Beast Gacha System: Chapter 191: Beyond the Ditch

Chapter 191: Beyond the Ditch

"Insolent!"

Serayu’s voice was contained, cold. And her violet eyes now blazed with a fury that made the autumn air feel suddenly, dangerously thin.

"That boy," she spat. "That child. That wling, grasping, presumptuous whelp—"

"Serayu." Lazuardi cald again.

"Seventeen years," Serayu continued. "Seventeen years His Majesty went for his dangerous pilgrimage to protect the world from evil. And this—this insect thinks he can simply walk into His Majesty’s sanctuary, guided by the scribblings of a false prophet, and harvest him? Like timber? Like ore?"

Her elegant hands were trembling with the effort of not reaching for the blade Arzhen couldn’t see, the power coiled beneath her human guise that would reduce him to ash and mory.

"We should have killed him," Jenggala said.

His voice was flat, matter-of-fact, the tone of a man stating an obvious, irrefutable truth. The green-haired dragon shook his head as they followed Oathran’s steps. The coiled readiness of his body was of a hound straining against its leash.

"His Majesty commanded us to rely scare him," he continued, bewildered, frustrated. "I do not understand. The boy ca here to dismber him. To grind his bones into dust and forge his heart into a trinket. And His Majesty—" He broke off, shaking his head again. "Why? Why are we here, if not to—"

Lazuardi finally spoke. His voice was rough.

"Because His Majesty is rciful," he said. They were an observation after spending decades serving a sovereign whose compassion was, to his followers, an endless source of both wonder and exasperation. "He has always been rciful. It is... his way."

"rciful," Serayu repeated. "That creature ca to him with a sack and a prophecy, intending to use his death as currency. And His Majesty laughed. He told him to go ho."

She shook her head, a sharp, disbelieving motion. "I do not understand it. I have never understood it. Four hundred years, and I still do not understand how he can look upon such filth and feel pity instead of—"

She stopped. Her jaw clenched. The wind stirred the golden leaves at her feet.

"If His Majesty will not permit us to kill him," Jenggala said, his voice still that sa flat, chilling calm, "then I will content myself with ensuring he never forgets this day. Every ti he closes his eyes, every ti he sees mist or hears a voice in the dark—I want him to rember. I want him to dream of His Majesty’s rcy, and wake grateful that it was rcy he received, and not—"

"Enough."

Oathran’s voice was quiet, but it cut through Jenggala’s rising tide of fury like a blade through silk.

"I will deal with him when the ti cos. We leave for now."

There was no room for argunt. The three dragons, their outrage still simring beneath carefully composed exteriors, fell into step behind him.

Serayu’s jaw remained tight, her hands still trembling with the residue of suppressed violence. Lazuardi’s silence was heavy, a man wrestling with centuries of devotion and the bewildering, frustrating rcy of his sovereign.

Jenggala’s every step was controlled violence, his green hair catching the fading light like the crest of a predator forcing itself to retreat.

They followed Oathran through the skeletal trees, the mist parting before them like a held breath finally released.

At the edge of the forest, where the dead grass gave way to open sky, Oathran stopped. His human form shimred, blurred at the edges, and then unfolded.

White scales caught the dying light, imnse and luminous. Horns curved skyward like frozen lightning. Wings spread wide, each beat sending ripples through the fog.

He rose.

The three dragons watched him ascend for a single heartbeat. Then, as one, they turned their gazes back to the dark mouth of the forest. Back to the direction they had left the boy alone, trembling, still pressed face-down in the cold ditch where his ambitions had died.

Jenggala’s growl was low, guttural, like a predator denied its rightful prey. His claws flexed against the earth. His muscles coiled.

Then he, too, transford. Green scales shimred into being, catching the grey light like polished jade. His own wings spread, and he launched himself into the sky in pursuit of his king.

Lazuardi and Serayu followed, their draconic forms tearing through the mist in flight.

It was only when they had climbed above the canopy, when the cold wind of the upper air stread over their scales and the forest below had shrunk to a dark smudge, that they realized their trajectory.

They were flying toward the Elder Dragon’s lair.

"The three of you..."

Oathran’s voice entered their ears directly.

"In the event when I truly died," he said, "and was harvested... would you go and flatten the ground with fla and unleash destruction? Is that what you would do?"

Jenggala’s wings stuttered. Serayu’s flight faltered with a sudden, ungainly tilt before she recovered. Even Lazuardi, who had spent decades training himself to et any revelation with composure, felt his heart seize in his ancient chest.

