In the distance, at the entrance of the mine, the makeshift barricade erected by the Kobolds shattered into flying debris with a loud bang that was enough to drown out the dragon’s roar.
“Hehehe… finally opened it!”
“Those pointy-eared bitches must be hiding inside!”
“The boss said, catch them alive this time! I’m going to be the first one to take the Queen!”
Accompanied by lewd and arrogant shouts, fifteen vanguards of the Black Dog Mercenary Group, clad in pitch-black armor and reeking of stench and blood, charged into the dust-filled cave entrance.
Their eyes gleamed with lewd desire as they brandished their battle-axes, flails, and scimitars, their minds already filled with fantasies of brutally abusing the Dark Elves.
They were members of the Black Dog Mercenary Group who had found the Dark Elf Queen’s hiding place by following a mage’s magic, a scout’s detection, and various strokes of coincidental luck.
These sounds coming from outside the mine were as clear as a thunderclap to Balthazar’s sensitive draconic senses.
He had just finished.
A refreshed Balthazar looked down at Chloe, who was limp on the straw pile, trembling all over from the rough union they had just shared, not yet recovered from the daze of her orgasm.
Her wheat-colored abdomen displayed an unnatural, rounded curve—proof that his offspring was taking root.
“Take care of… Chloe, Olga.”
Balthazar’s hoarse voice echoed in the cave.
He extended his giant claw, and though the movement wasn’t gentle, he shoved the unconscious knight toward the still-stunned Dark Elf Queen with great force.
Olga instinctively caught Chloe’s warm, sweat-drenched body; when her fingertips touched the heat filled with the dragon’s essence, her pupils shrank sharply.
She looked up at Balthazar, her amber eyes flashing with an extremely complex light.
There was a trembling at this primitive conquest, as well as unease about the coming battle.
“Don’t die here… Dragon.”
Olga, whose senses were equally sharp, also detected the human footsteps approaching from the distance; she took a deep breath, forcing herself to maintain her composure as a Queen.
“Otherwise, I will curse you to the lowest level of hell.”
Balthazar did not respond; he turned, his dark iron-colored body creating a dull gust of wind as he left the room the Kobolds had prepared for him.
In the moment he pulled away, he completed the transition from “mating partner” to “predator.”
Because his size had surged during his slumber, his hard dragon scales scraped against the mine walls as he passed through the narrow corridor, emitting a teeth-grinding sound of friction.
Consequently, the members of the Black Dog Mercenary Group stopped in their tracks after only a few steps.
Because what appeared before them was not the trembling Queen, nor the tenacious but exhausted female knight.
But a scene of hell that was enough to make their sanity plummet and their worldview collapse.
Inside the dim and narrow mine tunnel, a pitch-black giant monster radiating intense heat and pressure was looking down at them from above.
Its hideous head profile in the shadows almost touched the ceiling of the tunnel, and it puffed white smoke smelling of sulfur from its nostrils.
It looked exactly like a devil that had jumped out of hell.
“ROAR!”
With the dragon’s roar, Balthazar’s hind leg muscles tensed, his sharp claws gouging deep trenches into the rocky ground; his massive draconic body, like a runaway heavy tank, instantly covered the short distance of ten meters, carrying a gust of stench and heat.
The mercenary who was walking the fastest and charging at the very front had no time to react at all.
“CRACK!”
That was the crisp sound of metal armor being crushed along with human bones.
Balthazar’s gaping maw, filled with fangs, bit down on the mercenary’s upper body with precision and brutality, as if crushing a piece of shortbread.
The sharp dragon fangs easily pierced through the seemingly decent plate armor, embedding deep into the flesh.
“Aah… ugh?!”
The mercenary’s scream lasted only half a second before it was cut off.
As his dragon neck jerked violently, a large amount of blood exploded like a fountain from the twisted metal gaps, splattering onto the stunned faces of his nearby companions.
The salty, warm red liquid not only stained Balthazar’s lower jaw red but also awakened the long-dormant, primitive bloodthirsty instinct of the dragon within him.
“Ptui.”
Balthazar spat out the mangled corpse as if it were a walnut shell, throwing it away with a “bang” against the cave wall, where it turned into a blur of gore.
“Don’t… don’t come over! Monster! What kind of monster is this!”
“Formation! Scatter! Aaaaaah!”
The vanguards of the Black Dog Mercenary Group finally woke up from their terror, but the narrow mine tunnel limited their space to dodge.
Balthazar did not stop.
Using the momentum from throwing the corpse, his thick, powerful dragon tail, covered in hard scales, swept out with a whistling wind.
“Bang! Bang! Crack!”
