Schedule will be 5 chapters a week. All bonus chapters have been posted for Rising Goals we hit.
I will make new goals for next month, most likely Followers milestones.
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Beyond the edge of the Nest there was no mere boundary. It was the precipice of existence itself, where the Dragon Nest's biomes collapsed into the raw, untamed chaos beyond. The terrain itself had been ravaged over centuries of neglect. Jagged rocks, scorched earth, and splintered bone formed broken ridges and shallow craters.
The ground was littered with the shattered husks of dragon bodies, bones bleached to a pale gray and cracked underfoot. Scales, once brilliant and jeweled, lay scattered like fallen leaves, dulled by time, dust, and exposure.
Above it all, the sky was a heavy gray, thick with ash and drifting feathered remnants of wings long gone. Sunlight or whatever filtered through the Nest's artificial atmosphere—struck the carcasses at a sickly angle.
Within the hollow skull of a dead Immortal Dragon, two figures of true blood were located inside there. At its center of the chamber coiled the Karma Dragon who peered over some petri dish like plate where there was black blood that drank in light.
Before him, restrained within a lattice of opposing forces, lay the void Dragon… Noxiris. The Karma Dragon studied his blood in silence.
For centuries the Karma dragon had peered into the karmic weave of beings both great and small. He had watched dragonflights form and rot. He had observed great dragons drown in the weight of their own unresolved sins.
And yet this creature made the threads scream. Not audibly. Karmically. Where Noxiris should have had a single, coherent karmic braid that led to his origin, lineage, the cause and effect…there were fractures. Forks that did not reconnect. Loops that returned to themselves without explanation. Entire segments where karma simply… ceased, as if something had excised causality with a surgeon's precision.
The Karma Dragon's eyes narrowed. "This is not natural," he murmured, voice resonating through the chamber like distant bells. Noxiris did not respond. He lay still, chest rising and falling slowly. His eyes, void-black, rimmed faintly in pale white were open, fixed on the far wall. He did not struggle. He had learned early that resistance here only tightened the weave.
The Karma Dragon put down the blood he was looking at and came up to the young dragon without a word he extended a single talon. "Don't worry," he said. "It will not hurt." At its tip, a bead of condensed karmic essence formed golden, luminous, heavy with meaning. He touched it gently to Noxiris's chest.
The world unfolded. Threads burst into visibility. Thousands of them. Lives that brushed past Noxiris's existence. Events he had never known. Futures that recoiled from him as if burned. Past iterations that overlapped imperfectly, like reflections in cracked mirrors.
The Karma Dragon inhaled sharply. "I see now," he said softly. "It all makes sense."
He followed a particular strand thicker than the rest, stained with annihilation and loss that tied him to the void dragon. He followed it back through battle in a different universe. Back through a death he experienced.
Back to an alabaster void dragon, older, vast, murdered in a confrontation that still echoed through causal layers. The Karma Dragon grinned savagely. "There you are!" Noxiris could only stare in surprise at the images the red threads made of the other dragon.
He whispered under his breath, "Is that another Void dragon." He couldn't shake off the kinship he felt with it but it was much more closer than that as if he was looking not at a sibling but another him.
The Karma dragon made a final flourish, all the threads that connected to the void dragon mapped out perfectly before him and all was revealed. There was not one void dragon or two or even a dozen of them but hundreds of them all located in different parts of the Multiverse.
The chamber filled with ghostly afterimages made of red threads, all of them of different void dragons. There were a bunch of other hatchling and young dragon scatted throughout other Dragon Nests and within different Dragon Peaks.
Next were the Champion ranks void dragons which the alabaster was the one that stuck out to the Karma dragon. Followed by a couple more Elder ranked void dragons holding esteemed positions in different dragonflights.
Then there were the Lord ranked dragons who some he knew including the Null wurm and the Oblivion dragon that was close to ascending to Kingship. Finally came the 3 different Dragon Kings and Queens who the Karma dragons at that pointed peering at them for fear of his own life and getting noticed.
"So you are a clone," he said. It was not conjecture but pure determination.
"You are not some descendant or great heir," he continued, more to himself than to Noxiris. "Not reincarnation. Not echo. You are… reproduction without inheritance."
He withdrew his talon, eyes glowing brighter. "An experiment."
At that, Noxiris stirred. His head turned slightly, chains clinking with soft inevitability. His voice, when it came, was low and still in shock. "…What does that mean?"
The Karma Dragon regarded him. "It means," he said, "that someone is up to something.
He moved around the restrained void dragon, each step leaving faint ripples in the fabric of the chamber. As he circled, he reached again this time not with talon, but with will and plucked a thin filament from Noxiris's weave.
