122: Chapter 122 in Progress

The illusion gave him no time to catch his breath.

It dived low, its dragon wings trailing two parallel tracks of lightning behind it—trails that lingered in the air for several breaths before dissipating. Its movements were unlike any technique White Mane had used on the training grounds—it was the posture she had assumed when pinning him down during their duel outside Yunkai.

But it was not human; it used a dragon tail instead of her legs. The tail coiled around his lumbar spine like a python and yanked downward violently.

The bone spikes at the tip of the tail hooked into the scales on his waist, pulling with such force that the edges of the scales began to lift.

Simultaneously, the tail blade stabbed directly toward his throat from above.

A fist-sized ball of lightning gathered at the tip of the tail blade during the dive, and the air ionized with a sharp hiss—like metal scraping against glass.

Its center of gravity was identical to White Mane's: leaning to the left. Because White Mane was right-handed and held her dagger in her right hand, her body instinctively leaned left.

The Storm Ancestor Dragon had read this center of gravity from the Brand, but it had not read the weakness she had told him during their post-training reviews.

"Center of gravity leans left. Yank the right tail to the right—she'll lose her balance immediately."

You read her center of gravity in the Brand, but you didn't read how I break her moves on the training ground.

She even taught me her own flaws.

When the tail blade was only three feet from his throat, he violently swung his dragon tail to the right.

He wasn't parrying the tail blade—he was wrapping it around the illusion's waist. The bone spikes at the tip hooked into the storm energy nodes on its side and yanked right—the angle and force of this pull were exactly the same as what he had done to White Mane on the training grounds.

As the tail spikes embedded into the energy nodes on its waist, the nodes emitted a low, muffled crackle, and lightning gushed out from around the spikes.

The illusion's left-leaning center of gravity was pulled off-course from the right.

The trajectory of the tail blade's thrust deviated by half an inch at the final moment.

The ball lightning grazed the scales of his jaw, slicing a very shallow blood-red mark into the nearest scale—it wasn't a cut, but rather the heat of the lightning itself burning a hair-thin scorch mark into the surface of the scale.

The fresh flesh beneath the jaw scales—the very first scale that had regrown after being pierced by an ice spear atop the walls of Meereen—was slightly thinner than the others. Beads of blood seeped from the gaps between the scales, instantly freezing into dark gold ice crystals in the storm before being blown away by the wind.

After the illusion's tail blade missed its mark, the entire dragon body briefly lost its balance due to the shifted center of gravity.

Its left wing instinctively unfurled in an attempt to steady its body, but the storm energy suffered a brief moment of turbulence after its balance was broken—the storm energy in the left wing began to flow backward from the wingtip, like a river churned into chaos by a reverse current.

It tilted in the air for a split second.

Then it steadied itself again. The ancient cold light in its amber eyes flickered more intensely—it was learning.

It was adjusting. It was trying to understand why he could break even this move.

Lightning gathered once more on its tail blade, the ball of lightning swelling from the size of a fist to the size of a human head.

A system prompt appeared, flickering intermittently.

"Second pattern... broken. Illusion damaged approximately thirty percent. Host sustained minor jaw injury; scales not penetrated. Warning—the illusion is... recalibrating data from failure. It is not merely repeating White Mane's moves. It is undergoing Evolution."

The illusion reorganized its posture.

It circled half a turn in the air, its wingtips dragging two long trails of lightning—the wakes weaving into an incomplete spiral in the sky.

Then it launched its third move—a straight thrust of the dragon-kiss sword.

Its tail blade condensed within the storm into a sword form identical to the dragon-kiss sword in White Mane's hand.

The blade was slender, the crossguard entwined with twin dragons, and even the dark ripples of the valyrian steel on the blade were simulated flawlessly—the depth, width, and spacing of every ripple were exactly the same as the real sword she held.

It raised its tail blade and thrust forward in a straight line. It was so fast that it left a perfectly straight trail of lightning in the air, the air on either side of the path ionizing into a pale blue plasma mist filled with countless tiny sparks of discharge.