"But—" Jenggala’s voice cracked, the cold from monts ago shattered. "But, Your Majesty, what else could we do? You are—you are our king!"

No longer the address of a retainer to his sovereign, it seed. It was the cry of a child who had never imagined a world without their north star. The Alicei Line.

"Even if we could stop ourselves from destroying the world," Lazuardi said slowly, admitting a terrible, unavoidable truth, "we could not stop the ones with your bones in their hands from destroying it. Upon their hands, your power—"

He couldn’t finish. The image was too vivid, too monstrous. The Dragon Lord’s remains, desecrated, forged into weapons. His strength, his legacy, his very essence turned against everything he had spent four hundred years protecting.

"Your Majesty." Serayu’s voice was steadier now, but the tremor beneath it was unmistakable. "Not just us. All skyborn would erge. All skyborn would descend upon the world. We could not stop it. No one could stop it."

Oathran listened. His great white form sailed through the clouds, his wingbeats slow, asured, unhurried. The weight of their words settled over him.

He knew.

He had always known.

This was the future he had seen, the cataclysm he had spent seventeen years trying to prevent. This was why, when the wormhole had finally spat him out into that anonymous ditch, broken and bleeding and done, his first coherent thought had not been of survival. It had been of containnt.

He needed soone to manage his death. Soone who would find his body before the scavengers, before the ambitious princes and false prophets. Soone who would secure his remains, protect his legacy, and ensure that his power, that terrible, world-shaping power, would never be weaponized.

He needed Cecilia.

But if he had never t her... if, in so other tiline, so other permutation of fate, there was no solemn, eight-year-old girl who had looked at a mighty dragon and promised to bear his burden—

If he had t soone else. By Ruby Vaiva, with her divine eyes and her careful, calculating ambition. By Arzhen Vasiliev, with his sack and his containnt sigils and his desperate need for validation. Or—worse, soone who thought nothing of consequence...

Then his corpse would have beco currency. His bones, artifacts. His heart, a trinket. And the dragons, all the dragons, would have risen.

He had commanded them, once. Before his pilgrimage, before the seventeen years of isolation and preparation, he had gathered the eldest among them and made them swear. "If I do not return, you will not seek . You will not avenge . You will let

fade."

But oaths sworn in grief were brittle things. And the younger ones, Serayu, Jenggala, Lazuardi, they had never sworn anything at all. They had only waited. And hoped. And now, faced with the hypothetical of his desecration, their response was not hesitation. It was certainty.

They would burn the world for him. They would call it justice.

So, in the event where he must die alone, without Cecilia, without her gentle, ruthless, rciful hands to guide his passing, he would pray. Not for salvation. Not for reunion with Isaiah or his ancestors or whatever waited beyond the veil of death.

He would pray to be forever hidden in that ditch. Forever unfound.

He would not seek help. He would not crawl toward civilization or light or the distant hope of a compassionate stranger. He would not even have the energy to find a better place to hide. He would simply lie there, in the cold, anonymous earth, and wait for death to embrace him.

He would make himself as small as possible. As forgettable. As nothing.

And the world would never know where he fell.

But that day, the day the wormhole had finally closed, the day his body had finally given out, he had not been alone.

The mory of an oath, seventeen years old and made to a child in a sun-drenched temple, had surfaced through the pain.

"I will bear the burden for you."

Such a small voice. Such impossible, beautiful arrogance.

He had forced himself to move. One claw, then another. A crawl, then a stagger, then a broken, faltering flight. Toward her. Always toward her.

And sohow, by Isaiah’s grace or the stubborn, aching hope of a dying dragon, they had t.

Not in the temple. Not in so prepared, dignified setting. In a ditch, yes. Another ditch, closer to the capital but still just a gouge in the anonymous earth. He had collapsed there, too weak to continue, too stubborn to stop. And she had found him.

Together dying.

He had not been alone.

The clouds parted. Below them, the Elder Dragon’s lair ca into view. A peak of black stone and ancient ice, waiting in vigil.

Oathran descended. His wings folded. His great white form settled onto the familiar stone, and for a long mont, he simply stood there, staring out at the darkening sky.

Behind him, three dragons landed in careful, reverent silence. Their earlier fury was tempered by sothing they could not na.

The weight, perhaps, of their sovereign’s quiet, inconsolable grief for a death that had not yet co, and for the rcy he had chosen to extend to a world that would never, could never, understand the full cost of his compassion.

Then—

"You’re here."

A voice from beyond erged.