Read Novel Full Chapter 683: How Disappointing
Chapter 683: How Disappointing
“What is this, Uncle?”
Mika strolled forward, hands in his pockets, regarding the kneeling king with a look of mischievous reproach.
“It was my turn multiple times now, and you kept taking moves for yourself. That’s not very sporting of you.”
Vorthar’s eyes were trembling. “Wait—brat, no —”
“Well, since you’ve finally stopped.” Mika said, coming to a stop directly in front of him. “I suppose I should take my turn.”
He reached up, grabbed a huge clump of scales on his own neck—hundreds of them, far more than Vorthar had taken in all his turns combined—and ripped them out.
Pachuk!
Five hundred scales. Gone.
“AHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Vorthar’s scream split the air. He collapsed, rolling, thrashing, his body convulsing as the mirrored agony detonated through every nerve, every muscle, every inch of his being.
“IT HURTS! IT HURTS! IT HURTS SO MUCH! AHHH!”
Mika watched him writhe, and his smile slowly widened into something with an edge of genuine sadism.
“Since you took so many turns on your own, I’ll be taking a few extras as well.”
“WAIT—PLEASE—STOP —”
Mika grabbed another clump from his thighs and yanked.
“AHHHH, NO, STOP IT, IT HURTS—PLEASE—IT HURTS TOO MUCH!”
But Mika was on a rampage, and he did not stop.
“I’ll take this one…”
PACHUK!
“These scales look annoying…”
PACHUK!
“And this one, too…And this.”
PACHUK!
Scale after scale. Patch after patch. He tore at his own body with the indifference of a man cleaning his fingernails, and with every rip, the Dragon King of the Black Dragon Race screamed, wept, and begged.
When Vorthar had fought his brothers centuries ago, he’d managed to endure the removal of roughly four thousand five hundred scales before reaching his limit.
That had been the greatest pain of his life.
Mika had already passed sixteen thousand.
Only about four thousand scales remained on the king’s ruined body, and the agony that wracked him now was beyond anything he had experienced in three hundred years of existence.
He was beyond screaming, beyond begging, beyond dignity. He was just a broken, weeping thing on the floor of his own sacred hall.
Korra watched frozen, her hand pressed to her mouth.
This was her husband. The man who had never, in all their centuries of marriage, shown a single moment of weakness.
And he was groveling.
“See, Auntie?”
Anya’s voice was silk wrapped around a knife, her eyes glittering with cold satisfaction.
“This is why I told you not to underestimate Mika. This is nothing to him—child’s play. One of his greatest strengths is enduring pain so that the ones he loves never have to.”
Her eyes flickered with something old and sad.
“Your husband chose the worst possible game to challenge him with.”
“Exactly. It’s his own fault.” Astrid nodded, arms crossed. “He’s the one who decided to do this to Mika, so he gets what he deserves.”
She was remembering the burning cross, the skinned body, the endless, endless hours of torture in Marcus’s domain.
Everything Mika had endured. Everything he’d kept hidden behind a smile and a promise that he was fine.
After that, a few dragon scales were nothing. Nothing at all.
Charlotte sighed pitifully at the broken king.
“Stupid dragon.”
Maria, meanwhile, had wrapped her arms around Nuri and pressed the little dragon’s face into her chest, shielding her eyes.
“What’s going on?!” Nuri squirmed. “Why is my shitty father crying like that? I want to see! I want to see!”
But Maria held her firm, murmuring, “As shitty as he is, this isn’t something a daughter should watch. Trust me.”
Finally, Mika stood over Vorthar, one foot planted on the king’s chest, pinning him to the floor. He leaned down, golden scales still gleaming across most of his body, and smiled.
“Come on, Uncle. Just a few more scales left. Then the game will be over.”
“STOP! PLEASE! I BEG YOU—NO!” Vorthar clawed at the floor, tears streaming down his face. “YOU WIN! YOU WIN! I GIVE YOU THE WIN! JUST STOP!”
But Mika’s smile didn’t waver. “No. I don’t like leaving games incomplete.”
He reached down and grabbed the final patches of scales—tearing them free one by one.
“NO! PLEASE! AHHHHHHHH!”
The scene was surreal: a human boy, casually skinning the Dragon King alive, piece by agonizing piece, while he shrieked like a wounded animal.
Finally, Mika pulled the last scale free. He then pushed off the king’s chest, took a step back, and clapped his hands together with a satisfied sound.
