They entered the third floor and Lucius blinked.
"What the hell..." he muttered under his breath.
These floors were getting ridiculous. The first floor looked like a dieval ruin. The second floor was a fleshy forest that felt like running across soone’s tongue. And now...
A whole damn ocean made of blood.
"What next? A mountain?" Lucius asked no one in particular.
Grimm floated beside him with his legs dangling as he stared at the endless crimson waves.
"Where the hell are we even going to set camp?"
The dragon girl, slung lazily over Lucius’s shoulder like a misbehaving oversized cat, tilted her head at the ocean.
"I don’t understand the issue," she said. "Just sleep on the water."
Lucius’s face contorted into at least five different expressions... disgust, disbelief, annoyance, inevitable resignation, then annoyance again.
"Of course you would, dirty pig."
"I’m not a pig!" she snapped.
She began wriggling her legs like an irritated toddler trying to kick him in the chest. It only resulted in her hurting her own foot. "I’m a dragon."
Lucius ignored her tantrum and looked upward, the other Awakeners were falling down now.
The staircase from the second floor led straight into the sky.
They had fallen out of it... literally dropped like loot from a tower boss. If Lucius hadn’t been there to catch them, everyone would’ve belly-flopped into an ocean of blood.
He lifted his hand casually.
Space bent, locking all of them mid-air and preventing the drop.
The drone finally drifted down from the staircase above, its cara sweeping across the entire hellish vista.
[@VoidMapper: WHERE THE HELL EVEN IS THIS FLOOR???]
[@CrimsonMoist: Bro ocean of blood is crazy]
[@DungeonLoreKid: THIS IS A LORD-CLASS DUNGEON WTF]
[@SaltySkies: Bloody ocean? Nah I’m out]
[@Over101: 🤦 Lucius is overrated, nothing’s even happening]
|__ [@GoKSnowflake: Then KYS bro 💀]
|__ [@UsernaBro: Bro you really don’t have eyes]
|__ [@SkullHy: You sound like a girl 💀💀💀💔💔💔]
|__ [@HowIsGenderHere: How did this turn into a gender issue??]
"Well, what do we do?" Luna asked, adjusting her glasses. She was hovering, but even she knew they couldn’t sleep suspended in mid-air.
Lucius floated downward, the dragon girl still draped across his shoulder and kicking him occasionally.
Once he got close enough to the blood ocean, the water... if one could call it that churned violently.
Sothing massive slithered under the surface.
A monster leapt from the crimson depths... a colossal, skinless snake with jagged fangs dripping blood.
It skidded across the surface, rushing at Lucius like a guided missile.
Lucius didn’t blink.
A razor-thin slice of space blasted outward, cleaving the monster in half vertically before it even got close. The creature’s bisected remains splashed back into the red waves.
The dragon girl trembled.
It wasn’t fear of the monster.
It was Lucius.
That fist he struck her with earlier, when she was still a dragon was burned into her mory.
That blow carried enough force to break mountains. Now, watching him kill sothing several tis her current size without effort...
’A dragon must have pride at every point in his life,’ her father always said. A dragon never kneels. A dragon never fears. A dragon never surrenders.
But this?
How could she keep pride against soone who could erase her existence by accident?
’...I’d rather submit,’ she admitted with a shiver. ’I love my life too much.’
Lucius ignored her internal crisis.
He stretched out his foot and tapped the water.
Instantly, the ocean shuddered.
The blood itself recoiled backward like it had been slapped by a divine hand.
Space warped around Lucius’s leg, forcing the crimson sea outward in a perfect circle several dozen ters wide.
The distortion widened until a dry clearing appeared... a circular arena large enough to set up a camp.
But beneath the receding water lay horrors.
Skeletons.
Disfigured corpses.
Broken armor.
Rotting weapons.
Lucius suppressed a gag. ’Nope... absolutely not.’
He flicked his hand, and all the corpses and bones disintegrated into dust that vaporized into the air.
He threw a piece of wood and tossed it onto the exposed ground.
The instant it touched the floor, it expanded... sucking moisture from the dead earth and sprouting thick planks outward like growing roots.
Within seconds, a solid wooden platform grew from the center outward, forming a wide campsite.
The wood extended further, building into a raised barrier around the platform’s circumference... high enough to protect them from sudden waves or monsters.
Lucius reinforced the edge of the barrier with spatial distortion, keeping the blood-water from rising again.
[@BloodyArchitect: WHAT DID I JUST WATCH??]
[@CraftKing42: THIS MAN BUILT A FLOATING ISLAND???]
[@WoodW: BRO SUMMONED A WHOLE HOSTEAD]
[@PocketDinsionKid: Space magic is busted I swear]
[@OMG: DRAGON GIRL IS TERRIFIED AND IM HERE FOR IT]
[@Over101: Okay nevermind he’s actually insane wtf]
|__ [@Lucius4Life: Lucius is our god, he has all the won, a big dick and he has our hearts and money]
|__ [@GlazedDonut: That’s not even enough glaze fr]
[@BloodSeaScholar: Is this even a DUNGEON anymore??]
