Chapter 108

Chapter 108
## Chapter 108

Rolling in the Pumpkin (3)

[KuoOoooooh—!]

The beast’s bellow echoed once more from the deep valleys.

Harley and Heinz knit their brows at the sound, sensing a wave of spiritual intimidation meant to crush lesser mortals.

While it didn’t truly affect individuals of their caliber, the raw animalistic pressure was still irritating.

‘Was a dragon actually nesting in these parts?’

It wouldn’t be shocking to find one dwelling within the endless expanses of the Northern Mountains…

Yet, that wasn’t the pressing issue at hand.

‘A dragon driven entirely insane?’

The bellow echoing through the air was far from healthy.

Much like Entracio, the Bone Dragon, whose cry carried the chill of the grave after rising as an undead creature, this beast’s roar vibrated with pure, unadulterated madness.

‘Something is terribly wrong here.’

While common beasts succumbed quickly to such corruption, dragons possessed an intellect that rivaled, if not surpassed, human understanding.

They were universally recognized as the most brilliant and formidable entities across Auterica…

Crack! Crack!

Harley kept crunching on his magic stones, pondering the circumstances.

‘So, a dragon resides here, and its mind is completely broken, huh?’

True dragons were already a rarity, their population having plummeted drastically following the dual catastrophes brought by the Immortal King, leaving them on the brink of total annihilation.

The Immortal King posed a lethal danger even to their majestic kind, prompting them to align with the grand coalition of the continent to battle the oncoming legions of the dead.

During that first conflict, the initial Immortal King systematically targeted the dragons, recognizing them as the primary obstacle to his dominion over the land.

He directed his forces to slaughter them relentlessly, even at the cost of losing territory on alternative battlegrounds.

Because of that sacrifice, the continental forces managed to hold their ground and ultimately crush the Immortal King, though the dragon race sustained wounds from which they could never truly heal.

The emergence of the second Immortal King delivered the final blow, ensuring that dragons became a mythical sight across the Ion Continent thereafter.

The surviving few mostly retreated to the isolated eastern territories, far removed from the theater of war.

‘Still, they aren’t creatures that easily fall to corruption.’

If they were so easily tainted, why would Hans command only a single undead dragon, Entracio, among his legions?

‘Their sense of honor is so absolute that they prefer self-destruction over being enslaved by the Immortal King. Furthermore, even if their remains were collected, their innate magical defiance made resurrecting them as undead an agonizingly difficult task.’

This piece of knowledge had been extracted directly from the recollections of those who had fought in those ancient wars.

Even on the rare occasion a dragon was successfully raised into undeath, its former kin would hunt it down without mercy until nothing remained.

They refused to permit the defilement of their species, let alone themselves.

‘It required immense fortune for Entracio to end up under Hans’s control.’

Given that background, did it make any sense for a dragon—a creature capable of resisting almost anything—to lose its mind to a wave of madness that barely compromised ordinary humans?

The concept still seemed absurd…

“Then again, the cause doesn’t change anything.”

“Kkahahahat! A true dragon! We’ve struck absolute gold!”

Heinz offered a grim smirk, while Harley leapt to his feet, roaring with laughter.

Indeed, the underlying reasons mattered very little.

“I can’t help but wonder what a dragon tastes like!”

Fired up with anticipation, Harley dashed forward toward the origin of the echoing roar.

His stride was swift and unburdened, his internal reserves fully replenished.

“If we can purge the taint from its body, its blood will serve as an extraordinary medicine. A true masterpiece of a tonic.”

Heinz tracked Harley’s rapid departure before vanishing soundlessly into the shadows.

Naturally, he was heading toward the exact same coordinates.

To the location of the beast.

—

-It hurts, it burns, why must I suffer this, let’s just tear everything to pieces!

-This is all his doing. But who is ‘he’? Feeble mortals, arrogant Elves, foul Dwarves! And… there was another, wasn’t there?

-I am broken, I must mend. To mend, I must feed. Let us hunt. Let us feast until we are full!

[KuoOoooooh—!]

The Red Dragon, Heratos, howled in a state of delirium, his thoughts fractured by a chaotic cacophony.

Yet beneath the agony, a wave of intense euphoria washed over him.

He hungered for more of this intoxicating sensation, driven to project his voice louder and louder.

