I opened my eyes to a tall crimson silhouette sitting in front of me.
Vesperra hadn't moved. She was still sitting in the exact same position — four claws arranged neatly, back straight, watching me with those focused crimson pupils.
The tentacle lay between us.
I'd eaten four-fifths of it before falling asleep. The remaining meter of pale flesh sat on the rock, glistening with dark fluid.
*She waited.*
The entire time I was sleeping, she just... sat here. Guarding me? Watching me? Making sure I didn't roll into the river and drown?
"Your turn," I said, pushing the remaining tentacle toward her with my claw.
Vesperra lowered her head. One glance at the meat, and she picked it up with her claw, hooking it into her jaws. She swallowed it in two bites — skin and all. Not a single scrap wasted.
I watched her eat. Then I looked at the dark fluid staining her jaws, the gouges in her forelimb scales, the torn wing membrane.
She'd fought something to bring this back. Something big enough that a single tentacle was a meter thick.
And she'd done it alone.
*Strong. Absurdly, unreasonably strong.*
If I was going to survive whatever was waiting in that dark water, I needed her on my side. More than that — I needed her to be *stronger.*
"We start hunting Kelpfang now," I said, pushing myself to my feet. My legs were steadier. The magic was still thin, but enough for Sense Vines. Enough for the plan.
Vesperra rose in one fluid motion. "The channel mouth?"
"You guard it. Nobody gets past you."
She didn't argue. Didn't even nod. Just walked to the water's edge and launched herself in.
*Classic Vesperra. Less talk, more doing.*
A cold crimson gaze caught mine from the far end of the bank. Ferra. She was watching me from her corner — still bleeding, still wrapped in her own wounded pride. Her eyes held nothing warm. Just a flat, calculating stare that said: *I haven't forgotten.*
*Good. Remember all you want. It won't change anything.*
Honestly? She was kind of fun. The glare, the pride, the refusal to back down even after getting wrapped up like a holiday present. Most of the hatchlings had rolled over the second I pinned her. Not Ferra. She'd fought every vine, every thorn, every inch of the way. Even now, bleeding and humiliated, she was already planning her rematch.
*Respect.*
I turned to the rest of the hatchlings. Fourteen pairs of eyes stared back at me — wary, annoyed, still sore about the magic core deal.
"No extra words," I said. "This hunt is ambush-style. Get in the water, dig a hole, bury yourselves. When I attack, you attack. That's it."
Silence.
Not a single hatchling spoke. But the looks said everything: *We do all the work, and you take all the magic cores.*
I ignored the stares. Silence meant agreement. In my experience, that was the only kind of agreement that mattered in a team setting.
I dove in first.
The pit had cleared after hours of settling — water almost transparent again, the earlier blood and sediment washed away by the steady underground current. The fish and shrimp were long gone — hunted or scattered. The pit was empty, clean, and ready for its second act.
*Arc 2's fish farm, repurposed as a kill box. That's called asset repurposing.*
That clarity didn't last.
Fourteen hatchlings hit the water behind me, each one finding a spot on the pit floor and digging. Claws scraped mud. Bodies settled into shallow depressions. Within minutes, the water turned brown again — perfectly murky, perfectly opaque.
I took position in the center. The deepest part.
A thought, and a green spell circle unfolded before my snout.
This time I wasn't modifying the spell. I was summoning. Raw, unmodified Sense Vines. As many as I could push out.
Green shoots erupted from the mud. Dozens. Then hundreds. Each one grew fast — thin stem, curling leaf, and at the tip, a small green eyeball that blinked open with dull curiosity.
The entire pit floor became a forest of Sense Vines. They swayed in the current like underwater grass, hundreds of green eyes staring in every direction.
My magic dropped again. Not empty this time — just low. Maybe ten percent left.
But it was enough.
I connected to two vines. Just two. One aimed at the channel mouth, one aimed at the open water beyond.
The rest were bait.
Through the channel-mouth vine, I saw Vesperra. She'd dug herself into the left wall of the channel, creating a hollow just big enough for her body. Her crimson eyes glowed in the dark mud.
Ready. She didn't need instructions. She didn't need a plan. She just needed a target.
I checked the other vine — the one aimed at the open water beyond the pit. Through its green eyeball, the underground river stretched into darkness. Empty. For now.
Two views. That was all I needed. One for the bait. One for the gate.
