Nihility [ Isekai • Dragon Evolution ]

My meeting with the pontiff was a blur. I told her about what I found– the nobles, the food, the drinks, everything. She looked concerned, but thanked me and ordered me to go back to my room and to try to sleep.

The following week was another blur as they conducted a thorough investigation of the place I mentioned. Unfortunately, due to some magic, the investigators weren't able to determine who participated in that party. I was questioned, and even had my memories searched, but they weren't able to extract anything as the food or the drink I had consumed by mistake there had blurred my memories too much to make sense of what happened. I could only remember the general circumstances of what happened, with the sole exception of what the vampire said. For some reason, his words were like the calm region inside the storm of mixed memories of the events.

Because of this, the Church and the kingdom changed their tactics. It was clear that this threat was much worse than they imagined. We were being dispatched to several regions in groups of two to minimize the chances of mind control in an effort to try to eradicate the half-demons as soon as possible to avoid them gathering even more forces.

The king placed all his chips on us and bought several equipment pieces from various other kingdoms in the region and even on another continent. He wanted us to take turns protecting the royal palace and culling the enemy's forces.

They gave Alex a full set of something called black obsidian, which is very durable, and a bow made of starlit gold and the silk of a spider-like monster. She could conjure arrows made of solid light whenever she pulled on her bow, and each arrow could have a different effect, ranging from something very similar to an aimbot on the arrow itself and an explosion that could level a city block in its weakest power. Honestly, she was terrifying when shooting arrows faster than some guns could shoot back on Earth.

For me, they gave me just a set of armour, as the sword I had was already very powerful. Apparently the materials for the armor came from the same kingdom as my sword. The armor was of a green color with several multi-colored lines forming a very intricate patterns all around it. They said it was made of the scales of an unknown species of dragon and several very pure elemental crystals.

A few days after they gave everyone their new armor and weapons, I met with Alex just outside of the royal castle. Her eyes looked a little darker, and her hair wasn't made like she usually did. When I approached her, I saw that she was worse than it looked from afar. Her hands were minimally twitching, and her eyes were scanning the surroundings, but the moment she saw me, she stopped and smiled.

Her smile was like a radiant sunshine, it was so beautiful I almost stopped just to stare at it for a moment, but I managed to keep going until I reached her.

"Alex, hey," I said, my cheeks blushing a little. "How are you going? We haven't seen each other for a while."

"Hey Leo," she started. "I've been busy. I researched a little bit about what you told me the vampire is looking for, these 'genesis seals'. Apparently, they are old, like very old. I've been able to access the Church's archive and found out that they are older than written history, but apparently they are seals that keep the leftover energy from when the Great Seven created the universe."

"So the vampire is looking for them to become a god?" I asked a little incredulously.

"Who knows, but I also discovered something else," Alex said, then moved closer to me and placed her mouth in my ear.

We were so close I could smell the perfume she was wearing, it had a sweet fragrance that reminded me of lavender mixed with a small touch of oranges. I had to control myself from grabbing her hair to smell it.

"The seal for the light element is stored deep inside the castle's vault, right here. We are standing on top of it." She said, bringing me back to reality.

I looked to the ground and then at the castle. It was imposing, with thirty-meter tall walls and so many protection enchantments that I doubted even an air strike from the United States would put a dent in it. Of course, that's what Alex and the others have told me. I haven't actually seen it because I can't use magic outside of my skills.

"Then I think it's ok. I don't think anyone would be dumb enough to try to steal it?" I said, but I wasn't sure about it myself. Who knew what that vampire, who fed the people at that reunion human meat, thought was possible or not. At least it seems he doesn't know about the presence of the seal in the castle, at least for now.

Alex and I moved to the castle, got our patrol route for the day, and while Alex patrolled the outer walls, I patrolled the inside of the castle.

As I walked, I felt something pulling me in certain directions. I hadn't noticed it at first, but the closer I got, the stronger the pull I felt was. It was like I was meant to go in this direction. I wasn't sure about what to think about it, I guessed it was something about the armor they gave me. It had come from an unknown dragon, and this was probably an effect of a skill it had. I thought about ignoring it and keeping on my patrol route, but something on the back of my mind told me I needed to follow the sensation.

I walked until I hit a perpendicular corridor. My patrol route told me to go right, but the sensation was telling me to go to left. I paused for a few moments, weighing in my options.

There were two voices inside my head, one to turn right and one to turn left. I wasn't sure which one to follow, but I felt the pull to the left again, but this time it felt… important? It was a strange sensation that I didn't know how to explain, but it made me decide.

"That settles it," I said out loud. "I'm turning left."

I moved to the left and started walking, following the pull I could feel. It drove me to a pair of nondescript doors, but the sensation was telling me to enter them. I placed my hand on the knob and found it warm, someone used it not so long ago.

