In the last few months, sothing had changed within Jolthar. The beast king’s power had been growing along with him, unlocking the new potential for Jolthar. He can turn into any form of beast if put his mind to it and sufficient mana is present in him.
Each battle, each confrontation, each mont of pushing himself to the limit had unlocked sothing. New beast forms were becoming accessible—creatures of legend and myth whose shapes he could now assu. He could feel himself progressing further up Tier 9, approaching sothing greater.
Tier 10 was close.
He could sense it, that threshold where power beca sothing fundantally different, where mortal limits gave way to sothing approaching the divine. But it was still distant, like seeing a mountain peak from the valley below. Near enough to recognize, far enough to require a journey.
But for now, Tier 9 was more than sufficient.
The first wave of Shinokishi reached him, their grey blades cutting through the air with lethal precision.
Jolthar’s hand shot out—not to block with a weapon, but to channel pure telekinetic force.
Twenty knights were lifted off their feet simultaneously, suspended in mid-air by invisible power. With a gesture, Jolthar hurled them backward into their advancing comrades. Bodies collided, armor clanged, and the organized charge beca chaos.
"Formation!" the Shinokishi commander shouted.
"Don’t engage individually! Surround and—"
His orders were cut off as Jolthar’s telekinesis grabbed him specifically, lifting the commander fifty feet into the air before slamming him down into the courtyard hard enough to crater the stone.
The knights regrouped quickly—credit to their training—forming a tightening circle around Jolthar with shields raised and weapons ready. They advanced in coordinated steps, a wall of grey armor designed to overwhelm through disciplined pressure.
Then the Aethar Corps mages unleashed their assault.
Binding spells lashed out—chains of pure magical energy designed to restrain and immobilize. Fire spells followed, creating a conflagration that would have incinerated a normal person. Ice spells froze the air itself, creating a killing zone of supernatural cold.
The combined magical assault struck Jolthar’s position, and for a mont, smoke and energy obscured everything.
Halvren allowed himself a smile.
"Got him. No one survives—"
A pulse of green energy erupted from the smoke, dispersing it instantly.
Jolthar stood there completely unmarked.
The binding spells had simply... slid off him, unable to find purchase against his aura. The fire had been deflected by telekinetic barriers. The ice had lted before touching him.
"Irritating," Jolthar said, brushing imaginary dust from his shoulder.
"You’re starting to annoy ."
The mages’ eyes widened. Their most powerful prepared spells had done nothing?
"Again!" one of the senior mages shouted.
"Concentrated assault on—"
Jolthar’s aura flared, and several mages actually cried out as the pressure of his power disrupted their spell formations.
"My turn," Jolthar said quietly.
[Raidorgan form initiated]
[Beast King’s Authority]
As he said, the green-colored energy flared up around him, circling around him like a hurricane. He bent forward, and his body started expand.
Then he began to change.
It started with his size. His fra began expanding—not explosively like the Fudrachen transformation, but steadily, inexorably.
His skin began to shift, taking on a texture that wasn’t quite scales and wasn’t quite fur, but sothing in between. The color changed to a distinctive beige, marked with patterns that seed to shift and flow.
His face elongated, becoming reptilian but retaining elents of mammalian features. Two horns erupted from his skull—not straight like a bull’s, but curved and elegant, gleaming with inner light.
His body stretched, becoming serpentine in length while maintaining powerful musculature. A tail erged, thick and muscular, capable of being used as a weapon. His arms extended, hands becoming massive clawed appendages that could rend steel.
And then the wings.
They burst from his back in a display that made everyone watching gasp—massive, mbranous structures that stretched impossibly wide, each one large enough to create shade for dozens of people. They weren’t dragon wings in the traditional European sense, nor were they the feathered wings of birds. They were sothing unique, covered in the sa beige fur-skin as his body, structured with bone and sinew that spoke of both power and grace.
The transformation completed, and where Jolthar Kaezhlar had stood, there was now a dragon.
But not any dragon from legend or myth that most present would recognize. This was sothing older, sothing that predated the empire’s formation, sothing from a ti when such creatures were gods in their own right.
