While they had been anxiously waiting for Prince's return, Sophia had kept Paolo and Michel posted on those new developments before perusing the system resources about anything on non-hostile monsters.

But her search had bore no result.

And Prince had finally come back, surrounded by a patrol of armed sentient armor and carrying a metal plate stating:

'You are welcome.'

Although the way it was it was aggressively inscribed onto the plate belied the statement.

"His Majesty the abyssal dragon Nerzha is asking the human delegation to send off its best chefs to demonstrate the height of human cuisine in exchange for safe passage." The tressym announced and winked, letting her know that her statement was not to be taken at face value.

And so, after discussing some more with even more implied in the subtext, she made yet another message to Michel:

This floor boss is a lesser dragon. He is the one causing the anti-magic field. And the sentient armors are worshipping him as their God. A frontal attack is suicide. Prince negotiated with him. The plan is to cook, feed him delicious spicy food, and poison him.

I don't care how you make it happen but tell the others that this floor challenge turns out to be a draconic cooking festival and that we need cooks who are confident in their skills. Also, the armors are going to be really mad once their God is slain, so everyone should come for the epic fight. But cooks first! And bring true spices!

This time, it took almost five minutes to respond.

That one was tricky. I had to fake an aneurysm and pretend to be possessed by some higher power! I got you eight clueless cooks going up to meet you. They think they were chosen by Gods and that everyone would die lest they went first! That's the best I could come up on the fly with without triggering the system penalty.

Sophia chuckled upon reading him. She could vividly picture the performance from his colorful description. And she could also read in between lines that he was not eager for a repeat performance.

And so, she addressed her team next:

"I'm going to help in his majesty's kitchen. The two of you, just make sure everyone else on the human delegation is on its best behavior until his majesty grants us safe passage. We can't afford to give our host a bad impression."

Which translated to: "I'm going to poison that dragon. Have everyone ready for the armor genocide on my signal."

Then, she gave a pointed, displeased look at Prince who looked sheepish.

While it might not be technically his fault, that was one absolute failure of a diplomatic mission.

★☆★

It was only behind the closed doors of the kitchen that Sophia finally got the time to explain the situation to everyone with the tressym help. And so she wrote:

"Alright everyone, our host is an evil dragon who plans to slave us for food and then eat us for dessert. We need to keep the food coming regularly until the poison takes effect or it will eat us instead."

Everyone nodded their agreement and she wrote a second message:

"I will brew the alchemical poison and a catalyst. The dragon might suspect something and ask you to taste the food. Do it. You are only going to feel dizzy unless you drink the catalyst too. And I will have the cure readily available."

They nodded again and she wrote again:

"However, we have to make sure the dragon is both eating and drinking. But don't push it. If the dragon doesn't like something we serve, put it aside and rush back to the kitchen to get something else. The poison itself will have no taste or scent so don't get paranoid."

Everyone agreed and she wrote one last paper:

"Also, dragons' constitution is supremely high. So it's going to take hours. Be patient. Take some breaks. We are in for one hell of a cooking marathon. So make delicious food, have fun, and never forget the special spice."

And so everyone went on with their business.

And she started brewing the poison and catalyst for the first batch of dishes.

★☆★

I just escaped my forge. I will run your errand and join the dragon party ASAP.

The message from Paolo gave her a smile after hours of slaving on her alchemical table. The evil lesser dragon was still very much alive and his appetite, still boundless. And the catastrophic respiratory failure they were waiting for would most probably not happen for yet a few excruciating hours.

Wait! I have been repeatedly doing the same task for hours. Please talk to me.

And so another message from Paolo responded to her desperate call:

Okay. So you want me to distract you? But not too much so you can keep doing whatever it is you are doing.

And sorry, I'm terrible at jokes so I'm going to tell you more about my family instead!

She kept brewing the next batch of catalyst reagents while awaiting his next message.

So I'm from a rich immigrant Italian family in Brasilia exploiting crude oil and doing some cattle farming to the side.

No shady business or anything but we were clearly no saints either.

It sure explained Paolo's cosmopolitan wealthy background. As well as his surprising moral streak, always pushing her to keep going and do the right thing. He was feeling guilty for his family bread earner and his own responsibility in their homeworld end.

My father was often absent. It was Mama and Mom leading the farm. My elder brother was studying at the veterinarian school and we were being groomed to take over the farm in a decade or so. And my young sister wanted to go to France to study ecology and become a landscape gardener.

Sophia could easily picture the bucolic and pastorale lives they were leading, seemingly disconnected from their father's business and yet trying their best to distance themselves from it.