For reasons he couldn’t comprehend, his massive frame, which had languished in a stagnant slumber for centuries, was mending at an impossible pace, filling him with the urge to break free from his confinement.

‘This feels magnificent, far better than expected. My recovery is moving at lightning speed. Naturally, because I am peerless!’

Heratos was a grand dragon who had sustained catastrophic trauma during the conflict with the second Immortal King, three centuries prior.

He had been too young to fight during the era of the first Immortal King, but the war he eventually joined proved far less daunting than he had anticipated.

The mortal races and his fellow dragons were no fools; they had devised far superior strategies and defenses compared to the past.

Granted, the Western territories fell to ruin and a proud empire turned to ash, but it remained a vast improvement over the dark ages of the first crisis.

…If only he hadn’t allowed pride to blind him at the very end.

‘But where exactly am I… Ah! This sanctuary is my own creation. But what drove me to…?’

Heratos had blundered into an ambush orchestrated by the legions of darkness, leaving him mortally wounded.

Though he managed to escape the slaughter that claimed countless legendary figures, his trauma was far too profound to be cured by mere fortune.

Grievous gashes marred his colossal form, and through those tears, the necrotic malice of the void poured inward.

No restoration spells, nor the purest holy incantations, could dissolve the fatal hex, leaving Heratos to await his inevitable demise…

Until a final stroke of fortune came his way.

The Immortal King, the supreme anchor of the rot eating him alive, was ultimately brought down by the grand crusade.

With the anchor severed, Heratos was pulled back from the threshold of death, yet his condition remained perilous, forcing him to employ the absolute best strategy for survival.

‘Ah—? What thoughts was I chasing? Yes, I meant to abandon this den. The hunger is deep, I must consume everything.’

He had chosen an isolated ridge within the Northern Mountains, an area crawling with beasts, and erected an array of protective wards before slipping into a deep sleep.

A dragon’s dormancy could span centuries, a state where the physical form expanded and natural mending reached its absolute peak, making it the perfect remedy.

Constructing those complex wards while bleeding out had nearly claimed his life, but he succeeded by exhausting his cache of enchanted relics and utilizing his own royal blood as the foundation.

Yet, a cruel twist of fate accompanied that final bit of luck.

To maximize his self-healing, he designed the wards to draw in the ambient ambient energy of the region, even structuring the perimeter to bait local monsters so he could bleed them of their life force.

How could he have foreseen the outcome?

That the void would fracture once more, unleashing a wave of ‘madness’ across the lands, or that his chosen sanctuary would become a magnet for monsters brimming with that exact corruption.

While his wards were crafted to repel conventional threats, they possessed no defense against the psychological rot of the abyss.

Consequently, the toxic energy seeped into his resting form over the decades, completely fracturing his sanity by the time he awoke.

[KuoOoooooh—!]

Flap—! Flap—!

Heratos forced his way out of his subterranean lair, beating his massive wings with furious intensity.

His physical trauma had vanished entirely.

His slumber had been exceptionally long, and the volume of madness he had absorbed was staggering.

‘Ah— The crispness of the wind. Yet, it feels incomplete. I require the iron tang of blood and the scent of ash. Only then will it be right.’

His mind, thoroughly unhinged by the corruption, arrived at a horrific realization.

‘…Of course. A settlement of mortals lies just beyond the ridge. I shall incinerate it with my breath!’

In doing so, he could savor the music of their screams and the smell of roasting flesh all at once during his feast.

And by tearing them apart while they still drew breath, the flavor of their lifeblood would be unmatched.

As a true dragon, Heratos was capable of sustaining himself purely on ambient mana, rendering physical food entirely unnecessary, but such logic no longer applied to his fractured mind.

Blinded by bloodlust, he ignored the low-tier monsters scurrying around his feet and calculated the trajectory toward the nearest human town.

‘Now, let us fly… Wait?’

Right then.

An unexpected vibration disrupted his focus.

An entity was advancing toward his position at incredible speed, radiating a torrential surge of vital energy.

‘…A mortal man? No, can a mortal possess such vitality? And there is a second presence. I nearly missed him. A creature of the night?’

Drool—

Saliva dripped from his jaws as he focused on the newcomers.

