I blink at the clock.
11:13 AM.
I really slept in.
No surprise, clearing an entire raid in one night might be the new normal, but that doesn’t make it any less brutal on my mind. At least we finished in time; the idea of the Ashwing pair attacking the Dominion while Scott and I were stuck awake… yeah. That thought still crawls down my spine like ice.
I lie there for a minute, staring at the ceiling, replaying the night.
The lair.
The ossuary with its ancient ribcage ceiling.
The slime-colony.
The matriarch’s heart.
The evolution.
Things I never expected to find in the Ashwing’s home, and things I didn’t have nearly enough time to investigate. That can wait. I’ve already issued standing orders for excavation and expansion. The Dominion will keep moving even while I’m gone.
I sit up, wrestling with the question of what to do first: watch the last hour of the stream replay, or ignore it and start the day like a normal human being.
I cave instantly.
My browser opens straight to my channel, I’d set it as my homepage days ago for convenience. The stream pick-up rolls immediately: Kyris in the bone chamber, pushing the male Ashwing back. The third-person view makes my stomach do a weird flip. Watching myself move with that hybrid posture, the vents, the claws, the armor plates glowing like they’re still cooling, it all feels alien and native at the same time.
When I’m in Nod, it’s all instinct.
Here, watching it on a screen, I look like something out of a game cutscene.
Its all Might & Magic.
Nations, map events, artifacts, unit types.
All the same ideas, just… living in my dream.
The footage reaches the surface battle , the sonic net, the final execution , and chat starts scrolling.
[archivolt]: I was on the edge of my seat that whole fight, afraid to ask if it’s over
[GainsGoblin]: well it’s not like there could be a THIRD ashwing right?
[VioletVex]: Don’t joke like that. Our poor king needs to rest!! He’s been at it all night!!
Rest. Right.
My body feels fine, my mind feels like someone wrung it out like a wet towel.
Something is going to have to give eventually.
Either I adapt to living two lives, or I start building “rest days” into my real schedule.
The stream ends with Kyris laying back on the cot in the command tent. The screen cuts to black for a heartbeat… then snaps back to the throne room of the Singing Citadel.
Cast kneels in front of the throne.
The scene is deliberate, framed perfectly, like she knew I’d rewatch this. She stands, steps out of frame, and the stream goes back to its usual quiet lobby music.
Viewers drop off one by one, a few giving tithe on their way out. A relief, I burned everything last night forcing the evolution.
Luck.
Fate.
Or just timing.
Whatever it was, it saved us.
I stare at the empty throne on the screen.
Soon, a twelve-man raid team won’t cut it.
Nod isn’t just a dungeon crawler, it’s a political powder keg.
If I can kill a threat like the Ashwing, other kings will be planning their own counters to me.
I have to be ready for that.
My phone buzzes. Victor.
Just like I expected.
“Hey Victor.”
“Marcus, that was insane. You doing alright?”
“Well I’m not hurt or tired, if that’s what you mean. Mentally? Bit fried.”
“I figured. Didn’t want to push you, but… think you could meet me and Scott? We’ll pick you up. Strategy breakfast.”
“Haha, already acting like an advisor to a king. You fall into the role fast.”
“I’m not the only one, King Kyris. You command that kingdom like you were born for it.”
I snort. “It’s basically Might & Magic or any of my city builders. I have a bit of practice I guess.”
“‘A bit of practice,’ he says… You have like four thousand hours in Forest Village.”
“Hey, hey, don’t expose me like that or I’m skipping breakfast.”
“Fine, fine. Get ready. I’ll text when I’m outside.”
While getting dressed, I shoot Scott a message.
Me: Hey, you doing alright Scott?
Scott: Absolutely man! Just finished watching the stream. You freaking CRUSHED that second dragon. So glad we’re on the same team, don’t wanna fight you!
Me: Hah. It’d take a lot for me to ever go against you. Plus you’re getting pretty strong yourself. I keep learning more every day, bet Sunforged have hidden tricks too. I can help you dig ‘em out.
Scott: Right on!! The team’s good btw. They’re back in the capital on the med sled. You STILL haven’t visited btw. Now you got no excuse.
Scott: Gonna hit a workout before meeting you guys. Catch ya later.
Me: You never slow down do you xD. Later man.
Good, I’d been worried about his fighters. I could check my Hekari via resonance before waking, but I can’t reach Sunforged that way.
A reminder to myself: Scott and I get three deaths. Our people don’t.
I pack a backpack, laptop, notepad, colored pens, and can’t help feeling like I’m prepping for a D&D session instead of a national-strategy meeting.
With time to kill before Victor arrives, I check my desktop.