[@CampBuilder: That place is BEAUTIFUL]
[@StormWatcher: Soone marry this man]
Lucius floated closer to the blood-water edge.
’Fuck... I’ve lost most of my mana.’ His face didn’t show it, but internally he was groaning. ’Of all tis to run low...’
He turned back toward the others still hovering awkwardly above the ocean.
"Co on down! Set camp!" he shouted.
...
Lucius eased himself down onto the wooden platform he had created, feeling the exhaustion press down on his shoulders like an invisible weight.
The mont he allowed the dragon girl to slip from his grasp, she fell beside him with a soft grunt, shifting awkwardly on the new surface.
Creating a structure of this size with a first-rank wood heart had been like trying to carve a mountain with a spoon, and while his second-rank space heart made it possible, the effort still drained him more than he wanted to admit.
’I’m tired,’ he thought, staring at the faint shimr of distorted space still lingering near the wooden barrier.
His breathing remained even, but a tremble in his hand betrayed how heavily the spell had taxed him.
The dragon girl watched him quietly.
"You’re running low on mana," she observed while pulling herself upright.
Around them, everyone else focused on setting up tents or securing supplies.
Luna had dragged Vanessa to the far corner of the camp to tell her about sothing, leaving Lucius alone with the dragon girl.
The drone had been deactivated aning that this was private.
"So what?" Lucius replied, leaning back with his elbows supporting him. He didn’t bother pretending he wasn’t depleted.
She could probably sll it; dragons sensed mana like sharks sensed blood.
"Let help you," she said, shifting closer. "I have a lot of mana to waste, and it regenerates faster than yours. But if I help you, you’ll help with sothing as well."
Lucius gave her a sideways glance tinged with amusent.
"Yeah right. You can’t even maintain your dragon form."
Her cheeks puffed slightly in indignation. "I can. I’m just not used to shifting repeatedly yet. If I were an experienced dragon, I would have wiped the ground with you."
He snorted quietly, rubbing his forehead.
"Sure you would’ve." Even so, she had looked like a terrifying Charizard in her dragon form before he knocked her out of it.
Lucius closed his eyes for a mont, then sighed through his nose. "What do you want to help you with?"
She scooted slightly closer, folding her hands in her lap.
"My kind... dragons... we can learn things about other races through lip contact with them." Her eyes lifted to his, they were full of sincerity. "I haven’t learned anything about humans yet. Your customs. Your social habits. Your behaviors. Everything confuses , and I want to understand."
She took a small breath before continuing. "So I want to initiate lip-on-lip contact. I’m unsure if it is considered taboo among humans, which is why I chose to ask first."
Lucius straightened slightly, studying her expression. She didn’t look embarrassed nor did she look coy.
She looked genuinely curious, like a scholar asking permission to consult a rare book.
The innocence made the request sohow both more ridiculous and more compelling.
"You’re free," he said simply, because refusing wasn’t even on the table. She was a beautiful dragon girl... who would want to miss out on that?
She nodded once with an earnestness that would have been adorable if she weren’t technically a creature capable of leveling cities.
She shifted onto her knees and leaned over him with careful movents, bracing her hands lightly on the wooden floor beside his hips.
Her closeness let him see the subtle outline of her features, the way her hair... still tinted with red scales at the ends frad her face.
Her eyes, bright and molten gold, remained focused on his lips.
"Is this the correct position?" she asked softly.
"Perfect," Lucius answered.
The dragon girl lowered her head slowly.
When her lips touched his, the connection was soft and deliberate rather than impulsive.
She didn’t press hard or move with practiced skill; she simply held her lips against his as though waiting for sothing to happen... and it did.
A surge of magic glowed between them.
The dragon girl’s fingers tensed on the wooden floor as her eyes fluttered closed. Her body leaned slightly closer as her mind filled with visions and impressions not her own.
Human knowledge rushed through her senses: how humans navigated emotions, how they interacted, how they ford bonds, how they saw beauty, how they greeted one another, how they expressed affection, what intimacy ant, what it didn’t an, and everything in between.
She absorbed it all... fragnts of humanity rging with her innate draconic instincts.
Lucius felt the mana return to him in gentle waves.
For a mont, the world around them seed distant and all he could hear were mumbles from the people setting the tents, he couldn’t hear their words.
When she finally broke the kiss, she pulled away slowly, blinking several tis as if adjusting to a new world.
She lifted trembling fingers to her lips, tracing them with a mixture of confusion and newfound insight.
"Hey," she whispered.
"Yeah?" Lucius replied.
"You just took my first kiss, dummy."
Reviews
All reviews (0)