[Ding! NEW MISSION GENERATED]

[MISSION: DRAGON’S HONOR]

[Description: The Prince of Earth and Original Angel Progenitor is looking for trouble and has publicly humiliated your women. Defend your women’s honor. Consequences be damned.]

[Objective: Make Marcus Heavenchild humiliate himself — without physical contact — and assert your dominance.]

[Rewards: 20,000 EXP. Dominance Aura upgraded to Dragon Dominance — classification: DxD Element.]

Phei looked at the system notification. Amethyst eyes unmoving across its blue text for one heartbeat and then another.

The silence around the Empyrean Dining Hall still holding, Marcus’s an incest orgy served on good china still settled into the marble like a stain that would not, if left, lift.

Then he swiped the notification away with a mental flick.

’You’re wrong, system. It won’t just end at that. No one humiliates my women and walks out of my breakfast with only a public humiliation of their own.’

Yet in the abyss of his thoughts, where draconic laughter rumbled like thunder over the graves of fallen empires, Phei allowed a sliver of shadow-kissed mirth to curl unseen at the corner of his mouth.

’Humiliate himself without physical contact?’ the thought coiled forth, dark as the space between dying stars and twice as biting in its sardonic grace.

’How delightful... I shall make his soul kiss the dirt of its own making while his body remains pristine — a spectacle so exquisitely humiliating that even the void might chuckle at the irony. Let the fool broadcast his own unraveling; the cosmos adores a good tragedy when the villain writes the script himself.’

He unfolded his arms from across his chest, coffee cup down, finally, with the quiet definite clink of porcelain meeting porcelain.

And turned—slowly, deliberately—to face Marcus Heavenchild across the length of the table.

"That’s enough."

The words descended not as sound alone but as sovereign decrees carved from the marrow of impending cataclysm, each syllable wrapped in fancy restraint yet pregnant with the promise of storms that could drown kingdoms.

His voice was not raised. Not commanding in the shouted sense, low like weather was low before a storm.

And yet every ear in the Empyrean Dining Hall heard it. The staff at the sideboard heard it. The two groups of chefs in the small private kitchen heard it. The four people at the Heavenchild table across the Hall heard it.

The dozens pairs of eyes that had been discreetly watching from adjoining tables heard it, and so did the cluster of patrons near the lift who had been pretending to wait for a table and had in fact been recording every word of Marcus’s monologue on phones held at their hips.

The low of it carried because the Dominance Aura was no longer sheathed and settled across the Hall in a faint sovereign weight that made conversation at the peripheral tables cease mid-word.

Men who did not know why they had fallen silent fell silent and why their shoulders had loosened found their shoulders loose. A waiter who had been carrying a tray of pastries two tables away set the tray down because his hands, for a reason he could not articulate, were no longer fully under his command.

Somewhere to Phei’s left, at the Heavenchild table — in a dark navy suit, Marcus’s father — shivered and then, noticing that he had shivered, composed himself with careful speed — pre-verbal understanding that he had just been reminded of his station.

Phei, at the head of his own table, did not register the aura he had released.

"Master. The phones. Every phone in this hall is recording. Several tables over have been recording Marcus from the moment he began speaking. The Heavenchild table’s maid—" her attention flicked briefly to a woman in white standing behind Marcus’s father’s chair, pretending to be attending to a water pitcher, "—has been livestreaming to at least two platforms. She is snickering. The Heavenchilds are not merely here to humiliate you at your breakfast.

"They intended that every word of Marcus’s monologue reach the public feeds before your televised interview on next day. Two birds, one stone — public humiliation plus a pre-emptive weapon for the interview press cycle."

Phei did not visibly acknowledge it, his attention did not shift toward the Heavenchild table or other people who’d been recording the movements and actions of the Earth Prince.

"They want to broadcast as Marcus humiliate me? Then let it be a broadcast."

Marcus was already laughing with a short sharp patrician laugh — pitched, like everything else Marcus had done this morning, for audio pickup.

"Or what, Phei?" He spread his hands. "Or what? Am I poking where it stings? What can a family-fucking whore of a boy like you actually do to a Heaven—"

Phei stood up.

