Chapter 54 — The Masochist's Gambit

Jay let out a long, shuddering sigh that tasted of iron and spent adrenaline. He looked up at the tectonic wall of scales that was Draco.
「Lena. Clara. Whatever the hell happens next... stay out of it. Don't help me,」 Jay said, his voice terrifyingly level.Lena tilted her massive lion head, her golden mane shimmering with residual heat. 「Why?」「Just because we skipped the middle act doesn’t mean the finale is gonna be a cakewalk,」 Jay replied.
Then, Jay did something that made every tactician in the kingdom want to lobotomize themselves. He snapped his fingers, and a wave of high-tier restorative mana washed over Draco, knitting the dragon’s crippled front leg back together until it was pristine.
The silence that followed was heavy enough to crush bone.
「Why would you do that?」 Draco asked, his voice a low vibration of genuine confusion.Jay laughed—a jagged, ugly sound. 「I know you’ve got a dragon-human hybrid form. Switch to it. I’d hate to whoop your ah—almost forgot the kids were listening—I’d hate for you to blame your damn zip code-sized body when I beat you into the dirt. Shape up.」
Draco didn’t need to be told twice. He threw back his head and roared as a pillar of concentrated solar fire and mana erupted from his core, lancing into the clouds. His massive bulk began to collapse inward, compressing, turning density into a weapon.
The three-hundred-meter god shrank down to a two-meter nightmare. He stood on two legs, draped in shimmering draconic scales that fit like organic plate armor, four wings tucked tight, and a tail that flicked like a razor-wire whip.
The moment the fire died, Jay was already in his space. No monologue. No warning.
「Lancer Technique: Fourth Form...」Draco’s eyes widened. 「What—」「Home Run.」
Jay swung the Knobbed Club with the torque of a dying star. The impact sounded like a car crash in a cathedral. Draco was launched, a blurred streak of violence that tore through three city blocks, leveling whatever ruins were left standing. He bounced off the cobblestones, skipped like a stone on water, and finally dug his heels in to stop the momentum a full kilometer away—stopping exactly one meter from the royal castle’s gates.
The two red dragon reinforcements lunged at Jay’s flanks, but the girls were faster. Lena, a golden blur of fur and fury, swiped the one on the right, her claws carving trenches in its hide and sending it tumbling three hundred meters. Clara clamped her jaws onto the throat of the left one and whipped her head, tossing the multi-ton beast like a ragdoll.
「Don’t worry, Papa. We got this,」 Lena growled, her voice a tectonic rumble.Clara added a sharp, toothy grin. 「Yeah. Go ahead.」「We are going on a goddamn unlimited shopping spree after this,」 Jay chuckled.
In the blink of an eye, Draco returned. He didn't fly; he teleported through pure speed, coming down with an overhead axe-kick. Jay parried, the resulting shockwave shattering the pavement beneath them and rattling Jay’s teeth.
Draco landed, standing chest-to-chest with Jay. He scoffed, wiping a trickle of black blood from his lip. 「Now we’re even.」「Fair enough,」 Jay laughed.
Jay didn't reach for his weapons. Instead, he jammed his spear and the Knobbed Club into the massive Mythril Bolt sticking out of the ground nearby. He took a classic, low-center-of-gravity fighting stance.
「Hand-to-hand?」 Draco asked, mimicking the martial pose. 「Bold.」Jay smirked. 「Sure. Why not?」
As the giant golden lion and silver wolf tore into the red dragons in the background, the two "kings" began their dance.
Jay led with a lightning-fast double jab; Draco parried both with his palms. Draco countered with a snapping low shin kick; Jay stepped into the pocket, checking the motion before it could peak. Jay spun a roundhouse kick aiming to take Draco’s head off, but the dragon ducked beneath the arc.
Draco dropped to all fours for a sweeping leg-trip; Jay leaped, suspended in the air for a fraction of a second. Draco used that beat to launch a spinning midsection kick, which Jay caught against his ribs with a grunt.
