraction. He gave a small, almost reassuring nod.

"You do not need to be," he replied.

"He is stronger than you think. He survived the Scorched Sands, just as you did. I am confident he will endure this journey until our forces locate him." Vale glanced up at that, catching on immediately.

"Your forces?" he repeated, narrowing his eyes.

"What do you mean, your forces will find him?" A faint chuckle escaped Drago, as though the concern was predictable.

"Do you truly believe I would send him into the world unprotected?" he asked.

"I have established countermeasures. He has been directed toward one of our secure bases. If all proceeds as intended, we should receive confirmation of his arrival within a month." Vale let out a slow breath, tension easing just slightly.

"If all goes well," he echoed, tone dry.

"Right. Then let's hope it does." Silence returned, this time less charged but still heavy with unfinished thoughts. Vale stood there for a moment, gaze drifting downward as he processed everything. Then, deciding to break the spiral before it deepened, he shifted his weight and awkwardly rubbed the back of his head.

"So…" he began, deliberately changing direction, "your daughter. What was she like?" The shift worked. Drago blinked once, visibly caught off guard, before his expression softened in a way Vale hadn't seen before. He looked away briefly, as though reaching back through time.

"She had beautiful brown hair," Drago said slowly, voice quiet but steady.

"Pale skin like her mother's. She was… radiant. For as long as I had her." Something in his tone carried more than nostalgia, it carried absence. A carefully contained grief that had long since stopped screaming and instead simply remained. Vale watched him carefully.

"How long was that?" he asked gently. Drago lifted his head slightly, gaze distant.

"Until her fifth birthday," he said.

"That was when Dagon came." The name alone shifted the atmosphere. Vale's posture changed instantly, his focus sharpening.

"Dagon?" he repeated.

"You fought Dagon?" His disbelief was immediate, instinctive. The idea itself clashed with everything he understood about scale and survival. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Drago's eyes narrowed slightly at the intensity of his reaction.

"Yes," he said simply. Vale stepped forward without thinking, voice rising.

"You fought Dagon to a stalemate? That's! how is that even possible?" Drago lifted a hand slightly, a subtle attempt to steady the conversation.

"Calm yourself," he said.

"To answer your question… I was fortunate. I managed to suppress his rampage long enough to prevent total annihilation. He still destroyed half the population." The words should have softened the claim, but instead they deepened its horror. Vale's expression faltered, shock overtaking anger. His body went still for a moment, as if recalibrating the scale of what he had just heard.

"That's… insane," he muttered under his breath, voice quieter now.

"Do you even know what caused him to go mad?" For a long time, Drago didn't answer. The silence stretched uncomfortably, and Vale's expression shifted slightly as he began to reconsider the question. Maybe he had pushed too far. He opened his mouth to redirect, Then Drago spoke.

"Dagon was corrupted," he said, voice suddenly colder. Sharper.

"An angel took hold of him." Vale froze. Drago's gaze darkened as he continued, the calm veneer replaced by something far more brittle beneath the surface.

"It twisted him. Broke him. Drove him into madness until he became something that could no longer distinguish purpose from destruction. That was what reduced the world to ruin." Vale stepped back, his hand rising instinctively to his mouth as Drago's words settled into him in uneven layers, too heavy and structured. For a moment he just stared at the bakery floor, as if the answer might be etched into the grain of the stone.

Drago continued anyway, voice calm in the way of someone recounting a disaster that had long since stopped feeling like a singular event.

"In the end, using Nirvana, Dagon managed to kill the angel. But by then the damage had already propagated through the world's structure. Neither of us had the strength left to resist the Fracture that formed afterward… the one that placed us inside this tower." Vale didn't respond. He wanted to, there were too many questions pressing at once, but they collided in his throat and dissolved before they could form properly.

The silence that followed wasn't empty, it felt compressed, like the air itself was waiting for him to catch up. Drago exhaled slowly, as though dismissing the weight of the subject by sheer habit.

"Take time to process it. We'll finish the cake another day. You should rest." Vale's gaze snapped up. Something in him refused to let the thread end there.

"Do you know where Dagon is now?" Drago paused mid-step at the doorway. He glanced back over his shoulder, expression unreadable, then let out a faint, almost tired smile.

"Who knows," he said evenly.

"Perhaps he's somewhere within Irea. Perhaps he's wandering deeper into the tower, hunting false angels and killing anything that resembles what was done to him." Then he left. The door shut with a muted finality, leaving Vale alone in the bakery with the smell of flour, heat, and unfinished questions. For several seconds he didn't move. Then his voice came out quieter than he intended.

"… An angel corrupted him?" He leaned back against the counter, fingers tightening briefly on the edge as his thoughts began to structure themselves against his will. Corruption didn't feel like the right word anymore. From what he had heard, it sounded less like influence and more like invasion, something trying to overwrite a being too large to erase cleanly. His mind drifted back to Artoria. To what he had seen when souls fractured or disappeared entirely.

The mechanics were inconsistent, but the pattern was there: angels didn't simply kill. They replaced, or merged, or rewrote until identity stopped being a stable concept. And Dagon… if he truly had been what Drago described, then even that had not been enough. Vale's eyes sharpened slightly.

'Angels exist in this tower.' The realization tightened in his chest before expanding outward into something colder. If that was true, then Eskar, alone, inexperienced in the scale of what this place contained, was not just traveling. He was exposed. Continuously. Vale lowered himself onto the floor without noticing, sitting back on his heels as the weight of branching possibilities began to stack too quickly to separate cleanly.

His thoughts spiraled, each conclusion producing three more questions until the structure of certainty itself felt unstable. Time passed without definition. Then,"Why are you sitting on the ground?" Vale looked up sharply. Maximus stood in the bakery entrance, his sheer presence making the room feel smaller by comparison. Light from behind him fractured across the stone floor, his silhouette cutting through it like an anchored mass rather than a person.

His expression was neutral, but not absent; it carried the kind of awareness that suggested he had already read half the situation without needing explanation. Vale blinked once, collecting himself.

"Sorry. Drago told me… a lot." He extended a hand upward without thinking, expecting assistance. Maximus didn't take it. A beat passed. Vale's expression twitched with mild irritation, and he withdrew his hand, pushing himself up instead.

"Right. Of course." Maximus studied him briefly, then let out a slow breath.

"If your concern involves angels, there is no immediate cause for alarm." Vale's attention snapped back.

"There isn't?"

"Most do not survive long enough within populated regions to inflict meaningful damage," Maximus said flatly.

"The tower's internal systems, guardians, and even hostile entities treat them as priority targets. They are… structurally disliked."

"That's one way to put it," Vale muttered, tension easing slightly despite himself. Maximus continued, unbothered.

"In addition, even lower-order entities resent them. Their presence destabilizes local rulesets. They are rarely permitted persistence." Vale exhaled, some of the pressure in his chest finally loosening. Relief came first, then confusion followed immediately behind it, sharper and more pointed. He narrowed his eyes.

"Wait. When did I say I was worried about angels?" Maximus regarded him for a moment longer than necessary. Then, without changing tone at all, he answered:"You didn't."