Paris.
Adrian sat hunched over his desk, a thick, ancient book propped open in front of him, its pages covered in symbols that looked, to his own eyes, like little more than scattered scratches and loops.
Mr. Clown's Fooling Aura let him read it as English anyway, even if half the meaning still slipped through his fingers like water. Better than nothing.
He'd already checked in on Lily twice tonight through Mr. Clown's connections, confirmed she was fine, safe, asleep in her own bed. The uneasy weight sitting in his chest hadn't budged an inch regardless.
I still don't know why I feel like this, he thought, frowning down at the page without really seeing it. I should probably check on school stuff too. Just in case.
He'd shelved the feeling for now, unable to chase it any further than he already had, and buried himself in the book instead. Right now, that meant the section on legendary beasts.
Specifically, the one belonging to his own pathway.
"Hey, Mr. Clown," Adrian said aloud, mostly out of habit, before remembering the room was empty. He sighed.
Mr. Clown had wandered off nearly an hour ago now, promising he'd "be back before you even notice," which, Adrian had learned quickly, meant absolutely nothing coming from him.
He's never actually left me alone this long before, Adrian thought, glancing toward the door for the third time in ten minutes. Where did he even go?
He wasn't scared, exactly. Max was apparently patrolling somewhere nearby, and Eric, or worse, some actual Hypernova, could show up in an instant if anything went wrong. That thought alone still felt strange to sit with.
Why exactly am I getting this much protection, anyway? He wondered, not for the first time. I'm not even that important. Am I?
He shook the thought off and turned back to the book, running back through what he'd just read.
Every pathway, apparently, birthed its own legendary beast, each one carrying a title Adrian's current rank was still too low to actually decipher, though the book still handed him plenty of raw information regardless.
His pathway's beast was called Draco.
A massive, immortal black dragon, capable of scaling itself up to the size of an entire planet if it wanted to.
That's genuinely terrifying, Adrian thought, staring at the page a moment longer.
Draco had emerged sometime during the latter half of the Dystopian Era, scales black as pitch, eyes some shifting shade of red or green depending on the account. Every description agreed on one thing: pure, overwhelming pride, and a habit of leaving devastation behind wherever it decided to go.
In raw battle strength, the book claimed it could hold its own evenly against a True Supernova.
That last line, Adrian read twice.
Most beasts, even ones matching a human Aura user's rank exactly, rarely stood a real chance against one, purely because most beasts operated on instinct alone, with no real thought behind their actions.
Legendary beasts broke that rule entirely. They thought. They spoke. Some even used Meditation Aura, built proper techniques, carried fully formed inner realms just like any human Aura user would.
The door creaked open.
"Ta-daaaa!" Mr. Clown announced, spinning through the doorway with both arms flung wide, one gloved hand holding what appeared to be an entire ice cream cone balanced on top of his hat. "Did you miss me? Be honest. I'll know if you lie."
Adrian stared at him. "Where were you?"
"Buying ice cream," Mr. Clown said, as though this were self-evidently the correct priority for a bodyguard mid-shift. He plucked the cone off his hat and took an enormous, theatrical bite. "Also stealing ice cream. From several different vendors. It's more fun that way."
"You're supposed to be protecting me."
"I am protecting you! From the crushing tragedy of never having tried the pistachio flavor from the shop three blocks over." He flopped dramatically into the chair across from Adrian's desk, kicking both feet up onto the desk itself. "You're welcome, by the way. Now, what dusty nonsense are you reading?"
"Legendary beasts. Draco. The Apocalypse Pathway one."
"Ah, the big scaly narcissist. Lovely fellow. Terrifying. Would absolutely eat both of us without noticing." Mr. Clown licked a drip of melting ice cream off his wrist with alarming enthusiasm. "What's got that little furrow in your brow, then? You've got the exact face of someone who just found a plot hole in his own life story."
Adrian hesitated. "It says here it can reincarnate. That it's died before and just... comes back somewhere else in the world. Untraceable."
"Correct."
"So who actually managed to kill something like that in the first place?"
Mr. Clown's grin widened, slow and delighted, ice cream forgotten entirely in his hand.
"Ohhh, now that," he said, "is a much better question than anything in that dusty old book."
He leaned forward, resting his painted chin on both gloved hands, eyes glittering with something that looked suspiciously close to genuine excitement.
"The first Meditation Master himself. Killed it clean, once, a very, very long time ago." He paused for effect, letting the silence stretch just long enough to be annoying. "And here's the truly interesting part nobody bothers writing down in books like that one."
Adrian leaned in despite himself. "What part?"
Mr. Clown's smile sharpened, delighted and wicked all at once.
"Nobody's ever actually found where it reincarnated to. Not once. In all these centuries."
He straightened back up, tossing the rest of his ice cream cone carelessly over one shoulder, where it vanished into thin air before it ever hit the floor.
