Chapter 267: Dragon Queen in Chains

The blast of hot breath came without warning, straight at Victor’s face.

He twisted his body to the side on pure reflex, feeling the heat graze his cheek as though someone had opened a furnace in front of him. His dodge was clean, quick, and enough to avoid the main blast of fire, but it didn’t solve the rest. The next instant, a gust of compressed wind came with it, far too sharp to be called mere wind. Victor barely had time to notice the distorted shimmer in the air before he felt his left arm disappear.

The severed limb spun away, still intact from shoulder to hand, while blood splattered across the black stone floor.

"You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me..." Victor muttered, taking a step back as the flesh on his destroyed shoulder began rebuilding itself. He turned his head on reflex, as though expecting to hear a comment. "Rowena, are you seeing this?"

No answer came.

The silence was immediate and strange. Her presence was gone. Her energy was no longer beside him, and he couldn’t sense anyone watching from outside. Victor narrowed his eyes for a second, then understood. His consciousness had been pulled into the sword alone. Rowena had stayed outside with his real body, while only his mind had been dragged into this world.

"Great," he grumbled, opening and closing his newly formed hand. "So it’s just me and this giant lizard."

Fafnir didn’t seem to care about the remark. The dragon raised her head above the mountain of treasure, smoke pouring from her nostrils, then charged forward with a movement that sent coins, jewels, and ancient bones rolling down the slope. Victor wasted no time. He extended his hand and summoned Lilith. The blood sword formed in his grip in an instant, liquid for a second before turning solid.

"All right." He adjusted his stance and smiled. "Guess I’ll have to beat some sense into you."

Victor vanished from where he stood.

His speed truly made a difference. Before Fafnir had finished turning her body, Victor had already appeared above one of her forelegs and brought Lilith down in a diagonal slash. The blade opened a gash between her black scales, drawing hot blood and an aggressive reaction from the dragon. A claw came toward him with enough force to crush a fortress, but he was no longer there. He leaped back, appeared on the opposite side, and attacked again, this time at her neck.

The fight grew intense almost immediately.

Victor was too fast for Fafnir to land a clean hit with a direct attack. He crossed her field of vision in a succession of blurs, leaving cuts, punctures, and shallow marks all over her draconic body. The problem was that it wasn’t working nearly as well as he would have liked. Her scales were absurdly tough, the flesh beneath them seemed packed with monstrous vitality, and every wound he opened looked far too small compared to the size of the creature.

In return, a single mistake was enough for him to lose half his body.

Fafnir opened her mouth and spat another torrent of fire. Victor dove beneath the flames, but the wing movement that followed raised a cutting pressure that tore through his abdomen and destroyed much of his right side. He spun through the air, landed on one knee atop a pile of coins, and immediately forced his regeneration to rebuild his ribs, muscles, and organs.

"Either I’m not as strong as I think," he muttered, standing again, "or you’re way too strong."

He discarded the first possibility a second later, when he vanished again and reappeared behind the dragon’s head before she could complete her turn. The difference in speed was real. Fafnir was powerful, monstrous, and extremely destructive, but he could still read her main movements and anticipate them. That was enough for one thing.

Putting his usual plan into action.

As the battle continued, Victor began using his own blood. Not in the improvised way he had done in the past, but with far more intention. Every dodge, every wound, and every approach served a purpose. Whenever he had room, he let his blood flow onto specific points on the ground. Instead of merely completing an old pattern, he changed everything. He altered the lines, expanded the range, added layers, symbols, and points of convergence, pouring as much vampiric power as he could control into them.

With Carmilla, Scarlet, and even Rowena, he had adapted the marriage ritual intuitively. Now, against Fafnir, he decided to rebuild it almost from scratch.

"Let’s see if this works on dragons, too," he said, sliding beneath a leg and dragging Lilith’s tip across the ground, using blood as ink.

Fafnir seemed far removed from any organized thought. She made no attempt to conceal what he was doing, nor did she care about the circle beginning to take shape around her body. The dragon simply attacked, roared, and destroyed everything around her, as though all she wanted was to crush the irritating presence that insisted on crossing her domain.

Victor was finishing the last line when he took the worst hit yet.

Fafnir raised both wings and unleashed an explosion of flames and compressed wind all at once. The blast struck him directly in the middle of his movement. Half his body simply vanished from the chest down, reduced to ruined flesh, blood, and broken bone before his regeneration began to work.

Victor fell onto his side, sliding across gold and stone.

"Oh, fuck off..." He coughed up blood and forced the rest of his body to rebuild itself. "This body refinement is way too weak. I really need to improve this shit when I see Rakshasa again."

Despite his complaints, he finished what remained. He used the rest of the scattered blood to close the final line of the circle, then clapped his hands together in front of his chest. The blood magic responded immediately. The entire ground pulsed dark red, as though the valley itself had grown a heart, and the great circle around Fafnir lit up completely.

Victor had been expecting resistance.

Perhaps pressure.

Perhaps an attempt to impose a bond.

But what happened next was something else entirely.

Several blood chains emerged from within the magic circle as though they had a will of their own. They shot in every direction, wrapping around Fafnir’s legs, neck, wings, and even her tail, tightening with enough force to make her roar in pain for the first time. Her enormous draconic body was pulled downward. Treasure exploded around her. The ground cracked. And the chains kept tightening.

Victor’s eyes widened slightly.

"...I didn’t do that."

The chains didn’t stop.

They tightened more and more, compressing the dragon’s colossal body as though they were forcibly reducing her entire form. Fafnir’s roar became higher-pitched, angrier, and more confused. Her size began to visibly decrease. First her wings shrank. Then her torso, legs, tail, and neck—everything was forcibly compacted, stripped of its original form and reduced by that strange magic Victor hadn’t planned to work this way.

"What the fuck..." ℯℯ𝑙.

The red light grew more intense for a few seconds.

Then it disappeared.

In place of the enormous dragon, a humanoid figure lay fallen among the chains.

Victor stared for a moment before approaching.

She had long golden hair spread across the ground, two black horns curving backward, a still-living tail writhing behind her body, and golden eyes filled with hostility. Her clothing looked like a strange mixture of a dress and living armor, black with golden details and tears that seemed far too natural to be mere fabric. Her hands still ended in claws, her legs retained a draconic appearance, and the blood chains were wrapped around her wrists, ankles, waist, and neck.

Fafnir slowly raised her head and looked at Victor as though she wanted to rip his soul out through his throat.

Victor studied the chains for a second, sighed, and raised Lilith.

"I guess you can’t force a dragon into marriage."

With a quick movement, he cut through the chains one by one. The hardened blood broke apart and fell to the ground, turning back into dark liquid before dissipating. Once she was free, Fafnir didn’t move immediately. She remained on her knees, supporting herself with one hand against the ground while her golden hair fell over her face.

Victor lowered his sword.

"So," he said, still breathing heavily, with half his clothes destroyed by the earlier attacks. "You okay?"

Fafnir raised her eyes very slowly.

Her expression remained dangerous. It wasn’t just anger. It was humiliation, irritation, and something even worse coming from someone who clearly wasn’t accustomed to being reduced to that state. Victor realized it immediately and, for a moment, thought that perhaps he had asked the wrong question.

Even so, it was already too late to take it back.

She opened her mouth, her voice coming out hoarse, low, and utterly venomous.

"If you ask me that again..."

Victor arched an eyebrow.

Fafnir raised her body a little higher, still unsteady, and bared her teeth in a smile that was anything but friendly.

"...I’ll rip your head off and swallow it before it regenerates."