Demonic Dragon: Harem System - Chapter 556

Chapter 556: Confronting a Worm

Scathach slowly turned her hand in the air. The runes surrounding Ignisar responded as if they were hearts beating outside their chests—out of sync, crazed, pulsing with the hunger for a truth hidden for ages. With each vibration, they pierced deeper into his mind, invading not with physical brutality, but with the surgical precision of one who knows where every crack in the soul lies.

Ignisar screamed. Not like a warrior. Not like a dragon. But like a child lost in an endless nightmare. A nightmare that, with each passing second, became more real than reality itself.

He saw everything.

His deformed childhood, dragged by the horns before the draconic council. His mother’s voice begging for his life before being sacrificed as an example. The indifferent faces of the elders, each marked by centuries of arrogance, now turning into smiling, distorted masks, mocking his helplessness.

“This… this isn’t real!” he choked, trying to close his eyes.

But even that was not allowed. Runes held his eyelids open, forcing him to face the horror of himself.

“Of course it’s real,” replied Scathach, her voice low, steady, relentless. “You’ve just spent your life running away from it. I just forced you to look.”

She didn’t shout. She didn’t scream. Each word was spoken as if she were sewing an open wound with barbed wire. It wasn’t anger that drove her—it was precision. A cold, unbreakable will.

Ignisar struggled in the air, but it was like fighting his own reflection. The runes distorted the space and time around him. Minutes turned into hours. Hours turned into lifetimes. He lived entire existences, each ending in suffering, betrayal, or loss. In all of them, Scathach was there. Sometimes as executioner. Sometimes as spectator. Always as a reminder that he had never been anything but a pawn.

Each beat of his heart brought a different word.

Shame.

Failure.

Liar.

Coward.

Scathach circled him, like a patient predator. Each rune she created was not just a spell—it was a key, opening doors in his subconscious that Ignisar had spent centuries locking. She didn’t want his death. She wanted his essence shattered, his soul in pieces. She wanted him to know exactly what it was like to be undone.

“Killing you would be too easy,” she said, raising a hand bathed in the living energy of the runes. “But this? This is art.”

He was crying now. Soundlessly. Uncontrollably. As if his body had given up on maintaining any semblance of dignity. His limbs trembled, even as they regenerated endlessly. But his mind… his mind was shattering like glass under the weight of a thousand truths.

Scathach stopped in front of him. Her eyes were two opposing suns—not of light, but of presence. It was impossible to look at them for long without feeling as if one were standing before something that came before time.

She touched his forehead with a finger.

“Tell me. Who ordered this? Who sent you to hunt me, to try to control me?”

Ignisar tried to resist. He tried to retreat to the last untouched corner within himself. But she was already there too. Resistance was just a reflection of old arrogance.

It was then that Scathach raised her bloody palm. And with firm, almost ceremonial strokes, she drew a single rune in the air—an ancient rune, forbidden, forgotten even by the gods themselves: the inversion of the soul.

With it, he felt. Everything.

All the pain he had inflicted. All the cries he had ignored. The eyes of his victims who never looked at him, but through him, asking for something he never had the courage to give: compassion.

He felt the deaths he had caused.

The betrayals he had promoted.

The promises he broke.

And then… he broke.

He roared so loudly that the sound echoed beyond the cave. It cracked the rocks. It made the ground shake.

“HERMES!” he shouted. “IT WAS HIM! THE GOD! HERMES!”

The name fell like molten lead into reality.

Scathach did not move for a moment. She only blinked slowly, as if confirming a suspicion she had hoped was not true.

“Hermes… the messenger of the gods…”

The mention of the name changed the atmosphere. The air grew thicker. The sky itself seemed to tremble, as if some force far above—or far below—had felt the tug on the veil.

Strax took a step forward, instinctively. A chill ran down his spine.

Even Ouroboros, always so calm, seemed to lose the sparkle in her eyes.

“I… I don’t know why,” stammered Ignisar, sobbing like a child. “He said it was an order… from above… he wanted you, a controllable dragon… to… deal with a demonic dragon…”

Scathach took a step back, her face finally showing something: disgust.

“Hermes dared… to bring me back as… a pawn? Wait…”

She looked up at Strax, and in that instant, she realized… Yes, how could she not have realized… “Those bastards… were going to use me to kill my own son…?” Scathach’s anger began to boil over as the murderous pressure began to leave her body…

Scathach’s face contorted into a dark mixture of hatred and deep pain. Her eyes, once like opposing suns, now burned like incandescent embers about to consume everything around them. The veins in her neck bulged, her jaw tensed to the limit, and a cutting aura of ancient fury emanated from her, making the air vibrate with a silent, almost palpable threat.

Without saying a word, without giving any chance for defense, she advanced with the speed and precision of lightning. A single, perfect, accurate blow—as cold as steel tearing through the silence of the night. Ignisar barely had time to react before his body shattered into a splinter of pain that only death can bring.

In the next instant, his body retracted, shrank, as if an invisible force compressed each fragment of flesh and squeezed them until everything was reduced to a small pulsating ball, almost alive, of flesh and corrupted magic.

Scathach held that repulsive sphere in the palm of her hand for a moment, observing what remained of that broken and defeated being. Then, with a sharp gesture, she crushed it unceremoniously.

With her free hand, she raised her spear. The air around her seemed to crack, reality breaking into bright, distorted lines. The runes engraved on the blade took on a life of their own, radiating an ancient and relentless power that shattered half the space, as if opening a rift to another place—a hidden, secret, dark environment, full of veiled promises and dangers.

She looked back at the portal she had created, her expression cold and relentless.

“I’ll be back soon.”