"Which means, little destroyer," he added cheerfully, "somewhere out there, right now, today, an enormous, prideful, world-ending dragon is currently walking around with absolutely no idea what it actually is."
...
Lumenia
ROOOAAARRR!!!!
The sound tore through the sky before anyone could brace for it, and the entire mansion shook down to its foundations, glasses rattling off shelves, lanterns swinging violently on their chains.
In the long hallway just off the main hall, where the lower-ranking guests, escorts, and household staff had gathered while the wedding party occupied the garden, chaos erupted instantly.
A young Alberich cousin, one of Kurtain's grandsons barely out of his teens, dropped to one knee, both hands slamming against the marble floor to keep himself upright. "What is that?!"
Beside him, a girl in Vitalis family colors stumbled sideways into a pillar, gripping it with white knuckles. "I can't— my legs won't— "
Further down the hall, one of the household's senior stewards, a grizzled man who'd served three generations of Blackbells without so much as flinching, felt his own knees buckle for the first time in decades. He caught himself against a wall, breath coming ragged.
"That pressure alone," he muttered, sweat beading along his hairline, "and it's not even inside the barrier yet."
Sylvana, cradling Alisa's care bag over one shoulder while Chris supported an unsteady Kurtain family attendant beside her, felt the Aura wash over her like a physical wave, pressing down against her chest hard enough to steal her breath for a full second.
"Everyone stay calm," she called out, forcing steadiness into her own voice despite the way her pulse hammered in her ears. "Whatever this is, panicking helps no one!"
Nobody listened. Several younger guests had already collapsed outright, unconscious on the polished floor, their families scrambling to check on them amid the tremors still rattling through the walls.
A pair of twin cousins from the Emetra family clung to each other near a window, both pale as sheets, watching debris rain down from a distant spire visible through the glass.
"Is Lumenia under attack?" one of them whispered.
"It has to be," the other answered, voice shaking. "Nothing normal could do this."
Down near the entrance, an elderly attendant from the Sua family's retinue crossed himself instinctively, murmuring something under his breath, eyes fixed skyward even though the ceiling blocked any actual view.
"I've served four generations," he said quietly to no one in particular, "and I have never felt an Aura like this. Not once."
Malefic straightened himself with visible effort, jaw tight, forcing his voice into something commanding despite the tremor still running through his own hands. "Guards! Get the unawakened guests moved to the lower shelter halls, now! Junior staff, assist the fainted; don't just stand there gawking!"
The hallway erupted into motion at that, servants and lower-ranked attendants scrambling in every direction, some carrying fainted guests bodily between them, others simply running toward the nearest exit out of pure instinct.
Sylvana pressed a hand briefly to her own chest, steadying her breathing, before turning sharply toward one of the household guards rushing past. "Get word to Lady Alia immediately. She needs to know the second this settles, whatever it is."
The guard nodded fast and sprinted off without another word.
Through a nearby window, past the chaos of the hallway, past the trembling floor and the screaming echoing faintly from somewhere out in the city itself, the sky remained visible in jagged fragments, and even from here, even without proper sight beyond the veil, everyone in that hallway could feel it.
Something massive was pressing against the very edge of Lumenia's barrier.
And whatever it was, it hadn't even fully arrived yet.
Far beyond the barrier's edge, in the dead quiet of open space, three figures who had been drifting silently, unnoticed, watching Lumenia's wedding festivities from a safe, careful distance, felt the pressure roll outward like a physical tide.
One of them, a lean, hooded man who had spent the better part of a decade evading detection from every major body in the region, went completely still.
"That's not possible," he breathed.
His companion, a woman wrapped in shifting violet light, didn't bother responding. She simply turned and fled, Meditation Aura flaring violently around her as she vanished from that stretch of space entirely, gone before the third figure had even finished processing what he was looking at.
The third one didn't wait to think at all. He was already gone.
Across the surface of Lumenia itself, in the outer districts far from the mansion, ordinary citizens who carried no Aura at all stumbled out of their homes, drawn by the shaking ground and the deep, resonant roar still echoing overhead. A crowd gathered instinctively in a public square, necks craned skyward, watching a distant black shape claw its way visibly through the barrier's shimmering edge.
"What is that thing?" a young mother whispered, clutching her son tight against her hip.
"I don't know," an old man beside her answered, voice trembling. "I don't know, but look at the size of it, look at—"
He didn't finish the sentence. His knees buckled, and he collapsed straight to the pavement, unconscious before he even hit the ground.
He wasn't alone. Across the square, person after person crumpled where they stood, the sheer weight of the Aura bleeding outward from that distant black shape enough to overwhelm even those who couldn't consciously perceive it at all, some primal, animal part of their bodies simply refusing to keep functioning under that pressure.
