Chapter 533: Chapter 533- His Actions to Save His Grandma
The blade was singing too, the same note as the axe, and he was running toward the dragon with the full, unthinking, complete commitment of a boy who has not yet learned that he is small.
The dragon turned.
Its head. The full, massive, scaled head of it turning toward the boy running at it with a singing sword, its eyes — the vertical slit pupils, the molten gold of them — finding the child.
Edda moved.
The fastest she had ever moved. The axe left her hand — thrown, the spinning blade catching the moonlight and the firelight simultaneously — and it hit the dragon’s neck at the exact moment its head began to descend toward the boy.
The blade bit.
Not deep. Not enough. The dragon’s head snapped toward her — the distraction, the irritation, the full roar of a creature that has been annoyed by something small.
The fire came.
Edda stepped into it.
She stepped into the way that the dragon’s breath was directed at Jacob, and the fire took her — the full, white-hot, impossible cone of it hitting her square in the chest, her body lighting, her axe burning where it had fallen from the dragon’s neck, her silhouette visible for one moment inside the flame before it overwhelmed her.
Jacob screamed.
The sword in his hand. The singing blade. He ran through the fire that had been his grandmother and swung at the dragon’s descending head with everything a Twenty-year-old boy could produce.
The blade bit.
The eye. The dragon’s eye. The molten gold of it meeting the singing steel and the blade driving home with the particular force of a weapon that had been waiting for a worthy hand.
The dragon screamed.
Not roared. Screamed. The head whipping backward, the claw coming up, the full, convulsive death-throe of a creature that had not expected to be blinded by a child.
Jacob swung again.
The blade caught the throat. The scales parted. The fire in the dragon’s own belly met the air through the opened throat and the creature convulsed — once, twice, the massive body falling backward through the burning houses, the ground shaking with the impact.
Silence.
Not complete. The fire still burning. The distant screams of villagers still running. But the dragon’s silence. The absence of the roar.
Jacob stood.
Twenty years old. His grandmother’s burning outline visible in the grass where she had fallen. The sword in his hand dripping dragon blood that hissed as it hit the heated ground.
He ran to her.
She was burning. Her chest. Her arms. Her face — half of it, the right side, the fire having taken what it could in the moment she had stood between him and it.
But her eyes were open.
Her left hand moved. The unburned one. Finding the clasp at her belt. Pulling something free.
The emblem.
The badge of the dragon slayer. The silver-and-iron seal of the capital’s highest order. Warm with her body heat, warm with the fire, pressed into his palm with the particular grip of a woman who does not have the strength to be gentle anymore.
"Head," she said. Her voice came out of the burned half of her face with the crackling quality of a throat that has breathed fire. "To the capital. Show them. This badge."
"Grandma—"
"Become," she said. "A knight."
She smiled.
The unburned half of her mouth. The particular smile of a woman who has done exactly what she intended to do and does not regret the cost.
She died.
The hand on his went slack. The eyes stayed open. The fire consumed the rest of her in the time it took him to understand that she was not going to close her eyes.
The memory ended.
Jacob was twenty-five.
He had the badge. He had been the knight. He had served the princess Lybia in the capital. He had lived the life his grandmother had sent him toward, and he had died in it — a battle, a blade, a darkness — and had woken again in the village with his Twenty-year-old body and the full, complete, absolute knowledge of everything that had happened and everything that would happen.
He was a regressor.
He had come back. He had lived the years again. He had grown to nineteen again. He had watched his grandmother — alive this time, not burned, not dead — and had decided that this time, he would save her. He would not let her die. He would not let her step into the fire.
He was among the few who knew there was a world beyond this where he could become the hero.
He had trained. He had fought. He had prepared for the dragon that would come in the summer of his twenty-fifth year.
Unbeknownst to Jacob, the dragon had come.
But not the dragon from the memory.
A different dragon. A worse dragon. A dragon that had not burned the village but had taken it — claimed it, marked it, changed the women in it into something that Jacob’s past-life memories had no category for.
And now.
Now, standing at the edge of a waterfall pool at night, with his past-life memories of his grandmother dying in fire and his present-life reality of his grandmother kneeling in the water with twelve inches of dragon cock in her throat—
The memories collided.
"WHAT," he said, "WHY I DON’T REMEMBER ANYTHING LIKE THIS!?"
The voice came out wrong.
Not his voice. The voice from the memory — the Twenty-year-old voice, the broken voice, the voice of a boy watching his grandmother be destroyed. It came out of his twenty-five-year-old throat with the exact same register, the exact same break.
SHLRCH—
"Gkh~!! Mmngh~!!"
Edda pulled back.
She pulled back with the desperate, convulsive force of a woman who has heard her grandson’s voice and has decided that nothing currently in her throat is as important as responding to that voice — her head snapping back, the braid unwinding from her neck, the cock pulling out of her throat with the wet, obscene, continuous sound of something being rapidly vacated.
"Jacob—" Her voice came out hoarse. Destroyed. The throat that had just been used for twenty minutes producing a sound that was barely recognizable as language. "Jacob— go— hah— go back— do not— hah— look—"
Jacob looked at her.
He looked at her face.
The red where the braid had choked. The white where the tears had run. The swollen lips. The running nose. The wet chin. The marks on her neck. The complete, total, absolute ruin of the woman who had died in fire in his last life and was currently dying in a different kind of fire in this one.
He looked at Raven.
He looked at the cock — twelve inches, glistening, crimson, the green veins standing out, the head dark and flushed and pointing at the moonlight above the water.
He looked at his grandmother’s tits — bare, marked with the sole-print from earlier, resting on the water surface where she knelt.
He looked at the two women on the rock shelf.
He looked at the five women behind him.
"WHAT," he screamed, "ARE YOU DOING TO HER?!"
He ran.
Not thought. Not decision. The pure, complete, unmediated reaction of a body that has watched its grandmother die once and has absolutely, categorically, without any negotiation whatsoever decided that it will not watch it happen again in any form.
He took three steps.
