Chapter 215: A Being Beyond Mortality

Chapter 215: A Being Beyond Mortality

Late Evening - Late Fall : The Tree of Prayer

- Vernados Peroti ~ (The dragon who originally came to arrest Vasilias and Amara for the murder of Cyrus Aetos in Chapter 201)

*Fwooosh* *flap-fwoosh* *flap-fwoosh* I zipped through the evening sky as I made my way toward the center of Valtivar with great haste. -The ceremony should be starting soon. I hope I can catch them before they leave...-

Technically, I was still on a mission that involved the destruction of the Helvig estate, but instead of the mission being to find and arrest the culprits, the investigation was reset, and the aforementioned culprits were to be questioned without punishment.

It was quite a sharp change in direction, but with the information I stumbled across, such a shift was to be expected. The only problem was that the information I planned to report wasn't what caused the change. -For the higher-ups to reset the investigation yet not know of the blatant manipulation of information... Just what is going on?-

A few days prior, I had met up with a young dragon named Vasilias Whyte, who was closely associated with the culprits. But instead of arresting him like I was ordered, he pointed out an incredible discrepancy in the information I was provided, which, in turn, made their arrests impossible.

Regardless, as I was flying back to Bahamut to report it, I was still quite nervous that the information he gave me could have been false and that I would be punished for not following orders, but thankfully that wasn't the case.

By the time I arrived, the investigation had already been reset, and we were ordered to reinvestigate everything from the ground up while purging our prior knowledge because of something called Suspicion of Honesty. It was basically a protocol normally used when a witness or investigator is caught or suspected of lying.

At the time, I thought it all made sense, thinking someone must have just reported some other kind of information discrepancy before I could. But when I finally reported my observations directly to Miss Exypnos (his boss's boss), she started panicking and sent her direct subordinates to oversee the investigation personally.

It was a worrying reaction, to say the least. -If Miss Exypnos didn't know about an investigator or group of investigators lying, then what caused the Suspicion of Honesty?-

I quickly fell into a rabbit hole of inexplicable questions as I hopelessly tried to figure out the situation.

But, in the next instant, the walls of the hole I would have struggled to escape vanished like they were never around me in the first place.

"Huh?" My eyes went wide as I looked at the horizon and saw an absolutely colossal beam of light stretch into the sky like a rising sun. -W..what.. is that...-

The blinding light alone made me feel like death was looming over me and made the beat of my heart start to slow down, but I only started to panic when I realized where the beam came from. -The Tree of Prayer should be just over the horizon.. don't tell me...-

I immediately sped up, using every ounce of strength in my wings to fly as fast as possible, and darted over the horizon.

*crunch-crunch-crackle-crunch* Slamming my way through the smaller branches, I followed the tail through the fog, but it kept going until I had gone just short of half a kilometer into the canopy.

-T..the tail alone is nearly 400 meters long... Is this really a dragon?!- Continuing down the spine that was barely being held together by a trace, yet still considerably large amount of lingering divinity, a knot of anxiety grew in my stomach. -Just how much divinity did it have when it was alive for not all of it to have dissipated already?-

I found it hard to believe it could be a dragon with how massive it was, as even the biggest ancients ever recorded were only around 130 meters tall, but there was simply nothing about the skeleton that didn't seem draconic.

At least that was the case until I got to the base of the neck and saw something that made assuming it was a dragon much more outlandish.

*crackle* Landing on a sizable branch that had grown through the skeleton over the countless years it laid there, I turned to the base of the skeleton's neck with a look of confusion. "What the f*ck am I looking at?"

In the area where the base of the neck should have been, the spine split apart and formed three identical, smaller vertebrae that then grew out to form three distinctly different necks. -So it's not a dragon, but a creature with multiple heads? How would that even work?-

With my curiosity quickly blotting out my other emotions, I promptly stepped off the branch and descended farther into the canopy to try and find one of the detached necks of the creature.

But when I eventually stumbled across one of them, my confusion returned like a wave. "I must be hallucinating.. r..right?" Drooped across a large branch with countless smaller branches woven through it was a massive, and distinctly draconian neck and head.

The size of it made me shiver, as its head alone was nearly as big as I was, but I was so intrigued that I simply ignored the fear.

-A multi-headed dragon, hundreds of meters larger than even the largest and oldest of ancients...- Only a single theory made sense. -So there really is a stage beyond Ancient...-

As I crept closer to the colossal, hanging skull of the dragon, I finally noticed a large, but deteriorated golden ring around one of its countless massive horns, with the only remaining legible text reading: 'Lernaean~'

-Lernaean... Was that.. its name?- I memorized the word in a heartbeat, hoping it would eventually lead me to some information about the colossal, multi-headed dragon when I returned to Bahamut.

But I was still left in a pit full of questions with no answers. -Could the other ancients have come into the fog out of curiosity fueled by the tail sticking out of the canopy? Or did they come here for a different reason...-

Quickly getting lost in thought, I glanced down toward the rune within the tree trunk that remained far out of sight. -I wonder...-