"You are sort of similar to those broods. Those mindless creatures bred and sent off to die. However you were given a soul so there are greater plans for you."
Noxiris sat there for a long while process that until the Karma dragon broke it, asking. "Do you know anything about your sire?"
Noxiris's claws curled. "I don't know who my sire is," he said quietly. "I only remember a clutch. I remember claws grasping… which it turned out to be the Probability Dragon who kidnapped me."
"Wait, the Probability Dragon Emperor? Do you mean Zytherion?!" the Karma dragon asked in surprise.
"You know him?" Noxiris head whipped around to him. Unknown to the both of them, what the Karma dragon had done had not gone totally unnoticed. The black blood pulsed as if something woke up inside it. Then it moved, falling to the ground then crawled forth.
"Yes, Zytherion was one of my mother's adherents. It had come to her as a surprise when he fell unexpectedly." The Karma dragon replied, meanwhile the blood continued like ooze, it elongated, thin tendrils snaking outward.
"It is almost like it's all a coincidence," Noxiris remarked.
The karma dragon could only shake his head, "You will soon learn nothing is happenstance. Everything is all part of a much greater plan." The blood kept on coming close with none of them any of the wiser.
Noxiris processed that tidbit of wisdom, and did not like where his thoughts went but spoke them out loud. "Do you think my sire… whoever they are. Purposefully let me get kidnaped?"
"But what for?" the Karma dragon asked. "What is the game that is afoot?" Just then the blood latched out and instead of heading to its owner, it latched onto the Karma Dragon.
"What—" The Karma Dragon recoiled, trying to sever the connection, but the blood flowed faster, climbing his arm like living ink. It burned. Not with pain but with foreign intent. The Karma Dragon roared, karmic threads flaring around him as he attempted to purge the contamination. Fate bent. Consequence surged.
Too late. The blood entered him. Noxiris watched it unfold, all of it happening so fast.
The blood spread across the Karma dragon's chest, his throat, his eyes - void-black tendrils sinking into reddish gold scales, corrupting him, rewriting his mind and self.
Noxiris could only call out in horror. "No…stop!" he shouted, struggling against the chains. "Please!"
The Karma Dragon staggered. His roar cut off mid-breath. His body straightened. Slowly. The glow in his eyes dimmed then shifted. Gold inverted to pale, empty white. The karmic threads around the chamber went slack, like marionette strings suddenly held by a new hand.
Noxiris's breathing hitched. The Karma Dragon turned. Not with urgency. Not with confusion. But with recognition. The chains around Noxiris dissolved. Link by link, they unraveled not broken, but released.
The dragon, no, the thing wearing him tilted its head. Its mouth opened. The voice that emerged was layered, gentle, impossibly intimate. "My child," it said.
Noxiris froze, terror rooting him in place. "It's so good," the thing continued, smiling with borrowed lips, "to finally meet you."
-
The battlefield no longer looked like a battlefield. It looked like a feeding ground.
Smoke and ash rolled from the broken courtyard, carrying the iron stench of blood and burned scale. Craters overlapped craters, each one filled with shattered bodies, some still twitching, some already being torn apart by claws that had forgotten who they once followed. What had begun as a siege, a structured clash of formations and tactics, had degraded into something far older. Something animal.
The War Dragon roared, and the sound was not a command, it was a provocation. "Is that all you have?!"
It stood at the center of the chaos, massive even by draconic standards, its hide a brutal patchwork of scars, freshly torn flesh, and half-healed wounds that knit together even as blades and breath weapons struck home. Its wings were shredded, one membrane hanging in ribbons, yet it remained aloft by sheer force of will and muscle. Bone jutted from one shoulder where his sword had cut deep and was still sticking out of it.
Artorius was running on fumes but he sent a lance of forces to breakdown the creature's bones and the War dragon just eagerly tanked it. Then he watched as it used it powers to have the bone pulled itself back in. Muscle surged. Scale crawled. The wound sealed with a wet, grinding sound.
The War Dragon laughed. It was a deep, booming sound, layered with pain and joy in equal measure. "YES," it thundered, smashing one of the Artorius's champions into the ground hard enough to crush the stone beneath. "THIS is war!"
Artorius watched it happen through smoke-blurred vision, his chest heaving, blood running down his jaw when the war dragon broke it. His right arm hang uselessly and one of his eye was so bruised he could not see from it at all.
He wasn't the only one in a sad state, he could feel his army breaking. Not routing. Not fleeing just getting whittled down one by one with none of them aware.
