NOVEL NEXT Chapter 57: The Monarch of the Seas
Long before Lukas Drakos ever opened his eyes beneath the waves and long before he had even taken his first breath in this second life, there had been the Monarch. In the present day, his given name had long since been forgotten, as if spoken aloud it might summon him from the grave—or worse, from memory. The Monarch was the only title he now bore. A title born not of ceremony, but of fear. He had not been the eldest of his clutch, nor the strongest at first. But from the moment he drew breath, it was clear: he was different.
The Drakos Household had once been in decline. Still a proud banner among the Great Houses of Linemall, it had begun to wither after the death of Thalorian Drakos, the last true patriarch who'd earned their seat with dignity and valor. But after his fall, the House became weak. Unworthy. The other Great Houses whispered. Plotted. Waited. And the Lesser Houses sharpened their blades, eager to take their place as one of the ruling parties of Linemall.
But the Monarch would not let the Drakos name die in disgrace. For it was the name he carried now and his name would never be among the dishonoured. He began by slaughtering his own brothers—kin who dared to claim the right of succession. One by one, he tore them down. Not through honor-duels or council votes, but by ambush, execution, decimation.
When it was over, none were left to challenge him. He became the Head of House Drakos. A position he claimed not by succession…but through pure brutality and violence. And when the Great and Lesser Houses came for his blood—believing the weakened Drakos Family would fold under the weight of war, especially with their newly appointed Lord who was young, inexperienced—they found a monster waiting for them beneath the depths of Linemall's Seas.
What followed was not a conflict. It was a massacre. A civil war tore through Linemall, but in truth, it was a war in name only. It was one House—one dragon—against them all. And still, he won.
The Monarch turned the sky red. He razed cities. He broke any who would challenge him beneath his claws. During the war, he was the one who put down two of the Dragon Lords who stood in his path—not through cunning or deceit, but with raw, unimaginable violence.
Because the Monarch did not train to defend his people. He trained to kill his own. While others studied magic, diplomacy, and the Draconic Flow…the Monarch obsessed over anatomy of his kind. Over battle. Over war. He restructured his fighting style not around power, but chaos. Every motion, every claw strike, every breath of flame had a single intention to obliterate the draconic kind who dared to challenge his reign.
He wielded no honor. He offered no mercy. He was not a protector of their people. He was their executioner.
That was how the Monarch had ruled. Not with law. Not with tradition. But with terror.
And though he had no name left in the living world…every child in Linemall knew he was someone not to be. Their mothers ingrained the saying from the day they were born:
Don't grow cruel.
Don't grow hungry.
Don't grow like the Monarch.
And yet…it is him that Lukas faces now.
The Monarch is not a teacher. He is no a mentor, like Rodan. He is the monster that Lukas has to put down.
Two heirs to the same house. Only one who would stand victorious.
Rodan had trained Lukas the Divinity of the Seas, taught him the four foundational spells of the Drakos Household. But there were more than just four. These were the spells that had been hidden. Forbidden. Sealed beneath Linemall long ago. And the Monarch was the one to uncover those very spells. The forgotten spells of the sea, carved into drowned temples and whispered by the abyss itself.
There was no opening exchange. No respectful bows. No honorable silence before the first exchange.
The Monarch didn't believe in theatrics. The moment Lukas laid eyes on that twisted, hulking form—blackened scales like shipwrecked armor, sea-salt crusted between ancient claw marks, spines jutting from his back like harpoons—the old warlord charged forward. Not a sound. Not a roar. Just the seismic shatter of the ocean floor splitting beneath the weight of his fury.
Lukas barely raised his arms before the Monarch was on him. Claw met flesh.
A punch—no, a detonation—slammed Lukas backward, crashing him into a coral ridge that exploded into fragments of jagged bone. He tasted blood. Lukas felt a few bones fracture but he was already spinning, wings snapping open to stabilize as he transformed into his full draconic form.
The Monarch was chaos embodied. He fought like a storm given flesh. There was no pattern, no rhythm. Just pressure. Constant, smothering, carnivorous pressure. Lukas lashed out with a burst of tidal force, warping the seawater around them into solidified blades that threatened to slice the Monarch right open, forcing the Monarch to dodge—but he didn't.
He didn't need to. It was here where Lukas saw the Fifth Spell of the Divinity of the Seas:
V. Everchanging Vessel
The Monarch didn't evade—he dissolved. His form collapsed into a ripple of translucent fluid, his silhouette bleeding into the ocean like an ink spill, until Lukas' attack passed straight through a body that was no longer solid. A flicker of displacement. Then that same flicker reformed behind Lukas, twisting into muscle, sinew, scale—and pain. Claws buried themselves into Lukas' side. Not slashing. Ripping through him. He howled, twisting mid-air to break free, only for the Monarch to shift again—his legs liquifying, wrapping around Lukas like serpentine coils, dragging him down with the weight of the sea.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
There was no room. No room to breathe. No room to recalibrate.
Rodan had trained Lukas to control the battlefield, creating distance such that he could then create constructs that would aid him in combat. The Monarch fought to dismantle that very control he'd taken centuries to learn, his approach to battle in stark contrast what made Rodan a formidable opponent. He moved as fluidly as the water he transformed into. Every time Lukas thought he had found an opening, the Monarch shifted, his body becoming that sickly, half-formed tide—a walking current with just enough mass to slam into you but no anchor to ever strike back.
