Chapter 58: Dragon Meat, History?
"You seem busy — who was that?" Niel asked, stepping toward them.
"Some minor demon heir, I think," Lydia said, walking to meet him.
Niel went still for a moment. Why would a demon heir show up here — were they hunting him specifically? Had word gotten out he'd survived the explosion? He looked to Lydia. "Any idea why they came?"
"Dragon meat," Draken cut in, still visibly furious. "They came to kill a dragon for a meal."
Niel stared at him, genuinely confused. Did demons actually eat dragons? He dug through Vael's memories and found a fragment of it — tasting it once, though the memory sat nearly a century deep, maybe further.
Then something else clicked into place. Draken's story put the dragon experiments' failure at roughly five decades back — the same event that had opened the portals in the first place. If Vael had tasted dragon meat centuries before that, as a demon, the timeline didn't hold together.
He turned it over. Either dragons had once existed in the demon realm on their own, or this wasn't the first time a portal had opened between the worlds. Both possibilities dragged in a flood of new questions — had demons wiped out an entire native dragon population once before, or had a portal opened and closed again long before this one?
Lydia's voice cut through before he could chase it further. "Hey! Where'd you go just now?"
He blinked back to the present. "Nowhere — just thinking." His gaze shifted to Draken, still simmering. He could've pressed the question, but Draken clearly wasn't in the mood, and it only reinforced that demons had crossed paths with dragons before — humans certainly never had.
He filed the question away for later, somewhere more convenient to raise it.
He turned back to Lydia, reaching into the heavy bag at his side and pulling out three masks — one shaped like a ram's skull, eye sockets cut clean through. "Look what I picked up. Masks, for all of us."
"I'm not wearing that. Why do we even need masks?" Lydia asked.
"Sinners' disguise. We'll need them for the feast — if we're showing up, we can't do it bare-faced. Not until we're confident enough to drop the anonymity."
Lydia studied hers a moment. Not the worst idea, honestly — no kingdom could hold her as a fugitive outright, but a royal feast was a different kind of line to test. She sighed. "A ram, though? Couldn't find anything with a bit more style?"
She glanced at Draken. "You good with this?"
Draken looked at the mask, then at her. "Fine by me."
He turned toward the mountain, wings unfurling, and took off without another word.
Lydia watched him go. "He seems upset, don't you think?"
"Yeah, he is," Niel said, stepping up beside her. "The whole dragon-as-food thing seems to have hit some old nerve. Makes me wonder what he's actually sitting on underneath it."
"I don't claim to know much about human history," Lydia said, still watching Draken shrink toward the mountain, "but I do know humans have never eaten dragon. Which raises the question — was there ever a time dragons were served up as meat? And to who, exactly?"
The question hung there, unanswered, as they both watched Draken close in on the mountain. History had buried itself under too many lies and half-truths — untangling whatever secret drove that reaction wasn't going to be simple.
---
Elsewhere, in the demon world, Dreece and Lambadack arrived back at Cronos's castle. Most of it stood rebuilt now, less than twenty percent still under repair.
They made their way down the hallway, slowly healing as they walked.
"I still don't get why we ran," Dreece muttered.
"It wasn't going our way, and I spotted an adventurer closing in from a distance. Didn't need a third opponent added to the mess." Lambadack's thoughts kept circling back to the fight, replaying it until she finally spat, "Damn it. That bitch."
"What bitch?" a voice asked from behind them.
They spun around. Standing there, white hair, red eyes, was the eldest of the demon heirs — Valak. "You two look like hell. What 'bitch' did this to you?"
"How should I know? She was just strong, and I couldn't land a real hit on her. That's the short version." Lambadack sighed. "Next time, I'm ripping her head clean off."
"And I'm getting my meal!" Dreece added.
Only one phrase actually caught Valak's attention — *couldn't land a real hit.* He turned it over, and the moment Lambadack's earlier word — *bitch* — echoed back in his mind, the pieces clicked. He looked at them, expression unreadable.
"You two ran, didn't you?"
Lambadack and Dreece both froze, unsure how he'd landed on that so fast. Neither spoke quickly enough to invent a cover story before he sighed. "No point lying to me. You fought the S-class disaster, didn't you?"
Only then did the title surface in their memory. Lambadack looked at him, bracing for how to explain running from a mere human — but something in the way he'd asked made the loss feel almost expected, not shameful. "You know her?"
"Lydia Grey." Valak turned to leave, then paused mid-step. "Don't waste energy on it. Just be grateful you walked away — most don't."
He tilted his head slightly back toward them, expression still flat and distant. "For now, if either of you spots Lydia anywhere — run first."
"But we could—" Dreece started, but Valak's steady gaze cut her off before she finished. He walked on, and the two girls exchanged a disappointed look before heading off themselves.
---
He'd barely turned the corner before the name surfaced again in his mind — Lydia Grey. He'd never crossed her personally, but the rumors had reached him plenty of times from other elite demons — including how she'd left Erna a wreck months earlier, a fight Erna herself described as entirely one-sided.
His path carried him out of the castle, toward the nearest portal. Nearly a decade since he'd last stepped through one, and something else was pulling him toward it now. Not the itch for conflict, not a desire to stir up another war. He simply wanted to see, firsthand, exactly how strong this S-class disaster really was.