POV Troublemaker:
The small group of people walked through a massive space of black stone, the only light coming out of the massive lava trenches following along the tall, glossy black marble walls.
Tall statues of dragons made of pure gold, towering high above their heads, stared at them with their large diamond eyes.
The armored steps accompanied them from all four sides, the capes of the monstrous infantry occasionally appearing in the black background of their armor, visible only due to the reflected orange light of magma and the red runes engraved on them.
‘The tournament ended, but they still summoned these with the highest scores.’ The leader and his nerdy friend with glasses, who passed together with him, walked amidst the small group of players.
‘Only two of us got here… if it weren’t for that annoying wyrm, more of us would get through.’
Finally, they reached a vast empty space filled with nothing but thick smoke.
Without warning, one of the guards yelled, making them slightly bounce out of in surprise, “Bow before the king!”
Everyone kneeled while the captain secretly suppressed his disdain and thought, ‘What a king? This is just a monster bullying weak into submission.’ He was glad for his enchanted items that masked his true emotions. Otherwise, there would be no way for him to survive meeting the dragon.
“Well, done. Even with the appearance of the cowards that dared to disturb my tournament, I will honor my word. You, who are now kneeling before me, will get the right to take one of the provinces in the outer kingdom for you to manage.”
‘We did it….’ Relief filled the troublemaker’s body as he knew he had successfully finished his quest.
Ding!
//
The faction mission was successfully cleared!
Rewards: 2 x instant level up; 500 Contribution points; You have infiltrated the enemy faction.
//
‘Maybe that whole incident wasn’t so bad. At least it distracted the dragon and all the officials from focusing on finding them while overlooking me.’
He has finally done it; he has infiltrated the enemy faction. He was now one of them. While he was far from the center of power, he could still do a lot with the small piece of land under his control.
POV Vesuvius:
The dragon threw one last glance at the players kneeling before him, and the next moment his mind sent a ripple through the space, and all of them vanished as if they had never even existed, their bodies and souls expelled from the dragon’s divine kingdom.
The next moment, a complex magic circle appeared in the dragon’s mind, his eyes scanning the letters in it one by one.
It was the simplest portal spell in his repertoire.
‘If I can’t get the space evolution, maybe I can at least get some of its features standalone.’
A second magic square appeared before his eyes. It was one of the spells he learned at first. It was the breath lens for concentrating his breath into a thin ray.
From the moment he read about it, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about it, ‘Maybe I can’t bend space just with my will to fire my breath in the ridiculous ways as with the evolution, but I can certainly shoot it through a short-range portal or teleportation spell.’
Vesuvius closed his eyes, the calming feeling of the gold beneath him and the absolute silence of his chamber allowing him to focus on the task before him.
He couldn’t just open a portal in his mouth, as that would lead to its own problems, ‘Problem with portals is that they are bidirectional. If someone strikes through it, their attack will hit me straight in my mouth, where I don’t have armor or my scales.’
His neurons flared to life as possible solutions passed through his mind. But there were none to easily implement, at least with his knowledge, and only a few ways to mitigate it.
A portal was like a bent, curved space directly connecting two distant points. At best, he could tilt the connection, with his breath simply rushing down the hill while the enemy attack would have to climb up, making it harder.
‘No, that is a bad solution. Cheap and unreliable….’𝑂𝑽𝐿xt.𝗇t
The worst was that he knew there were ways to fix it, like messing with mana frequencies and self-collapsing portals, allowing only mana on a specific frequency to pass through it or collapse.
‘Damn, all of those options are complex as hell. I would have to create a new lens that would change the mana frequency of my breath, and that will take a while.’ Mana frequencies and mana filters were something that he never got to study.
As for the teleportation, there was a problem with stability, as it was immensely hard to teleport pure energy without destabilizing and disrupting the teleportation spell.
And even if he could solve the problem, he knew it was much harder to teleport something like his breath attack than just teleporting something like a projectile.
Suddenly a light bulb lit up in his brain as he found a potentially easy solution, ‘I also have the breath glands in my tail. Opening a portal there would solve the problem of the two directions. And later, I can add the frequency changing part to make it better and more usable for my mouth.’
It was a cheap and ad-hoc solution, but it was fast to implement, and he could use it as a base to find a more permanent solution.
‘Now I have to only solve the stability issue. Luckily, I have an example of a spell designed to withstand huge firepower flowing through it right before me.’
The dragon turned his attention to the square lens circuit floating in his mind. He was going to use it as a base and form his first original and complex spell, the portal lens.
‘Maybe I can offload it on the overzealous wyrm? No, they are just getting into space magic. Currently, their insights on it are even worse than mine. It will take a while before they can help me with this.’