The fifth spell allowed the Monarch to transform his very existence into the Seas itself, turning his body into liquid. But that was not all.
With a single gesture, he activated the Sixth Spell of the Divinity of the Seas:
VI. Tempering Waves of the Sea
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, the battlefield transformed. Vapor didn't just rise—it screamed into existence, shearing through the water like blades of pressurized mist. Lukas barely had time to shield his face as scalding fog raced past, leaving the tips of his wings blistered and raw.
But that was only half of it. The cold followed after just as fast. From the edges of the steam—where the vapor kissed untouched water—the temperature collapsed. The Monarch didn't just boil or chill the ocean. He orchestrated both at once. A symphony of extremes.
Sudden sheets of razor-thin ice formed mid-surge, glinting like shattered mirrors in the seabed's light. They didn't form passively—they attacked. Spirals of frozen water coiled like spears, moving with jagged precision toward Lukas' throat, chest, and gut. Lukas weaved through the water, narrowly avoiding them with his increased perception of the world around him.
And through it all, the Monarch strode forward, wrapped in a warform of fluid terror.
The sixth spell allowed the Monarch to control the temperatures of the water.
The two spells came together to turn Monarch into a force that Lukas could barely hold back. Where the Monarch struck, his own body adjusted—freezing at the knuckles so that every punch carried the jagged force of an ice pick, or superheating his limbs to searing temperatures so that his claws cauterized the wounds they inflicted.
The Monarch's form flickered between boiling surge and freezing impact, crashing into Lukas like a tide that couldn't decide whether to scald or shatter. Both were deadly. He slammed a liquid-turned-solid forearm into Lukas' ribs, he felt the ice fracture under the impact of his strike but so did his ribs.
"The Sea does not yield to you boy," the Monarch snarled. "It doesn't ask. It does not choose. It takes."
Lukas tried to retaliate but the pain blinded him and by the time he'd returned to his senses, the Monarch's hand had crystallized into a jagged, frost-forged spear. He drove it into Lukas' shoulder—and the ice didn't just pierce, it began to spread. Cracks spiderwebbed across Lukas' skin as the Monarch forced the cold inside him, momentarily overwhelming Lukas' inner fire. Pain like frostbite burst down his arm, slowing his movement, numbing his grip. Lukas could feel it—the numbing crawl of ice burrowing deeper into his shoulder like a parasite.
The Monarch's hand, still halfway solid, was buried in the wound he'd driven there, the frost-spike anchoring Lukas to the seabed like a crucified beast. He tried to wrench free, but the Monarch's weight crushed him from above, suffocating, inescapable, like the pressure of the deep ocean itself.
The Everchanging Vessel gave him the freedom of form while the Tempering Waves of the Sea weaponized it. The very substance of his being was a shifting mechanism of thermodynamic death—every attack altering the battlefield, every breath dictating the environmental law.
"You see now," the Monarch declared, as his form pulsed between water and flesh, "that control means nothing?"
Lukas didn't answer. He couldn't. His throat was raw from screaming. His strength was quickly fading. Somewhere in the corner of his mind—behind the pain—something ancient stirred. The human part of him screamed for strategy. For distance. For a spell to cast. But the dragon within him only knew one thing:
Survival.
With a roar that tore through the water in a deep, guttural shockwave, Lukas reared his head back—and bit down. The Monarch's grin twisted into confusion for half a second too long. By then, it was too late. Lukas' jaws snapped shut around the meat of his arm—not a clean bite, not measured, but feral, jagged, pure rage. Teeth shredded scale, muscle, tendon. He didn't stop when the first wave of blood hit his tongue. He tore through it, yanking his head to the side like a wild beast, ripping the Monarch's arm from his body in a detonation of flesh and cartilage. Just like the Monarch had done to him when Lukas had been but a child.
The scream that followed wasn't even a scream—it was a gargled howl, bubbles rising in a furious cloud as the Monarch staggered back, blood blooming through the ocean in thick, dark clouds that stained the seabed red.
Chunks of flesh floated between them. Lukas spat one out. Another still hung from his teeth.
Blood poured from Lukas' shoulder where the Monarch had struck—but it didn't matter. He stepped forward through the crimson murk, shoulders hunched, hands curled, no longer standing tall with draconic pride, but crouched like a predator.
The Monarch clutched his ruined stump. He should've been enraged. But instead—he was grinning. Mouth stained with his own blood. Fangs bared.
"Good," he rasped. "Good." His voice was guttural, proud, even joyful beneath the agony.
"This is how it's supposed to be. This is the cost of victory, my dear grandson. Remember this. This is how you win. You're learning now," the Monarch said through bloodied lips, "what it takes."
In some sick way, the Monarch still wanted Lukas to succeed. As twisted as the old dragon was, the fact of the matter was that he had chosen Lukas as the heir to the Drakos Household. He wanted his grandson to succeed. To succeed him, to become stronger than the Monarch had ever been.
Lukas didn't speak. He couldn't. His throat wasn't made for words anymore. Not right now. His body was still bleeding. His shoulder was still torn. But his eyes—they were not those of a rational being. They were narrow now. Slitted. Primal. And when Lukas lunged again, it wasn't with spells or form or even reason. It was with instinct.
They collided like meteors, tearing through the battlefield in a frenzy of fire, frost, blood, and water—not fighters anymore, but monsters.