The young mother staggered, vision swimming, and dropped to her knees, curling protectively around her son even as her own consciousness started slipping away from her.
The creature finally tore free of the barrier entirely.
It let out another roar, and this one hit differently than the last, closer now, sharper, rattling windows across the entire city hard enough to shatter several of them outright. Every remaining conscious person within earshot felt something ancient and terrified wake up deep inside their chest, an instinct with no name, screaming at them to run, to hide, to simply not exist in the same world as whatever had just arrived.
It moved.
The black dot on the horizon surged forward, closing the distance toward the white mansion at a speed that defied its own monstrous size, and as it closed in, its true shape finally resolved out of the haze.
Teeth like a row of daggers filled a mouth large enough to swallow a carriage whole. Two vast, scaled wings, black as pitch, beat once, twice, each stroke sending a visible shockwave rippling through the air around it. Its limbs ended in claws thick enough to tear through stone like paper, every inch of its body armored in overlapping layers of scale that gleamed, impossibly, like polished diamond despite their absolute blackness.
Its eyes held no pupils at all, only twin rhombus shapes of pure, burning red, fixed and unblinking.
It was the size of a hill. A moving, breathing hill, wreathed in a dense, roiling Aura of black particles visible only to those strong enough to perceive it, and wherever its body passed, the air itself seemed to buckle and fold, faint cracks spreading through the fabric of dimension itself in its wake.
This was Draco. The Bringer of Calamity.
Back inside the mansion, in the trembling hallway still full of fainted guests and scrambling staff, a young Vitalis cousin pressed both hands over her ears, sobbing openly. "It's coming here. It's actually coming HERE."
Malefix grabbed the nearest doorframe, forcing himself upright through sheer stubborn will, staring out through the window as the massive shape grew larger by the second. "Everyone still conscious, get the fainted further inside, now, MOVE—"
Nobody needed telling twice.
Outside, in the garden itself, Draco folded its wings in a sudden, violent motion and dropped from the sky in a near-vertical plunge, slamming down into the center of the ornamental garden with enough force to send a visible shockwave rippling outward, flattening flowerbeds and cratering the earth beneath its claws.
The assembled Hypernovas didn't hesitate. A coordinated wave of attacks erupted from a dozen different directions at once, blades of condensed Aura, streaking bursts of elemental force, dense clusters of raw destructive energy, all converging on the massive creature in a single, devastating volley.
Draco didn't even flinch.
Sasaki let out a light, almost bored snort and waved his left hand.
A pale blue Aura threaded with cyan and white particles bloomed outward from his palm, and where it touched the air, endless white slashes began carving themselves into existence, cutting through the space in overlapping arcs until they folded together into the unmistakable shape of a dragon, coiled and malicious, made entirely of blades of light. It surged upward from the ground the moment the Hypernovas' combined attack arrived, meeting every strike head-on, absorbing blast after blast of raw elemental force in bursts of shifting color that scattered across the garden like a swarm of dying fireflies.
By the time the assault ended, nearly forty percent of the construct had been torn apart.
It remained, still, gleaming, very much alive.
Sasaki waved his right hand almost lazily, and the slash-dragon dissolved back into nothing, as though it had cost him nothing at all to summon.
Every Hypernova who had launched an attack stood frozen, staring at the space where their combined firepower had simply been absorbed and discarded.
Why did he block us?
Was he protecting us? Or protecting it?
Before anyone could voice the question aloud, Draco landed.
BAM.
The impact shook the ground beneath every guest still standing, and the massive dragon lowered its head directly in front of Sasaki, close enough that its breath alone stirred the fabric of his suit, red rhombus eyes fixed unblinking on the young man standing his ground without flinching.
Killing intent rolled off its body in a suffocating wave, and every single person present below Supernova rank simply stopped functioning for a moment, bodies locking rigid, breath caught somewhere they couldn't reach.
A True Supernova.
The realization spread through the crowd like ice water. True Supernovas stood at the very apex of the known universe, moving through it however they pleased, answerable to nothing, feared by everything beneath them. No Supernova alive could dream of matching one directly. It simply wasn't a fight that existed on the same scale.
The tremors had already stopped by now. Dust still drifted lazily through the air, catching the last of the veil's golden light, the only thing in the entire garden still moving at all.
Nobody else dared to.
Draco stood at the center of it, enormous, motionless, watching.
No Aura bled visibly from its body now. None that could actually be seen.
That absence was somehow worse than the roar had been.
Several lower-ranked guests dropped to their knees without meaning to, legs simply giving out beneath them, chests heaving in short, useless gasps, as though invisible hands had wrapped around their throats and squeezed.
Even the Hypernovas said nothing. Not one of them moved to attack again. Not one of them spoke.
