Red Dragon And Dragon Orbs (8)

Even so, the Elder thought that liking a human so much made her quite unique.

Many dragons had played with humans for fun before, but Rurin was completely different. This wasn’t a game. From the beginning, her encounter with El was far from playful.

To dragons, humans were like insects. A relationship that shouldn’t even exist.

Of course, El wasn’t an ordinary human, so it wasn’t entirely incomprehensible. If someone was that strong, even a human could be acknowledged.

So, the Elder hoped they would stay in the lair once it was built.

While the Elder was lost in these thoughts, Nies anxiously watched the Elder who had stopped.

With El’s back turned and distracted, Nies decided this was his chance. He made up his mind and slowly walked towards El and Rurin.

Approaching as planned, Nies secured El’s back.

It was an ambush. Quick and decisive.

He intended to end it in one blow. His attack power was worlds apart from Garud’s.

An incredibly close distance.

At this distance, if his breath attack hit directly, even someone with the Heart of the Dragon Lord couldn’t survive.

That’s what Nies thought.

In the next moment, breath poured from Nies’s mouth.

A powerful breath.

“El!”

Rurin screamed in shock, but the breath struck El’s back. With a powerful impact, El collapsed.

Everyone watched in surprise. However, El had already noticed Nies approaching.

El had also been keeping an eye on Nies. He had no intention of letting the culprit go.

So he had been watching even more closely, and had realized in advance that Nies was about to use his breath attack.

Thanks to that, he was able to push Rurin away before getting hit by the breath attack.

But he didn’t avoid it. The reason lay in legitimacy.

El suspected that Veint and Nies were somehow involved. But that was as far as he could go. In the current situation, there was no way to uncover more. He lacked information.

But he didn’t like the idea of letting it go either.

The culprit who had traumatized Rurin so badly that her hands trembled just by seeing them.

That was already beyond the stage of forgiveness.

Nies was clearly one of the accomplices who had colluded with Veint to frame and kill El, so letting him go was out of the question.

Even if the Red Dragons dealt with Veint for his self-destruction, Nies would be exonerated as things stood.

But there was no evidence.

Lacking information, he naturally lacked evidence. He couldn’t just attack outright in such a situation. So El thought hard. And then Nies made a move.

El had allowed himself to be attacked for the sake of legitimacy. Of course, the cost of not avoiding it was high. The breath that struck his back burned as if it would set his entire body on fire.

El felt his blood boiling inside him and felt like he would lose consciousness, but he gritted his teeth and endured.

All of this was for the bigger picture.

Recently, his mana level had increased by one stage thanks to the dragon orb. El knew this very well.

He was still far from fully absorbing the orb’s power, but he had enough mana swirling around him to withstand the breath attack.

So for now, he just needed to withstand the breath attack and let Elena use healing magic, as she had done for Sereina.

That was exactly the picture El had in mind.

“El!”

Rurin shook El in a panic. She was so shocked that she looked expressionless.

Rurin couldn’t come to her senses. Elena also ran towards El in shock.

But at this moment, El was feeling something strange.

‘They say when the pain is too great, you don’t feel anything, right?’

No. The pain was there. It felt like his brain couldn’t keep up with the intense pain. The sensation of his whole body burning remained. He needed a reason to deal with Nies, but dying in the process would be pointless.

El smiled bitterly and looked at Elena.

Of course, it wasn’t a reckless gamble. As long as Elena was here.

This pain was part of the plan.

“Nies, you scoundrel! What have you done!”

The Elder scolded Nies with a shocked expression. But Nies didn’t look at the Elder.

The questioning would come later. Killing the human was the most important thing for now.

But it was unexpected that he didn’t die in one blow. It had been a full-force strike.

At this distance, he should have died according to his calculations.

Nies clicked his tongue and assessed the situation for the next attack. But he frowned as the Elder blocked his way to El.

Rurin’s condition was also very serious.

