Chapter 340| I Refuse To Finish Him Off
The dawn sky above the Draconian crater was painted a dense, blood red.
The crimson hue emanated from the boiling sea of magma churning deep at the crater’s base.
At the crater’s peak stretched the Altar of the Ancestral Breath. A circular obsidian platform carved at the dawn of time.
Dozens of black obsidian pillars, ten meters high, surrounded the altar’s edge like the fingers of a giant. At the peak of each pillar, the ancestral flames burned eternally—blazing in radiant sapphire blue, deep violet, and smoldering gold. Without firewood, without plumes of smoke.
They were the residual breaths of deceased dragons, watching over the arena in sacred silence.
Around the altar, the members of the Council of Elders sat in a ring upon the stone steps. Their reptilian eyes were freezing cold.
At the highest vantage point, Emperor Tharazion sat upon his massive obsidian throne.
The Emperor’s vertical, golden-yellow eyes stared straight down. His face was flat, entirely unreadable.
Right beside the throne, Seraphina stood like a statue.
Her white silk gown fluttered softly, swept by the dry crater wind. Her silver hair fell in a messy cascade. Her dragon-red eyes looked wet and inflamed.
Both her hands clenched so tightly her knuckles turned white.
In the center of the arena, the two fighters were ready.
Roland Sudrath stood, pacing his breaths in a slow rhythm. Haaah... The dense, sulfur-laced air filled his lungs.
The man was clad in nothing but a white cotton shirt and dark trousers. His black hair was tousled by the crater wind, but his gray eyes shone with crystal clarity, utterly devoid of hesitation.
In his right hand, he gripped a rapier. The phenomenally thin thrusting sword caught the glow of the flames, its tip glinting sharply.
Opposite him, ten meters away, Ignis stood in defiant challenge.
The dragon prince’s humanoid form was covered in blazing copper scales, resembling metal freshly pulled from a forge. His fiery red hair was slicked back flawlessly. He carried absolutely no weapons—his own body was the perfect instrument of murder.
Fwoosh... fwoosh... Small licks of flame danced wildly above his palms. A predatory smirk bloomed on Ignis’s lips, flashing rows of razor-sharp teeth.
Tharazion slowly raised his right hand.
The howling wind and the popping magma seemingly died at that exact second. An absolute silence blanketed the Altar of the Ancestral Breath.
"The Blood Duel..." the Emperor’s heavy voice vibrated through the obsidian stone. "...begins."
SWOOSH!
Without any further warning, Ignis closed the distance. The dragon prince didn’t run; he detonated flames from the soles of his feet and launched himself like a cannonball!
An explosive blast of fire shot straight from Ignis’s palm, slicing through the air toward Roland’s chest.
Dash! Roland vaulted sharply to the left, dropping his body and executing a rapid roll across the unforgiving obsidian floor.
A wave of blistering heat swept the spot where he had stood a second prior. The bottom edge of Roland’s white shirt caught a lick of flame. The man swatted the burning fabric out with his bare hands, immediately kicking off the floor to spring back up.
However, Ignis was vastly faster than human logic could predict.
BAM!
Before Roland could even fully straighten his back, Ignis’s copper-scaled fist slammed dead into the center of his chest!
The sickening crunch of crushed bone and muscle echoed loudly. CRACK!
"Ugh...!"
Roland’s body was sent flying through the air like a ragdoll, suspended for five meters before his back violently struck an obsidian pillar at the edge of the arena. CRASH!
All the air in Roland’s lungs was squeezed out in one agonizing gasp. His vision went instantly dark.
Before he could even gulp down fresh oxygen, the copper shadow lunged from the front once more. Five razor-sharp talons swiped horizontally straight for his neck!
Roland threw his body to the right, relying entirely on the residual muscle memory from Rhea’s brutal training.
SLAAASH!
He managed to save his neck, but the talons didn’t completely miss. Three deep lacerations tore through Roland’s upper left arm. His flesh laid open, spilling fresh blood that dripped onto the black obsidian floor. Drip... drip...
Ignis halted his assault, lowering his hand, which was now coated in Roland’s blood. His smirk grew even wider.
"This is where you die, human," Ignis scoffed lowly, dripping with absolute contempt. "Upon the very same sacred stone... where my ancestors ended the lives of thousands of your kind."
