The Lord of the Seas - An Isekai Progression Fantasy [ Currently on Volume 2 ]

Time had barely made sense in Kairos Castle. But in the Crest, it finally lost all meaning to Lukas. There was no day or night beneath the depths of these black waters he found himself in, no sun to track across a sky, no moon to rise and fall. Only the pale blue of bioluminescent flora, the burning clash of magic, the soundless rupture of the sea each time their blows met.

Seconds blurred into minutes. Minutes into hours. Hours into years. The only thing that remained constant was him: The Monarch.

Lukas fought. He clawed. He bled. And he endured. One of the four spells that Rodan had taught him to master—the Water of Life—was the only thing that kept his body intact. Every cut he took, every organ that ruptured, every muscle that tore or bone that snapped under the force of their exchange; it was mended, healed, replenished by the eternal reservoir of mana surrounding them. The sea was vast. The sea was endless.

But Lukas was not.

His mind wore thin. His thoughts dulled at the edges like an old blade left to rust. There were many times—moments that seemed to have no end—where he forgot why he was even fighting. He'd dreamt, sometimes, that this was just a punishment, that he had already died and this was his afterlife: to suffer, to fight, to keep struggling forever against an enemy who seemed relentless in his violence.

Lukas was hungry. He was tired. Not physically—no, the sea sustained that. But in the deepest hollows of his soul, he was worn.

Lukas wanted to sleep. He wanted to rest. He wished to return to the castle. To wrap himself in warm cloth, to feel a bed beneath his back, to be rid of the metallic taste of blood in every breath he took. Sometimes, during the seconds that he was not fending off the great beast, Lukas wondered to himself:

Could he just stop? Could he just surrender? How long had he already suffered beneath the oceans within the Crest? How long more would he have to suffer? Could he not just return to Kairos Castle? Could...he not just return to find Styx there? Maybe, just maybe, she was waiting for him. But he knew she was not.

But gods…to all the Gods of Hireath and every realm beyond, Lukas wished he could.

Yet he persisted. Because Lukas knew that if he ever left this place, if he ever tasted freedom again, he would never come back. And because Lukas knew that, he also knew that if he allowed the Monarch to remain, he would never forgive himself.

So he stayed. He fought. He survived.

In the aching eternity of that battle, Lukas began to see it: the rhythm, the logic, the brutal elegance behind the Monarch's movements. The small flickers before each transformation. The momentary lag between phase-shifts. The brief tension that preceded each temperature spike.

The Monarch hadn't been giving him these small moments of reprieve out of pity. He was giving Lukas a moment to process what he'd done, he was trying to teach Lukas in his own diabolical fashion.

All of it, they were lessons. Opportunities to learn, to understand, to adapt.

And slowly, Lukas did.

The young dragon began to learn how to shift and transform his very own body into water. It was a crude transformation, at first, messy and unstable which the Monarch made Lukas pay for dearly. But Lukas continued on. It was similar to the Draconic Flow. But the Everchanging Vessel required much more technique than the Monarch let on for he wielded the spell with reckless abandon.

Lukas started to match temperature with temperature, countering the boiling surges that the Monarch sent at him with sudden dips in temperature to send the water to freezing point.

With every clash, the Monarch's lessons were embedded into his very muscles, into the marrow of his bones. Slowly, Lukas began to see the truth of reality:

The Monarch, despite his overwhelming intensity, was not invincible.

His spells required delicate balance—the Everchanging Vessel could not hold form forever. His transformed body of water needed constant manipulation, or else it would collapse into the seas around him. His heat and ice were potent, but the very nature of water worked against him. For once water turned to vapour and became solid ice, they ceased to be under the Monarch's control.

There were limits to what the Monarch was capable of. At the core of the Monarch's style of fighting was his physicality. It was not the mystic arts, the Spells of their Divinity. It was the merciless, crashing rhythm of his fists, claws, tail and motion—a violent tide that gave no room to breathe which made the Monarch a force to be reckoned with.

In a way this old beast was Rodan's exact opposite. Rodan's presence overwhelmed the battlefield with the sheer radius of which his constructs could be manipulated. On the flip side, the Monarch closed the gap and he thrived in proximity—inches from your throat, your ribs, your spine—never truly giving you the distance to think.

What the Monarch had not known was that he was not the only one who thrived in close quarter combat. Up close and personal was always his style in the ring.

Lukas had simply needed time to learn how the Monarch moved. As their battle raged on, Lukas began to understand that the Everchanging Vessel was not invincible, only elusive. Once he had unlocked that knowledge—once he had tasted mastery over those very same spells—the tide of battle finally began to shift.

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Because Lukas had something up his sleeve, something that the Monarch had never bothered to master:

The Draconic Flow.

The cultivation technique that allowed him to transform between his human and draconic forms in a matter of seconds. It was his Martial Art: The invisible current of movement, the perfect alignment of instinct and intention, the sacred rhythm of motion that made the Draconic Flow a weapon in itself.

And in that rhythm, Lukas found his opening.