I closed my eyes and settled into the mud, letting the silt drift over my scales until I was just another bump on the pit floor.
Through the other vine, I saw them.
Kelpfang.
A school of them had gathered beyond the channel mouth — at least twenty, maybe thirty. Each one a minimum of three meters long, needle-teeth glinting, bodies cutting through the current with predatory ease.
They were circling. Hesitant.
Something in the water ahead of them smelled wrong. Mud and dragon-scales and something they couldn't identify. Every instinct they had said *danger.* Their lateral lines twitched. Their jaws opened and closed, tasting the current.
But behind them — behind the thorn vine net that I'd dissolved hours ago — the Sense Vine eyeballs were glowing. Hundreds of tiny green lights, pulsing with concentrated life force. A feast of energy, just sitting there, asking to be eaten.
Instinct versus caution. Hunger versus fear.
Hunger won. It always does.
The first Kelpfang went through fast — a darting crimson blur that shot through the channel mouth and into the pit. Then another. Then three more. Once the first one committed, the rest followed like a dam breaking.
Vesperra didn't move. She let them pass. Her hollow in the wall was perfectly positioned — the Kelpfang streamed right past her nose, close enough that she could have snapped one up without leaving her hiding spot. But she didn't. She wasn't here for the hunt. She was the gate. And gates don't eat the traffic.
My dragon heart started beating faster.
*Thump. Thump. Thump.*
The Kelpfang pouring into the pit weren't just prey anymore. They were *mine.* Every one of them. Every magic core buried in their skulls.
The greed hit me like a physical wave. My scales prickled. My jaws tightened. Every instinct I had was screaming: *Take it. Take all of it.*
I pushed the feeling down. Not yet.
More Kelpfang poured in. Twenty. Twenty-five. The channel mouth was a steady stream of crimson bodies.
Then the last of them went through. A small one — barely three meters — trailing behind the rest like it had been debating the decision.
I waited three heartbeats.
Then I attacked.
My claws kicked off the bottom. My jaws opened and closed around the nearest Kelpfang's head. One crunch. Half the skull gone.
The water exploded into chaos.
Every buried hatchling struck at once. Claws snapped. Jaws crushed. The clear water turned red in seconds — a blooming cloud of blood and torn flesh.
My dragon heart was hammering now. The hunting instinct — deep, primal, *ancient* — had fully awakened. Every scale on my body was alive with it. The taste of blood in the water, the vibration of struggling prey, the frantic darting of fish that didn't know which way was up.
*More. More. More.*
I locked onto the nearest target — a five-meter Kelpfang that didn't flee. Instead, it turned toward me, jaws wide, needle-teeth flashing.
In these waters, Kelpfang were the predators. They'd never been prey before. They didn't know how to run.
The fight was short. Its jaws clamped down on my foreleg — teeth scraping scale — and my tail whipped around to slam it against the pit floor. Once. Twice. It went limp.
Another Kelpfang lunged from the red haze — this one smaller, faster. It snapped at my tail. I twisted, caught it mid-turn, and drove it snout-first into the mud. It thrashed. I held on. My jaws closed harder. Something cracked.
The water around me was thick with blood and torn flesh. Bits of Kelpfang drifted past like crimson confetti.
And the smell — *god,* the smell. Copper and salt and something raw and primal that made my dragon heart hammer against my ribs.
*Thump. Thump. THUMP.*
Every beat sent a pulse of heat through my channels. The hunting instinct wasn't just awake — it was *roaring.* My claws flexed involuntarily. My pupils had contracted to needles. Every fiber of my body was screaming the same word:
*MORE.*
Blood spread everywhere. The entire pit was a red haze.
Dead Kelpfang began floating to the surface. One. Then five. Then so many that the water's surface was carpeted with crimson bodies.
The remaining Kelpfang finally figured out that something was very wrong and tried to flee. They turned for the channel mouth.
Vesperra was waiting.
A Kelpfang lunged at her — all teeth and desperation. She didn't dodge. She didn't need to. One claw. One swipe. The Kelpfang's head exploded like a ripe fruit.
Blood cloud. White bone fragments. The body floated past her, belly-up.
Nothing got past Vesperra.
Not a single Kelpfang escaped the pit.
I surfaced first, breaking the water with a gasp and a spray of red droplets.
The sight that greeted me was beautiful.
Kelpfang bodies covered the water's surface like a crimson raft. Dozens of them. Maybe more. Each one fat with muscle, each one carrying a magic core in its skull.
