Naturally, Gauss was not about to be intimidated by the juvenile dragons trying to throw their backer's name around.
Did he come here without knowing who was behind them?
Seeing that Gauss showed no reaction at all, the young dragons exchanged looks, a fierce glint flashing through their eyes.
They were wary of his identity, yes, but that was only basic respect for a stronger being. At their core, chromatic dragons and metallic dragons did not get along.
They represented two opposing branches of dragonkind, and to humans they were practically the embodiments of the dragon race's "good" and "evil" factions.
Metallic dragons might not interfere in wars between humans and monsters, but that did not mean they would show mercy to chromatic dragons.
Their conflict had never truly stopped. It had lasted for multiple eras.
If anything, it had only eased up somewhat in the last few thousand years.
From that perspective, the conflict between humans and monsters was actually the newer thing.
"Attack!"
A wand appeared in Gauss's hand.
At the same time, all the chromatic dragons tensed.
"ROAR!"
They moved so decisively for two reasons.
First, Gauss had already taken an attacking stance.
Second, they had calmed down enough to think.
They had been startled at first by the idea that he might be a metallic dragon, but true dragons were not dumb drakes. It did not take them long to realize his strength might not be as terrifying as they had first imagined. If an adult silver dragon or gold dragon had really descended here, it would never have wasted time talking to them.
One burst of dragon fear would probably have left them unable to move.
So this man could not possibly be an adult metallic dragon.
Most likely, he was just some dragon roughly their own age, or perhaps a little older, with exceptionally advanced shapeshifting magic.
Of course, it was also possible they were wrong.
But even then, there was no helping it.
Given the relationship between chromatic and metallic dragons, they did not believe he would spare them just because the Dragon Mother was absent. It was not as if he had come here to make friends with them.
No matter what, striking first was never the wrong choice.
"Kill him!"
Four dragon roars exploded almost at the same time.
The sheer force of the sound, wrapped in dragon pressure, swept out in all directions.
The fastest to react was actually the black dragon. Its black-gray maw, packed with jagged teeth, opened wide. Its belly swelled, and then it spat a cone of dark green acid.
The corrosive power of that acid was terrifying. Even the air seemed to sizzle beneath the acidic mist spreading around it, giving off a vicious hissing sound.
Fortunately, Gauss was just as fast.
Before the black dragon even fully launched its attack, he had already tightened his grip on the white wand, and Any Door—a spell he had cast hundreds, thousands of times—came out almost as naturally as breathing.
Buzz.
His figure vanished from where he stood.
Ssshhh—
The black dragon's acid breath blasted forward for over a hundred meters before slamming into the ground, melting a scar that stretched dozens of meters and gouged from several inches down to nearly a full meter deep.
A true dragon's breath really was one of its most terrifying weapons.
Now over a hundred meters away, Gauss glanced sideways at the destruction the black dragon's breath had carved into the ground.
Unlike Hephaestus's fire breath, a black dragon's breath was corrosive acid. A green dragon's was poisonous fumes. A blue dragon's was lightning. A white dragon's was freezing frost.
That had everything to do with their bloodlines and their habitats.
In fact, this black dragon was even smaller than Hephaestus by a fair margin, yet in terms of sheer breath power, it still outclassed Hephaestus's current fire breath.
A flicker of understanding passed through Gauss's eyes.
So aside from magic talent and inherited bloodline knowledge, there were indeed other differences between drakes and true dragons.
A true dragon's breath seemed stronger by nature.
Hephaestus had gained intelligence and had been growing stronger rapidly lately, but he had started too late, and in certain areas he had not yet fully made up the gap.
Gauss glanced at Hephaestus.
He looked excited.
Maybe it was because, for once, he had run into several other chromatic dragons.
"That black dragon's yours."
"No problem."
Hephaestus beat his wings and lunged toward the black dragon.
That was right. The black dragon's breath was stronger than Hephaestus's at this stage.
But the outcome of a battle was not decided by breath alone.
Hephaestus's physical strength clearly surpassed the black dragon's by a wide margin.
Raw physical talent mattered just as much for dragons.
It meant fiercer close-quarters combat, faster flight speed, thicker hide, and stronger recovery.
Beyond breath, magic, and other abilities, a huge part of dragon combat came down to ripping each other apart at close range.
A massive body was an advantage, but also a disadvantage. Especially in a fight between two giants, close combat was crucial.
