Chapter 73 — What Is Worth Protecting
"Well, well, well."
The smile remained intact. The purple-pink eyes swept over Dagon with that specific curiosity of something still cataloging the world around it and finding everything equally fascinating.
"Looks like more fun has arrived."
Dagon didn't move immediately.
He stayed where he had landed, sword at his side, staring at Steve's face with the particular attention of someone searching for the person beneath what was currently on top.
"Snap out of it, kid," he said. "That's not you."
The smile didn't disappear. But the head tilted slightly — the gesture of someone who had heard something both wrong and predictable.
"Cut that talk about winning with words," the voice with the wrong harmonic said. "The power of words isn't going to work here. Only fists and weapons."
Pause.
"So do me a favor and shut up. Come at me."
He exploded toward Dagon.
Dagon gritted his teeth.
"After all," he muttered, sword rising, "I'd rather settle things with fists instead of words."
He burst forward.
Not in full human form — but halfway there, that specific state the Nexus had built over three years of pushing past limits. Golden scales covered his forearms and shoulders, skin hardening into plates that reflected the underground valley's torches in warm fragments of light. His wings emerged partially from his back — not fully spread, just enough to give vertical thrust to his leaps. His eyes became reptilian.
"Before thinking about anyone else, my own interests come first."
The sword met Steve's giant scythe at the midpoint between them.
The clash wasn't sound. It was pressure — a wave of force that expanded in all directions at once, sweeping the underground valley with wind that didn't belong in an enclosed space. All the torches bent in the same direction. Stone fragments lifted from the ground and flew. The freed prisoners still on the battlefield fell or crouched on instinct.
Keara raised an arm to shield her face.
When the wind died down enough to see, she found Yelra standing beside her, silver hair still moving with the last gusts, emerald eyes fixed on the point of impact where Dagon and Steve continued, blade against blade, neither willing to yield.
"Yelra," Keara said.
The other turned her head.
"Is there anything you can do? To bring Steve back?"
Yelra remained silent for a moment. Not from hesitation — from evaluation. Her eyes moved to Steve, to Dagon's hands on the sword, to the distance between where she was and where she needed to be.
"If I can touch his head," she said finally, "I can use the power of my people. I can expel what's inside."
Then she added, almost as a minor correction:
"And my name isn't Nessira. It's Yelra. Nessira is my race."
The smile was small but present.
"Understood," Keara said. She turned toward the battlefield. Took a deep breath. "DAGON!"
Her voice cut across the valley.
Dagon heard it — he was hearing everything, even while Steve pushed the scythe against the sword with force that made the scales on his forearms creak. The part of his mind not fully occupied with physics registered the name.
"Try to knock him out!" Keara pointed at Yelra. "So she can get close!"
"I'll try!" The reply came through gritted teeth from the effort. "Who is this Yelra?"
Keara pointed.
"The one you called Nessira."
"Got it."
Dagon made the decision in a fraction of a second.
He released the pressure against the scythe — a counter-intuitive move, going with instead of against — and used the sudden forward momentum from Steve to leap vertically, his wings opening fully for the first time since landing.
His body transformed in the air.
Not gradually. The Underworld watched scales cascade and multiply, limbs lengthening, structure reorganizing with sounds the stone absorbed in respectful silence. The wings reached full span. The tail formed. The head elongated.
Four seconds. Complete dragon.
The possessed Steve looked up.
His purple-pink eyes widened.
"Magnificent," he said, genuinely awed, head tilting back to follow the scale of the thing that had just appeared where a man had been.
The tail struck him from the side.
It wasn't a calculated blow — it was the natural movement of a tail in a space that had suddenly become far too small for the body generating it. But the result was the same. Steve was launched horizontally with force that turned him into a projectile, crossing the distance to the stone forest in a fraction of a second and then crashing through the forest — tree, another tree, a third — the sounds of impact and breaking arriving at the battlefield in rapid sequence.
The silence lasted one second.
Then the fire came.
A massive column of blue-white flame that the dragon Dagon spat toward where Steve had disappeared, the temperature high enough to make the air around the underground valley visibly ripple, to make the stone walls crack in micro-fractures, to make everyone on the field turn their faces and raise their arms on instinct.
The fire entered the forest.
It swallowed the stone trees — it didn't destroy them (stone doesn't burn), but the space between them filled with heat and blue-white light that left no shadow at any angle.
Silence.
Then.
Laughter.
Coming from inside the fire.
