It didn't take long to find another burnt village, the resulting side quest offering exactly the same set of rewards as last time and granting me another class level. Finally, it was time to go home. Full of longing to finally see my family and friends once more, to sleep in a decent bed and eat proper food, I ignored my newly available skill evolution and enhancement, and quickly brought up my list of available third class skills.
Navigator: Directions are known to you.
Cloaked: You are shrouded from Their vision.
Dwelling: They possess you.
Scrier: Your sight pierces shadow and Void.
Formless: Your Form is an illusion, projected by your will.
Listener: You can hear the echoes in the Void.
Once again, the descriptions had shuffled. I couldn't even tell if they'd grown stronger than the level one versions. Or what the two new options did, for that matter. Fortunately, I could just list them repeatedly until they built up a few more details.
Shifter: Shape is malleable and Form as you wish it.
Seeker: Nothing is lost forever.
And again
Disguised: Cloaked in shadow, none may see your Truth.
Timeless: All that was, may be once more.
I needed to find more villages. Unless I was very much mistaken, the first of those new skills would let me disguise myself as a normal human. And the second...
The second seemed to offer a way to bring back everyone who had died in the pocket dimension.
Maybe. It was a stretch, but the black dragon had called them all echoes, and they were certainly lost. I wasn't going to risk my way home on a maybe, but... how many of these burnt down villages were there? For now, I picked pathfinder. Or wayfinder, or navigator. Whatever it happened to be called. And I knew the way.
Getting home was so easy.
All I needed to do was step in this direction, and I'd be there. I lifted my foot, and stopped as I felt a faint tug at my soul.
Now I knew what the soul magic I'd picked up earlier had been. The green dragon's revenge on me, designed to keep me prisoner here more securely than any cell or chains. My link to the fox-kin.
I could leave with a single step, and my departure would kill all of them. Their souls had been made dependent on my own.
Despite doing my best to broker peace between humans and demons, I was going to tear the green dragon apart for my own purposes. Using their entire race as hostages! That could never be forgiven. But first, I needed more power. My search uncovered one further burnt village, unlocking another pair of skills.
Whisperer: The susurrations of the Void surround you.
Reflected: You are mirrored in every shadow
Unlike my previous level, I wasn't interested in either. The first sounded like a version of void-touched from my monster tamer class, and I had no clue what the second did even after repeated viewings of its mutating description.
Should I take formless, to better fit in back home and among humans here, or should I take listener, in the hopes that it did what I thought it did? Hopefully, I'd find another statue, so I could take both, but right now, what I wanted most was to enhance my monster tamer skills.
I hadn't run out of mana recently, short of being strapped to a table designed to extract it, and I hardly wanted to give the humans an even bigger motivation to try that again. Neither was I making use of my silk. Draconic scales and draconic might were going to be the target of my upgrades.
Skill enhanced: Draconic scales (rainbow)
Develop rainbow dragon scales to provide great additional protection from both physical and magical attacks, as well as near immunity to the elements.
Skill enhanced: Draconic might
You gain a massive increase to physical strength and endurance, along with slow regeneration.
The slow regeneration was new, but other than that, both skills were straight upgrades over their previous version. My scales grew a little more vibrant, as if they weren't shiny enough already. Draconic might had no visible effect, and regeneration wouldn't buy me much given my propensity for dying every few minutes, but I wasn't going to turn it down.
For my first class, I had two skills to evolve. I couldn't really imagine any of my four options giving me anything cool. My item box was already far bigger than I needed, and had a time stop function. I wasn't sure how it could improve. Analysis already gave me all the information I needed. Mapping had room to grow, if it either filled in information without me having to visit the area, or gave me a full map instead of my minimap. Fast travel could likewise grow if it didn't limit me to shrines, but I'd been disappointed in that respect once before. Besides, I might be able to travel through the Void instead, once I solved my fox-kin problem.
After all of thirty seconds of consideration, because I found it hard to get worked up about the choice, I went for mapping and fast travel, since they were the only ones where I saw useful options for growth.
Skill mapping evolved to auto-mapper
Automatically record the layout of any visited locations, viewable at any time. Maps are overlayed with location information. Maps within one kilometre are overlaid with presence information.
Skill fast travel evolved to gate
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
You can teleport or open portals between spawn points and shrine locations.
Mapping evolved in one of the ways I guessed; I was no longer restricted to a minimap centred on my location, but could now view any area I'd previously visited. Fast travel still didn't give arbitrary teleportation, but I could now open full portals instead of teleporting myself, presumably permitting me to bring others along for the ride. I suppose that was a sizeable upgrade, but it wasn't one I'd ever wished for.
What next? Should I search for more shrines or confront the demon lord?
To be fair, it wasn't like I was going to immediately attack him. That wouldn't achieve anything, even if I won. I needed to convince him to undo the link. And the fact that he could make the link in the first place implied he could use soul magic. More power was nice, but I wasn't confident I could win a fight, and another couple of levels wouldn't change that. Perhaps a fourth class would, but these shrines didn't seem to want to offer that up as an extra reward.
I flew towards the demon lord's lair, forgoing a teleport from the village back to the fox-kin town in favour of keeping an eye out for more burnt settlements. I still needed to follow the paper maps, never having visited the demon lord's lair before. That would have been a useful upgrade for the skill evolution; being able to copy paper maps into it, to avoid needing to visit in person.