At the start of the siege, they had been precise. Shields interlocked. Fire rotated. Kill zones established and held. Even outnumbered, they had fought like soldiers; disciplined, coordinated, deadly.
But the War Dragon did not allow that and his forces didn't fight like soldiers. They fought like beasts and this state everyone seemed to be in was their natural state. They tore into the lines screaming, clawing, biting, ignoring wounds that would have dropped lesser dragons. When one fell, another took its place, fueled by frenzy rather than order. Their ranks were deeper than expected, far deeper as they poured from deep with in the fort and every minute the Artorius's forces were forced to fight this way stripped away what made them superior.
A scream cut off abruptly to his left. One of his lieutenants, third rank, disciplined, brilliant went down beneath three War Dragon soldiers, their jaws locking around her wings and neck in a frenzy of snapping teeth and crushing force. She took two of them with her before the third tore her throat out.
Artorius clenched his claws. They were losing. Not all at once but steadily. Relentlessly.
His adaptability trait burned through his veins, reinforcing bone, tightening muscle fibers, redistributing force away from wounded organs. It was the only reason he was still standing. Any other dragon of his rank would have been dead ten times over by now.
But adaptability was not regeneration. Every wound stayed. Every injury accumulated.
His vision blurred at the edges. His breaths came shallow. His energy pools was a ravaged ruin, patched together by sheer stubborn refusal to collapse. And the War Dragon? The War Dragon thrived. He kicked something that was the closest at hand to keep it busy. It was a direct hit slammed into it an implosion spear designed to collapse organs inward. The weapon detonated inside the beast's chest, shredding heart, lung, and spine.
The War Dragon staggered and dropped to one knee. Then stood back up as new organs grew. The Artorius remaining eye had draconic eye flared involuntarily, golden lines etching themselves across his vision as perception deepened beyond surface reality.
He saw it then. Not one ability. Not two but three abilities being used in tandem along with its Word of Power and Law. A core regenerative trait anchored in war-aspect vitality. A secondary conversion ability turning damage into raw energy reserve. A tertiary reinforcement loop feeding excess energy back into regeneration.
A closed system. Perfected. "I see…" the Artorius muttered.
That's when the message came in. It was not sound nor sight. A pressure inside his skull that carried weight older than stars broke through.
The Star Dragon's presence settled into his mind like a collapsing constellation.
The Artorius swallowed blood. "How long?" he thought back.
There was a pause, fractional, but heavy.
Cold dread coiled in his gut. If Imperial Dragons arrived now, this wouldn't be a war anymore. It would be a purge. He would be erased once and for all.
"Already tired?" The War Dragon aske as he charged again, slamming into him mid-air with the force of a falling boulder. The Artorius felt ribs shatter, felt his spine nearly snap as they crashed through three layers of ruined fortification and skidded across crumbled stone.
He rolled, barely bringing up a his left arm in time to block jaws that could have taken his head clean off. The War Dragon bite down on it making him cry out in pain then he tossed him like a ragdoll.
Artorius somehow stood up, both of his arms useless now and the war dragon loomed over him, bleeding, burning, broken and grinning. "You have fought well," it rumbled. "But it is time to end this."
Artorius struck with everything he had left. Fire. Light. Crystal. Focused kinetic force compressed into a single blow. It punched a hole straight through the War Dragon's chest.
The beast staggered. Looked down. Watched its ribs crumble. Then threw its head back and laughed as a new ones formed. "Again," it said. "Again!"
The Artorius body trembled, ready to keel over at any moment. 'I can't outlast this,' he thought to himself. He didn't have time. He didn't have strength. What else did he have. He looked at his abilities. He had Last Stand which might let him outlast this thing or he could his new mutation.
But then he had been watching and another idea entered his mind. The draconic eye sharpened further, ignoring pain, ignoring blood loss, ignoring the screaming demand of his body to stop. He saw the timing. The order. The key.
"Let see if you can tank this," he called out and the war dragon did not have any care in the world, confident in its abilities and that was its downfall. Combining together his words of power and putting everything he had into it, this seemed to be his final attack. And in truth it was.
The war dragon eagerly took on his last attack with a smile, "Give me everything you have!"
Artorius watched his last great attack land then he reached out right when the war dragon started activating its abilities. Copy-cat did have the ability to mimic other people's skills he witness but it also had a added bonus where when he did he stole their skill from them during that duration.
For a heartbeat, the War Dragon's regeneration was not able to work as intended as it was a missing a crucial piece. The War Dragon recoiled, confusion flashing across its brutal features as its body tried to heal and failed.