The dragon tail swept past like a battering ram; two mercenaries who tried to raise their shields to block were sent flying along with their shields, their bones snapping audibly in mid-air before they rolled into the dark corner like broken sacks.
The hard dragon scales left behind fragments of armor and strips of flesh; the blood-stained iron scales reflected the terrified faces of the mercenaries.
“Is this… your… so-called hunt?”
Balthazar took heavy steps, each one making the ground tremble slightly. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
His reptilian pupils gazed coldly at these trembling thugs before him, with pieces of the previous unlucky victim’s internal organs still hanging from the corner of his mouth.
“I just… gave myself a name…”
“This means… rebirth.”
“…And I do indeed need some redder sacrifices… to celebrate my rebirth.”
Balthazar glanced out of the corner of his eye at the Main God Space character status bar that had appeared out of thin air beside him, which now displayed a new skill.
[[True Name Release]: When declaring one’s true name, all attributes are slightly increased for a short time, and the pressure effect is strengthened.]
Subsequently, Balthazar turned his gaze back to the trembling mercenaries.
“This shall become… a… law.”
“You are fortunate… to be the first… to experience it.”
“Be proud of it…”
He did not use dragon breath, nor did he use magic—whether he knew how or not was irrelevant—he simply relied on the overwhelming physical strength of the dragon race to unleash a one-sided massacre in this narrow space.
As his claws swung, severed limbs flew; where his draconic body rammed, flesh and blood splattered.
Broken organs lay scattered on the rocky ground, still steaming; the thick smell of blood instantly overwhelmed the original musty and sulfurous odor in the mine.
Those mercenaries who, a second ago, were shouting about wanting to taste the Dark Elves, had now turned into unrecognizable piles of rotting meat.
“Mon… Monster… It’s a dragon!!!”
Only now did the few surviving mercenaries finally see the true form of the giant monster in the darkness.
Upon realizing that the opponent was a dragon, they stumbled backward, their weapons trembling uncontrollably.
A scarred captain standing at the very front of the crowd, whose eyes had originally been fierce, now held only unfocused terror.
He watched helplessly as his most capable subordinates had their sternums shattered by that single tail swipe; the ease with which it was done, like slaughtering chickens, completely shattered his will to fight.
In their eyes, the dark iron-colored behemoth lurking in the shadows was simply the embodiment of a nightmare.
Balthazar did not rush to pursue; instead, he lowered his head, his maw still hanging with scraps of meat, and brought it close to a corpse on the ground that had been snapped in two by his dragon claw.
“Crack—creak—”
A teeth-grinding sound of metal friction rang out.
Under everyone’s horrified gaze, the behemoth ignored the armor and bit directly onto the half-plate steel armor worn by the corpse.
The sharp dragon fangs pierced through the steel heart guard as if it were tofu; as his jaws closed, the hard metal was forcibly twisted and torn, emitting a screeching wail as it mixed with human flesh and bone.
It was eating iron.
“Gulp.”
As his throat rolled, the entire piece of twisted steel plate, along with the blood on it, was swallowed into his belly.
“Inferior… metal.”
Mixed with complaints about the quality of the armor, the chewing sound produced by such terrifying biting force—chewing metal as if it were brittle bone—became the final straw that crushed the mercenaries’ nerves.
“Run… run away! This is not something we can deal with at all!”
“A dragon! A high-level monster! Someone go call the mage unit!”
With a blood-curdling scream, the surviving mercenaries didn’t even bother to pick up their dropped weapons, scrambling and crawling as they fled toward the outside of the mine tunnel like frightened wild dogs.
Those mercenaries, shedding their armor and crying for their parents, could never outrun a Ferro-Dragon in a straight tunnel.
“THUD—!!!”
Heavy footsteps crushed the rock, and the dark iron-colored giant shadow refracted through the mine tunnel like black lightning.
Every leap was accompanied by a gust of despair-inducing stench.
“No! Don’t! Aaaaaah!!!”
An archer running at the back didn’t even have time to draw his bow before he was pressed against the rock wall by the giant dragon claw, instantly crushed like a fly, splattering blood in a radial pattern across the wall.
After just a few minutes, the mine tunnel returned to a deathly silence.
Except for Balthazar’s heavy breathing, like a bellows, and the “drip” of blood hitting the stones, there were no survivors.
All of this was witnessed by Chloe, who was in the darkness where the humans could not see.
Chloe had already awakened; after hearing the sounds of battle, her long-ingrained habits as a knight compelled her to stand up, ignoring her injuries and her Queen’s dissuasion, and walk out of the room with her weapon.
At this moment, she was in a very disheveled state; her beige long hair was messily plastered against her cheeks, which were covered in sweat and dust, and her naked body was covered in red marks and scratches.