They broke away, panting, circling each other like starving wolves. They charged again. Draco feinted a jab; Jay read the tale and beat him to the punch.Draco parried the lead hand but ate a follow-up right cross that snapped his head back. As Jay’s feet left the ground from the momentum, he flipped, driving his heel into Draco’s temple.
Both men spat blood. Both wore the same devilish, psychotic grin.
Draco lunged, wrapping Jay in a crushing bear hug. Jay didn't panic; he hooked his leg, arched his back, and executed a brutal belly-to-belly suplex. The moment they hit the dirt, Jay rolled, gripped Draco’s head, and drove a jagged knee into the dragon’s face.
Draco recovered with supernatural speed. He caught Jay’s trailing leg, swung him like a sack of grain, and slammed him into the earth. Jay kicked his leg free and used the momentum to stomp Draco’s face into the rubble before springing back up.
They stood, chest-heaving, covered in dust and gore, both smiling like they were having the time of their lives.
◽ At the Old Ruins ◽
The spectators were frozen. The sheer brutality of the fistfight—the fact that a human was trading strikes with a Dragon King without being turned into a red mist—defied every law of magic they knew.
「Who the fuck skips the third phase and goes straight to the fourth?」 Iris muttered, her face a mask of annoyed disbelief. 「Like, bruh. Are you actually stupid?」Lisa patted Iris’s shoulder, though her eyes were glued to Jay’s rippling muscles on the projection. 「I mean... It is Jay. Rationality died a long time ago.」「Still doesn't excuse him,」 Iris pouted.Lisa giggled, her voice dropping into a sultry, dangerous register as she watched Jay slam a knee into Draco’s jaw. 「Yes... but he’s so... mmph. Handsome. He looks like he could devour me ten times over and still be hungry.」Iris turned, staring at Lisa in pure, unadulterated shock. 「Sister... aren't you a literal Saintess?」Lisa’s grin widened, her eyes dark with a very un-holy hunger. 「Well, I am a woman at the end of the day, darling.」【Seems like in this universe, even the church girls are sexual deviants,】 Iris thought, sweating nervously. 「Err... okay. If you say so.」
 ◽ The Azure Capital ◽
While the brawl raged, the twenty-meter Mythril Bolt began to glow. It was shrinking, its mass being sucked into Jay’s spear and club like a vacuum.The weapons weren't just changing; they were becoming impossibly dense, vibrating with a lethal frequency.
Draco blocked a hook and scoffed. 「Tell me, Jay Von Lancer... why the obsession with fistfights?」「Because you’re closer to the victim,」 Jay hissed, a cruel, jagged grin splitting his face.Draco chuckled. 「That’s fucked up. I like it.」
They vanished, reappearing in the sky in a blur of motion.Draco launched a fireball; Jay didn't dodge, he punched it, creating a vacuum that snuffed the flame. He closed the gap, buried a fist in Draco’s gut, and followed up with a spinning uppercut that rattled Draco’s brain in his skull. Jay front-flipped into a heel kick to the crown of Draco's head, then finished with a one-inch-punch to the sternum that sent the dragon hurtling toward the clouds.
Draco coughed out a spray of black ichor. 【What the hell was that?】 He looked down at Jay, who was suddenly vibrating with a cold, terrifying fury. 【Why the hell is he so mad?】「Who the fuck do you think you are, using magic in a fistfight?」 Jay spat, his voice trembling with "disrespected" rage. 「Motherfucker, I will end you for that.」Draco stared. 【Oh nah, he’s actually tripping.】
Draco vanished and reappeared, putting his entire weight into a punch that shattered Jay’s guard. He followed through with a double-leg dropkick to Jay’s chest. Jay coughed blood, sliding back through the air.
Draco scoffed, mimicry in his eyes. 「How’d you like that, motherfucker? Kicked you dead in your chest. No magic. Just physics.」Jay wiped the blood from his mouth and let out a manic laugh. 「That’s more like it!」