The Red Dragon Just Wants To Do As It Pleases

They were only ordered to suppress the peasant rebellion, not to become sacrifices for Demons.

At the same time, their hearts were increasingly collapsing. Since the failed coup seven years ago, the entire Valden Kingdom seemed to be cursed. The incessant peasant uprisings, the ever-emerging Drow meddling in politics, the continuous invasion of Barbarians from the Old Continent, and the gradual annexation by the northern Bafanya Kingdom had already strained every soldier's nerves in this realm.

Now, facing this sudden 'demon invasion,' this taut nerve finally snapped.

... Watching the battlefield disperse in an instant, without the feeling of evenly matched forces, David felt this 'dream' suddenly quite uninteresting.

After all, I'm not some homicidal maniac; I only enjoy the thrilling sensation of adrenaline released during 'simulated combat,' not the actual lust for slaughter.

Just as he was about to open his eyes and 'awaken,' he suddenly felt the sound of rushing wind coming from behind.

If this were his Red Dragon true form, he would have instinctively activated the Eye of Greed by now.

But in this 'dream,' perhaps due to some 'software and hardware mismatch,' David's reaction was a bit delayed. By the time he turned around, he saw a vaguely 'familiar' creature with wings on its back diving straight at him, and then it threw a punch.

David only managed to instinctively raise his arms to block, but it felt as if he had been hit head-on by an eighty-kilometer-per-hour sedan, sending him plummeting toward the farmstead outside of town, an area the Nobles' cavalry had previously occupied.

This sudden sensation of weightlessness almost 'startled him awake,' but to the freshly intrigued David, waking up like this was even more tormenting than being woken by an alarm clock just as he was about to have a rendezvous with a lady whose face he couldn't see in a dream!

I haven't even had my fill of excitement yet!

And with my vigorously healthy Red Dragon constitution and thick nerves, who knows when I'll experience lucid dreaming again.

Right then, like an anime protagonist in 'Eva Unit-01' during a system crash, helpless to do anything but watch as his beloved was ravaged by a Monster, he kept hypnotizing himself:

Rise! Rise! Get up for me!

His vision was confined to a wrecked chicken coop, where a startled hen, perched on his head, was in the process of laying an egg on his face.

His field of vision gradually blurred, and his consciousness uncontrollably began to drift away.

I really want to just sleep like this.

Then, Sloth took hold.

The Demon Gutemund, hovering in mid-air, looked at his blood-stained fist with the same disbelief:

This? Is that all?

At the moment, Gutemund felt an extreme similarity to how David had felt earlier. He had thought he met an equally matched adversary from the Abyss, but it turned out to be no better than a lesser Demon—no, more like a chaos maggot, dead at the slightest prod.

This unprecedented discrepancy gave him a feeling of pent-up frustration, like having great strength but nowhere to use it.

Indeed, under his full-powered strike, the 'David' whose body twisted as it crashed into the chicken coop had already disintegrated due to the overload of its mortal form. Various parts scattered everywhere, and his head rolled like a bowling ball into the neighboring chicken coop...

Under such circumstances, a 'restart' would be truly miraculous.

But soon, both the Demon Gutemund and the trembling peasant soldiers in the town would truly 'see a ghost.'

Gutemund, who had initially planned to sweep the battlefield, crush all witnesses, and gather souls to bide his time and grow stronger, and the somewhat despairing peasant soldiers in the village suddenly felt an immense sense of 'lassitude.'

Suddenly, they wanted to do nothing at all. If death was coming, let it come. If they died, there would be nothing left to fear.

Gutemund even absurdly felt the urge to return directly to the Abyss, his old home.

With his level of power, he could sense the disconcerting separation, as if his body, spirit, and soul each possessed its own distinct 'consciousness.' This realization made him feel even more oppressed:

I don't want to go back to the Abyssal Depths! I still want to enjoy five hundred years in the material world!

But his consciousness began to fall toward the lower planes against his will.

If it had been an irresistible, instantaneous pull back, perhaps it would have been more bearable. But due to David's fluctuating excitement and 'Sloth' consciousness, all beings, including the Demon Gutemund, alternated between terror and apathy—one moment refusing to go back, the next considering returning to the Abyss after all.

CLUCK CLUCK CLUCK, CLUCK!!! Perched on 'David's' head, the little hen struggled, its egg stuck halfway out. The sheer kinetic energy from its frantic efforts almost roasted it into a New Orleans-style grilled chicken.

"No!!!" In that moment, both the Demon Gutemund, about to fall into the Abyss, and the awakening David let out a roar of unwillingness.

And as David overcame his own 'Sloth,' Gutemund finally struggled free from the suddenly released 'Sloth.' Then he witnessed a scene reminiscent of his own arrival.

It was the instinctual craving and utilization of flesh and soul characteristic of an Abyssal Demon.

For this reason, many ignorant mortals would call them Blood Demons!

The flesh and blood scattered outside the farm, even the fragments of Redscale's body that had been blown apart, began to move as if imbued with consciousness, coalescing into tendrils of flesh. Then, like a Resurrection Spell cast at over ten times its normal speed, 'David' was 'reborn' in the chicken coop!

No, the body of Redscale that David now inhabited, stimulated and augmented by the flesh and blood of David, a True Dragon, had transformed. It was no longer the body of a Dragonkin whose bloodline had been thinned over countless generations, but that of a Half-Dragon, clad in full scale armor, possessing the head of a Red Dragon....