Ch100 Reddit is on fire, reaction posts, power speculation, slow-mo edits of the execution, theory threads about my new Aegis.
And of course…HistoriaH.
Every time something big happens, they’re on it. Screenshots, annotations, UI edits, health bars, attack summaries. I click their profile.
They’re doing YouTube breakdowns.
Their newest is a dive into the war with the Clockfather.
I scroll until I find a thumbnail that hits like a punch:
“King Alaric of the Holy See of Solmir – Complete Kingdom Breakdown.”
It’s a full dossier, capital tour, troop analysis, login times. Alaric logs in with a pattern eerily close to mine. With the two-hour offset applied, he could be anywhere from MST to EST.
Closer than I realized.
Something to discuss later.
My phone buzzes again.
Victor: Outside.
Perfect timing.
I grab my bag, lock the door behind me, and head out.
The moment I climb into Victor’s car, he and Scott both turn toward me like I’m carrying the nuclear football.
Victor doesn’t even wait for me to buckle the seatbelt.
“Alright,” he says, lifting a hand like he’s calling the court to order “because if we start anywhere else I think I will explode holding it in, we need to talk about that evolution thing you did, Marcus.”
Scott leans forward between the seats, eyes wide with manic adrenaline he clearly hasn’t come down from.
“YEAH, MAN! That was freakin’ awesome! I had no idea what to think when you went into that, like, honey bubble thing, but I knew I had to keep you alive ’til you were done. Then you came out like a damn freight train!”
He’s practically vibrating.
Victor nods sharply. “You didn’t just come out stronger. You came out different. Stronger than anything we’ve seen. That armor? Those vents? Marcus, you looked like something that walked out of a myth someone forgot to warn us about.”
Scott waves a hand. “Nah, nah, say it right. He looked like a Boss fight we would be under-leveled for. Like the kind of shit that kills you just for entering aggro range.”
Then he pauses.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“…But he’s at least our boss fight.”
Victor shoots him a look. “Scott.”
“What? I’m right.”
I rub the back of my neck, heat crawling up, equal parts embarrassment and leftover adrenaline.
“Look… I didn’t know if it would work. Hekari evolution is normally a whole process and the tithe thing was an experiment. I wasn’t planning on doing it in the field.”
Victor gives me a long, pointed look.
“You ate a dragon heart on stream, Marcus.”
I wince. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
Scott bursts out laughing. “Dude. DUDE. You didn’t just eat it. You tore into it like a caveman ripping open a dinosaur. Reddit thinks you’re gonna start eating other kings now.”
Victor elbows him. “I told you not to bring that up just yet...”
I blow out a breath and stare out the windshield.
The light changes, Victor starts driving, and for a moment none of us talk.
It’s quiet enough that I can actually hear my own heartbeat, and that’s… rare.
Finally Victor says softly, “That power level… Marcus, you need to know what that means politically.”
I nod. “Yeah. Trust me, I’m painfully aware.”
Scott’s smile fades a little, replaced with something harder.
“You scared the Ashwing, man. A male Ashwing. That thing had no fear in its body until you stepped out of that bubble.”
“Yeah,” Victor adds, “and the rest of the CH100 saw that too. That clip of you walking through its beam? It’s everywhere. The subreddits. Twitter. People are already arguing if you’re a Hero or a monster.”
A hollow laugh slips out of me.
“Great. Super reassuring.”
Scott leans forward again.
“But hey, let’s be real here: that evolution saved all our asses. Without it? We were dead. Straight up. No one blames you for using it. We just… we want to understand it.”
Victor nods. “And we need to figure out how it changes everything going forward.”
Just like that, the banter drains away and the atmosphere tightens.
Not uncomfortable.
Just real.
The way it feels when three friends know they’re sitting on decisions that might alter the fate of a world.
Victor clears his throat.
“So. Start from the beginning. What did you feel? How did you trigger it? What changed? And what do you think the limits are? Because everything in Nod changed last night, Marcus, and we need to understand how.”
Scott nudges my arm.
“And then we can order breakfast. Because I need pancakes to process this.”
My stomach answers before I do.
It growls loud enough to echo off the car’s interior, and both Victor and Scott stop talking mid-sentence.
I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose.
“Can we at least wait until we’re eating to go over this? Bombarding me with questions as soon as I get in the car feels a little unfair.”
Victor raises both hands, mock surrender. “Alright, alright. Moratorium on dragon-heart discussion until there is food on the table.”
Scott points between the two of us. “I make no promises, but I will try very hard to wait until there are pancakes.”
“Good enough,” I mutter.
