On that day, the entire Astera was shrouded in thick fog, with visibility at one point dropping to less than one meter, forcing the busy Astera to suspend work for a day. Even many hunters who were outside, when they returned and faced such dense fog, could only choose to pitch temporary tents at the fog's edge.
However, faced with such an abnormal phenomenon, the people in the base did not panic in the slightest.
The faint mandrake fragrance that drifted through the fog from time to time was already enough to show who the instigator of all this was, and the trust built up over several decades made the Commander choose to believe her.
Of course, that was on the condition that it did not last too long; otherwise, no matter what the reason was, they would have to go investigate.
At night, the thick fog disappeared just as abruptly as it had appeared. The high-ranking members of the Research Commission who had been watching the situation all let out a sigh of relief in unison, and the Commander specially assigned the Provisions Team to head to the back mountain after dawn to investigate Chameleos's condition.
At the same time, beside the plantation behind the mountain, Mother Chameleos, as if venting her anger, stretched out her forelegs and kicked the paralyzed Tempered Chameleos again and again.
The young Chameleos, seeing its normally calm mother fall into a berserk state, drew its head back and quietly went invisible, striving to lower its presence as much as possible.
Once she's done hitting it, she won't be able to hit me anymore!
The Tempered Chameleos had never imagined that, upon their reunion, what awaited it would actually be a brutal beating.
Wait, why?!
With its resistance to poison, why was it being repeatedly paralyzed and stunned?
Also, its mate only lived on the outskirts of the New World, so why was that one's body even larger than its own, which lived in the Elder's Recess and was a Tempered Elder Dragon?
Those kicks really hurt~
Especially the next day, when the Tempered Chameleos noticed that the base color of Mother Chameleos's scales had actually turned orange-yellow, it looked as if it had seen a ghost.
It immediately activated its "super brain," trying to figure out what on earth was going on, only to be met with yet another round of furious kicking from the well-rested Mother Chameleos.
Chameleos were merely indifferent when it came to family affection, but between mates they would not play at things like living apart. In fact, because of Chameleos's innate love of watching fun and their dislike of trouble, after a pair of mates formed, they would even share a single territory and look after each other to face potential risks together.
As for this scumbag dragon, though, as soon as Mother Chameleos got pregnant, it ran off! And it even ran off with a perfectly legitimate excuse.
They were all Chameleos—who didn't know what the other was like?
If this scumbag dragon hadn't run off back then, incidents like the earlier Shagaru Magala incident and the later Yama Tsukami incident would not have needed Mother Chameleos to personally take the field, right?
"You… do you know… how I… have gotten through… these years, gwa?"
Mother Chameleos raised her upper body; with every "gwa" she cried, she viciously stomped once with her two forelegs on the Tempered Chameleos, whose body had been paralyzed by the specially made targeted medicinal mist, its eyes full of disbelief.
As a Tempered individual, the Tempered Chameleos naturally had its poison resistance maxed out, but Mother Chameleos's poison was not poison, it was medicine—something that could undergo a series of miraculous reactions with the innate toxins inside the Tempered Chameleos's body, thereby slipping past its immune system, restricting its muscles, and putting it into a state similar to paralysis.
This was a drug that Mother Chameleos had specially developed for this scumbag dragon after completing her final metamorphosis and becoming a special individual. She had originally planned to find time to make a trip to the Guiding Lands, but she had not expected this scumbag dragon to actually run back on its own.
Watching its mother's violence, the young Chameleos also learned from her words that this Chameleos, only a little smaller than its mother, was actually its scumbag dad.
However, the young Chameleos did not really feel anything about this. Because of Mother Chameleos, it felt a bit more familial affection toward him, allowing him to share a territory with Mother Chameleos, but that was all.
It was just that, seeing the excuses Mother Chameleos came up with to kick its scumbag dad, the young Chameleos was still a bit puzzled.
What kind of life was she talking about? Did she mean the days of snatching his share every day, then lazing around eating and waiting for death, and from time to time going to the Ancient Tree to freeload?
...
Back when the previous Provisions Manager led a team to the back mountain to investigate the situation, they had seen a scene of Mother Chameleos bullying another Chameleos, while the young Chameleos watched with great interest from the side.
"Is this Chameleos the intruder from last night?"
Slott motioned for the investigators to stop. He walked alone up to the young Chameleos and asked curiously.
In his impression, apart from falling into a bad temper when she could not figure out a new lock, and occasionally stealing hunters' medicine supplies when they were preparing to set out so she could "gwa-gwa" laugh at their panicked expressions, Mother Chameleos's mood had always been very stable at other times; as long as she had something to eat, she could stay quiet for a long time.
Yet now, this excitement that looked as if she could not wait to kick that Chameleos straight into the ground somewhat shattered Slott's understanding of this old friend.
"An intruder? You could say that."
The young Chameleos skillfully extended its tongue, probed into the travel pack on Slott's back, hooked out two bottles of medicine, and downed them in one go.
The healing medicine specially adjusted to suit a Chameleos's taste made the young Chameleos tremble its wings in comfort. Under Slott's unfazed expression, it extended a head that reached more than half of his height and let out a few light gwa calls beside him.
"Hm? Mother Chameleos's mate?"
Slott rubbed his chin. He was one of the people who knew quite a lot about Mother Chameleos; in order to learn more Elder Dragon secrets, he often communicated and chatted with her, so he knew that Mother Chameleos had once had a mate.
However, according to the scholars' conjectures at the Ecological Research Center, Mother Chameleos's mate should have died for some unknown reason. That was why, during the decades she had made her home behind Astera, no one had ever seen her mate appear.
But unexpectedly, he had appeared today!
Slott now understood why Mother Chameleos would behave so out of character at this moment.
"It's just that, if he is her mate, with Astera's current output, we might not be able to afford to feed him…"
...
Off the coast near the Guiding Lands.
This battle, which had lasted for many days, finally came to an end amid several violent collisions of energy.
Seen from above and facing downward, the originally rounded Guiding Lands now looked like a cookie with a bite taken out of it—the missing chunk was that conspicuous.
The details of the battle were unknown, but at the site where the energy blasts had created that massive gap, seawater poured in, colliding with the magma flowing at the bottom of the deep pit and forming a new submarine volcano. Around it, countless shattered bones rose and fell with the rolling seawater.
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