Someone has to do something, a Hypernova near the back thought desperately, sweat pouring down his temple. Where is Lord Alexander? Where is the Meditation Master? Surely they can feel this. Surely someone stronger is coming—
Nobody came.
Some deep, ancient part of every single person present, something far older than reason, screamed the same single word over and over.
Don't.
Sasaki, alone among all of them, remained entirely unbothered.
His smile only widened. He didn't bother glancing at the terrified crowd around him, didn't spare a single thought for the guards frozen mid-step or the guests collapsed against each other near the mansion's steps. His gaze stayed fixed upward, locked directly onto Draco's massive head, unblinking, utterly calm.
Is he insane? Someone whispered somewhere behind him, voice barely audible. Is he actually planning to fight it? Here? Now?
If they fight, another guest thought frantically, the entire mansion, the entire garden, all of us, we're finished; there's no surviving a battle at that level—
The stare-down stretched on, seconds crawling by like hours, Draco's crimson eyes boring down into Sasaki's calm blue ones without a single flicker of hesitation from either side.
Then, faintly at first, Draco's massive body began to tremble.
The trembling started small, barely noticeable at first, a faint tremor rippling through the muscles along Draco's massive jaw.
Then the corners of its mouth began to twitch.
Sasaki watched it happen without moving, his own composed expression holding steady even as Draco's jaw kept twitching harder, the tension between them stretching thinner by the second.
A grin broke across the dragon's face.
For one more heartbeat, silence held.
Then Draco threw its head back and laughed.
It was an enormous, booming sound, rolling out across the garden like a second earthquake entirely of its own making, and as the laughter poured out of it, the deep red of its eyes bled away entirely, replaced by a warm, easy green. Every trace of killing intent that had been suffocating the crowd only moments earlier simply vanished, gone as though it had never existed at all.
"HAHAHAHA! To think we actually fooled all of them, right up until now!" Draco managed between booming laughs, its massive body shaking with the force of it. "Sorry, Sasaki. Truly. I couldn't hold my composure for even one more second."
Sasaki broke a moment later, a low chuckle escaping him first, then building into full, unrestrained laughter, his shoulders shaking, one hand coming up to wipe at the corner of his eye.
Every single guest still conscious in that garden stared at him in open, uncomprehending shock.
Nobody present, not one guest, not one Hypernova, not even his own family, had ever once seen Sasaki laugh like this.
"It's fine, old friend," Sasaki finally managed, still grinning as his laughter settled. "I wasn't exactly expecting a masterclass in acting from you anyway." He spread both arms wide, gesturing toward the mansion behind him. "Welcome to my humble wedding. I've already arranged somewhere comfortable for you to rest."
He paused, tilting his head slightly, studying the sheer, absurd scale of the dragon looming over his own garden.
"Though," he added, a faint, teasing edge creeping into his voice, "I would appreciate it if you shrank down. Just a little. The good people of Lumenia aren't quite used to sharing their gardens with a Legendary beast."
Draco huffed out something that sounded suspiciously like a laugh and obliged, its massive frame folding and compressing rapidly until it had reached what was clearly, for it, the smallest form manageable.
It still stood roughly the height of a small mountain.
Sasaki finally turned back toward the crowd, a wide, genuine smile still lingering on his face, and bowed deeply.
"My apologies for the fright," he said, voice carrying easily across the stunned silence still hanging over the garden. "But now that the show's concluded, allow me to properly introduce you all to my dear friend. Draco."
"It's nice to meet you all," Draco rumbled pleasantly, curling its long tail loosely around Sasaki's shoulders and lowering its massive head in an approximation of a polite bow.
"...What the fuck is going on?" someone muttered from somewhere near the back of the crowd, voice thin with disbelief.
Nobody answered him. Nobody could.
Alia, several yards away, burst out laughing, loud and delighted, throwing a wickedly amused glance toward the assembled family heads before dropping straight down onto her hands and knees and crawling eagerly toward the dragon, eyes shining with childlike excitement.
Draco lowered its head carefully, closing its massive jaws around her with startling gentleness, and lifted her directly onto the flat crown of its skull, where she settled herself comfortably, grinning down at the still-frozen crowd below.
Every Supernova present wore some variation of the same strained, ugly expression, mouths working uselessly, no words managing to actually surface.
Of course, the thought settled into every single one of their minds, near-identical and equally unwelcome. Of course the Blackbell family gets a pet Legendary beast on top of everything else. It looks like they'll be ruling Lumenia for a good while longer.
Off to one side, Sasaki reached out through Meditation Aura, contacting the Dragonman Hypernova stationed among the household staff, quietly instructing him to personally oversee every one of Draco's needs for the duration of his stay.
The Dragonman's eyes went wide, his heart suddenly hammering hard against his ribs.
This, he thought, scarcely daring to believe his own luck, might just be the single greatest opportunity of my entire life.