Devouring Dragon Heir

"How about you let her go first? It will be good for you—literally."

The voice cut cleanly through the thick tension of the throne room, resonating from somewhere behind the two aggressors like the sound of steel sliding free of its sheath.

Both Godwin and his towering guard turned their heads slightly, their focus momentarily breaking.

The messenger had spoken.

He was leaning casually against one of the marble pillars that framed the hall, his arms folded loosely across his chest.

His posture was relaxed, but there was a stillness about him that felt more dangerous than any drawn sword.

His gaze was not even fixed on Godwin, he was looking elsewhere, as though the man wasn't worth the effort of his full attention.

In truth, Klaus had been watching this scene unfold from the very moment Godwin stepped foot inside the palace.

His pseudo-transcendent-level senses, far sharper than most of those in the same rank, had spread across the entirety of the royal palace grounds like a vast, invisible net.

Nothing within that range escaped his notice. Compared to him, Godwin's perception was narrow and shallow.

When Klaus felt the oppressive aura weighing down on Queen Andrea and Caesar, he recognized the threat for what it was, serious enough to warrant his direct intervention.

It wasn't loyalty to the queen or compassion for Caesar that moved him, Klaus was indifferent to their survival.

His motivation lay entirely in his role as a summoned messenger. A messenger's mission was not an aimless task there were specific objectives, demands, and conditions set at the moment of summoning by the one who called him forth.

Failure to complete them meant failing to obtain the rewards and power he sought.

A messenger could refuse the mission and still return to his own world unharmed, but such a choice came at the cost of no gifts.

Yes a gift that the messenger would gain from the star world's supreme consciousness if he completed the messenger's mission.

Klaus knew all of this because he had uncovered an ancient archive left by the late king, hidden deep within the royal treasury's secret compartments.

He had found it during one of his many forays through the palace using his shadow-phasing ability, a skill that allowed him to slip unnoticed through locked doors, guarded corridors, and hidden chambers.

He had never told the queen or her general about this. In truth, he didn't need to.

Caesar had lied to him about how his mission was only to defeat the demon king and he could not choose to opt out if he wanted to return when in reality he could chose to return anytime.

He just had will it in his mind while calling forth the supreme conciousness much similar to the heavenly will of blue planet.

He understood that they had fabricated their own narrative to justify summoning him, likely to avoid being seen as desperate or powerless in the eyes of others and himself. Without such a fabrication, they would already be corpses.

In some quiet, unspoken part of his mind, Caesar reminded Klaus of his own past of a powerless boy who had scraped and clawed to survive in a world that didn't care whether he lived or died.

These thoughts swirled through Klaus's mind even as the throne room fell silent under his sudden intrusion.

Godwin and his hulking guard were visibly startled. They had not seen him enter the hall, nor had they felt the faintest ripple of his presence. It was as though he had simply appeared there, standing in plain sight.

They took in the sight of him a handsome young man dressed in strange black garments that seemed utterly foreign to this world. It was a modern Earth jogger outfit, something neither of them had ever laid eyes on.

Godwin broke the silence first, his lips twisting into a cruel smile. He laughed, the sound sharp and mocking.

"And who might you be, little boy? What could you possibly do here? Are you some magician playing at bravery? Do you intend to try suppressing the queen yourself?" His tone dripped with mock.

Then his voice hardened, carrying the self-assured arrogance of someone who had never known defeat.

"I am a peak Pseudo-Transcendent warrior from the Empire. I fear no one in this pitiful kingdom, a place so weak it doesn't even have a single Pseudo-Transcendent left to defend it.

If you value your life and wish not to be torn apart, kneel before me now. Perhaps I'll be merciful and take you on as my personal slave. After all, you've slunk in here like a rat, without me even noticing."

Klaus's expression remained perfectly still.

Not a flicker of emotion crossed his features. He had heard this sort of posturing too many times to count the arrogance, the delusions of superiority, the condescension. He was weary of it.

"You really don't know when to shut up, do you?" His voice was quiet, but it carried a cutting edge of cold annoyance an annoyance so sharp it was as if a god were about to crush a planet beneath his palm.