I was the ugly duckling of the family. I didn't care about the farm. I had my head in the clouds. I was a big fan of science fiction and space exploration. But I didn't truly know what I wanted to do with my life. I was doing the bare minimum to get the family off my back.

She chuckled to herself. It sounded more like the Paolo she knew: eager to learn, but more focused on the abstract of magic than its practical use. She also could feel the love-hate relationship with his overbearing family.

My brother... he is just so freaking perfect. And I used to hate him for that. Hard to live up to expectations with him as the role model: He is a freaking popular morning bird, working out straight out of bed for fun. Everything he does, he makes it look easy. And he is still always putting in the extra effort that makes everyone look up to him.

Yep. She understood his feelings and knew the type. His brother was a freak and a literal living poster for life coaching. He was that kind of narcissistic maniac who perfected their social persona and were actively putting their every effort into turning that image of themselves into reality.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

My sister is easier to be around. She is kind, compassionate, and a bit of an airhead. She is truly living the lie our family has been building up. She is a hardcore environmental activist and was really obsessed with gardening her small orchard and trying to convince Mama about making the shift to permaculture.

Paolo indeed had a colorful family dynamic. It was better than Sophia's semi-dysfunctional family relationship. But she also understood that a rich family had the means to cultivate some balance of make-believe that her own family could not afford.

She now had a better understanding of where Paolo was coming from. And as she kept brewing poison, she let her reading lull her away from the growing pressure of her task.

★☆★

It was one thing to know how to brew an alchemical poison and its known effect.

It was another thing entirely to witness it entirely and realize its true meaning.

Catastrophic Respiratory Failure.

It was an aptly named effect for the poison effect as the lesser abyssal dragon had started thrashing around its 'throne room' in evident distress, like a fish out of water. Even watching it happen from the kitchen doorstep.

She had picked that poison in the hope the dragon would not be able to breathe and therefore, use his breath weapon. But now realize the error of her judgement.

It was breathing just fine. It simply did not benefit the creature at all.

No matter how laboriously it tried to breathe and how hard it coughed to remove some obtrusive object that wasn't there, it was to no avail. The oxygen it needed to stay alive would never leave its lungs and enter its bloodstream. Or at least, whatever small amount was still getting through was not nearly enough to sustain its life.

It was now, and until its last breath — no pun intended — in nearly complete apnea.

About three minutes and a half.

It was as long as the dragon could hope to last, similarly to a human, despite its disproportionate lungs and outstanding iron constitution. But a dragon could do a lot in much less time. And the dragon was only twenty meters from the kitchen.

'I'm not going to die like this.' Sophia decided as she ran away for her life before the dragon realized it was no accident.

And indeed, only eight seconds later, the dragon had unleashed its mighty breath upon the kitchen and all its occupants. Surprisingly, some people did survive that initial attack and fled for their lives, screaming, from the kitchen single door. But the dying dragon mercilessly welcomed all the survivors with his claws.

Only one out of her eight fellow cooks made it alive from this second attack, only for his life to be whisked away, splattered against the wall like a mere insect under the brutal onslaught of the dragon's tail.

Though Sophia blissfully saw none of it, the sounds, however, would be haunting her dreams for years to come, already dethroning her recent giant Elemental trauma.

'Shit, shit, shit, shit.' Sophia internally cursed as she zigzagged through the dedale of the armor city central district, trying to put as much distance as she could between her and the rampaging dragon. But the dragon did not give chase and the armors had so far been too startled to comprehend the situation and arrest their God would-be murderer.

And soon, the dragon's rage had been replaced by cries of pain and whimper of despair and fear that sounded so uncharacteristic of a dragon that it finally gave her pause.

The dragon fighting the inevitability of its death had been everything she expected and more. But the dragon's vulnerability and distress in its last moment of agony: It shook Sophia to the core, deep into her soul.

And then, the silence, almost as unbearable, falls onto the troglodyte city.

You have gained a new boon [Hellish Cuisine].

It is currently disabled and can be enabled at any time.

She dismissed the notification almost as immediately as she got it. She honestly did not care and never intended to do anything like this again. Not if she had a choice, that's it.

But then, she had something else to occupy her every thought:

Her magic was back with revenge and wanted out, no longer contented to crawl madly under her skin.

Something broke inside of her as the magical energy forcefully divorced itself from her body and conjured itself out into existence, lashing out at everything around her, spreading chaos without rhyme or reason.

But it also meant that her weavesinging was back. And so, she started singing to conceal her own presence at the epicenter of that chaos maelstrom.

The sentient armors, creatures of absolute order were shredded to pieces by this antithetical force of nature.

And then, the chaos receded and she felt better than ever. Better than she ever felt before unlocking her bloodline.

Cause though momentarily, the magic was truly gone from her ravaged body.

