Chapter 54: Will Breaker
—Roar!!!!
From a corner deeper in the cave, three massive Rock Drakes emerged while the team pushed forward through the narrowing passage, their eyes tracking immediately to the group cutting down the smaller drakes ahead of them.
The hostility was instant.
They spread apart from each other and lowered their frames, bodies coiling back into the posture of something about to close distance fast.
White Ghost caught it before anyone else did.
He raised his hand and his summon materialized without a sound, a Smoke Wolf that filled the available space of the cave in seconds, its body dissolving outward into a thick grey barrier that pressed into every corner and removed visibility entirely.
The drakes lost their line.
In the next moment, three beams of white light cut through the smoke from three separate angles as three summoners activated White Transit simultaneously, the spell carrying each of them through the obscured space and bringing their blades across the drakes before the creatures had reoriented.
These weren’t ordinary tier 7 beasts.
Each of the three Rock Drakes carried the strength of a hundred lower creatures, their dragon bloodlines compressing that output into frames that hit harder and absorbed more than anything else at their tier. A random summoner of equivalent rank had no reasonable expectation of handling one cleanly.
"Hold one."
Hela’s voice came sharp and immediate, her scythe already in her hand, her light-based summon hovering into position beside her.
"I’ll take the two."
"Hm."
Ethan nodded and turned to Ella beside him.
Hela and Ella were opposites in combat despite sharing every other visible quality between them. Where Hela pressed forward and cut, Ella held. Defense type, capable of pinning creatures with a mass and output that would have overwhelmed most summoners at her tier. That was exactly what the moment required.
Ethan summoned Vlad.
He pushed the command through immediately and Vlad transformed, the shift moving through his frame in a single fluid motion before he launched forward at the Rock Drake, closing the distance with the speed that consistently caught everything it encountered unprepared.
Ella summoned a rhinoceros beast and drove it in alongside, the two summons hitting the drake from opposing angles and compressing its available responses.
That wasn’t the full plan.
Ethan summoned Morgan.
She appeared beside him and he gave the command without waiting.
Dragon Dive.
After the drake had absorbed two consecutive hits from both summons, Morgan invaded its mind. The beast’s body convulsed immediately, its movements losing their coordination as the intrusion took hold, a sound tearing from it that had nothing to do with pain from the physical fight still pressing against its body from both sides.
Ethan had learned things about Dragon Dive across the failed attempts that the ability’s description hadn’t communicated at first reading.
It wasn’t simply about bending a beast’s will.
The bloodline mattered, but the mind was the more critical variable. Dragons gained sentience at certain points in their development, and that sentience required a foundation. A weak mind meant a dragon without the potential to carry what the bloodline was supposed to produce. It meant an evolutionary dead end wearing the right exterior.
Morgan had no patience for that.
A beast that failed the mind evaluation didn’t get released and left to recover. She would drive it to brain death before she withdrew, and she had done exactly that across every hybrid they had encountered on the roads outside the town.
[Lesser Dragon subspecies detected.....]
[Evaluating mind strain capacity.... Success]
[Beast core integrity.... Success]
[Bloodline purity.... failed]
The drake convulsed and went still.
Ethan watched it settle onto the cave floor and nodded once, the excitement moving through him quietly rather than loudly.
These Rock Drakes were good.
The mind held. The core held. The bloodline was the only thing falling short, and bloodline purity was a fixed variable. It couldn’t be trained into a creature or developed over time. Either it was there or it wasn’t.
But two out of three criteria passing consistently meant they were close to the right source.
"Let’s join Hela."
He turned toward the far end of the cave where the other fight was still running.
Hela nodded without looking back at him.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,
"Fuck!!"
Her scythe came down with the full weight of her frustration behind it, the blade curving through the arc and connecting with the Rock Drake’s neck from behind, the force of it driving through scale and bone and dropping the creature’s body to the cave floor in a single motion.
The other two arrived at the edge of the cleared space and looked at the corpse.
Their expressions said enough.
"What?!!"
Hela turned on them, her voice carrying the particular edge of someone who had just finished something difficult and had no interest in being evaluated for how long it took.
Killing a dragon-type creature alone was not a simple undertaking. Their look was unnecessary and she had no patience for it right now.
But she understood the plan.
"The other one is still alive."
She pointed toward the far side of the cave, where her serpent was locked in a sustained grip around the last remaining Rock Drake, its massive coils working to hold the creature’s body in place while the beast thrashed against the restraint with everything it had.
Ethan looked at the struggling drake and felt something sharpen behind his eyes.
He activated White Transit and came out beside the beast in the next instant, loading shock rounds and opening fire into its flank before it had registered his arrival.
—Roar!!!
The drake screamed, the sound filling the cave and pressing against the walls, but it didn’t go down. It pivoted instead, redirecting its hostility toward Ethan, the fight with the serpent temporarily secondary in its processing.
Ethan didn’t move back.
He leveled the crossbow at its face and fired.
Not a bolt.
A chain erupted from the mechanism and wrapped around the drake’s head in a single coiling motion, the links tightening before the beast could shake the contact loose.
He handed the crossbow to Vlad without looking away from the drake.
Vlad took it, planting his feet, and held the chain with both hands and the full weight of an S-rank summon bearing down against the pull of the creature on the other end. Hela’s serpent pressed inward from the opposite side, its coils finding new purchase and tightening.
Between the two of them they held it.
The drake fought the entire way, its output not dropping, its resistance not breaking, the sound of its effort rolling through the cave in sustained waves.
Long enough.
Dragon Dive.
Morgan entered its mind and the beast’s body locked, the convulsions moving through it from the inside while the physical restraint held it in place from the outside.
[Lesser Dragon subspecies detected.....]
[Evaluating mind strain capacity.... Success]
[Beast core integrity.... Success]
[Bloodline purity.... Success]
[Will breaking initiated]
[Congratulations, you have bound a Lesser Dragon]
[1/15 Lesser Dragons bound]
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