Flesh was smouldered and falling off of, blood poured, and nothing closed. "What—" it began. Artorius did not have to lift a finger which he really couldn't as the war dragon fell. Silence rippled outward.
Artorius rose there shakily, wings dragging, blood streaming from a dozen wounds only held together by will and guts.
You have slain [Imperial War Croc-Draco — Level 47]
Congratulations! You have leveled up. Race: [True-Blood DragonMen] → Lv. 41
Stat gains: +1 STR, +1 CON, +1 DEX, +1 Per, +1 CHA
Congratulations! You have leveled up. Archetype: [Leader] → Lv. 41
Stat gains: +1 INT, +1 WIL, +1 CHA
Looking at the surprise etched on the war dragon's face, it never expected this was how it would fall. It really hammered home the lesson these fights were not about power or amazing skills. It was all about who could outthink their foe.
He had the key to undue all the abilities that made the war dragon invulnerable and unkillable. He needed to watch out for someone that had the abilities to counter him.
He looked at the battlefield. At his army who were slowly coming back to theirselves, thanks to him in parts as he commanded them freely now. The War Dragon soldiers meanwhile were still tearing into each other now even though their anchor had fallen. That went to show how persuasive laws could be. Even in death they could carry on.
That should have been the end with the War Dragon dead. Any other war would have ended there, in exhaustion and grim relief. Instead, the sky split open savage joy.
He felt it rolled across the battlefield like artillery fire, low and wet and delighted, shaking loose stones and rattling the bones of the dead. The surviving War Dragons froze mid-frenzy, their snarls cutting off as if their throats had been seized by an unseen fist.
Blood stopped dripping. Fire went still. Artorius felt it before he saw it, a presence that did not arrive so much as overwrote the battlefield. The sky above the Nest peeled back, revealing not stars, but a vast, churning red void layered with marching orders, burning banners, and the silhouettes of endless armies locked in perpetual fighting. From within that war-scarred firmament appeared something colossal.
The form was monstrous, a crocodilian and lizard fused into something obscene and magnificent. Endless ranks of teeth spiraled within his maw, each etched with the names of conquered worlds. His scales were not uniform; they were plates of different eras, different wars, hammered onto his body like trophies. Broken weapons, shattered standards, and the bones of great beasts were chained into his armor, clanking softly as he moved. His eyes were burning war-engines that could besiege suns.
When his gaze fell upon the corpse of the War Croc-Draco, something remarkable happened. He did not mourn. He howled with laughter. "HAHAHAHA!"
The sound slammed into Artorius like a physical blow, driving him to one knee, blood spraying from his mouth as his already-fractured bones screamed. Around him, dragons dropped flat, their instincts screaming - kneel or die. It was unusual for a Great dragon to pay attention to them let alone even speak to them but this dragon did not care.
The War Emperor leaned closer, massive jaws stretching into a grin that could swallow fortresses-worlds. "My SON," the cipactli boomed, voice layered with marching drums and screaming horns. "MY beautiful, stupid, INVINCIBLE son—"
He tilted his head, examining the corpse with naked curiosity. "You BROKE him." The Emperor's gaze snapped back to Artorius. Pressure crashed down which was not killing intent or domination but appraisal.
He saw everything. The copying. The timing. The theft. The momentary collapse of a closed war-system. But more than that he saw his wars, his battles, his uprisings, his killings, his invasions he had been on.
"Ah, I like you." His grin widened. "You are a worthy General to have on my campaigns."
[War Cipactli Dragon Emperor has seen you as a worthy commander]
[New Evolutionary Path Available: War Cipactli Dragon Emperor]
The Emperor loomed for a final moment, his presence suffocating, exultant, terrible. "LIVE," he commanded. "Fight more wars. Break more peoples. Kill better sons than mine."
Then, softer almost fond: "Next time we meet… I want to see what you've learned." With that, the War Emperor tore backward into the war-scarred sky, dragging his laughter and his armies with him. The sky sealed. Silence returned.
He straightened after a bit and faced his men. It was better not to think too much of that madman or he might just go insane like him. "We're done here. Let's loot this place and get out."
His command pulsed through his forces and they withdrew in a precise and practiced fashion. Discipline snapped back into place like a drawn blade. They disengaged cleanly and left the War Dragons to their savagery.
And as the Artorius turned away, barely standing, the Star Dragon's presence returned; quiet, thoughtful.
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Author Note: How the mighty fall. I always find it interesting how in myths heroes and powerful beings can fall due to one weakness. Take achilles heel.
The War Dragon Emperor is more insane than his ex-son. Based him on Ares/Mars god!