“Wow. That was a nice game.” He rolled his shoulders, stretching like a man emerging from a pleasant nap. “I feel completely refreshed.”
Behind him, Vorathor lay twitching on the cold stone floor, whimpering softly, every scale of his body gone, his dignity in ruins.
Mika turned and began walking back toward Korra. But Korra had already pounced onto him.
“Mika!”
Her hands were everywhere—his chest, his arms, his face, his neck—patting and prodding and searching with the frantic desperation of a woman who had just watched someone she loved walk through fire.
“Does it hurt?! Are you in pain?! Sometimes the sensation lingers even after the test ends. There are documented cases where the nerves remain sensitized for hours, sometimes days—Mika, say something, are you alright?!”
Mika caught her wrists gently and held them still.
“Korra. I’m fine. Look at me.” His voice was calm, steady, utterly unshaken. “There’s no pain. No lingering sensation. Nothing. I promise.”
“But—”
“Really. It was honestly quite refreshing. Like a very thorough massage.”
Korra stared at him. Searched his face for any sign that he was hiding something and found nothing.
Her shoulders sagged with relief—but the relief was immediately replaced by confusion.
How? How could anyone endure that kind of torture without flinching?
“Anyway.” Mika said, releasing her wrists and glancing back at the twitching, half-conscious form of the Dragon King. “Shouldn’t you be looking after your husband? You are his wife, after all.”
Korra’s expression curdled. “I don’t give a shit about that man.”
The profanity, delivered in her elegant, queenly voice, was jarring enough to make the sisters blink.
“He brought this upon himself.” Korra continued, her crimson eyes blazing. “Imagine what would have happened if the roles were reversed. Imagine if you were the one on the ground right now, writhing in agony while he stood over you gloating.”
She turned her head and spat in the direction of her husband’s crumpled form.
“I don’t care if he’s crippled for the rest of his life. I don’t care if he never walks again. He tried to—he wanted to—”
She couldn’t finish. Her voice shook with fury.
Mika shook his head slowly. “Even so, you might want to tone down the concern. Just a little.”
He nodded toward the other side of the hall.
“You have an audience.”
Korra froze. Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head.
Nuri was staring at her with wide, puzzled eyes. The sisters had stopped their quiet snickering and were now watching her with doubtful, calculating gazes.
The way she’d thrown herself at Mika, the way she’d dismissed her own husband’s suffering without a flicker of hesitation, the way she was still holding Mika’s hands…
It hadn’t been the concern of a family friend. It had been the concern of a woman terrified of losing her man.
Korra’s face flushed. But she recovered quickly. No one could possibly know. The idea was too absurd. Too far-fetched.
A dragon queen and a human boy? No one would ever suspect.
She turned back to Mika and pouted, keeping her voice low enough that only he could hear.
“I feel so sad right now.”
“Sad?” Mika’s brow furrowed. “Because I beat up your husband? I really didn’t want to, at the start. But he pissed me off. I had to.”
“No. Not that.” Korra shook her head, and for a moment, her regal composure cracked. “I’m sad because you never told me about what happened to you in the past. Everyone here seems to know something, even my own daughter knows something—and I…”
She pressed a hand to her chest, over her heart.
“I don’t know anything, Mika. I want to know everything about you, too.”
Mika’s expression softened.
“You may think of me as just a side piece.” Korra continued, her voice barely above a whisper. “A woman you can play with when it suits you. And I don’t mind that! Truly! I’ve accepted it. But to me, Mika—”
She took a shaky breath.
“To me, you are everything. And the fact that I keep discovering these parts of you that everyone else already knew about—it breaks my heart a little. Every time.”
She looked up at him, her crimson eyes glistening.
“So please. Tell me. Later. Not everything—I know you have secrets. But tell me what you can, so I’m not the only one left in the dark.”
Mika was quiet for a moment. Then he reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Fine. When we have time alone, I’ll tell you.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Her face lit up like a sunrise.
“As for what you said about being a mere side piece…”
He glanced back at the Dragon King, then returned his gaze to her.
“I’ll prove to you how wrong that is.”
Korra’s breath caught. “What do you mean—?”
But she never got to finish the question.
“You INSOLENT BRAT!!!!”
The roar shook the hall to its foundations. A flash of blinding black and crimson light detonated in the center of the room, and when Korra and Mika turned, the broken man was gone.
In his place stood a monster.