Twisting the knob, I opened the door and revealed a set of stairs going downward for at least fifty meters underground. I closed the door and began my descent.

As I descended, I could see various disarmed traps and broken runes still faintly glowing with magic. Someone had broken in. I pulled my sword from my inventory and immediately felt it resonate with my armor, something very deep that I couldn't put into words, but felt as if they were made out of the same creature. I decided to ignore it for now, I could feel the tug on me to continue down.

After ten minutes of walking down the stairs cautiously with my sword in hand to avoid drawing attention from the intruder to myself, I reached the bottom of the stairs.

There was a pair of huge doors, at least 5 meters in height, that were half-open. I walked towards the door carefully, trying to make the minimal amount of noise I could.

"Damnn, stupid dimensional lock." I heard Vinicius' voice coming from the other side of the door. I peeked with one eye and saw him on one knee with several magical devices and colored crystals thrown around haphazardly on the ground as he pushed what looked like a pencil with a crystal on the tip, drawing lines over the several runes covering a giant metallic door. It was even bigger than the door I was peeking from.

I stood there for a few minutes, trying to understand what he was trying to do, but after I saw him breaking one of the runes on the door and loudly exclaiming, "Yes!" I knew I needed to step in. He was trying to open what was clearly a vault, and after I heard from Alex about the genesis seal, I wasn't taking any chances.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

"Vinicius!" I shouted as I entered the room. Vinicius looked back at me, clearly surprised by my presence, but changed his facial expression to one of annoyance.

"Look who it is, if it isn't the sword jockey himself," he said. "What are you doing here? Got booted from your precious guard job?"

"I'm the one who should be asking that question. What are you doing here? You should be near Karah, helping against the half-demons there." I questioned him.

"Flash news, blade clutch, I go wherever I want," he said and opened his arms to point to the entire room, "and this is where I wanted to go."

"This is obviously a restricted place. Neither of us should be here," I said to him. "I saw the deactivated traps you left behind. What do you think you are doing?"

"Just getting what is mine by right," Vinicius said and entered a position as if he were holding something heavy, and in the next moment, a heavy machine gun appeared in his hands. I had to jump backwards and behind the doors as a storm of bullets hailed from Vinicius and his conjured weapon.

His skill allowed him to create anything he imagined. I didn't know the limits because Vinicius was very secretive about his skills in general. I only knew what he had shown in training or in battle, that was why I knew that the machine gun he had conjured wasn't like a real one. Our bodies, I mean from everyone in our class, changed when we arrived in this world, and continued to change as we leveled up. We were strong enough now that a normal bullet would simply bounce off from our skin, but the weapons created by Vinicius' skill were different, stronger, and capable of piercing through heavy armor like it was made out of paper.

The bullets were hitting the door, but even though Vinicius' skill was certainly high level, as well as himself, the doors, which looked like they were made out of wood, held firm against the bullets.

I dove into [Elemental Slice] as I bent what the skill counted as a "slice" and shot out one infused with the illusion element. An illusion of me appeared and ran to the right of the room, Vinicius's aim following it and diverting the storm of bullets from the entrance that I used to enter, running towards the left, already launching several more slashes through the air.

Fire, ice, and wind sliced through the air after my blade, directly into Vinicius' gun. He looked surprised at my attack and tried to turn his machine gun towards me, but before he could, my attacks hit it. The fire slash cut through the rotational chamber of it, effectively slashing the gun in two. The ice hit soon after, freezing it inside a giant ice crystal, and then the wind hit the ice and exploded as all the pressurized air inside the attack was released at once, sending Vinicius tumbling to the floor.

"Gah! You're gonna pay for this!" Vinicius shouted as he conjured two rifles and aimed them at me before starting to shoot. The bullets were slower and in less density than the machine gun from before, meaning I could counteract them.

Slashing using the wind element, I knocked the bullets off course as I sent wave after wave of pressurized air to Vinicius, who dismissed one of the guns to create a tower shield right in front of him. The wind hit the shield and exploded, but didn't affect Vinicius as he was protected behind it.

I saw him tossing something towards me, but it was slow enough that I parried it and threw it behind me, which was a bad call, as the moment it flew past me, I saw it was a grenade. I quickly turned and tried to attack it, but it was too late, and it exploded, sending me flying backwards towards Vinicius, who didn't fail to capitalize on top of my mistake.

As I flew, Vinicius was already there waiting for me with a baseball bat, hitting me square in the chest, sending me flying forward and hitting the wall.

