Chapter 268
The ground bucked with a primeval roar, a primal scream of tortured earth that threw the Bahamut familia like rag dolls.
Michalis, Eleni, Dimitra, Nikolaos, Vasileios, Vasiliki, and Clair, all caught within the invisible ripple of an immense force, were sent sprawling.
A blinding flash of light, hot and bright enough to sear their eyelids shut, followed by an explosive sound that hammered their eardrums, had originated from the factory district, just a few blocks away.
Now, they lay scattered, a jumbled heap of groans and aching limbs.
The air, thick with the acrid scent of ozone and pulverized rock, clung to their throats, making each breath a struggle.
The very earth seemed to be swallowing them whole.
Beneath their prone forms, the intricate network of the city’s sewer system had violently ruptured, its pipes and tunnels collapsing inward.
Dust, fine as flour and smelling of damp earth and decay, billowed up, coating them, filling their mouths, finding its way into every crevice.
Chunks of concrete, rebar, and splintered wood rained down, burying some of them deeper into the crumbling street.
The initial shock gradually receded, replaced by a dull ache that throbbed behind their eyes and throughout their bones.
Vasileios, the first to snap back to reality, pushed himself up onto his elbows, coughing against the suffocating dust.
His head spun, but his mind, focused instantly on the state of his other familia members.
“Is everyone ok?” he rasped, his voice raw.
A muffled groan came from Michalis, who lay half-submerged in a shallow crater of debris, one arm flung over his face.
“Ugh, my head,” he complained, his voice thick with pain and irritation.
Eleni immediately sat up, spitting vigorously.
“Ptt, Pttt, so much dust in my mouth,” she gagged, wiping at her lips with the back of a grimy hand.
Her usually glossy hair was matted with grey particulate.
From an odd, contorted angle, a strained voice emerged.
“Uhm, a little help please.”
It was Dimitra, her lower body pinned precariously under a jagged slab of what used to be pavement, her face pale beneath a layer of grime.
She looked like a half-buried statue.
Nikolaos, still dazed, managed to push himself into a sitting position, shaking his head to clear the ringing in his ears.
He scanned the chaotic scene, his eyes wide with a mixture of confusion and growing alarm.
“I am good, but where is Clair and Vasiliki? I don’t see or hear them around.” his voice, was tinged with genuine worry.
Vasileios followed Nikolaos’s gaze, his brow furrowed.
“They probably got thrown somewhere else or didn’t fall like us,” he speculated, already trying to rationalize the absence, even as a knot of unease tightened in his stomach.
The force had been immense.
Anything was possible.
But then, a new sensation pierced through the lingering shock and pain.
Eleni frowned, her brow furrowing.
"Does anyone else feel like it’s incredibly hot? Like, oven-hot?" she asked.
Dimitra, from her precarious position, nodded as best she could.
"Now that you mentioned it, it is crazy hot. And it smells like… burnt metal and something acrid."
Michalis grumbled, still more focused on his discomfort.
"Can you girls do more digging and less talking? We’re not out of this dust cloud yet." his comment earned him a sharp, stinging smack on the back of his head from an unseen hand—presumably Eleni's.
Silence, thick and heavy soon descended upon the group, broken only by their strained breaths and the scraping sounds of their hands against rubble.
Nikolaos, his mind racing, broke the suffocating silence.
"So, is no one going to talk about the crazy explosion that got us buried here? That wasn’t your average explosion."
No one replied.
It wasn’t that they didn’t have ideas on what had happened.
On the contrary, their minds were screaming, but they all desperately wanted a distraction.
And what better distraction was there than shovelling piles of jagged rocks and dense earth around?
They dug with a frightening intensity, fuelled by a nascent, chilling fear.
They had all felt that familiar, overwhelming aura before the explosion.
It was raw power, unbound and primal.
It was definitely from their brother, Draco.
A strong, bitter sense of guilt plagued each and every one of their hearts.