I found no further villages, and a couple of hours later flying in the sky at full speed, I found myself approaching the designated mountain. There was no tall-walled fortress built on it. No towers or defences. The only unnatural structure was a gate.
Built into a cliff face stood doors of black metal, rising fifty metres tall and just as wide. They were halfway up, without so much as a ledge beneath them, winning no awards whatsoever for accessibility. Thank goodness I had wings.
Decorations were carved into the frame, as well as built into the gates themselves. A vast, stylised dragon's head adorned the centre, surrounded by a swirl of geometric patterns, split into three sections. One seemed to be a representation of fire. One other I was less sure of, but would have guessed ice. The third I had no clue about, but given the other two, possibly acid or corrosion. A match for my three most useful breaths, and, presumably, three dragons. There must be an ice one somewhere I'd never met, in either world.
One other interesting fact about the gates was that they were closed. There were no visible guards. Nor did I see a doorbell. I knocked, pushed and pulled, but nothing received a response.
"Get out here, you weirdo!" I yelled, which likewise achieved no result.
If I wanted to talk him into undoing his ridiculous soul bond, breaking in would likely be counterproductive, but perceive presence made it clear he was in there, and I wasn't about to give up and leave.
Maybe a small hole. One that could be easily filled in again later. I pulled my pickaxe from my item box and rather than attacking the thick, metal doors, I went for the stone alongside them. Between my flame breath and pickaxe, it didn't take me long to build a side tunnel. Seemed a bit silly to have a practically indestructible gate when someone could just go around it.
Mind magic immunity advanced to level 34
Soul magic nullification advanced to level 21
My pickaxe shuddered in my hands as my mind and body rebelled against swinging it the moment I'd dug a metre into the rock. Okay, so there was some protection. I didn't see that as a problem. Any extra levels I picked up now would be more than worth it once I faced the green dragon again, given that he could use both varieties of magic.
My progress slowed to a crawl, the entirety of my being complaining that I really shouldn't be heading in this direction, but my resistance skills and the stubbornness that had driven me through so many insane situations back in the dungeon didn't let me stop.
Soul magic nullification advanced to level 22
Mining advanced to level 9
It took longer than it should have done, but eventually I broke through. The inside was an enormous passage, but to fit a dragon, it needed to be. I flew down it towards the presence that I felt, coming out in an enormous cavern very much like the red dragon's back in the dungeon. A layer of golden treasure covered the floor, and curled up in the centre of it, seemingly without a care in the world, was my target.
"Wake up!" I yelled.
"You think I'm asleep, with all the noise you've been making?" he growled without moving. "I'm simply concentrating on the war and directing my armies."
"Then you should have answered. Would have saved me having to tunnel my way in."
Now the dragon moved, raising his head and opening one eye. No-one could give side-eye like a dragon, with an eye bigger than I was embedded in a head that seemed more like a wall from this close up.
"You murdered my brother. He and I may not have seen eye to eye on some matters, but he was still my family. I despise you. I would love to shatter your mind and hand you over to the corrupt human nobles, to live out your life as a sex slave in one of their demon brothels, forgetting you were ever human. To rip out your soul and store it in an inanimate container, for you to spend an eternity alone with your thoughts in darkness and silence. Alas, I can do neither, for the Goddess has granted you resistance to my magic. Killing you is more than you deserve, yet I can't even do that, for she has granted you immortality too! Nevertheless, should you push me, I promise to find more ways to hurt you, however transient."
"He started the fight! I approached peacefully."
"So? He couldn't hurt you. Your life was never in danger. The outcome occurred simply because you valued his pets over him, while I value him over his pets."
"That's not true. If I didn't care about them, his use of Ancora as a hostage wouldn't have worked, and he still would have ended up dead."
Ironically, if I'd ignored his hostage and killed Ancora along with him, I'd have saved lives overall. Not that I could ever have acted in that way.
"I fail to see the reason for your anger. Surely it isn't that bad having an entire race at your beck and call? I do legitimately believe giving you ownership of them is in their best interest. They are designed not to be independent, after all. Having no master would be fatal. Had I not reacted as quickly as I did at the death of my brother, you would have killed them all."
...Okay, I take back my previous thought. Had I killed Ancora along with him, I'd have wiped them out, not saved them, because the demon lord wasn't nearby at the time.
Wait, did that mean all the fox-kin fighting on the front lines died? Or was proximity not needed?
But that was beside the current point. "Don't feign innocence! You've already admitted wanting to trap me. You used them to stop me returning home, not to help them!"
The dragon raised his head, looking down at me with both eyes. For the first time in this conversation, he seemed to be taking me seriously.
My necklace burnt as his most powerful burst of mind magic yet focused on me, battering my defences and probing at my memories.
Mind magic immunity advanced to level 35
"Get out of my head," I screamed, before blasting him with flame breath. He countered with his own dragon breath, which, as expected, was corrosive. The two met in a violent explosion, showering the cavern with boiling acid. That wasn't going to do his hoard any good. Thankfully, it also disrupted his invasion of my mind, hopefully before he'd dug anything out of it.
He continued to glare from his vantage point upon high. Somehow, I had the feeling that something I'd said had disrupted our uneasy peace.