Steve burst out of the column of flame at a run — not fleeing from it but through it, his entire body covered in water that evaporated into thick steam from the heat, clothes smoking at the edges, purple-pink eyes absolutely alive with something that wasn't pain or fear but genuine delight.
"HAAHAHAHA!"
He ran beneath the dragon Dagon's jaw without slowing.
He leaped.
The punch landed under the jaw with enough force to snap the dragon's head back and make the entire valley hear the impact like a broken bell. Dagon lost balance — he didn't fall (four legs prevented that), but he staggered two steps, each one worth a meter of distance.
Steve landed on the dragon's head.
He ran along the neck.
Along the spine.
To the tail.
"So this thing is what hurt me."
He grabbed the tail with both hands.
Dragon Dagon realized what was about to happen early enough to be unable to stop it. Steve's weight was no longer that of a seventeen-year-old human — it was the weight of something using that body without respecting the limits the body normally imposed on itself. His hands closed. His feet planted themselves in the air as if the air were solid ground.
And he spun.
Dragon Dagon described a full circle — once, twice — before being thrown. The impact in the stone forest was a localized catastrophe: trees snapping in sequence along the body's path, the ground cracking in a straight line, dust rising in a wall that blocked vision for several seconds.
Steve landed back on the battlefield.
He looked at the destruction he had caused.
His smile grew wider.
Then the dust from the forest exploded outward.
Dagon burst out of it at high speed — intermediate form again, scales and wings and reptilian eyes, sword raised, expression serious like someone who had stopped trying to communicate and was simply solving the problem in front of him.
"Still want more?"
Steve materialized the giant scythe.
"Always."
What followed was not an exchange of blows — it was a physical dialogue between two objects in motion happening at a speed the human eye could barely follow. The scythe described arcs that should have been impossible for that weight. Dagon's sword intercepted, deflected, answered. Sparks were constant — small stars born and dying in the space between the two weapons.
Dagon took as much as he gave.
The scythe was different from last time — faster, the movements carrying the quality of something that had practiced for far longer than Steve had been alive. *Sensō-jutsu* — ancient spear techniques, spins and circular movements that created attack angles a conventional sword wasn't designed to defend against. Dagon dodged, leaped, ducked, using the years in the Nexus turned into instinct.
But he was falling behind.
*If this continues, I won't be able to stop him. I need a distraction.*
Dagon's eyes flicked — fast, just one second — to the other side of the field.
Jelim was leaning against a tree, semi-conscious, her face still wrong where Dregor had struck her. But her eyes were open.
*Jelim.*
The mental call was direct. Urgent. Without the calm tone Dagon used when he had time to choose how it sounded.
"What?" The reply came tired but present.
*I need two things. Create an illusion of Yelra in front of Steve — identical, convincing. And when I give the signal, grab her and launch her onto Steve with everything you have.*
Pause.
*Why do you think he'll lose focus seeing her?*
*Trust me. My plans are solid.*
Another pause. Longer.
*You're making this up.*
*Jelim.*
*…Wait for your signal.*
Dagon returned his focus to the fight — the scythe was coming from above, a descending blow with full weight — and deflected with a rotation that placed him beside instead of below. He used the opening for a kick — not to the body, to the head.
The foot struck Steve's face with enough force to snap his head back and make Steve lose half a second of orientation.
Half a second was enough.
"NOW!"
The illusion materialized in front of Steve — Yelra, silver hair, emerald eyes, exact in every detail. Standing still. Looking at him.
Steve stopped.
Completely.
The scythe hung in the air where it had been when the kick landed, his body motionless, purple-pink eyes fixed on the figure before him with an expression that was neither the maniacal smile nor Steve but something in between — a primitive recognition of something that mattered, coming from so deep that even the possession couldn't completely erase it.
"You—" the voice said, and the wrong harmonic was weaker on that word.
The real body of Yelra arrived from above.
Jelim had thrown well — enough force, correct trajectory. Yelra's body descended in a controlled fall and landed on Steve's shoulders, her hands already moving toward his head before the impact ended.
Her hands touched.
And glowed.
Not golden like Keara's. Not purple like the Percentage System. It was white — white with that specific quality of light that doesn't come from an identifiable source but exists anyway, the kind of light that casts shadows in directions that make no geometric sense.
Steve screamed.
---
In the dark place, the scream arrived before the light.
Steve was on his knees on the nonexistent floor, eyes closed, body contorted with pain that wasn't physical but was real in every way that mattered. Around him, the two corrupted beings — the version of Yelra with bottomless eyes, the version of himself with the posture of someone who belonged — were contracting.