And under his breath — so softly that only Eira and Melissa and perhaps Maddie caught the shape of the words, so softly — intoned:

"Cosmic Dragon Face."

The invocation did not merely whisper into being; it detonated as a cataclysmic eruption from Phei as Cosmic Dragon Face manifested within Marcus’s soul as a titanic, eldritch visage—

The force crashed inward with the inexorable weight of a collapsing universe, flooding every crevice of Marcus’s essence in a deluge of Phei’s supremacy so vast it made the air itself shimmer and distant chandeliers sway in instinctive terror.

Marcus stopped mid-syllable. Stopped — the rest of Heavenchild dying in his throat as his jaw locked open and the light drained out of his face in one immediate bleach. The cool confidence cracked along his mouth and his pale grey eyes went wide.

His shoulders jerked once, hard, involuntarily, as though something inside his soul had been grabbed by the scruff, his whole body began to shiver a full-body tremor of a soul registering that something cosmic had just arrived inside it and recognised it and was now looking directly at it from the inside.

Phei took the first step forward.

And folded the full Dominance Aura around Marcus.

Not the sheathed sovereign weight that had fallen across the Hall moments before. The unveiled aura at full Lv.10 field at a single target — yet its magnitude erupted as a tidal cataclysm, a colossal ocean of draconic dominion pressing from every direction at once, bypassing outer defences to crush directly against Marcus.

The power output was titanic, immense enough to warp the marble beneath their feet and send invisible ripples through the very fabric of the hall, as though reality itself bowed before the awakening of an ancient wyrm.

It was no mere pressure; it was the judgment of forgotten epochs made manifest.

Marcus staggered and made full two backward steps.

Between the Cosmic Dragon Face settling into his soul realm and the Dominance Aura crushing down on his body at the same instant, Marcus’s composed frame was being asked to hold two simultaneous cosmic pressures his body had no defence against.

His face went red before everyone, a thin trickle of blood appeared at his left nostril. A second trickle, lighter, came from his left ear.

Phei took a second step. Marcus retreated three more from the first two.

A third. Marcus hit the edge of the long sideboard behind him — hard, the back of his head connecting audibly with the polished wood, his feet skidding on the marble — and his knees folded as he went down.

He sat straight down on the marble floor, his three-piece suit bunching absurdly around his thighs, his back against the sideboard, his pale eyes fixed on Phei with frozen horror—

Maddie scoffed, her voice carried cleanly across the silent Hall. "Pathetic."

Somewhere on one of the peripheral tables someone inhaled audibly.

Phones kept recording.

Phei had not said a word since the low that’s enough.

He continued walking toward Marcus’s collapsed form. His stride unhurried, amethyst eyes steady.

The Dominance Aura moved with him like a tide, its leading edge arriving at Marcus a half-second before Phei himself did, compounding each step.

Behold the mighty scion.

The Empyrean Dining Hall had gone fully silent now.

And in that profound, fancy hush — thick with the aftertaste of unleashed might — the air itself seemed to remember the dragon’s passing, a silent vow that arrogance, once challenged in the shadow of true power, would never again rise unchallenged.

The staff had frozen, the Heavenchild father who had risen half out of his chair and then — whether by some self-preservation instinct or by the secondary bleed of Phei’s aura reaching the Heavenchild table — sat back down.

The Dominance Aura’s aftershock rolled across the Heavenchild table like a blacked-out SUV cruising through a velvet-roped VIP section — silent, heavy, and unmistakably final. It pressed down with the weight of a skyscraper deciding whose name stays on the deed.

The man felt it in his bones and chose the wiser real estate: his chair.

The twins beside him stared at Marcus on the floor with wide identical eyes.

The snickering maid had stopped snickering; her phone was still held up, still recording, but her face had achieved a specific expression — a woman who was beginning to suspect that her employer’s plan had a flaw.

Marcus tried to stand.

Could not.

Instead the colossal pressure — still humming at apocalyptic levels from the earlier cataclysm — pinned him like a cornered hustler under a dozen red-dot sights.

His muscles screamed against the invisible tonnage of draconic will, every sinew begging for mercy while the marble beneath him stayed cold and unimpressed.

Instead, he did the only thing his body could do — he crawled backwards... away as far as he could from Phei.

***

"Stop."