The dragon was perhaps sixty feet long from snout to tail tip, standing thirty feet tall at the shoulder. Its beige coloring was marked with darker patterns that seed to glow faintly with inner power. The fur-skin covering gave it an appearance that was both regal and alien. The two horns curved backward from its skull in elegant arcs. Its eyes—still recognizably Jolthar’s—blazed with green energy from the Beast King Aura that now suffused every cell of this massive form.
The courtyard had gone silent.
Every knight, every mage, every observer stood frozen in shock at the sight before them.
Behind his hastily erected barrier, Andrion let out a sound that was half laugh, half whimper. "That’s... that’s a fucking dragon!! He just turned into a dragon. A big fucking dragon."
His voice carried equal parts fear and amusent, the reaction of soone whose mind was struggling to process what their eyes were showing them.
Milan was completely speechless. His mouth worked soundlessly for several seconds before he managed to speak.
"What... how... that’s not possible."
"Apparently he can make it possible," Andrion interrupted, his voice pitching higher with barely controlled hysteria.
"Because there’s one man right there. Right there in our courtyard. That young man nad Jolthar who can make anything possible."
"I thought he was just a swordsman. Just how many secrets does have?"
Andrion and Milan both wondered.
The Shinokishi commander, who had recovered from being slamd into the ground, stared up at the dragon with an expression of pure disbelief.
His voice was barely a whisper.
"Retreat. Sound the retreat. We can’t—"
The dragon’s head swung toward him, and when Jolthar spoke, his voice was amplified by the massive form, carrying harmonics that resonated in everyone’s chest.
"Too late for that."
The dragon’s tail swept across the courtyard in a single motion, and twenty knights were sent flying like toys scattered by a child’s hand. They crashed into walls, into each other, their grey armor providing no protection against the sheer physical force.
The dragon’s wings spread fully—an intimidating display that blocked out the evening sky from the perspective of those on the ground. When they beat downward, the resulting wind was hurricane force. Dozens of knights were knocked off their feet. The lighter mages were actually lifted into the air and thrown backward.
"Fire!" the senior mage scread desperately.
"All offensive spells! Now!"
The Aethar Corps unleashed everything they had. Lightning bolts that could vaporize stone. Fire spells that burned hot enough to lt tal. Ice lances that could punch through castle walls. Void spheres designed to erase matter. Wind blades that could slice through anything.
All forty-five mages attacked simultaneously, their most powerful combat magic directed at a single target.
The spells struck the dragon’s form, creating explosions of light and energy that lit up the evening sky.
When the magical assault cleared, everyone leaned forward to see the result.
The dragon was unmarked. The beige fur skin hadn’t even been singed.
The Beast King Aura had simply absorbed or deflected every spell.
"Oh gods," one of the mages whispered.
"We’re all going to die."
The dragon’s maw opened, revealing teeth the size of swords, and when it spoke, the voice carried amusent alongside power.
"I warned you. I told you exactly what would happen. But you didn’t listen."
One massive clawed hand swept down, slamming into a cluster of knights. Armor crumpled. Bodies were thrown aside like ragdolls. The dragon’s tail whipped around, creating a zone of devastation wherever it struck.
"Fall back!" the Shinokishi commander ordered, finally accepting reality.
"Organized retreat! Protect the mages!"
But there was nowhere to retreat to. The dragon was too large, too fast, and too overwhelmingly powerful. Every movent displaced dozens of warriors. Every sweep of wing or tail created casualties.
And through it all, the Beast King Aura blazed brighter, the green energy seeming to feed on the chaos, growing stronger with each mont of combat.
From their protected position, Milan and Andrion watched in a mixture of horror and awe as a single transford individual systematically dismantled an elite imperial force that should have been able to conquer a small city.
"We’re witnessing history," Milan said quietly.
"The day the empire learned that Jolthar Kaezhlar wasn’t just dangerous. He was apocalyptic."
"Yeah," Andrion agreed, his voice still carrying that edge of hysterical amusent.
"And we’re his friends. I genuinely can’t decide if that makes us the luckiest or unluckiest people in the capital."
The dragon roared—a sound that shook buildings for blocks around and sent birds fleeing from their roosts across half the city—and the battle continued.
But everyone present already knew how it would end.
Not with the dragon’s defeat.
With the empire’s humiliation.
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