Roland didn’t answer.
The man leaned heavily against the obsidian pillar for a moment, grinding his teeth to endure the stinging agony from his arm. Gulp. He swallowed the metallic taste of blood pooled in his throat.
With slow but absolute certainty, Roland wiped the sweat from his forehead, straightened his knees, and stood back up in the center of the arena.
Seeing that white shirt stand tall once more, the smile on Ignis’s lips suddenly faltered.
Something was wrong. That punch earlier should have been enough to pulverize the internal organs of an ordinary human. Those lacerations should have made any opponent howl in agony. Yet Roland merely stood there. Silent. Staring back at him.
At that exact second, a rotting memory infiltrated Ignis’s mind. Uninvited, unstoppable.
Flickering torchlight. The freezing stone walls of a dungeon.
The clinking of rusted iron chains shackling his wrists.
Heavy steel boots approaching from the dark corridor. Cloaked humans carrying a branding iron glowing a violent red.
Argh, they pressed that searing iron... directly onto the unhardened scales of a dragon whelp!
He screamed hysterically until his throat tore. And those humans only laughed.
"Pathetic little dragon. Scream all you want. No one is coming to save you."
Hsssh! Ignis shook his head violently, hissing wildly to banish the flash of childhood trauma gnawing at his brain.
He refocused his eyes on the arena. Roland was still standing before him. The tip of the rapier in the Sudrath boy’s right hand was pointed forward, flawlessly stable. Blood dripped constantly from his left arm.
However, those gray eyes... showed not a single shadow of terror. No dread, no begging for mercy. There was only a bizarre, eternal tranquility.
"WHY WON’T YOU RUN?!" Ignis suddenly roared, his chest heaving as he hunted for breath. "Why won’t you just surrender, you fool?! You must know... you will never win against me!"
Roland wiped a thin trickle of blood from the corner of his lips with the back of his sleeve.
"You will never understand, Ignis," Roland answered softly. His voice was raspy, yet clear enough to pierce the crater wind. "You have never made a promise... to someone faithfully waiting for you."
Thump.
Something inside Ignis’s chest felt as though it had been struck by a stone hammer. Not out of fear toward Roland’s words, but due to a foreign, boiling rage—a wrath no longer directed at the human before him, but at himself.
"Shut your mouth!" Ignis growled, preparing to lunge again.
But this time, Roland moved first!
SWOOSH!
There was no heroic battle cry. No high leaps that wasted energy. Roland stepped forward using the floor-gliding technique Rhea had hammered into him—efficient, silent, and phenomenally fast.
He didn’t aim his sword at Ignis’s chest, which was plated in thick scales. He didn’t target the head, protected by a skull as hard as steel.
His gray eyes had been actively scanning for anatomical blind spots since that very first laceration.
SHWING!
The thin rapier blade shot forward like a flash of silver light. Thrusting dead straight into a narrow, millimeter-wide gap—right between the folds of the scales on Ignis’s right elbow just as the dragon prince raised his arm.
A thrust of absolute, flawless precision!
Ignis was too slow to retract his arm. The rapier’s tip pierced the thin skin beneath the joints of his copper scales.
Squelch!
Ignis gasped, stumbling two steps backward. He looked down.
A single drop of clear, reddish blood dripped from the crevice of his elbow. Falling and staining the black obsidian floor of the altar. Drip.
Ignis stood paralyzed. His vertical eyes blew wide in utter disbelief, staring at the tiny wound on his own arm. His own blood.
Then, his head snapped up to look at Roland. A human whose breaths were already ragged and labored. A human whose white shirt was dyed red with blood. A human who could barely support his own knees... who should have been dead ten minutes ago.
"You..." Ignis’s scales trembled. "...dare to bleed me?"
Roland didn’t answer.
The man simply raised his rapier back into a ready stance. His right hand was shaking violently from muscle fatigue, but the line of sight from his gray eyes remained locked dead onto Ignis’s eyes. Not retreating a single inch.
FWOOOSH!!
The fire in both of Ignis’s palms erupted with phenomenal ferocity. The flames shot up to two meters high, warping the air around the arena into a scorching mirage.
One more strike. It only required one full-powered punch at this temperature, and the fragile human body before him would be incinerated to ash.
