“So anyway~! I think I scrubbed away most of the rads by now. I gotta head home before my parents figure out I’ve been using the Asura Box without their permission again…”

The golden giant was sitting on Verna’s bed and brushing his long black hair, while looking out the back window at the silvery moon in the sky. He was wearing a huge white bathrobe that fit his amazingly large body.

“You’ve said that five times already. When are you actually leaving, Xenos?” The beautiful woman sat on a comfortable sofa chair by the window and drank actual red wine, wearing a thin silvery silk nightgown that didn’t really obscure much of anything.

“Or are you actually tempted by a ‘little girl’ like me?”

“No way.” Xenos sneered and scanned her nearly naked body a few times, “No fur, feathers or scales? Boring. I’m not a Chastity worshiper, but it takes more than just an ordinary human to make me interested.”

“Fur and scales? You’re almost as bad as Ollie…”

“Uranium Boy?” The golden man smirked, “Don’t be sad. As long as you’re willing to pay the price, you can still be with him.”

“I’m sad because my best friend died. Asshole.” Verna took another big gulp of red wine and asked, “How much?”

“How much what?”

“How much to resurrect that annoying bitch?”

“Maybe my ‘powers’ in this world might be able to do something like that if I trained them hard enough… But in my world, it doesn’t really work that way.” Xenos snickered and shook his head, tossing the brush onto the bed.

“I can’t stay here long enough to figure out some bullshit like resurrection or whatever. But… The biggest and most obvious requirement for resurrection is that you have a Soul. Now, I’m not just talking about a Spiritual Body like a Ghost or my Astral Projection tricks. The real Soul is a little big more subtle and complicated, or maybe simpler? I don’t really know. Even when I talk about collecting Souls, I’m actually just talking about Spirits like Wraiths and Spectres. They can be used as a power source or even currency where I’m from.”

“According to Greenstone Mythology, anyone who dies on the mountain will be trapped beneath the earth forever…” Verna finished off the rest of her wine and threw the glass against the wall, shattering it into hundreds of pieces that disappeared immediately.

“Ollie always said that he could talk to his parents when he was younger. He also saw a lot of other ghosts down there in the tunnels. Maybe Peri and the others are trapped in some horrible dungeon now?”

“From my experience, something that can trap Spirits somewhere is usually some kinda Divine Artifact or related to Higher Dimensional-”

*Rumble~!*

“An earthquake?” Verna frowned, “It feels like I’m losing money again!”

“Freak! What the freak is that shit?!” Xenos widened his shiny silver eyes in shock and pointed towards the top of the mountain in the distance. First a huge swarm of glowing green bugs appeared. Then white peak lifted up into the air and then a huge serpentine dragon emerged!

“What the hell is that?!” Verna was even more shocked, “It looks just like a jade sculpture I sold years ago!”

“It’s a freakin Chinese Dragon! Obviously! Uh, well, maybe China doesn’t exist in your world?”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

*Roaaah~!* With a deafening roar, the dragon breathed fire and incinerated all those bugs. Then it looked downwards… From Opal, they were only able to see the side and back of its head at this point. However, just judging by the fact that the two of them could see it so clearly could indicate just how absurdly large the monster really was!

“Well, we usually just call them ‘Eastern Dragons’ as a general term. Western Dragons are more like lizards and less like snakes… Though I guess the Nordic Dragons also have a lot of snakes… And the Mesoamerican-”

“Okay, I get it! But why the hell is there a dragon coming out of Greenstone Mountain?!”

“How the hell should I know?! It’s your mountain and your world! Maybe somebody summoned it or it was created by some magical bullshit ability?!”

“What should we do?!”

“I think you mean, what should ‘you’ do, because I gotta go home now! Trust me, my parents are a lot scarier than some random dragon!”

***

*Rumble~!*

“Earthquake?”

“Maybe?”

Oliver and Jade heard a lot of noise outside, so they left the secret base they hadn’t started moving yet and saw a sky filled with flames!

“What the hell?! The mountaintop!” The metal man pointed towards the top of the mountain that was transforming into a gigantic serpentine dragon at a rapid pace, “Shit! Is this their second wave against us?! First a Bug Bitch, now an ugly snake?!”

“No! This is impossible!” Jade’s yellow eyes glowed bright green as she saw a much smaller figure underneath the giant dragon, “Papa?!”

“Papa?!” Oliver looked at the giant statue of a man that was rapidly being ‘Sculpted’ out of stone and then turned into flesh, blood, he even wore a fancy glowing green robe and had a pair of glasses over his brown eyes.

“Are you kidding me?!”

“Of course not! Ollie! He-he’s back! He’s really back!” Jade trembled and held Oliver’s metal arm, “We have to hide! We can’t let him find us!”

“I don’t think he’s even looking for us in the first place.”

They watched as the massive figure casually walked onto the head of the even more outrageously large dragon. He glanced down the mountain casually for a moment, but immediately seemed to lose interest. Instead, the whole dragon slithered up into the sky and disappeared from their view within a few seconds. Even the snowy white tip of that absurdly long tail was impossible to see anymore.

However, the process of the several kilometer long dragon leaving the mountaintop caused a huge landslide on practically every side of the mountain! Especially the southern side where they were located.

“Where’s he going?” Jade extended her hand and created a huge curved barrier in front of them, then turned to Oliver.

“It looks like he went north… Should be Greenstone City, right? I’ve been there with my Dad-”

“No! We have to stop him! I don’t know what he’s going to do, but we can’t just standby and do nothing!”