His eyes shifted lazily to study the pair before him the arrogant envoy and his imposing guard.

The guard's energy signature was unmistakable. He was a Pseudo-Transcendent, but one of average strength, not even close to being a real threat.

Godwin himself boasted of being a peak Pseudo-Transcendent, yet Klaus detected no real difference in his aura compared to any other practitioner in that rank.

With nothing more than a thought, Klaus invoked Death's Monarch a legendary skill that he had obtained earlier.

A thick, black fog began to seep from nowhere, curling and coiling through the room like the breath of the underworld.

From within that suffocating shadow, shapes began to take form.

Seven figures emerged, their outlines shifting into solid, terrifying clarity.

They were the reanimated death-forms of the seven nobles Klaus had slain earlier. Their armor was pitch black, absorbing the light around them, their swords equally dark and deadly.

Their eyes glowed with an eerie, death energy.

The oppressive stillness in the throne room was broken only by the faint sound of their armor shifting and their weapons humming with unholy power.

Godwin's smirk faltered. His brows knit together in surprise.

"What… is this? What kind of ability is this?" His voice was tight now, stripped of its earlier mockery.

The crushing pressure he had been exerting on the queen evaporated as he turned fully to face the summons.

"They may be Pseudo-Transcendent, but they're lower tier. A peak like me should be able to handle them," he muttered, trying to mask his unease.

Yet he and his subordinate were now surrounded seven deadly presences closing in like the jaws of a trap.

What Godwin had not considered was the possibility that Klaus himself would join the assault alongside his creations.

The result was brutal, a one-sided massacre.

The death-monsters cared nothing for self-preservation. Their attacks were relentless, each blow carrying the strength of the Pseudo-Transcendent rank.

Their savagery was a force in its own right.

The guard didn't last long. Within seconds, one of the summoned knights split him cleanly in half from shoulder to hip, his body tearing apart under the unstoppable force.

The remnants hit the floor wetly, blood pooling fast.

While the monsters swarmed the guard, Klaus himself engaged Godwin directly, occupying him long enough for the seven subordinates to finish their grisly work.

When the muscular bodyguard was finally down, Klaus stepped back and let the seven focus entirely on Godwin.

To his mild surprise, Godwin held out longer than expected, managing to fend off multiple attacks at once.

But his brief sense of control shattered the moment another attacker joined the fray one of the newly formed death-monsters that had once been his own subordinate.

Seeing his former subordinate's corpse now moving against him was a shock that slowed him just enough for the others to overwhelm him.

Eight against one. The outcome was inevitable.

They tore into him with unrelenting ferocity, hacking through limbs, crushing bone, and ripping out organs.

His screams echoed in the high-ceilinged chamber before cutting off abruptly. Flesh was stripped away, leaving only gore-slicked bones.

The polished marble floor of the throne room was painted red, the carnage pooling in thick, glistening puddles.

The hall had not yet recovered from the bloodshed of earlier, and now it bore the stain of yet another massacre.

Klaus watched with eyes devoid of compassion. There was no mercy here, no pity for the dead. These men had come to kill him, and they had been killed.

He was the messenger, not a diplomat. His task was to deliver his mission's conclusion, not to make threats or bargains.

When the slaughter was over, both Godwin and his guard were gone reduced to nothing more than the latest additions to Klaus's legion.

With the battle finished, the death-summons silently withdrew, fading back into the sanctuary from which they had been called.

The silence that followed was heavy, oppressive.

Queen Andrea and Caesar were frozen, both still processing what they had just witnessed.

The empire's envoy, an emissary of terrifying strength had been annihilated before their eyes in seconds.

Andrea's mind was a haze of blank shock. She had seen power before, but nothing like this.

Klaus no longer appeared to her as merely a striking young man in strange black clothing. He seemed more like a monster wearing human skin.

Klaus stepped forward at an unhurried pace. His eyes were calm, his mouth curling into a cold, confident smile.

"Pick yourselves up," he said. His tone was calm, almost humorously casual as if he had not just torn apart a few people.

Slowly, Caesar and Andrea obeyed.

The two who had been forced to their knees earlier now stood once more, though the weight of what they had seen lingered heavy on their shoulders.