The white light entered from above.
It wasn't gentle. It was extraction — like a tooth being pulled, like a root being torn from soil that had claimed it long enough to consider it its own. The two corrupted beings distorted, lost form, became smoke that resisted the extraction with the passive resistance of something that had no will but had inertia.
They exited through Steve's eyes.
Through his mouth.
At a speed that wasn't natural but was unstoppable.
And they returned to the thrones like an inverted repeat of what had happened — smoke becoming form, form sitting down, the smiles returning to the places where they had always been.
Waiting.
---
On the battlefield, Steve's scream cut through the air and then cut the silence.
His body collapsed.
Yelra descended with him, her knees touching the ground before Steve's body did, her hands guiding the fall so his head wouldn't strike. Her hands still glowed — weaker now, the light dimming as the effort that produced it was reabsorbed.
Steve's eyes opened for a moment.
Brown.
Just brown.
They saw Yelra first — her face close, emerald eyes, the expression of concentration that was beginning to relax. Then Dagon behind her — still in intermediate form, golden scales, reptilian eyes, but sword lowered and posture of someone who had arrived in time.
Steve's eyes closed.
---
The night in the Underworld had no moon.
It had the stone formations on the ceiling that captured and reflected the torchlight, creating that diffuse clarity without a defined source that made the space both illuminated and shadowy. The freed prisoners had camped along the edges of the valley — groups of different races sharing the space with the specific caution of people who had spent enough time in cages not to trust open space easily.
The tent where Steve slept was in the center.
Dagon entered silently.
Keara was sitting beside him, hands resting on her knees, healing magic active at a low and constant level — not treating a specific injury but presence, the medical equivalent of staying awake beside someone. Yelra was on the other side, emerald eyes fixed on Steve's unconscious face with an expression that wasn't exactly worry but something adjacent to it.
"Any positive signs?" Dagon asked.
Keara didn't lift her head.
"Not yet. The situation is complicated. What the chaos did to his system on the inside…"
She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. The silence completed it in a way words couldn't.
Dagon looked at Steve for a long moment.
Then he left.
---
Jelim was leaning against the outer wall of the tent, her face still wrong, dried blood in three lines running from her eyebrow to her jaw. She raised her eyes when Dagon stopped in front of her.
"How is he?"
"Nothing new," Dagon said. "We wait."
Jelim remained silent for a moment.
"You know what it means if he dies. Right?"
Her voice wasn't an accusation. It was a real question — the kind asked when the answer is already known but needs to be confirmed out loud to become real.
Dagon was already walking away.
"You don't need to remind me," he said, his voice hard in a way that wasn't anger but something he preferred not to show. "I know that better than you do."
He entered the forest.
---
The tree he punched was large. It didn't break. It simply registered the impact with a dull sound the forest absorbed without returning.
"Damn it."
The word went out into the darkness between the stone trunks.
"This is different. From all the others. From everything I've encountered before in this cursed place."
He stayed with his fist still pressed against the tree, forehead almost touching the bark.
"I can't lose this chance."
Pause.
"Not for me. For you all."
---
Four years ago.
The sky was real — blue, with clouds the wind moved slowly, with that quality of light that only exists on the surface of the world and which Dagon had not yet learned to take for granted because he had arrived only three weeks earlier and still woke up counting the days.
The dragon flew between the clouds with that specific elegance of something that needs no effort to do what it does.
Simon was singing.
Sitting behind Dagon, arms spread for balance, black hair whipping in the wind, his voice off-key and completely happy:
"Adventure, adventure, adventure—"
The dragon shook its head with enthusiasm that was impossible not to interpret as a response to the song.
Dagon didn't sing. He looked at the horizon with the sour face he wore when the world didn't cooperate with his expectations, which was most of the time.
"Dagon."
"Hm."
"You have to appreciate the beautiful things in life more."
"I'm not an idiot like you, Simon."
Simon laughed. Not the performative laugh of someone who wants to be found funny — the genuine laugh of someone who finds the situation exactly as absurd and exactly as wonderful as it is.
"I know, Dagon," he said, when the laughter settled. "I know that perfectly."
The dragon continued to fly.
The clouds passed beneath the three of them.
And Dagon, despite the face, despite the unmet expectations, despite everything — stayed. He didn't go anywhere. He remained in the place he occupied, with the person beside him, letting the wind and the clouds and the off-key song exist around him.
Sometimes that was enough.