And it gave her the strength to keep pushing.

Your [Hellish Cuisine] has been upgraded to [Kingslayer].

It is currently disabled and can be enabled at any time.

'King Slayer, huh?' She thought, self-mocking rolling her eyes.

Sure, it was somewhat true as that dragon was pretending to be a god and she killed it. But it wasn't like she had done anything to deserve the title that the boon implied.

Besides, the battle between the sentient armors and her peers had finally broken out and she was still left stranded behind the enemy lines. Which gave her a unique perspective of the ongoing battle right before her eyes.

There were now hundreds of teenagers forming two lines on the battlefield:

The front line, where all manners of Fighters had their weapons and shields at the ready, holding the armors at bay. And the rear line, where all the spellcasters and archers were doing their best to rain death on the enemy from afar.

The armors were unable to hold their ground without taking major casualties and any attempt to retreat was met with severe blasting retribution. And so, the armor had been left with no choice but to senselessly repeat a suicide charge, until none of them was left alive.

As for the 'civilian' armors, they had done as most defenseless humans would have done in their shoes: they had barricaded themselves in their homes against the never-ending flow of murderhobos who wanted nothing but to end their lives.

This time around, however, Sophia was certain she wasn't under some magic-poisoning influence and tried her best to look the other way while searching for her team. Which she found at the edge of the inner city, as Moana was tending to the wounded.

"Hi Everyone," She called out before her voice turned her words into a disarticulated gurgle.

"Oh my god! Sophia? Is that you?" It was Paolo talking, who had somehow managed to make his way here while she was otherwise occupied.

And so she nodded.

Michel. Moana. Lono. And Paolo. They all made it in one piece and only Prince most likely met his gruesome end back in the dragon's kitchen.

"How can she still be alive?" Moana commented clinically, abandoning her patient to rush by her side instead.

Did she really look so bad? It wasn't even the battle or that damn dragon. Just her own magic breaking free and doing what it did best. And she, ironically, had yet to cast a single spell.

"Magical backslash." She tried to say and though it did not come out as such, Moana looked her in the eyes and nodded, letting her know that she understood what she had said nonetheless.

"I'm going to give you a little something. It's gonna hurt." She warned.

And so she nodded and decided that it was a good time as any to enable her recently acquired boon. Once in the void, she would be unconscious and would not feel any of the pain her body had to go through, which might actually help Moana do her dirty work.

Kingslayer

You murdered a king and survived without claiming his throne, leaving a bloody trail of blood in your wake before vanishing without a trace. You have become every king's worst nightmare.

Criminal Mastermind (Assassination Scheme): This alters your primary Archetype to [Criminal Mastermind]. It modifies your (((missing rogue specialization))) permanently altering any subsequent boon you may acquire from it. It also marginally improves your odds while recruiting, bribing corrupted officials and overall dealing with your target security detail while attempting an assassination scheme.

[Hellish Cuisine:

Very few cooks willingly or accidentally poisoning their king ever outlive them long enough to tell the tale. But in the Nine Hells, your poisoner skills will be much appreciated by true connoisseurs.

Fresh as brewed: spicing up food with poison still delays its effect, and purging oneself early might still allow the target to survive, but the poison's overall over-time effectiveness remains as potent as if undiluted.]

And Sophia had to read the boon description twelve times before she could accept the reality of what the system just enforced on her.

She did not doubt that Lady Silverhair tipped the scales for this to happen. And now, she was questioning how much the Tressym might have been instrumental in this particular scheme of her. Goddammit! For all her efforts, trying to be the best version of herself and undue whatever the system had done to her... she was promoted from 'Rogue' to fucking 'Criminal Mastermind.'

Why? And how on Earth was it fair? Was her being a witch not enough? Or was it her punishment for defying the gods with her ancestry boon selection?

But of course, the system did not answer her call when she needed it the most.

★☆★

Sophia woke up at the feel of her own magic coming back online.

And it felt like an excited puppy pulling on its leash instead of mad bees under her skin.

Its chaotic energy felt welcoming and playful rather than outright demanding to be unleashed.

If her magic could speak, she guessed it would say something like: "Hey! We had so much fun together! Come on! Let's play again!"

But her body was telling a different story. It spoke of a once unadulterated pain, now a lingering ghost of its former glory. And yet, it was still far worse than anything she ever felt, or at least remembered feeling, in her entire life.

Her entire body ached, to the point that even staying perfectly still in her bed was throwing daggers through her every muscle and bone each time she took a breath. Again, quite ironically given the circumstances that put her into that state.

It was hard to be grateful for being alive when she could write literal poetry about pain.

But at least, she would get to live and fight another day.