The ride is short and blessedly quiet. Just normal traffic noise, the hum of the AC, and my brain trying not to replay the moment I bit into something that should have stayed inside a dragon’s chest.
By the time we pull into the restaurant lot, my nerves have settled a little. It’s one of those big chain diners that smells like coffee, syrup, and grease the second you open the door. The kind of place with laminated menus and booths that can survive nuclear winter.
We get a table in the corner. I sit with my back to the wall without thinking about it. Habit, now.
A waitress swings by, all practiced cheer. We order,
Scott goes all-in on the carb apocalypse, Victor gets something that at least pretends to be healthy, and I just point at the first thing that looks like “enough calories to staunch the bleeding.”
Drinks arrive. Coffee goes down. The moment the waitress walks off with our menus, Victor laces his fingers together on the table and gives me that “alright, talk” look.
I sigh. “You two are not subtle.”
Scott leans forward, expression openly eager. “Look, man, you ATE A DRAGON and turned into a raid boss. If you don’t think I’m going to interrogate you about that, you don’t know me at all.”
“Fine,” I say. “Evolution first, then we move on to the ‘how screwed are we in the long term’ portion of breakfast.”
“Deal,” Victor says.
I stare at the swirl in my coffee for a second, trying to figure out where to even start.
“You remember how the Hekari drones evolved, back when we first started shaping the Dominion?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Victor says. “You basically gave them orders and a diet plan.”
Scott snorts. “ ‘Eat this monster, sleep in this glowing pile of sand, don’t die, congrats you’re a slightly more horrifying dog now.’ ”
“Close enough,” I say. “The Hekari don’t decide their own direction. I do. Or the captains do under my authority. We pick what they ingest, we pick when they go into chrysalis, and we set expectation for what they come out as.”
Victor nods. “Top-down design.”
“Right. But that’s still… distant. Abstract. I wasn’t inside their process. I was directing it.”
I tap a finger lightly against my chest.
“What happened last night was the same mechanic, but run on me. And it wasn’t distant. It was… full-contact.”
Scott opens his mouth, clearly about to crack a joke, then shuts it again when he sees my face. “Alright. Serious mode. What did it feel like?”
“Like being dismantled and rebuilt while awake,” I say. “But controlled. Mostly.”
Their food arrives, cutting across the gravity of the statement. Plates clatter down: syrup, eggs, sausage, fruit, the whole mess. The waitress tops off our coffee and vanishes again.
Victor waits until she’s gone, then gestures with his fork. “Go on.”
I pick at my hash browns, more to keep my hands busy than because I’m starving now.
“When I went into the cocoon,” I say slowly, “it wasn’t just… blacking out. I felt the tithe burn. All of it. Like fuel dumped into an engine. Hekari evolution usually takes, what, forty-eight hours? I’ve been testing ways to shorten that with tithe, just to see if it’s possible.”
Scott whistles. “Of course you have.”
“At max overclock, I got it down to about ten minutes,” I say. “Which is great on paper and still suicidal in battle. But with the amount of tithe the raid brought in, I could push it. So I did.”
Victor’s brow furrows. “And that’s what that… golden sphere was?”
“Yeah,” I say. “A chrysalis. But this time I wasn’t on the outside giving orders. I was in it. In my own evolution. My body was basically turning itself into raw potential, and my thoughts were… hard coding.”
Scott stabs a pancake. “Explain that in non-wizard, please.”
I take a breath.
“Normally, I tell the Hekari, ‘You’re going to become X. Here’s the monster. Here’s the intent.’ They go under. The Dominion and their biology work out the in-between. With me, it was like those two steps were stacked. I was the one under, but also the one aiming the process.”
Victor leans in. “So your desire literally shaped the final form.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Seth confirmed that, actually.”
That makes both of them go still.
Victor’s voice drops. “Seth was there?”
I nod. “He pulled me to the Black Table while the evolution was running.”
Scott’s eyes go wide. “He what.”
I shrug, because I don’t have a better reaction. “He said I was still in the cave; he’d just borrowed my consciousness so I didn’t have to ride out the pain in real time. Which is… considerate? In a terrifying cosmic game master way.”
Victor presses his knuckles to his mouth, thinking hard. “What did he want?”
“He called it an ‘extended tutorial’ for my nation-specific quirks,” I say. “He showed me… options. Not fixed builds, more like conceptual loadouts. Versions of myself with different weightings of offense, defense, presence. One looked like pure villain plate. Another like a walking bastion. He told me the tithe didn’t just affect speed, it amplified the quality of what I got if I was deliberate.”
“And you picked… this.” Scott makes a vague gesture, clearly picturing the armor from the stream.