Lukas met the Monarch head-on now. Clashing not in bursts or bursts of magic, but in the raw language of war. When the Monarch surged forward, Lukas slipped in close—deeper than the Monarch was ready for—and wrapped him up in a sudden arm bar, wrenching his elbow into a perfect lock. The bones didn't crack, not yet, but the Monarch twisted violently, forced to abandon his form and melt into liquid just to escape the break.

That was all he could do: try to escape from Lukas' grasp.

Again and again, Lukas slipped inside the Monarch's guard—not to dodge, not to counter, but to control. Control which the Monarch had disregarded as insignificant. Lukas twisted behind him and locked in a rear naked choke, coiling his forearm tight around the Monarch's throat.

Blood and water bubbled from between clenched teeth as the Monarch melted again.

Later, Lukas darted under a sweeping ice-clad punch, spun, and caught the Monarch in a guillotine choke, dragging him downward, forcing their bodies into the ocean bed. He didn't just want to beat him. He wanted him to drown.

The Monarch's transformations saved him each time—but that was all they did.

It was Lukas who pressed forward now, blow after blow, hold after hold, without mercy, without rest. Each time the Monarch slipped through his grasp like vapor, Lukas was already there, hunting him. Each breath the Monarch took was hard-earned, each movement desperate, reactionary.

The Monarch was being the one being pushed back.

There was no fear in Lukas any longer. No hesitation. He had become the relentless storm which the Monarch had once been during the majority of their battle. Lukas had mastered how to move in his draconic form. But the Monarch taught him to embody it, to become that beast that all humans had come to fear. To become a monster.

The sea sang through him now and it sang a song of Lukas' hard-fought victory.

The Monarch finally fell to his knees. Arms made of water, sculpted into human limbs, grotesquely coiled around his own, twisting the Monarch's elbows back in a brutal arm bar. More limbs gripped his large scaly legs, locking them out at impossible angles. The water groaned with pressure. Bones creaked. All of it choreographed, precise—a masterclass in Julien Fronterra's grappling techniques rewritten through Lukas Drakos' Divinity of the Seas.

Around the Monarch's throat, Lukas tightened the final grip. A rear naked choke of water—his own constructs, perfectly shaped, perfectly suffocating.

Drowning a dragon of the seas, how wonderfully ironic, Lukas thought to himself.

Still, a laugh seemed to escape the Monarch's lips. Not with defeat. Not with pride. But with madness, wild and ancient. A sound not of a mentor's joy, but of something animalistic—a being who had lived too long in the undertow of violence and never expected to see its end.

But Lukas…Lukas Drakos did not laugh. There was no mercy in his expression. No tearful respect for lessons learned, no reverence for a bond forged in battle. Only wrath. Only carnage. A fury that showed itself in the way his constructs tightened. The water trembled. The force Lukas exerted through the constructs increased. The Monarch's scales began to crack.

Lukas leaned forward—gaze hollow, voice empty—and spoke a single word: "Die."

He wanted to erase the Monarch. To strip him from the Crest, remove his name from the Sea's memory. Maybe he would appear once more but Lukas would hunt him down again and again and again, if it was the last thing he did. To kill not the mentor—but the monster who had dragged him through years of endless torment.

Just as Lukas began to completely crush the Monarch's throat, a shimmer passed through the ocean, as if someone had peeled back the current to reveal the depths of the ocean to the open air of the worlds within Lukas' Crest.

And a voice called out to him.

"Enough."

The voice was familiar. Commanding. Cold as steel and old as bone. Lukas turned—teeth bared, chest heaving—and froze. For it was the voice of the father he had never truly known. The voice of the man who had spoken to him during the first time he used this Legacy when they needed a way to escape from Nozar's fleets.

There, in the rift between worlds, stood Lord Jaren Drakos. And beside him, another Dragon Lord of the Seas, one that Lukas did not recognize. They were both in their humanoid forms. The other Lord wore flowing robes of white, matching the hair on his head. The cold air that emanated from him was immense.

The Crown of the Lords shimmered above them—an ancient halo of purpose and pain, and Lukas felt the thrum of it in his skull. A beat. A drum. A call. And in that moment, no words were spoken. There was no need for words. For all Dragon Lords present spoke the same language. The language of the Crown.

Lukas released the Monarch from his grasp, his constructs melting back into the sea from where they came from. The Monarch's body fell, wheezing and forgotten. Then he rose like a beast called to judgment. His wings flapped as he came face to face with the two Lord and a fury flared inside him so fierce it shattered the aching fatigue of his long battle with the Monarch.

Enough? He would decide when it was enough. Lukas would not rest. He could not. Especially not when they were new challengers who had now appeared before him. Lukas would fight both of them at once, all the rationality he once possessed stripped from his mind long ago. The two Lords could only feel his rage through the connection of the Crowns now, his hunger to grow stronger. A dragon's roar ripped from Lukas' throat, splitting the sea itself, and with eyes alight in primal challenge, Lukas charged.

This was not a fight that these two Lords could refuse nor was it one they wanted to refuse. They wanted to see what this new Lord was made of just as bad as Lukas did. And thus, the battle between the past and present Dragon Lords of the Seas began once again.