I hit the wall like a truck, but it didn't show any sign of cracks from the force of impact, causing me to fall to the ground as I tried desperately to regain my breath. I looked towards him just in time to see him holding a rocket launcher and shooting it towards me. I rapidly slashed in a diagonal arch, sending a wave of flames that intercepted the rocket and caused it to explode. The pressure wave knocked me back into the wall, and the smoke cloud produced made me lose sight of him.

I stabbed my sword on the floor, causing water to come out of the hole I stabbed, and I redirected it using the tip of my sword, sending it towards where Vinicius once was, but as it cut through the smoke, he wasn't there anymore.

"This is way too easy," Vinicius laughed. "After so much show about your strength, this is all you have? Pathetic."

I gritted my teeth as I used my sword to get up, but another grenade fell right next to my feet, launching me to the ceiling as it exploded. I fell on my back, my armour taking the most of the damage, but some still bled through. I coughed up some blood.

Vinicius walked next to me and stepped on the hand that I was holding my sword, causing me to scream in pain.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk." He said. "You know, after all these years, I never thought I would kill you. Hurt you and your stupid friend Marcos? Of course, but killing wasn't on my mind. If I did, I would be thrown into jail, and I didn't want that."

I tried to speak, but he put more force on his foot, causing me to let out another scream, but I still kept holding my sword. If I let it go, I was dead.

"But look at you now," he continued, "Marcos never came with us, and Alex looks like she won't be with us for much longer." He formed another grenade in his hand.

My anger shot up like it never had. "Don't… you… talk… about… her," I said through the pain.

"What was that?" Vinicius asked. "I couldn't hear you through the grenade in your mouth." He moved to shove the grenade in my mouth, this was the moment I was waiting for.

Storing my sword in my inventory, it vanished from my hand under Vinicius's foot and then reappeared in my free hand. I moved too fast and caught him by surprise. I slashed with my sword, a clean upward cut. Vinicius screamed in pain as his hand holding the grenade fell next to my head. I pierced it with my sword, encasing it in an ice crystal, and the next moment it exploded inside the crystal.

I got up, spat some of the blood that had accumulated on my mouth on the ground, and looked at Vinicius. "You were saying?"

He shouted in fury and created another machine gun with his other hand, but without one of them to hold it properly, the bullets came out flying everywhere. I was able to dodge several of them, and the ones I couldn't, I used my sword to slice or deflect them, relying heavily on my [Swordsmanship] at lv. 8 to cut through the bullet hell.

I started sending waves of fire, water, electricity, and many other elements. Vinicius seemed like he couldn't create more than one manifestation at a time after I cut his hand, so he ditched the machine gun and created a reinforced wall that blocked my attacks.

I ran towards the wall, slashing the ground and creating stairs I could use to step on, I jumped over the wall, spinning as I did so. I descended, slashing with my sword coated in fire, but Vinicius managed to jump out of the way before I hit him.

"We can talk about this," Vinicius tried to speak, but I wasn't hearing anymore. I launched at him with fire still coating my sword, but Vinicius used his skill to create a bubble shield that protected him, then he threw a grenade on my feet, forcing me to encase it in ice with a stab before it exploded, giving Vinicius enough time for him to get out of the way. "Try to slash this!"

Vinicius threw something at me, probably another grenade, and I was already moving to slash through it when I noticed it wasn't a grenade, it was a magical device. Unfortunately, I was already on the move, I couldn't stop the movement.

The moment my sword touched the device, it exploded in green light, sending me tumbling backwards as I heard a storm of energy roaring around me.

I looked around and saw myself? No, it was a ghost image of myself, from a few moments ago. I saw as a ghost image of Vinicius threw a grenade at my ghost image's foot, and it stabbed it to encase it in ice. Another image of myself was ahead, from earlier in the fight. Around me were ghost images of the past, it seemed. I could even see the ghost image of the king walking around.

I fell backward when I looked behind me and found a towering ghost image of a dragon looking directly at me. It seemed to react to my presence as it tilted its head. The image was too distorted for me to make out any details, it was just a distorted blue silhouette.

I got up and walked away from it, but the dragon still followed me. I saw him extending his claws and made a move to grab me, I dived to the side, avoiding him. The dragon still followed me and made a move to grab me again, but I jumped backwards and started running towards the center of the room, the dragon following me, trying to grab me, and I dodging his attacks.

Eventually, I found the real Vinicius, who turned around from his work on the door, surprised by my presence yet again. His eyes widened even more when he saw the creature trying to catch me.

When I saw Vinicius forming another gun, I timed my dodge to right when the dragon was about to catch me. When I dodged, the dragon hit Vinicius instead, who, despite the hail of bullets, didn't affect the dragon whatsoever.

The problem came when the dragon caught Vinicius and accidentally hit the vault's door. I saw the runes that protected the vault turning green, and then I was flung to the wall of the cave. Everything went black.