Hephaestus's golden eyes locked onto the black dragon flapping in the distance. Deep in his gaze, it was as if a great blaze had ignited.
His eyes screamed one thing:
I want to fight.
If there were ever a candidate for the most battle-hungry breed among the chromatic dragons, red dragons would win without question.
They were not afraid of violence. They were only afraid there would not be enough of it.
Up until now, the enemies Gauss had set before him had been goblins, kobolds, mushroom-men—things that might as well have been ants. Most of the time, Hephaestus could not even work up any real desire to fight them.
But this enemy was different.
These were true dragons.
Even now that he had awakened his mind, the humiliation of having once been only a drake still clung to Hephaestus at all times.
He would probably never forget hatching from his egg alongside his true dragon brothers and sisters, only to be bullied by them.
Nor would he forget the cold indifference of those same siblings, and of the mother who should have inspired his deepest instinctive attachment—only to drive him from the nest and leave him to wander alone.
To him, true dragons had never been companions.
They were enemies.
He longed to kill them, to prove that he—the so-called defective one—was better than those "proper" purebred dragons.
Boom!
Hephaestus's massive wings whipped up a violent gale.
His huge body crashed forward like a cannonball, slamming straight into the black dragon just as it tried to evade.
The two savage young dragons collided in midair.
Rip—
Almost instantly, Hephaestus's huge talons sank into the black dragon's body.
Black scales and crimson blood rained down from the sky.
"ROAR!"
The young black dragon screamed in pain.
"You filthy traitor!"
"Why are you helping a metallic dragon attack us?!"
Even now, the black dragon could not understand.
The bloodline inheritance of chromatic dragons did not just contain knowledge—it also carried a huge number of fixed instincts and prejudices: love of gold, gluttony, laziness, hatred of metallic dragons, and so on.
Projecting its own thinking onto Hephaestus, it truly could not understand why he would do something so despicable.
Sure, chromatic dragons were not exactly one united family either. But against metallic dragons, they should at least have stood together.
"Idiot."
Locked in a brutal midair tangle with the black dragon, Hephaestus's eyes flashed with mockery.
For the first time in his life, he felt that his close kin were so stupid that he could not help feeling a powerful sense of superiority.
So this is what it feels like to mess with idiots.
And the black dragon, having been insulted with absolutely no explanation, became even angrier.
It opened its maw too, and the two dragons tore into each other in a frenzy.
As for the other three chromatic dragons, what were they doing?
Obviously not watching the show.
There was no chance they were just going to stand there while Hephaestus, that "traitor," fought their black dragon companion.
Their attention was entirely fixed on Gauss, the "metallic dragon."
And that was precisely why they did not rush to support the black dragon, even though he was already at a disadvantage.
He was not going to die immediately, after all.
As long as they took down this mysterious metallic dragon in front of them, everything would turn around.
A mere immature red dragon—was he really going to beat four dragons by himself?
Ssss—
The two young green dragons flew up to the cliff walls on either side and crouched there. Their bellies swelled sharply, and then clouds of green spores expanded outward like living things, sweeping toward Gauss.
Meanwhile, the blue dragon on the main front had also finished preparing a spell.
Or rather, it had been prepared the whole time.
It had simply been watching, trying to figure out what kind of opponent it was facing.
Even at this point, they still did not know whether Gauss was a silver dragon, a gold dragon, or something else entirely, nor what age bracket he belonged to, nor what he specialized in.
But their own abilities were obvious at a glance.
That gap in information put them under tremendous pressure.
So far, the only things their opponent had shown were shapeshifting and spatial magic.
Nothing else.
And so, despite its fearless posture and bluffing confidence, the spell the blue dragon had prepared was actually a defensive countermeasure.
In its view, some kind of strange barrier had risen around the area, but a wide-area ability like that clearly could not last long, and after all, this was the domain of that old hag in the Emerald Forest.
Though inwardly it held the Green Dragon Queen Aeselrath in utter contempt—and fully believed that once it matured, it would become a far more terrifying, far more vicious dragon than that cowardly old green hag who had hidden in the forest for over a century—it still recognized her strength, at least for now.
Time was on their side.
As long as they dragged this out until reinforcements arrived, this mysterious enemy would be finished.
Metallic dragons might have been stronger than chromatic dragons overall, but the real difference still came down mostly to age and mastery.