Because when they had felt that wave of immense power, that preternatural surge that signalled something truly catastrophic, their first instinct – an instinct born of pure, terror – had been to run.
It was rather embarrassing, considering that they had all resolved themselves just a few minutes earlier to go save their brother Draco or die trying.
They should have been fearless.
How quickly had their resolve shattered when they had sensed an overwhelming, life-threatening power?
The shame of it burned hotter than the rising temperature around them.
They had nearly fled from their own brother, from the source of the danger, seeking only their own preservation.
The thought twisted their guts.
In silence, they quickly dug the rubble around themselves, their hands aching, nails tearing.
The dust was so thick it coated their lungs, making every breath a shallow, painful gasp.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Michalis’s head broke through the surface, followed by Nikolaos, Eleni, Vasileios, and the still-stuck Dimitra.
But what greeted them wasn’t the comforting, placid glow of the full moon they had left behind, nor the familiar, partially destroyed district.
Instead, the sky above the factory district was an apocalyptic canvas of placid, churning orange, radiating an immense heat that baked their skin.
A thick, choking smoke billowed upwards, twisting into malevolent tendrils that clawed at the heavens, blotting out any stars, any hint of the moon.
The air was heavy, metallic, and hot, tasting of soot and destruction.
The remnants of buildings around them were scorched, twisted husks, their skeletons silhouetted against the infernal glow.
Snapping away from their stunned state, the siblings quickly surveyed their surroundings. Dimitra, still half-buried but now able to see, gasped and pointed a shaky finger.
"Look!"
Her finger trembled towards a surreal sight.
Towering above a collapsed section of street, perched precariously on a shimmering platform of impossibly clear ice, stood Vasiliki and Clair.
It was rather hard to miss them, especially given the fiery backdrop.
Vasiliki, her face strained with concentration, had clearly conjured the ice with magic to prevent the entire area from collapsing further when the initial sewer system gave way.
Clair, stood steadfastly beside her, her frame rigid, eyes darting nervously around.
"Vasiliki, Clair, are you two alright?!" Eleni yelled, relief flooding her voice as she staggered forward, trying to run towards them.
"Sssshhhhh!" Clair immediately clapped a hand over Eleni’s mouth, her eyes wide with a silent warning.
Her expression was one of urgent, desperate quiet.
Nikolaos frowned, his momentary relief turning to confusion, then a prickling apprehension.
He frantically looked around, wondering why such extreme silence was suddenly necessary amidst the chaos and destruction.
But the answer quickly delivered itself, a horrifying, magnificent spectacle that commanded their full attention.
From the very heart of the smoke-covered sky at the center of the factory district, where the orange glow was most intense, a figure suddenly breached the roiling swirl of black and crimson. It wasn't a bird, nor any known monster of the dungeon.
It was something far more dangerous, far more terrifying.
Its form was reptilian, scaled, and powerful.
Obsidian-covered scales, each one seeming to absorb the light only to refract a deeper, molten glow from within, shimmered menacingly.
Vast, leathery wings, spanning an impossible width, beat the air with thunderous claps that, despite the distance, vibrated in their bones.
Its eyes, twin points of golden fire, raked over the devastation below, like a predator surveying its dominion.
It was a mini-dragon, no bigger than a small building, yet radiating an aura of immense, uncontrolled power.
And it was their brother, Draco.
The mini-dragon hovered ominously for a moment, a silhouette of destruction against the hellish sky, before slowly, majestically descending, dipping back into the swirling black smoke and disappearing out of sight, leaving only the sound of creaking metal and distant collapses in its wake.
A suffocating silence descended once more, far more pronounced than before.
Their previous shame and guilt morphed into something colder, more visceral: sheer terror.
"No way… is that…." Dimitra’s voice hitched, barely above a whisper, her eyes wide with disbelief and horror.
"Yes, it is," Clair nodded solemnly, her small face grim, the usual glint in her eyes replaced by seriousness.