Vorthar had transformed. His body had swelled, doubled, tripled, until he towered over the hall—a massive black dragon, muscles like forged iron beneath gleaming obsidian scales, wings that blotted out the torchlight, a tail that cracked the stone floor with every twitch.
His face elongated into a crowned snout, and from between his jaws curled wisps of black fire.
This was the true form of the King of the Black Dragon Race that had made armies retreat without a single arrow loosed.
And he was staring directly at Mika.
“YOU THINK THIS IS OVER?” Vorathar’s voice was a thunderclap. “YOU THINK A MERE HUMAN CAN DEFEAT ME?!”
Korra threw herself in front of Mika, her arms spread wide.
“Vorathar, STOP! What are you doing?!”
“I CANNOT ACCEPT THIS!” The dragon’s roar cracked the stone beneath his feet. “A BOARD GAME! A TEST OF ENDURANCE! THESE ARE NOTHING! NOTHING!”
“I AM THE DRAGON KING! I HAVE RULED FOR THREE CENTURIES! AND SOME INSIGNIFICANT HUMAN BOY THINKS HE CAN HUMILIATE ME?!”
His aura exploded outward—black and crimson, wild and uncontrolled.
The berserk state. Korra recognized it immediately. All black dragons had the capacity for it: a primal rage that unlocked unprecedented power at the cost of reason.
Her husband had not entered this state in over a century. The last time he had, he had leveled an entire mountain range.
“FIGHT ME, BOY!” Vorathar bellowed, his burning eyes fixed on Mika. “NO TRICKS! NO GAMES! JUST POWER AGAINST POWER! LET’S SEE YOU GET OUT OF THIS ONE!”
Korra’s fury matched his.
“He’s a HUMAN, Vorathar! The other challenges at least gave him some chance—intelligence, willpower. But this? This is just brute force! What could he possibly do against you like this?!”
“I DON’T CARE!”
“That’s IT!” Korra’s patience finally snapped. “You shitty, pathetic excuse for a husband—!”
And then she transformed as well.
Her body expanded in a swirl of purplish-black haze. Scales rippled across her skin, her limbs thickened, her spine lengthened.
Nuri cried out—”Mama!”—but Korra was beyond hearing. When the transformation settled, a second black dragon stood in the hall.
Smaller than the king, yes. But where Vorthar was brute force incarnate, Korra’s dragon form was beautiful.
Her scales gleamed with a iridescent sheen. Her wings were proportioned with an elegance her husband’s lacked. Her long neck arched gracefully, and her eyes held a seductiveness that somehow survived even in dragon form.
It was a sight that stole Mika’s breath.
In all their time together, Korra had never shown him this—she was too self-conscious, she always said, too aware of the difference in their species. So he’d never seen her like this.
He stared, utterly mesmerized, as the two dragons squared off—the king radiating black fire, the queen radiating cold, lethal grace.
“You’ve gone too far today, Vorathar.” She growled. “If I let this slide, you’ll think you can do anything you want. Not anymore.”
Vorathar laughed—a horrible, grinding sound.
“I’ve tolerated your coldness for centuries, woman! I let you push me away because I knew I deserved it! But today—”
Black fire licked from his jaws. “Today you defend this boy over your own husband! THIS I WILL NOT TOLERATE!”
“Defend him? You pathetic excuse for a king.” Korra’s voice dripped with contempt. “You call yourself a ruler and you’re picking a fight with an ordinary human boy. And you wonder why I can’t stand the sight of you.”
“Enough! I’ll remind you who the true sovereign of this realm is!”
“Try it. I haven’t been idle these past years.”
Their auras crashed together and the hall shook. Outside, across the mountain peaks of Dragoska, every dragon in the realm felt the pressure of two titans about to collide.
Families huddled together. Warriors reached for their weapons. The air itself seemed to hold its breath.
Nuri grabbed Mika’s arm, her tiny claws digging into his sleeve.
“Mika! Mika, do something! Make them stop! Please!”
Mika was about to do exactly that. Korra was powerful, but she wasn’t a match for her husband in full berserk state. If this turned into a real battle, she would lose.
He was about to step forward and teach the Dragon King a more thorough lesson, when all of a sudden someone else decided to do the same.
“Hmph…”
The voice was quiet. Elegant. Almost lazy. And yet it cut through the chaos ever so easily.
“A Dragon Sovereign, challenging my child to a duel. How…disappointing.”
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