The blue dragon was certain the Green Dragon Queen was the stronger one.
Far stronger.
Otherwise, this enemy would not have picked the moment she had just left the forest to make his move.
If Gauss had known what the young blue dragon was thinking, he might actually have been impressed by the judgment it had made in such a tiny span of time.
Aside from getting his identity wrong, most of its observations, analysis, and intended strategy were correct.
Gauss did need to end this fast.
So…
He had no intention of holding back.
In private, he had already tested his full-power state—that is, the stacked state where his purple-grade racial gift Draconic and second-stage Ghoulification were both activated at once.
He had not used it in real combat in a long time, because the effect was too extreme. In most normal fights, there was no need to turn on both states at once. One was enough. Forcing them together was like using a cannon to kill a mosquito, while also adding unnecessary strain to his body.
But at the same time, it was exactly the kind of move he could not afford not to practice.
Especially after both abilities had evolved from blue-grade to purple-grade.
There was no way he was going to wait until some life-or-death situation to use it for real without understanding its effects beforehand.
Gauss was not that reckless.
So where no one could see, he had secretly tested it.
The strength of the fully stacked state was terrifying.
Right now, as a level 8 professional, Gauss's normal combat power was roughly equivalent to a weaker kind of level 12.
Activating either enhancement alone could elevate him to the stronger end of level 12.
But what about Dragon-Demon Dual Synchronization?
Strictly speaking, Gauss had never fought a real Level 13 professional, so he was not in a position to judge exactly what that tier of strength looked like.
But in his mind, that violent surge of power clearly pushed him past the level 12 threshold and into the realm of level 13 combat power.
Do not underestimate the difference of a single level.
Once you entered the transcendent ranks at level 11, the gap between each level above that became enormous.
You could see it just from time alone.
The higher the level, the harder the breakthrough. It often took ten years, decades, even over a hundred years to advance just a single step. And even that counted as absurd luck compared to the many who never advanced at all.
But at the earlier levels? Advancing every few years was common.
And there was another easy-to-overlook truth here.
Could the time scale for geniuses capable of reaching transcendence and beyond really be compared to the time scale of ordinary low-level adventurers?
Obviously not.
So that time gap reflected not just a few times or a few dozen times greater difficulty, but perhaps hundreds or even thousands of times.
Through his private testing, Gauss had also more or less figured out the upper limit of Dragon-Demon Dual Synchronization, how long it could last, and how much time he could safely maintain it while still keeping enough mobility left to escape afterward.
Knowing that was crucial.
In the overwhelming majority of situations, he would never let himself fight until he collapsed unconscious from exhaustion. That would just mean leaving his survival up to other people and to vague luck.
So before setting out, Gauss had already made up his mind.
He absolutely could not let the Dragon-Demon Dual Synchronization state burn all the way to its limit.
If he could not achieve the objective within the safe time window, then he had to retreat immediately, without hesitation.
Of course, the ideal situation was still to complete the objective within that window.
The green spore cloud was still racing toward Gauss.
The other three dragons remained extremely cautious.
But just as the poisonous spore mist was about to reach him, the Gauss who had held still up until now suddenly widened his eyes.
His pupils slowly turned molten gold.
From the outer corners of his phoenix-like eyes, violent black-and-white streams of energy spilled out like solidified flames.
His body began to change rapidly.
Crack crack crack crack—
Under the increasingly uneasy gaze of the three dragons, Gauss's body transformed.
"Is he turning back into a dragon?"
"What are you, exactly? A silver dragon? Or a gold dragon?"
In the distance, the blue dragon drew in a sharp breath, its eyes gleaming.
But to their shock, although Gauss's body definitely changed—
it did not shift toward a dragon form at all.
Instead, hovering in midair was a humanoid figure over two meters tall.
His body was wrapped in a force the dragons found deeply familiar.
It was dragon blood.
That confirmed their original guess.
But alongside that draconic force, there was another power in him—strange, eerie, and fully capable of standing against dragon blood as an equal.
That sinister power sent a chill instinctively through all three dragons.
An ancient, violent aura burst outward from him with wild intensity, instantly crushing the dragon fear they had released.
His body was small compared to theirs, but he radiated a presence like a ruler descending over all beneath him.
"This…"
"What kind of monster is that?"
For the first time, the true dragons felt afraid.