His gaze had shifted to a brilliant crimson, stripped of all higher intellect, yet Heratos remained oblivious to his own degradation.

He simply thought…

‘Perhaps I should consume these two as a light snack…?’

Driven by a sudden spike in gluttony, he watched them approach.

“Kkahahahat! A living dragon in the flesh! Unbelievable, I’ve never seen one before!”

“The corruption has taken him entirely. Reasoning with it is out of the question. What matters is the degree to which its physical attributes have been enhanced.”

The warrior and the vampire materialized before Heratos in the blink of an eye, analyzing his form with absolute composure, yet the beast did not immediately strike.

He cared nothing for the chatter of his provisions.

‘Should I snap up the vibrant one first? It promises to be exceptionally juicy, bursting with vitality at every bite. The vampire will make a fine side dish afterward.’

As he weighed his options,

‘Wait? Why do I hesitate…?’

A sudden spark of his old cognitive power flared up.

His superior draconic intellect sensed a fundamental flaw in his current inaction.

And his broken mind attempted to apply logic to the situation.

Why was he merely standing there observing them?

The answer was simple…

[KuoOoooooh—!]

Unhinging his jaw, he lunged violently forward.

‘Exactly! I can simply devour them both in a single mouthful!’

There was no reason to delay!

His grand feast awaited him at the human settlement anyway, so gulping down these appetizers would clear the path.

Utilizing his augmented physical power, Heratos snapped shut over the patch of earth where they had been standing…

“Hooop—!”

Whoosh— Kwaaang—!

Harley, already primed for violence, slipped the attack effortlessly and drove his expanded right fist directly into the side of the beast’s colossal skull.

[Kuruuuuk—?]

Heratos staggered, disoriented by the sheer force of the blow, just as a crimson silhouette drifted soundlessly onto the bridge of his snout.

“Pardon me.”

Whoosh— Crack!

Two razor-sharp arcs of blood condensed from the vampire’s fingers, instantly carving across the dragon’s massive eyes.

Heratos snapped his lids shut in a reflex action, but the scales there weren’t dense enough to repel Heinz’s piercing strikes.

Dark blood erupted from the gashes as his eyelids were torn open.

[Kraaaagh—!]

Was it agonizing pain, or sheer indignation?

The dragon shrieked, his vision clouded with gore, and an immense shockwave of mana radiated from his frame, warping the very air around them.

Heinz, having leaped backward to evade the kinetic backpressure, prepared to press the assault but paused mid-motion.

“…The damage is already gone.”

Heratos’s gaze, burning with a malicious crimson light, had fully reset, leaving no sign of the lacerations.

‘I suspected the strike didn’t bite deep enough due to the eyelids, but still…’

The beast’s reflexes and the sheer resilience of its scales defied comprehension.

When factoring in that absurd rate of cellular repair alongside the kinetic force of its massive size…

“Kkahahahat! This creature might be a bit too heavy for just the two of us!”

Naturally, neither Heinz nor Harley entertained the thought of losing.

Their own physical limits were legendary, and it appeared the dragon’s capacity for complex sorcery had degenerated in exchange for the physical enhancements granted by his madness.

‘And it lacks the cunning typical of its species. It’s operating purely as a colossal reptile driven by base urges.’

‘True, but a reptile of that scale with that level of rapid mending… We could trade blows for days without reaching an end.’

Their direct combat styles were poorly suited for outlasting a behemoth of this nature.

They couldn’t rely solely on physical trauma to bring it down.

Heinz the Second, a high-tier True Blood, and Harley, the ultimate vanguard warrior, had not yet reached the pinnacle required to brute-force such a monster.

‘Which leaves us with a single alternative.’

If the threat exceeded their current capacity, they simply needed to introduce someone who could handle it.

And then.

A specific coordinate in the sky was suddenly swallowed by absolute blackness.

Goooo—

As if the firmament itself had been sliced open, the void drank the sunlight and then…

Brought forth a presence.

In that exact instant…

The surroundings lost their color, as though a bleak tint had settled over the landscape, despite the afternoon sun burning bright above.

[Kuhhuhuhut— A grand dragon drowned in madness. What a magnificent specimen for my collection!]

The walking apocalypse that had pushed the dragon race to the rim of extinction.

Had returned to the world.