Ignis raised his blazing right hand.
But... that fist of fire froze mid-air. His arm refused to swing down.
Inside his head, the mocking laughter of those humans from his past echoed sharply once more.
"Pathetic little dragon... no one is coming to save you..."
Back then, he was nothing but a dragon whelp locked in a dark cell. He couldn’t fight back when the searing iron burned his scales.
But now? He was no longer a weak whelp in the gutters of history. He was Ignis. Grand General of Draconia. The future sovereign of the dragon throne.
And at this exact second, he refused to become exactly like them!
Those rotting humans who tortured him had fought out of cruelty and cowardice. He had spent decades hating the entire human race purely because of the scars inflicted by a handful of cloaked monsters.
But the man standing and trembling before him now—Roland Sudrath—was not running away. This man was not kneeling to beg for mercy. This man was not crying and lamenting his fate.
Roland Sudrath... was not the monsters of his past.
Hsssh... poof.
The colossal inferno in Ignis’s palm abruptly shrank, then extinguished completely, leaving behind nothing but a thin wisp of sulfurous steam.
Ignis lowered his arm to his side.
"I am not going to kill you, Sudrath," Ignis stated flatly.
Roland blinked his gray eyes, his breathing still jagged. "Hah... why...?"
Ignis didn’t bother to reply. The dragon prince pivoted on his heels, turning his back on Roland, and stared straight up at Tharazion’s throne and the frozen ranks of the Council of Elders.
"The Blood Duel is over!" Ignis declared loudly, his voice echoing through the obsidian pillars.
Ignis raised his head with absolute authority. "I refuse to finish him off."
A storm of shocked whispers instantly exploded among the ranks of the Council of Elders. Their reptilian eyes exchanged looks of pure disbelief.
On the highest throne, Tharazion stared at Ignis for a very long time. There was no wrath in the Emperor’s golden-yellow eyes.
Slowly—so incredibly faintly it was nearly imperceptible to the naked eye—the corners of Tharazion’s lips pulled upward.
The Emperor stood, raising his hand.
"The Blood Duel is concluded," Tharazion decreed with a voice that shook the crater’s peak. "There is no victor. And... there is no loser."
The moment that sentence finished echoing, the white-gowned figure beside the throne immediately bolted.
Seraphina didn’t run hysterically. The girl strode rapidly with a firm, resolute rhythm, even though her red eyes were pooling with tears. She sliced across the obsidian stone arena, ignoring the stares of the entire Council of Elders, and stopped right in front of Roland.
Roland looked at the beautiful face of his woman. The man lowered his rapier, then carved a weary smile—a pale, yet profoundly genuine smile from the bottom of his heart.
"I told you, didn’t I..." Roland’s breath trembled. "...that I would definitely come back."
Seraphina was completely stripped of words to reply.
Completely disregarding Roland’s white shirt, which was soaked in blood and stained with ash, the girl stepped forward and grabbed Roland’s right hand. She gripped his fingers phenomenally tight—so incredibly tight—as if terrified Roland would fade away if she let go for even a single second.
At the outer edge of the Altar, the small contingent from the North witnessed it all.
Adul could no longer hold back his overwhelming emotion. The boy collapsed onto the stone floor, hugging his radio box tightly to his chest while tears streamed heavily down his cheeks. His shoulders shook violently in silent sobs.
Beside him, Eva stood tall with her arms crossed. She didn’t shed a single tear, holding them back, yet the corner of her lips undeniably curled into a proud smirk.
"Tch, you absolute idiot," Eva whispered softly, touching the hilt of her dagger in peace.
And standing one step behind them, Rianor Sudrath did not offer a single analytical comment.
Haaah... The genius architect exhaled a long, heavy sigh, then closed his gray eyes for three full seconds. His right hand, which had been clenched so furiously that his knuckles turned white, now slowly relaxed.
Whirrr...
The Arcanotech Bracer on his left arm hummed quietly, stabilizing the mana circuits that had been fully primed for battle the entire time.
Rianor opened his eyes, looking at his brother’s back, who was now being held tightly by Seraphina beneath the crimson sky of the Draconian crater. There were no words of congratulations. No grand victory speeches.
There was only absolute relief... locked tightly behind his thin glasses.