*My* magic cores.
I climbed onto the bank and shook the blood from my scales. Then I started carrying.
One Kelpfang in my jaws. Two more clutched in my claws. I dropped them on the bank and went back for more.
The hatchlings followed — silently, efficiently, carrying their share of the catch up from the water. Nobody needed to be told. Nobody argued. The blood in the water had woken something in all of us.
Within minutes, a mountain of Kelpfang bodies was piled on the bank.
I stood on the bank, water streaming off my scales, and looked at the pile.
It was *massive.* Thirty-plus Kelpfang, each one three to five meters long, piled high enough that the bottom ones were barely visible. Blood pooled beneath the pile, seeping into the cracks in the stone.
A proper haul. The kind of catch that would have been unimaginable when we were hunting translucent shrimp and meter-long fish.
*This* is what happens when you scale operations.
Then came distribution.
The hatchlings looked at the pile. Then they looked at me. Then they looked at Vesperra, who was already tearing into her share with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd earned it.
Nobody argued about portions. Not after that hunt. The blood was still under our claws, the taste of Kelpfang flesh still sharp in our mouths. Whatever resentment they'd felt about the magic core deal had been drowned in the red water.
This was fair. This was *dragon-fair.* You hunt, you eat. You fight, you keep what you kill. And the one who planned it all got the parts nobody else wanted — the small, hard, glowing stones buried in each skull.
I wasn't listening to the distribution discussion. I'd already found what I was looking for.
Buried in the skull of each Kelpfang — a small, round, faintly glowing stone. The magic core.
I pulled the first one free. It was warm. Roughly the size of a marble, with a deep blue-green luster that pulsed faintly in my claws.
I put it in my mouth and swallowed.
Warmth bloomed in my chest. A surge of magic — thin but real — flowing through my channels like the first sip of water after a long drought.
*Yes.*
I pulled the second one free. Swallowed.
The third. The fourth.
By the tenth, the warmth had become a steady burn. My scales felt tighter. My claws felt sharper. Every core was a shot of pure growth, straight into my bloodline.
I couldn't stop.
The hatchlings were dividing the meat by now — Vesperra directing the splits with quiet authority — but I was past paying attention. Core after core disappeared down my throat.
By the twentieth, my vision had gone slightly blurry. Not from exhaustion. From *saturation.* Every channel in my body was humming.
By the thirtieth, I was grinning.
A stupid, dopey, completely involuntary grin. My jaws were stretched wide around another core, my eyes half-lidded, my tail twitching in slow, satisfied beats.
I was sitting on a pile of Kelpfang carcasses, covered in blood, cradling a pile of magic cores between my forelegs like a dragon-shaped miser with a treasure hoard.
The hatchlings stared at me.
I could feel their eyes. Fourteen pairs, each one watching me swallow another core. Each one doing the math: *He gets all the cores. We get meat.*
I didn't care.
The cores were warm. My bloodline was singing. Every scale on my body felt like it was vibrating at a frequency just above normal. The greed wasn't even a choice anymore — it was *instinct.* Deep, ancient, dragon-shaped. Every core I swallowed made the next one feel more necessary. Like breathing. Like eating. Like the only thing that mattered.
*More.*
I reached for another one.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, a small, rational voice pointed out that this was exactly why dragons went to war with each other. The greed never stopped. It just got worse.
I ignored the voice.
Another core. Another surge of warmth. My scales felt tighter, denser. My claws itched with growth.
*Forty-two.*
Something tugged at my tail.
I looked down. Munch. She'd crept up while I was in the core haze and was now gnawing on a strip of tentacle skin I'd shed during the feast. The pale, leathery strip dangled from her jaws, and she was shaking her head violently, trying to tear off a piece.
The skin was too tough for her teeth. She knew that. I knew that. But she was trying anyway.
I picked up the other end of the strip and gave it a little tug.
She growled. A tiny, ridiculous growl. Her whole body went rigid, claws scrabbling at the stone, and she *pulled.*
I let her have it. She tumbled backward, rolled twice, and came up with the strip draped over her face like a pale green scarf.
*"Mrah~!"*
She sneezed. The tentacle skin slid off her snout and landed on the ground. She stared at it for a moment, then carefully, deliberately, placed one paw on top of it.
*Mine.*
*Yeah, yeah. Keep the scraps.*
I lost count after that.