Her lips had turned blue and she was trembling.

Her hands and feet were shaking like a freshly caught fish.

She seemed almost soulless.

Smoke rose from El’s back, and blood flowed out.

She hated it.

She hated this.

Absolutely hated it.

Rurin bit her lip. She bit so hard unconsciously that blood seeped into her mouth.

To her, El was more precious than anything. Nothing could compare. He was more important than her own life.

He was the one who led her to live as herself. If El died, she was determined to die with him.

Sometimes he grumbled,

sometimes he scolded,

but sometimes he was kind.

The moment she lost his face, sometimes smiling, the world would lose its meaning to her.

The fear that El was severely injured overshadowed her anger towards Nies. She forgot about revenge and trembled as she looked at El’s back.

The only one relatively calm was Elena.

She quickly approached El and began casting a major healing spell.

“Cough!”

At that moment, El thought he needed to transfer mana to Elena and recreate the powerful healing magic that saved Sereina.

But strangely, without doing that, the pain completely disappeared. He felt something hot flowing into his chest and was filled with a curious feeling.

Elena’s major healing spell could only regenerate some wounds; it wasn’t a solution for his body burning entirely.

According to the plan, he should transfer mana to her and then reconstruct everything.

But without even doing that, a warm energy began to envelop his whole body from his chest. El felt as if powerful mana was being absorbed through his chest.

‘Is mana being absorbed?’

With that thought, El immediately brought his hand to his chest. There was definitely one of the two dragon orbs he always carried.

The dragon orb used to find the culprit who harmed Rurin’s mother was stored in the lair, and the one he had now was the dragon orb from which he regularly absorbed mana.

Mana, which had not even been half-absorbed, started flowing in rapidly from that orb.

His body became comfortable. He even felt a sense of peace.

The mana, which had protected his burning body from the brink of death, seemed to have fused with his vitality and activated the dragon orb.

And in the next moment,

All the mana from the dragon orb was absorbed into El’s body.

The Heart of the Dragon Lord, living and breathing within El’s heart, interacted with the dragon orb with a strong will to live, and as a result, El felt an immense amount of mana overflowing throughout his body.

It felt as if he had absorbed another Dragon Heart.

If he absorbed another Dragon Heart, his human heart wouldn’t be able to withstand it and would burst. So it was impossible.

But surprisingly, the dragon orb had brought about such an effect.

In seeking a reason to settle the score with Nies, he had stumbled upon a stroke of luck. It was a blessing in disguise.

El stood up, but Rurin didn’t even notice and continued trembling. Her eyes were fixed on El’s wound, but her vision was wandering in the void.

Rurin was now so overwhelmed with fear that she couldn’t think of anything.

She was just in shock, denying the reality that El was so severely injured.

He had taken the breath attack directly.

Because his condition was worse than Sereina’s.

Therefore, she couldn’t even recognize that El had recovered and was just trembling.

Elena was the first to realize the anomaly.

His burning body had healed without doing anything.

Nies also panicked when he realized that.

He was thinking of killing Elena to prevent her from using healing magic, but an unbelievable miracle happened, and he was stunned.

A body on the verge of death healing on its own? Even for a dragon, the mightiest beings, that was impossible.

If things continued like this, all his plans would be ruined. Nies thought this and felt a surge of anger.

A human who possessed what was his.

He could never forgive that.

While Nies harbored such thoughts and was about to burn him alive regardless of the Elder’s presence.

El approached Rurin, who was trembling like a stone statue.

“Hey?”

Handling Nies was important, but Rurin’s condition was too strange.

He waved his hand in front of Rurin’s eyes. But there was no response.

El grabbed Rurin’s cheeks in surprise. But she was still dazed.

“Hey! Rurin!”

He shouted loudly, but nothing changed.

She seemed as if her soul had been sealed away.

Yet she was still trembling.

‘Did she become like this because of me? Because of me?’

Thinking that made him feel something pitiful.