“I picked what I needed,” I say quietly. “I needed to keep tanking, but I couldn’t just be a shield anymore. Not with threats like that. I needed mobility, verticality, and a way to fight back at range without abandoning protection.”
Victor nods slowly. “So: Ashwing aspects plus your existing role.”
“Exactly,” I say. “Fire immunity came baked in. The vents and the mid-air movement, that’s the Ashwing’s dominance of space. The greatsword is the Chime evolving with me, weaponized version of the shield’s defense. The armor… that’s the Dominion agreeing I get to be the wall and the spear now.”
Scott grins. “And the streaks in your hair? Pure style points.”
I roll my eyes. “Side effect, probably.”
Victor tilts his head. “You said stronger, but more limited.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s not a free power-up. I can’t just… live in that state without consequence. Everything I did against the male Ashwing? The vent dashes, the beam surfing, absorbing direct breath weapons, that all built heat. The armor manages it, but it doesn’t erase it. I could feel myself edging toward overheat. If I’d kept pushing full output, I think I would’ve cooked myself from the inside.”
Scott’s fork pauses halfway to his mouth. “So you can overheat and just… die.”
“Or shut down,” I say. “I don’t know which. Either way, it’s a limit. And I burned all my tithe to do this in the first place. I have nothing left banked now. No emergency respec. No second evolution queued.”
Victor sits back, exhaling. “So this is you now. No rewinds.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And I don’t know if I can evolve again. Maybe there are stages. Maybe this was a one-time thing. Seth didn’t clarify. Of course he didn’t.”
Scott frowns. “Do you trust him?”
“No,” I say immediately. Then, “But I believe him. Which is worse.”
Victor huffs a quiet laugh. “That sounds about right.”
We eat in silence for a bit. It gives me time to chew on something that isn’t dragon organs.
Eventually Victor sets his fork down and steeples his fingers again. “So. Hekari evolution, King evolution, Seth tutorial. Now the big question: what does this mean for next steps?”
“Short term?” I say. “We’re in a good place. Ashwing pair dead. Lair intact. Bones, slime colony residue, eggs… all of that is raw material. I already set standing orders before I woke up, road expansion north, preliminary excavation of the lair, foundation prep for that border fortress between my lands and Scott’s.”
Scott nods. “Sunforged side’s already moving. I checked my capital this morning. My people are banged up, but no one died. They’ll be ready to help secure the fortress in a few nights.”
“Good,” I say. “Because whatever we got from the Ashwing lair, we’re going to need infrastructure to actually use it. Storage, research, defenses. And we have to assume other kings didn’t miss the spectacle we just put on.”
Victor looks grim. “They absolutely did not. You know how this plays on the outside, right? One of the Hundred just took down a primordial dragon pair in a single night and walked away stronger. Strategically? You are now officially a problem.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
Scott leans back in the booth, staring up at the ceiling. “You looked like a final boss out there, dude. I’m not even joking. If I was some rando king watching the raid, I’d be drawing up a ‘how do we kill Kyris before he kills us’ document.”
“Well, good news,” I say dryly. “We’re going to make our own version of that. For everyone else.”
Victor’s eyes light with that dangerous strategist spark. “Exactly what I wanted to hear.”
He pulls his phone out, checking the time. “Alright. Here’s what I suggest: we pay, we hit the library, we hijack the biggest table we can find, and we start treating this like what it is, early-stage, multi-front war planning. You walk us through everything you saw in the lair, everything you felt during evolution, and everything Seth said, in as much detail as you can remember. Then we start building lists. Assets. Threats. Unknowns.”
Scott points his fork at him. “And coffee. More coffee.”
“Oh, obviously,” Victor says.
I stare down at my half-empty plate, then at my hands. They still don’t quite feel like they belong to just Marcus anymore. There’s too much of Kyris in the way my fingers want to curl, too much of that armor’s phantom weight clinging to my shoulders.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Library sounds good.”
Victor flags down the waitress and asks for the check. Scott downs the rest of his coffee and orders one to-go.
As we stand to leave, Victor claps a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll figure this out,” he says. “The evolution, the politics, the fortress. All of it. But we’re not winging it anymore. Not after last night.”
Scott smirks. “Yeah. No more surprise extra dragons if we can help it.”
I sling my backpack on, feeling the shape of my notebooks and laptop settle against my spine. It really does feel like I’m heading to a D&D session, not a war council about a dream kingdom and its very real enemies.
“Alright,” I say, exhaling. “Let’s go take over a table and plan how not to die.”
We step out into the daylight together, three guys in street clothes with too much weight on their shoulders, heading to a public library to decide the future of a world that only exists when we sleep.