Free Web NovelChapter 34: Unwanted Guests
The first thing Ren registered was the ceiling.
Or rather, the place where a ceiling should have been, because the space above him in Vel’s pocket dimension was not a ceiling so much as an absence of anything, and the fact that his head was significantly closer to it than it had been before he fell asleep was the first signal that something had changed substantially.
He sat up slowly.
Then he looked at himself.
"Whoa," he said, for the second time in as many minutes, the word leaving his mouth before he could think of anything more articulate.
He was enormous.
He stretched his wings.
They went out and kept going, eighteen feet tip to tip, the span of them larger than his own body length, the membrane between the joints catching light and scattering it in fractured crimson patterns across the tiles.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay, that’s a lot."
"Yeah," Vel said from the couch, not looking up from his pipe. "You really evolved majorly"
Ren pulled up the system screen.
[STATUS]
[Name: Ren Crimson Jnr]
[Race: Chaos Devouring Dragon]
[Level: 1]
[EXP: 0 / 2,000]
[Strength: 252]
[Speed: 256]
[Stamina: 256]
[Skills:]
[Predator’s Glide — Evolved from Glide]
[ Dragon Vision lv2]
[Rendering Claw — Evolved from Claw Strike]
[Chaos Flame Breath — Evolved from Ember Breath]
[Apex Devour — Evolved from Devour]
[Inherit Lv2]
[Ironscale — Evolved from Scale Hardening]
[Dragon’s Rage Lv2]
[Chaos Dragon Form — Evolved from Flame Dragon Form]
[Primordial Roar — Evolved from Sonic Roar]
[Venom Fang Lv2]
[Fusion Lv2]
[Borrowed Might Lv2]
[Boundless Gluttony — Evolved from Ultimate Gluttony]
[New Skill: Chaos Devour]
[Chaos Devour: Upon consuming any living being, absorb and store the chaos energy contained within them. Stored chaos energy can be used as a substitute for mana in all abilities, producing significantly more destructive and unpredictable output. Chaos energy stack is cumulative and does not decay.]
[New Skill: Dominion Aura]
[Dominion Aura: Passive. Exerts a suppressive field over all beings within range that the host designates as subordinates or enemies. Subordinates receive a combat boost. Enemies experience reduced output and involuntary hesitation. Range scales with host’s strength.]
Ren read through the full list twice, his eyes going wider with each pass.
"Every single skill evolved as well," he muttered. "Every single one."
"What did you expect?" Vel said, blowing a smoke ring. "You absorbed the name of a god. The energy that came with it rewrote the foundations of everything you had."
Ren looked at Chaos Devour specifically, reading it a third time.
Ren was quiet for a moment, doing the math on what that meant long-term, and the number he arrived at made his tail move involuntarily in a way that he was going to pretend hadn’t happened, he was about to be overpowered.
"Crimson Junior," Vel said, raising his pipe in a small salute. "Congratulations."
"I’m not using that name," Ren said immediately.
Vel laughed, short and genuine. "Use Crimson if you want. Drop the junior. But you and I both know what your real name actually is."
"Ren," Ren said firmly.
"Sure," Vel said, in the tone of someone who had already won the argument and was being gracious about it.
Ren shifted his weight, getting used to the new distribution of it across sixteen feet of considerably upgraded dragon, and looked at Vel properly.
"The agreement," he said. "You watch. I visit sometimes. We talk."
"Yep," Vel said. "Through the eyes when I’m observing, face to face when I pull you here, which I’ll try to do less aggressively next time, my bad on the forced transportation." He tapped the pipe against his knee. "And in return I get a front row seat to whatever you’re about to do to this world, which from where I’m sitting looks genuinely entertaining."
"You get nothing else," Ren said. "No interference. No agenda. You watch and you talk and that’s it."
"I already said that," Vel pointed out.
"I’m saying it back so we’re clear."
Vel looked at him for a moment, something moving behind the sleep-deprived eyes that was considerably older and considerably more serious than the rest of him projected, and then he nodded once.
"We’re clear, Crimson Jnr," he said.
"Ren," Ren said.
"Sure," Vel said again.
The space around Ren began to dissolve, the tiled platform pulling back, the incense-scented air thinning, the not-quite-ceiling receding, and Vel’s couch and its occupant fading into the ambient dim until they were gone entirely.
———
He landed at the mouth of the cave.
The forest stretched out below the cliff edge the same way it had when he’d left, the light the same, the trees the same, the air carrying the same mineral and green scent of the territory he’d started to think of as home. Exactly as Vel had promised, barely any time had passed, but in the few minutes that passed, something happened
Then he heard it.
The sounds reached him before he’d fully oriented himself, the particular noise of a fight already in progress, not the isolated crack and impact of a single exchange but the layered overlapping chaos of a battle involving multiple parties, shouts in the lizardmen’s hissing tongue, the howling of wolves, and underneath it something else, something with a different quality, higher pitched, more numerous.
He stepped to the cliff edge and looked down.
The clearing below was alive with movement. His lizardmen and wolves were fighting, but they were not fighting each other. A small army of orcs had come to their location.
Remu was in the center of it, four orcs on him simultaneously, keeping them back through sheer force of will and the evolved strength the territory bond had given him. Silas was moving fast along the flanks, drawing the orcs away from the other wolves and trying to control the flow of the battle
They were holding. But only just.
And then every single orc, in the same moment, stopped attacking.
They didn’t retreat. They all turned their heads to face one location
Toward Ren.
Standing at the cliff edge, sixteen feet of Chaos Devouring Dragon with crimson lines burning along his scales, wings half spread, looking down at the battle below with eyes that carried a glow that had not been there before his evolution.
The orcs stared at him.
His subordinates stared at him.
The clearing went completely silent.
