The Milf's Dragon-Chapter 93. A Dragon and Devil’s Dance

Azmireth moved the moment the last word left her mouth.

She didn’t disappear as one could mistake she did, instead she moved through the hall’s space in a way that defied tracking.

Owen’s Mana Sense caught nothing. But His eyes caught her blur.

She was between him and Leah before he processed the initiation.

"Out!" Owen said.

The group read it instantly. Yuki pulled Leah toward the exit. Alfred’s tower shield came off his back. Odessa’s fingers moved in summoning patterns. The Ironmane warriors scattered to the perimeter.

Marak didn’t move. He watched with the expression of a man learning the ground beneath him was not what he’d been told it was.

Azmireth’s void-black eyes were on Owen.

"Just the two of us this time," she said. "No Aaron. No Paul. No proxy armies."

Her tail moved, independent, tracing circles in the air.

"I’ve had days to think about the dungeon field. About what went wrong. About what I should have done differently."

"And?"

"The hellfire wasn’t the problem. Your Magic Affinity was. I was giving you a weapon every time I hit you. So this time I’m going to use something you can’t copy."

She raised both hands.

The air between them changed—not hellfire, not Devil’s Aura, but a certain wrongness. A quality that moved like water finding seams in reality, pressing against them with inhuman patience.

His system fired three notifications as his Dragon’s eyes, Magic Affinity and mana sense scrutinized the scene unfolding before him.

[Skill Usage Detected—Classification: Void Erosion]

[This ability targets spatial integrity. Sovereignty of Space-Time may interact unpredictably.]

Owen took two steps back. His wings snapped to full extension inside the hall, its leading edges catching support pillars that cracked but held.

Azmireth walked through the void erosion unhurriedly, her feet finding solid ground inside the wrongness of displaced space. Her expression had dropped its social mask entirely, something older underneath, something that had been alive for centuries, looking at him with a look that said she had already decided how this ended.

"I was going to kill you quickly in the dungeon...." she said. "Vorthraxx’s orders were to bring you dead. But I find myself curious. You learned hellfire from a single exposure."

She stopped three meters from him. "I want to see how long it takes you to adapt to something with no fire component for your affinity to anchor to."

"Oh what spectacular interest, I am flattered" Owen said.

"Enough with the jest. I have done everything simple. Only novel things hold my attention."

The void erosion pressed closer, testing the boundary of his Sovereignty like tide against a seawall.

He activated Dragon’s Aura.

The pressure wave rolled outward. Against humans and beastfolk it hit the nervous system. Against Azmireth, it hit something else. Her steps checked...not stopped but interrupted, and her expression registered it like intently.

"That works differently on demons," she said. "We don’t have the same architecture of fear for dragons..."

"But it disrupted the erosion pattern for half a second..." Owen said.

"Clever."

"I’m going to keep doing it. Every time you generate a pattern, the aura disrupts the outer edges. Eventually I’ll understand the mechanism."

"Eventually....maybe..." she said, "but I’ll not let you."

She moved.

This time his Mana Sense processed it as absence rather than motion. She covered three meters before the Dragon’s Aura could fire again, her hands finding his shoulders, the void erosion coming with her—not projected now, contact-transmitted, pressing directly against his scales.

It was extraordinary how much it hurt.

His scales held their integrity, but the void erosion moved through the physical layer the way hellfire had, bypassing hardness by addressing something else. His mana dropped sharply. Ultra-Regeneration fired and failed. The regeneration was biological. This was not.

He grabbed her wrists.

She tried to pull free and found his grip was not something that released easily. He held both her wrists, void-black eyes inches from his golden ones, and felt the erosion pressing against his palms, working at the hold.

"You are significantly more dangerous than I had thought," he said, his voice strained but even.

"good" she said, almost pleased.

She detonated Devil’s Aura at point-blank range. A skill synonymous to Dragon’s aura but demonicly inclined.

Demonic pressure hit him like a physical wall—displacement, all-directional force, a shockwave that shattered his grip and drove him across the hall. He hit the far wall, scales absorbing the impact, and was on his feet in the next second.

Azmireth stood at the hall’s center, her hands at her sides, watching him.

His mana reserves read sixty percent. The fight had been running thirty seconds.

She was not taxed.

"The problem...." she said, "...is not that you’re weak. The problem is that you’re a juvenile. You’re growing faster than anything I’ve seen in centuries. But Vorthraxx has had a thousand years, and whatever grows from a thousand years of solitary power development in a sealed dimension—"

She paused.

"Actually, I don’t know what he is anymore," she said. "He was impressive before the sealing. What he is now—" Something moved in her void-black eyes. "...I serve him because he will win. Not because I lack the imagination to serve myself."

"And if he loses?" Owen said.

"Then I chose the wrong side," she said simply. "I’ve been doing this long enough to know that’s possible."

She raised her hands again.

The void erosion built larger, spreading across the hall’s floor in an enclosure pattern—surrounding him, walls of spatial wrongness on all sides.

His system fired one more notification.

[Sovereignty of the Dragon King has peaked in resistance]

[New skill created from repeated pressure: Draconic Resonance]

Owen had never seen This Sovereignty list a skill before, it had at most just pressured lower draconic beings and resist status ailments. He Had no idea another function existed, but after meeting Dominus and getting the Drak’thar dimension, he had resigned himself to accepting he knew close to nothing about the full function of his system.

He looked at Azmireth across the enclosure.

Then he activated the skill instinctively.

Every scale on his humanoid body blazed simultaneously, not light exactly, but something interpreted as light. A sound came with it, below hearing, felt in chest and floor and stone walls rather than perceived.

The void erosion stopped. Then retreated.

Azmireth’s expression changed completel to Pure shock.

"That’s—" she started.

"Marak..." Owen said, voice layered with resonance, deep in a way his vocal cords shouldn’t be producing. "...Get your people out. Now."

Movement behind him. Marak’s voice sharp in the lion-folk dialect.

Azmireth recovered. Her shock folded back into a professional composure.

"Draconic Resonance..." she said. "I didn’t think you’d have access to that yet."

"Neither did I."

"It hurts, doesn’t it?"

"Enormously..." he said.

She smiled, the wide smile reaching her void-black eyes. "Good," she said. "It would be boring if it didn’t."

She vanished again.

Owen stood in the blazing resonance for three more seconds waiting for her to appear again but she didn’t... He continued tracking his surrounding with mana sense but nothing happened... then he let the resonance go.

The silence that followed was heavy.

His mana reserves read twenty-two percent.

The hall was empty except for him. Marak had gotten his people out.

Owen stood in the empty hall breathing heavy and waiting for his hands to stop shaking from the pain of Activating Dragon’s resonance.