So pitiful.

El unconsciously hugged Rurin tightly.

Did she feel the warmth?

Tears began to flow from Rurin’s eyes, which had been frozen.

As he wrapped his arms around Rurin’s waist and hugged her, it was as if her frozen body thawed, and the tears she should have shed earlier began to flow, and her mouth began to open.

“El? Y-you…! You clearly collapsed…”

Rurin, still hugging him in a hurry, gently touched El’s back.

Even then, tears continued to flow uncontrollably.

Even though she realized that El was fine.

She felt the urge to do something for him.

Because of that, El kissed Rurin’s tear-streaked eyelids.

“It’s okay. I’m fine, so pull yourself together.”

Rurin’s ears started turning bright red, feeling his lips.

“El? Now?”

Endlessly proactive but shy in situations like this. That was Rurin.

A flustered Rurin lowered her head deeply.

Nies watched all this, clicked his tongue at the display, but then saw it as an opportunity and unleashed his breath attack.

Because El’s back was exposed as he hugged Rurin.

“Die, you scoundrel! This cannot be happening!”

With a roar, a powerful dragon breath struck directly at El. But El no longer had any reason to take that breath.

The dragon’s breath,

Light, light, infinitely light.

Boom!

El, still holding Rurin, used Blaze to effortlessly deflect the breath.

“Rurin, stay here for a moment. I’ll sort this out. You need to stay focused until then.”

El said this, gently patted Rurin’s back, and turned around.

Rurin’s arms resisted as if not wanting to let El go, but soon they fell away.

El took a deep breath as he looked at Nies. He could feel mana overflowing throughout his body. This was the complete absorption of the dragon orb.

Therefore, he summoned a meteor in the sky. The strongest magic.

Soon, the meteor appeared in the sky.

El’s attack magic, having completely absorbed the dragon orb, surpassed a limit, and thus the sky was filled with meteors.

It was a so-called meteor shower.

The faces of the dragons watching this extraordinary magic were filled with shock.

“This, this is…! This is ridiculous!”

Nies stopped and froze. Feeling the storm of mana.

The moment his existence became powerless. His thoughts momentarily stopped, as if refusing to comprehend what was happening.

El mercilessly directed the meteors at Nies.

He had no intention of forgiving.

In his heart, he wanted to drop 799 meteors, corresponding to the pain Rurin experienced in her childhood and her age, but doing so would destroy the world.

So he compromised a hundred times and dropped six meteors.

Boom, boom, boom!

“Aaaargh!”

And immediately, Nies’s body was engulfed by the meteors.

Boom!

Soon, the heavens and the earth trembled.

A meteor is essentially an asteroid collision.

If it struck a planet from space, a single meteor could wipe humanity out.

But the meteors usually used by 9th-class mages were much smaller, and the difference was that they fell from the sky, not space.

El filled the sky with meteors that he could control freely.

Meteors of varying sizes were burning in the sky.

The number was so vast it couldn’t be counted. Seeing this, Nies’s uncle, Diehegma, shouted with a pale face. Diehegma, who hadn’t said a word since arriving here with the Elder. His first words were a denial of El.

“Unbelievable… This can’t be happening…! A mere human! A mere human!”

“A mere human, you say?”

The magic that turned Nies into nothing but dust.

No more words were needed. El just glared at Diehegma.

The quickest way to shut another being up in the world is indeed a difference in power.

To dragons, full of pride, this was an impossible event.

But it happened just now.

It was probably the first time in the history of dragons.

Nies’s death was his own doing. And the meteors.

There wasn’t a dragon who could argue further. None could survive the meteors in the sky.

That was true for Diehegma as well.

Diehegma couldn’t answer and lowered his eyes.

That was essentially a declaration of the Black Dragons’ defeat.

All of this was a warning.

A bold warning that if they ever try to disrupt peace like Nies again, he will face the entire dragon clan.

And at this moment, that warning was properly taking hold.