Drogon did not dodge.

His vertical pupils were locked onto the scabbard on the illusion's tail blade.

At the base of that "dragon-kiss sword" tail blade, there was a layer of storm energy simulating a scabbard.

The scabbard was new—the leather was smooth and seamless.

It lacked the three uneven hand-stitched marks found on White Mane's old scabbard.

It lacked the ring of old leather on the hilt that had been darkened by Dothraki sweat.

It lacked that crooked seam where she had sewn seventeen stitches. It was new. So new it looked like it had just been received from a tanner, before it even had its first coat of oil.

The scabbard. It's old. Three places where the stitching is uneven. Your own scabbard—you sewed it yourself. You didn't refuse a new one because no one offered; you kept it because you were used to the old one.

The Storm Ancestor Dragon isn't used to it. It thinks a new scabbard is more perfect. You're wrong—perfection is fake. The old one is real.

He did not evade. Facing the straight trajectory of the tail blade's thrust, he opened his dragon maw.

Ice Fire gushed out.

It wasn't a wide-area blast, but a beam condensed to its limit, only as thick as a wrist.

Within the deep blue were dark gold filaments of burning bloodline—each dark gold thread was energy from his bloodline compressed to the extreme, writhing like snakes in the cold light of the Ice Fire.

It accurately struck the "new scabbard" at the base of the tail blade.

The moment the Ice Fire collided with the storm energy, the new scabbard shattered into countless ice-blue fragments under the extreme cold—the sound was not an explosion, but the fine, brittle snapping of glass being flash-frozen and bursting apart.

Every fragment refracted lightning shadows from thousands of years ago before being swept away by the storm.

Deprived of its scabbard, the tail blade's thrusting trajectory shifted slightly at the final moment.

It wasn't a physical deviation—it was a cognitive hesitation in the Storm Ancestor Dragon's residual will the moment the "new scabbard was identified as a fake." Its will was one with the illusion, and its cognitive wavering directly caused the illusion's attack path to veer off.

It did not understand why a new scabbard would expose its disguise. It did not understand why something old, broken, and crookedly stitched was more real than something new, perfect, and flawless.

The tail blade struck his left chest, but it missed his heart. The blade tip penetrated less than two inches between the dragon scales and muscle before being stopped by a rib—he could feel the tip of the tail blade pressing against the bone, the chill of valyrian steel transmitting through the periosteum into his chest cavity.

Ice-blue storm energy surged in from the wound, attempting to detonate inside him—but the Ice Element he had absorbed before the trial activated automatically at this moment, freezing, enveloping, and assimilating the invading storm energy.

The storm energy struggled within him for less than a breath before being wrapped layer by layer by his Ice Element, like amber trapping an insect, finally falling silent.

A system prompt appeared, extremely intermittent.

"Third pattern... broken. Illusion damaged approximately fifty percent. Cognitive hesitation caused structural instability in the illusion. Host sustained left chest wound; heart not damaged. Old scabbard identification... effective. Brand calibration: all three patterns broken. Storm Ancestor Dragon's will entering... Phase Two."

The illusionary White Mane dragon's body suddenly froze after the tail blade pierced his left chest.

The ancient cold light in its amber eyes flickered violently—not with anger, but with a light akin to "confirmation." The dragon body composed of storm energy began to disintegrate starting from the tail blade, like ice crystals scattered by the wind, peeling away piece by piece and merging into the dark purple sky.

The tail blade shattered into countless tiny sparks of lightning, each fragment reflecting the dark gold fire in his vertical pupils. The left wing turned into a silent gale that swept over the surface of the sea dragon bone fossils, kicking up a layer of salt frost that had settled for thousands of years.

The dragon head was the last to dissipate, its amber eyes meeting his vertical pupils one last time before vanishing—there was no hostility in that gaze, only a sense of understanding that spanned millennia.

In the place where the illusion had completely vanished, another dragon shadow slowly emerged.

It no longer bore the silhouette of White Mane.

It was a true ancient Ancestor Dragon.