From her angle, she could only see the silhouette of that massive back; the tail covered in dark iron-colored scales was flicking unconsciously, scraping sparks whenever it swept across the ground.
The sound of chewing steel echoed in the empty mine, each one feeling like a strike against her heart.
This was the master of the essence within her.
This absolute brutality and power made Chloe feel a wave of dizziness.
Just a moment ago, on that pile of straw, her body had completely betrayed her will; in the face of the dragon’s absolute masculine power, she was no longer a sword-wielding knight, but a female beast wallowing in bliss.
She now instinctively clamped her legs together, where the turbid bodily fluids belonging to this behemoth were constantly seeping out—proof that she had been thoroughly marked.
Against this backdrop of a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, as a knight, she should have felt disgust and anger, but what welled up from the depths of her body was a more twisted, more fanatical sense of security.
As long as this power existed… restoring the kingdom… perhaps it really was no longer just a delusion.
The behemoth heard her ragged breathing and slowly turned its head.
Those reptilian pupils, burning with dark red flames, locked onto her in the dimness that neither the humans nor the Kobolds could see.
At this gaze, Chloe shuddered all over.
Instinct caused her to hurriedly lower her head, ignoring the pain of her knees being scraped by the gravel.
She wanted to press her forehead firmly against the dust-covered ground, displaying the most humble posture of submission to this tyrant who had just finished feasting on a “Feast of Flesh and Steel.”
But as soon as her knees bent, Chloe stopped her movement—she was Olga’s Royal Guard, she could not, and must not, pledge allegiance to anyone else, not even a dragon…
“I am the Queen’s knight, the Queen’s, the Queen’s…”
As Chloe thought this, she squeezed her legs together, the dragon’s essence writhing within her.
Balthazar did not care about Chloe’s inner conflict; he was simply inspecting his results.
With an elegant and cruel gait, he walked slowly back from the depths of the mine tunnel.
Along the way lay mutilated corpses: some cut in half at the waist, some crushed flat, others decapitated…
Starting with that scar-faced captain who he had rammed and then trampled to death, followed by the grunts who had pursued him.
One, two, three…
fourteen.
A full fourteen vanguard members of the Black Dog Mercenary Group, with not a single survivor.
Balthazar shook the viscous blood from his claws, his dark red slit pupils indifferent as he scanned the carnage that looked like an asura field, blowing a plume of hot white smoke from his nostrils.
He was reasonably satisfied with the number of sacrifices for his first birthday.
“A very good… birthday meal.”
“I like it very much…”
Afterward, he returned to the clearing at the mine entrance and glanced at his status bar.
Name: Balthazar
Gender: Male (Juvenile)
Personality: Politically sensitive, rational and calm
Status: Battle just ended, you are enjoying the peace surrounded by blood.
Body Size: 3 meters long, 1 meter at the shoulder.
HP: 220 / 220
Stamina: 80 / 80 (Enhancing)
Mana: 120 / 120 (Enhancing)
Strength: 15 (Can easily pull down ten humans in a tug-of-war)
Agility: 5 (You are not clumsy, but your body size and structure limit your agility)
Endurance: 18 (Can fight high-intensity battles for a day and night without rest)
Intelligence: 5 (Although your throat structure prevents you from speaking fluently, you are smarter than the average human)
Perception: 7 (Keen senses and intuition of the dragon race)
Bloodline: Dragon Race (Ferro-Dragon) (S-Rank Potential, Juvenile Stage)
Traits: [ Steel Dragon Scales + 2 ] Provides extremely high physical damage reduction (equivalent to steel plate armor) and resistance to mid-low tier Fire/Wood/Water/Ice/Earth/Light/Dark magic.
[ Devour and Grow ] Can digest high-hardness metals and magical items, converting them into attributes or restoring status.
[ Dragon Might Lv2 (Enhanced) ] Enhanced with True Name Release, area-of-effect fear aura.
Causes [ Tremble ] and [ Stun ] to lower-ranked creatures, and has absolute suppression over dependents.
[ Mineral Vein Perception ] Can sense mineral veins several kilometers away.
[ True Name Release ] When declaring your true name, all attributes slightly increase for a short time, gaining the acknowledgment of the world laws for your status as an overlord.
[ Kuroinu World Language LV1 ] As a dragon, you cannot speak fluently, but you can read and write the language of this world.
Possessions: [ Treasures in Stomach ] Undigested gold coins, gems (City of Darkness reserves).
[ Mithril Ore ] 5 pieces of low-purity ore (from Kobold tribute).
Exchange Points: 0
“Very good…”
Balthazar expressed his satisfaction with this.