Eleni, whose earlier relief had evaporated, now felt a fresh wave of despair wash over her.
Tears streamed down her dust-streaked cheeks, carving clean paths through the grime.
Her voice was choked, ragged.
"What do we do? How do we fix this?" she asked.
The question hung heavy in the air, a desperate plea for a solution to an impossible problem.
Nikolaos, Michalis, and Vasileios, however, were caught in a strange, terrible awe.
They weren't weeping like Eleni; instead, they just marvelled, their minds struggling to process the sheer scale of the destruction their brother had wrought, and the magnificent, terrifying form he had taken.
For a moment, their usual childish impulses surfaced.
"Do you think Draco-nii will let us ride him?" Michalis joked, a nervous attempt to lighten the mood, his voice a little too high-pitched.
"Bro, you just read my mind!" Nikolaos replied, playing along, though his eyes were still fixed on the churning smoke where Draco had vanished.
"Imagine the bragging rights! 'Yeah, my brother's a dragon, what about yours?'"
Vasileios, sighed, a heavy, world-weary sound.
Their casual reaction was completely out of place.
"Sigh, you guys. This isn’t the time to joke." his voice was firm, cutting through their nervous bravado.
"There are a lot of questions that need to be answered, and we need a solution, quick. For one, did Draco-nii kill any civilians or innocents in that form? Or Mors, for that matter? Are we the ones going to pay for the damages to the factory district? How will Orario react to having a ticking bomb within its walls? When will Draco-nii return back to normal? And so much more…"
He listed off the problems, each one a crushing weight, a reminder of the immense gravity of their situation.
The group once again fell silent, the earlier terror returning, now mixed with a deep sense of helplessness.
Vasileios had spoken the uncomfortable truth of the situation, making the horrifying reality concrete and depressing.
The problems were too big, too complex to grasp, especially for children like them, even if they were adventurers and part of a powerful familia.
Their childlike marvelling quickly faded, replaced by grim despair.
"Sigh, enough moping around." Vasiliki’s voice, calm and steady, cut through the suffocating silence like a sharp blade.
She slowly lowered her arms, her earlier concentration now visibly easing.
The shimmering ice platform beneath her and Clair began to crack and recede, melting into vapour.
"First of all, with you all making it back up safely, I don’t need to support the surrounding ground anymore," Vasiliki began, her tone surprisingly composed given the circumstances. Immediately, as she released her magic, the surrounding ground rumbled for a few seconds, a deep, unsettling growl.
Then, several precarious sections of scorched earth and rubble began to collapse further, swallowed by the newly exposed fissures of the ruined sewer system.
When the sewer had first collapsed, Vasiliki and Clair, being slightly ahead, had managed to avoid being pulled down into the depths.
Rather than joining the others in the potentially dangerous dig-out, Vasiliki had hastily conjured massive, crystalline structures of ice with her magic, using them as frozen buttresses to support various crumbling structures around the collapse.
Her quick thinking had prevented the entire area from caving in on her buried siblings.
She had needed to concentrate intensely to maintain the delicate magic consumption, so she had ordered Clair to guard her, trusting that Dimitra, the other vice-captain of their familia, would lead the others to safety.
It was a calculated risk, but one born of necessity and a deep understanding of her siblings' capabilities.
"Next, I will now explain what will happen. Feel free to pitch in if you have a better idea," she said, her gaze sweeping over their bewildered faces.
As she had been supporting the surrounding structures, her mind, remarkably, had been racing, considering all the problems Vasileios had just mentioned, and countless more.
She had racked her brain, pondering on various possibilities and solutions, filtering them through the lens of public perception and political fallout.
In the end, she had come to one inescapable conclusion: Draco’s transformation couldn’t be hidden.
The sheer scale of destruction, the infernal heat, the smoke, and the lingering magical residue would be impossible to conceal.
Furthermore, information that Draco and Mors, the fearsome champion of the evilus, were battling in the factory district was already known by the many survivors they had previously escorted out of the war zone.
