Rosalia took a few steps back, her draconic form wavering before melting away, her body returning to her human shape. She had believed he was dead, yet now he sat atop their most sacred beast as if it had accepted him. What kind of twisted joke was this? Around her, the other warriors also returned to their human forms, their faces pale and hollow with exhaustion, only for that exhaustion to be swallowed by disbelief.
Violent gusts of wind slammed into them as the dragon descended from the sky. Its massive legs crashed into the earth with enough force to make the ground tremble beneath their feet, stones jumping, dust exploding outward, and deep imprints sinking into the soil.
Gasps ripped through the crowd as everyone realized that someone was riding it. For a breath, nobody spoke, as if even their voices had frozen in horror. In thousands of years of their clan's history, not even the chieftain would dare commit such sacrilege. To them, only the Fire Dragon Clan they despised could be shameless enough to defile something so sacred, so pure, and so noble.
Yet in that moment, nobody spoke. All eyes were locked on Max, while shame weighed heavily on his face. He looked at them, but his gaze never dared to meet Rosalia's directly. He wanted to tell them that he had found a way to fix everything, yet the words died the moment he opened his mouth.
"Max!" In the end, Light was the one who shattered the suffocating silence. His eyes shone with a brightness that made it seem as though he were looking upon a god. To him, Max already looked like one of them, no, more than one of them. He looked like a leader descending from the heavens before his people. Deep respect swelled inside Light's heart, because a brotherhood born from kindness was not something so easily broken.
"Get back!" Henry grabbed Light's arm and yanked him backward. He had seen what Max had become. He had seen how terrifying he was when he lost control, so how had he recovered from that so easily?
Henry could not understand it. The Fire Dragon Clan might have been driven off for now, but in their place, an even more terrifying monster had returned to them, and this time, he had come back riding their ancestral beast.
"Get off the sacred beast!" Henry roared, fury and fear twisting together in his voice. He knew he could not fight Max, but he also could not endure the sight of their ancestral beast being humiliated in such a way.
What he received in return was a roar from the dragon that shook the entire mountain range. Those vast dragon eyes cut straight into his soul, cold and ancient, as if warning him that one more step would be his last.
Yet Max did not hide behind the dragon's protection. He leaped down from its back and placed a hand on its head, and to everyone's shock, the beast gave in like a living being that trusted him completely.
"I've come here not to make enemies of your clan, Great Chief Henry." Max pressed his fist against his chest and met Henry's eyes with a conviction too firm to look false. "I have a way to repay what I did to your clan. If you would just listen to me for a moment—"
"Get out!" Rosalia shrieked, drawing every eye toward her. Her breathing turned ragged, her heart thrown into chaos. She could not tell whether he had come to mock them or to bring them even more ruin, but one thing she knew for certain was that this was no time for empty words. Fix everything? The thought itself felt like an insult. She wanted to spit in the face of those words.
"Rosalia... I—" Max tried to explain himself, but she gave him no room to breathe. Purple flames burst to life around her as her body transformed once more.
"Don't do it!" Henry cried out, panic surging through him as he lunged for his daughter, but he was too late. Her claw smashed into Max and sent him hurtling into the distance, and she shot after him at once, ready to strike again.
"I told my father that if you became a danger to us, I would kill you! I swore it to him! I said I could take care of your situation, and you destroyed everything I loved! You betrayed the trust I placed in you! So why, Max!? Why should I let you come here and mock us even more?" Her thick tail crashed into his torso and drove him into the ground with an explosion.
Every blow hurt like hell, but Max did not dare hit back. His natural ability protected him, even more now than before, so he let Rosalia pour all of it onto him if that was what she needed. He was a man, and he knew how to own his mistakes. Her body crashed down on him from above, her knees slamming into his thighs while her fists rained against his face, but she was too weak, unable to draw even a single drop of blood.
"Why won't you die!?" Tears spilled down her face as figures came rushing from behind, only stopping a short distance away at Henry's command. Light looked the most shaken of them all. He did not understand why everyone hated Max so much, but if even Rosalia hated him, then Max must have done something terrible to hurt her. So he stayed silent, staring as the dust slowly rolled over the place where Max lay beneath her.
Max gave no answer. Instead, he slowly stretched out his hand, and a vast amount of mana burst from his palm, spreading through the surroundings at a speed too fast for any human eye to catch. The ancestral dragon gave a joyful leap, greedily drawing in the mana as its scales began to glow with purple light.
The greenery around the mountain thickened and deepened in color almost instantly. The mana in the air, which had once tasted only average, turned rich and sweet as it nourished the people, leaving their eyes wide with disbelief. None of them understood where it had come from, but Rosalia did. Her trembling fist stopped in midair as she stared deep into Max's eyes, shock spreading across her face.
"You... You can return the mana you absorbed?" Her voice shook, and everyone who heard those words nearly went numb. An ability like that had never once been recorded in their history. Among all those gathered, Henry's eyes shone the brightest, lit by a fresh greed as a dangerous thought began to take shape in his mind.