The air in the Obsidian Lair didn't just smell like smoke; it smelled like the end of the world.
Theon knelt in the soot, his lungs burning with every shallow breath. Through the shimmering haze of heat, he saw a fragment of Old Man Harl's cloak—the faded blue fabric the old man had stitched himself by the guild's gutter-fire—fluttering into a pile of white ash.
In an instant, the Rusty Compass guild was gone. His family. His only reason for enduring the spit and the kicks of the city.
They weren't heroes; they were just pack-mules who wanted a warm meal. And now, they were dust.
"See, boy?"
The voice was like silk sliding over a blade.
Grandmaster Vaelin of the Iron Aegis stood twenty paces ahead, his golden armor untarnished by the soot. He was humming a soft, victorious tune.
"Your lives finally have a purpose. You are the insulation. You died so the Dragon's fire would cool enough for a real master to step in. Be proud. In death, you've served your betters."
Vaelin didn't even look back. He was a god of the elite, and to him, the Rusty Compass members were no more significant than the gravel beneath his boots.
I was a good soldier, Theon's mind hissed, a cold, dark poison beginning to leak into his thoughts. I followed every rule. I bowed to every guild badge. I waited my turn in the dirt. And my reward is the smell of my father-figure's burning flesh.
He looked at Vaelin's golden back. The man was reaching out, his hand glowing with a spell to claim the dying Dragon Lord's soul.
The world doesn't belong to the righteous, Theon realized. The grief in his chest crystallized into something jagged and heavy. It belongs to the monsters. And if I die here as a 'scavenger,' I am just a footnote in Vaelin's legend. A piece of trash that was swept away to make room for his throne.
"No."
The word wasn't a plea. It was a rejection of the universe.
Theon surged from the ash. He didn't have a legendary blade or a holy spell. He grabbed a jagged, necrotic dragon-bone shard from the floor—a relic of a previous era, dripping with black bile. He didn't run like a knight; he lunged like a dying animal.
With a roar that tore his vocal cords to shreds, he drove the bone deep into the Dragon Lord's open throat wound just as Vaelin's hand made contact with the scales.
[SYSTEM ALERT: IMPOSSIBLE FEAT DETECTED]
[LEVEL 1 SCAVENGER HAS SLAIN THE CALAMITY LORD]
[MANTLE TRANSFER: INITIATING...]
The explosion of power was not a golden light. It was an oil-black infection.
Theon's heart stopped. For a heartbeat, there was only the void. Then, the Mantle—the weight of a thousand years of draconic fury—slammed into his soul. His ribs shrieked as they widened and hardened. His skin split open, leaking a glowing emerald ichor that hissed against the cold stone floor.
"You... you FILTH!" Vaelin screamed, spinning around. His face, once beautiful and calm, was now a mask of aristocratic rage and horror. "That is MY godhood! You are polluting a divine soul with your peasant blood!"
Vaelin didn't retreat. He raised his legendary blade, The Sun-Sunderer, the edge glowing with the heat of a star. "If the Mantle wants a vessel, it can find one in your corpse!
[HEAVEN'S RADIANCE]!"
A pillar of blinding white light, a Tier-9 execution spell meant to vaporize mountains, slammed down onto Theon's hunched form.
But the light didn't kill him.
Theon looked up through the white fire. His eyes were no longer brown; they were vertical slits of burning green, radiating a light so intense it made the shadows in the room scream. He didn't feel the heat of the spell. He felt... starved.
He reached out a hand—now tipped with obsidian claws—and caught the pillar of light. He squeezed.
The high-tier spell shattered like cheap glass, shards of holy mana dissolving into the black smoke swirling around Theon's reforming body.
Theon stood up. He was taller, his frame lean and predatory. The very air around him distorted, gravity bending toward him as if he were the center of the world.
"Vaelin," Theon rasped. His voice sounded like grinding tectonic plates.
Theon took a single step. The resulting shockwave cracked Vaelin's golden chestpiece and sent the Grandmaster stumbling back. The "Dragon Fear" aura—a weight that crushed the will of any lesser being—hit Vaelin like a physical blow.
The Grandmaster, the man who had commanded armies, fell to his knees. His golden armor went dull. He looked at Theon—this thing that was half-corpse, half-god—and his lips trembled.
"Monster..." Vaelin whimpered, his eyes wide with a pure, animalistic terror.
Theon raised a hand, black lightning dancing between his fingers. He wanted to feel Vaelin's neck snap. He wanted to hear the man beg. But as he prepared to strike, his new body seized.
The "Succession Pain"—the agony of a dragon's memories trying to cram into a human brain—hit him with the force of a hammer. Theon fell to one knee, clutching his head, his teeth grinding so hard they cracked. His beings felt like they were about to burst from the sheer volume of power.
Vaelin saw the opening. Fumbling with hands that shook uncontrollably, he tore a high-tier teleportation scroll from his belt.
"This isn't over!" Vaelin shrieked, his voice cracking like a child's. "You can't hold that power! You're a hollow shell! It will burn you from the inside out! I'll be waiting at the Academy... I'll take back what you stole from me!"
With a panicked flash of blue light, the Grandmaster vanished, leaving behind only the scent of ozone and the smell of his own fear.
Theon remained in the darkness, his fingers digging deep furrows into the solid obsidian floor. The pain was absolute, a white-hot iron in his brain, but he didn't scream again. He forced himself to breathe. He forced the emerald fire in his veins to settle.
He looked at the ash of his guild one last time.
"Run, Vaelin," Theon whispered into the silence of the tomb. "It only makes the hunt better."