Adding to that, Draco had already revealed his ability to partially transform parts of his body to that of a dragon during previous skirmishes, so it wasn’t a stretch for people to piece together that he could pull off a full transformation.
Since this couldn’t be hidden, then the next best thing was to change the narrative.
Draco had destroyed a large portion of the factory district, so it was unlikely that any evidence of survivors, or even just the exact circumstances of the battle, were left in the epicentre.
It was easy to spin that this level of destruction was necessary to take down the monstrous evilus champion Mors; it just needed to seem like Draco was in control of his transformation.
If it became widely known that it wasn’t controlled, that it was a wild, uncontrollable rampage, then that would bring another set of problems in itself.
People were always ready to blame anyone they deemed easy enough for their problems, it didn’t matter if it was true or not.
It was a bitter fact she had observed throughout the war with the evilus.
‘Most of this will likely only work on the general public and unimportant adventurers,’ Vasiliki thought, her sharp mind already anticipating the next layer of complexity.
‘The Loki familia’s brains and the gods will likely figure out the true series of events, so it’s best not to outright lie to them. We’ll offer a slightly modified, heroic truth for them, and a simplified, comforting one for the masses.’
"Anyway, before all that, we need a way to stop Draco-nii’s rampage, if anyone can," Nikolaos said, posing a completely new, urgent problem.
They had established the narrative, but a rampaging dragon-brother was still a problem.
"That's easy," Dimitra said, her voice sounding chipper now that she was free from the rubble and had caught her breath.
Everyone looked at her, surprised.
"How?" Nikolaos asked, puzzled.
Dimitra gave him a look that clearly communicated, 'Are you serious?'.
"Don’t we have an overpowered dragon as our goddess?"
Everyone’s eyes widened simultaneously, a wave of collective realization washing over them. They felt a bit foolish, a colossal amount of foolishness, for forgetting the most obvious solution: their own goddess, Bahamut.
It couldn’t be helped, perhaps.
Bahamut wasn’t an active participant in the war, observing passively from afar, and they hadn’t seen her for a while, busy with their own moral duties in the war.
But now, in this moment of impossible crisis, her existence was their literal saving grace.
"Alright then," Vasiliki said, her voice gaining a new edge of command, spurred by the surge of renewed hope in the group.
"The first order of business is to get someone to inform our goddess. Eleni, you are the fastest among us. You will go."
Eleni, despite her earlier tears, nodded decisively, her expression firm.
"On it! I’ll fly faster than light!"
"What should the rest of us do?" Michalis asked, feeling a surge of purpose now that a plan was forming.
Vasiliki’s eyes narrowed, scanning the distant, smoke-shrouded crater where Draco had disappeared.
"We will stop everyone and anyone from coming close to the factory district. For some reason, Draco-nii isn’t leaving this place. Maybe because his opponent, Mors, is still active. Or maybe because he doesn't want to leave the destruction he caused. Whatever the reason, we cannot have civilians, or even other adventurers, stumble into this. They would either be killed by Draco in his uncontrolled state, or realize the truth and panic, making our cover story impossible." She paused, her gaze hardening.
"We need to cordon off this area, contain the situation until Bahamut-sama arrives. Protect the people from Draco, and protect Draco from the people."
A new, resolute energy coursed through them.
The shame and fear were still present, but now they were overshadowed by a burning determination.
They were the Bahamut familia.
They had left their brother once, but they would not abandon him now.
With a direction, the siblings sprung into action, their individual skills and strengths falling into place like well-oiled gears.
Eleni, already a blur, dashed away towards the Hephaestus familia forge, her mission critical. The others fanned out, their grim faces set, ready to face whatever lay ahead.
They needed to protect their world from Draco, and in equal measure, protect Draco from the world.
This was their burden, their duty, and their resolve.
A/N: Feel free to read ahead on pat3on and donate.