Elden Ring: 2,000 Hour Speedrunner Becomes a Dragon Chapter 44 44: Disguise

"Sister Lansseax, when did this Master Shugo arrive at the temple?" Lucia asked in a hushed cadence, his eyes tracing the giant blacksmith's retreating silhouette.

"Roughly five winters ago," Lansseax recalled, her gaze drifting toward the high rafters. "I rember it was a crisp, biting December dawn. When the knights broke the frost to clear the plaza snow, they found him collapsed against a street corner. He had been butchered within an inch of his life. My imdiate thought was that he was a broken gladiator cast out from one of the capital's arenas, but then our dical priests discovered his lacerations had already been ticulously bound and treated. If not for that anonymous gauze, the mountain snow would have claid him hours before."

Lucia's brow knit together. His gar-honed intuition flared with a sudden, localized alarm. "And after he woke? Did he never na the hounds who broke him, or the saint who patched his hide?"

"Never," Lansseax sighed, a small, troubled breath escaping her. "Father Karen, who commands our logistics, interrogated him down to the marrow. But whenever the topic was broached, Shugo would slide into a profound, hollow vacancy—as if his consciousness had been utterly fractured by so unfathomable terror."

"It wasn't until he was wandering the rear courtyards that he caught sight of our other Misbegotten talworkers hamring out plate. He lunged forward, physically gripping the robes of his attendant priest, begging us to grant him an anvil. He pleaded with us not to banish him. As you've seen, the Temple routinely shelters displaced Demi-humans and Misbegottens; those our capital plaza cannot sustain are shipped to the Eastern Sea Archipelago under Farum Azula's sovereignty. We had no reason to turn him away."

"But what we didn't calculate," Lansseax continued, her voice rising with an undeniable note of reverence, "was that his 'rudintary smithing' was a masterclass. He is the most terrifyingly gifted artisan I have ever encountered. The grand masters who forge the imperial regalia for the Golden Lineage look like children next to him. Behold."

She held up the fresh knight's broadsword Shugo had left behind. Lucia focused his mind, tracing the tal. The alloy—a seamless, impossible crystallization of Adamantite, Cold Iron, and shed Ancient Dragon Scales—shimred with a faint, sub-zero azure hue. It radiated an oppressive, dark frost; even standing in the sweltering epicenter of the foundries, the air surrounding the edge felt sharp and freezing.

"Draw your common blade," Lansseax commanded, handing the azure sword to his left hand while he held his disguise-sword in his right. "A simple cross-cut. No divine power required."

Lucia cleared his mind, bringing the two edges together in a swift, un-enchanted arc.

Clang—

With a ring as clear as glass, his mundane steel sword was sheared cleanly in two, the fractured surface as smooth as a mirror. Conversely, Shugo's azure broadsword didn't exhibit so much as a microscopic burr along its edge.

"This structural integrity... it's nearly a match for the true Dragon-Scale Blades forged by the elders in the sky," Lucia muttered, genuine awe coloring his voice. He had expected a chip or a fracture, but these two weapons existed in entirely separate cosmic tiers. He couldn't decipher whether Farum Azula's raw materials were simply that volatile, or if Shugo's hamr possessed a logic-breaking genius.

"The work of our other smiths is a grade lower, but it equips our legions perfectly," Lansseax smiled, a look of profound, sovereign pride crossing her features. "I've placed Master Shugo at the head of our educational foundries. In ti, once we perfect this automated slting matrix, we will replicate the entire infrastructure across the sky-foundries of Farum Azula. The martial yield will be absolute."

Lucia looked at his sister with newfound reverence. Only now, seeing the macro-logistics layout, did he realize that every gear in this forge was part of a terrifyingly precise calculation. The high-yield furnaces anchored by magical rune arrays, the heavy conveyor tracks reverse-engineered from Leyndell's chanical guilds, and the streamlined assembly-line training—it was a revolution. While he had been brooding over the political decay of Farum Azula, Lansseax had quietly constructed a practical laboratory to modernize the entire Dragon Dynasty.

For this lone priestess, who had held the line in a hostile foreign court for over a decade, survival was never about chanting dead prayers. She had recognized the rot of stagnation long before her conservative kin in the sky, and she was single-handedly dragging her race to match the industrial stride of the Erdtree.

It was precisely this shared clarity that had fused their bond so rapidly. In an era where the Golden Dynasty towered over a dying world, a like-minded comrade wasn't just a sibling—they were a co-conspirator against fate.

They traversed the stone corridors, the heat of the smithy fading as they reached the private rectory where Lansseax resided. While he waited for her to shed her ceremonial robes, his mind kept returning to the gray-bearded Misbegotten.

Given the absolute, ancient terror that had flickered in Shugo's eyes during their eting, Lucia was seventy percent certain the smith had recognized his royal draconic aura. Such preternatural insight was expected from the master who would later forge weapons designed to kill gods. But the core anomaly remained: Who had pulled him from the at grinder five years ago and left him precisely at the Dragon Temple's doorstep? And why play the long ga for so long without pulling the strings?

The notion that it was re coincidence was an insult to his intelligence.

He was intimately familiar with the brutal economy of the capital's Colosseums, where foreign slaves were spent like coin for the amusent of the Golden People. Broken, useless fighters were discarded routinely—but they were dumped into the open gutters and plague-alleys of the Lower District. No overseer in history had ever marched a half-dead slave up the mountain plazas to drop him at the high-security gates of the Ancient Dragon Faith or the Erdtree Cathedrals.

Lucia rubbed his temples, a headache brewing behind his eyes. Any strategist with half a brain could sll the heavy, suffocating scent of an imperial conspiracy.

Is it Marika? he deduced, parsing his mories of the future ga's lore. The tiline is too early. And if she saved him, why leave him in a dragon sanctuary rather than the deeper vaults of the Golden Temple? The pieces refused to fit the board.

"Lucia! Stop brooding!"

The heavy oak doors swung open, and Lansseax stepped out into the candlelight. She glided toward him, performing a fluid, graceful pirouette, her eyes dancing with structural mischief. "Well? Is the cloaking sufficient?"

Lucia stared, entirely dumbfounded.

The High Priestess had completely vanished. In place of her grand, sweeping white vestnts, she wore a set of oil-black, form-fitting leather armor that traced the long, dangerous curves of her human form with razor-sharp precision. Polished elk-skin boots encased her legs, twin short swords hung silently at her hip, and a heavy midnight hood and silken veil obscured her peerless features. She looked exactly like a beautiful, lethal rcenary assassin from the outer borders.

"Sufficient?" Lucia muttered, looking down at his own rusted, mismatched chainmail. "It's a complete identity theft."

Standing beside her, his carefully cultivated image as a 'rugged, veteran sellsword' had instantly imploded. He no longer looked like an operator; he looked like Sidekick A assigned to a terrifyingly high-level, gorgeous guild master.

Lucia let out a long, hollow sigh. They hadn't even passed the temple gates, and he was already exhausted enough to want to crawl back into his nest.

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