The Max Level Hero Has Returned!

Chapter 971

The Great Orc Chief Tsu and the constellation Taurus, who had remained in the Dragon’s Nest, looked at the massive, muscular lion-like figure before them with skepticism.

A subtle battle of gazes ensued.

The lion, whose body bore stars just like Taurus, shifted its eyes of unfathomable death to stare directly at them.

“Hmm… Brother, is this being the same as you?”

Taurus gave Tsu a thumbs up in response.

“I see. No wonder I feel this tingling sense of tension.”

With that, he turned away.

Watching from the sidelines alongside Megalodria, Rinne tilted her head.

“Rinne detects no reaction. Rinne initially evaluated it as an abnormal preference for excessive musculature, but an unexpected variable was detected.”

“Hmm. You must be the one accompanying Taurus'sclosest friend.”

“Rinne evaluates the orc’s excessive muscles lowly.”

“Hmph! Muscles are the foundation of all communication! Even if it’s someone like you, I can’t overlook such disrespect toward my body!”

Despite her standing next to Megalodria, the manly orc showed no signs of intimidation.

Given that constellations were at least demigod-tier entities, it made sense. But the orc just seemed extraordinary, nonetheless.

As the situation unfolded, Megalodria finally spoke.

[So, is that one your comrade as well?]

It gestured toward constellation Leo.

Both Great Orc Chief Tsu and Taurus shook their heads in unison.

“That fake muscle-bound figure is no brother of ours! What we seek is the pure culmination of unwavering effort, not deception!”

Crack!Creak!

As they flexed their muscles and simultaneously struck a muscular pose, Rinne’s eyes narrowed.

“Rinne evaluates those idiots lowly.”

[Just an eyesore… If they ever meet that damn muscle-headed rabbit back at the territory, it’ll be quite the spectacle.]

Despite their differences in race, Megalodria and Rinne found common ground in disagreeing with Taurus and Great Orc Chief Tsu.

* * *

“Gah. Ugh. Hah. Damn it, this is brutal. Hey, are you sure you're really human? This is unbelievable.”

Leaning against a tree, the foe looked up at Davey.

His name was Valphors. As the Dragon Lord of the Yosh Continent, he was a supporter of the reformist faction. In fact, he was one of the few remaining key forces remaining among the fallen ones.

At that moment, his body was still suffering from the aftermath of the damage he had taken. He looked like he could collapse at any moment.

That was only natural, considering Davey had only healed him partially—he would need to earn a full restoration.

A battle between two beings at the lord-level wasn’t something that should have been possible in the first place.

If Davey hadn’t intervened, it would’ve been a one-sided slaughter.

It was commonly believed that knights and mages followed entirely different paths.

There was a saying that a mage’s promise was more important, but that was nothing more than a rumor.

In reality, when a mage broke a promise or lied, they often experienced an internal mental imbalance, leading to unintended consequences.

Odin, however, was different.

She was a demigod—a being who had willingly given up ascending to a higher level.

Yet, despite her low foundational level, she was known as one of the most powerful entities in the hall.

What Davey knew about her previous life was limited—pretty much only that she was considered exceptionally old among the heroes.

Judging by a few scattered pieces of information, and based on his own magical knowledge, he believed she had chosen a peculiar, unconventional path different from most mages.

That being the case, he figured perhaps there was something unique in her voice.

“Stop whining and start talking. I’ve healed you enough to preserve your life.”

Valphors grimaced in response.

“What will you do if I answer?” he asked, looking up at Davey.

“If I talk, what happens next?”

“What do you mean, what happens?”

“Are you going to kill me?”

Davey tilted his head at the question.

“Why would I?”

“What?”

Valphors blinked in confusion.

“I’m your enemy—”

“I already spared you once, and you’re not even resisting, so why would I go out of my way to kill you?”

At that, Valphors stared up at Davey, dumbfounded.

“Unless… you’re under the delusion that I consider you important enough to be worth killing right now?”

“You monster. I really underestimated you.”

For the first time, Valphors directly met Davey’s gaze.

His confident smirk faded away, and the fear he couldn’t conceal flickered in his eyes as he trembled. He then muttered under his breath.

“I’ve looked into the concept of human growth before, but this is just absurd. You… What the hell are you?”

His expression went beyond fear—he looked utterly defeated. He then let out a strained laugh and sighed.

“Hah… Alright. Where should I even begin…”

A brief silence followed.

“To explain this properly, I have to start with what happened at the Dragon Temple on Yosh Continent—”

A strong sense of deja vu washed over Davey.

For a moment, the image of Valphors in his head overlapped with that of Morziana, the younger sister of Emperor Contas. That woman had drained the souls of everyone around her entirely using her relentless chatter the moment they met.

Come to think of it, Davey had heard that she was currently traveling with Reina, acting as a hero.

Considering how talkative she was, he figured Reina must be tired as well. But yet again, she was still willingly traveling with her—perhaps she had a bit of a masochistic streak.

Whoosh!

‘No—this isn’t the time for such thoughts.’

The priority at that moment was shutting up the damned Dragon Lord of Yosh Continent before he unleashed an endless flood of words.

Snap.

When Davey broke the twig in his hand, Valphors flinched.

“Get to the point. If you drag this out, I’ll go find another informant.”

“…”

Valphors’s face soured before he slumped in defeat.

“There’s not much to it. That woman—the small one with golden hair and one eye… No, calling her human feels wrong. That monster ambushed us while we were helping rebuild the continent. After that, she took hostages and subjugated many of my kin, including myself, and brought us here. That’s all.”

If his testimony was accurate, it meant that just as Yosh Continent was recovering from the destruction caused by the Princesses of the Abyss, Odin had swooped in and overturned everything once again.

“And besides her?”

“I don’t know—no, wait, there actually was someone else. How did I overlook that until now?”

Valphors stroked his chin, frowning deeply.

“There was a young man with her. He had ice-colored hair.”

“A guy with ice-colored hair?”

Davey recalled the voice he had heard back in the hall that the monarch had fled from.

As far as he knew, Odin wasn’t someone who took orders from anyone.

She was always arrogant. She also possessed the overwhelming power to justify her pride, and she never bowed her head to anyone.

The only ones she’d ever compromised with were Rho Aias, the necromancer who pioneered the path of the Death Lord through her own power, Saintess Daphne, and the Goddess of Medicine Hypocria.

That being said, there was no way some random nobody suddenly gained the ability to command her. Even if they had, Odin wasn’t the type to simply go along with it.

And the biggest problem was that summoning Odin—who had now taken up residence within the Saint Sanctuary—was, realistically, impossible.

‘Unless she personally chooses to descend…’

“That monster… She was horrifyingly strong. My kin, renowned as the progenitors of magic, couldn’t even finish casting a single spell before she dispelled them all.”

That didn’t surprise Davey. She had once even driven out a god.

Even when facing dragons, she had already grown stronger in the hall, so they wouldn’t be able to handle her.

“That’s all? How about her condition? Anything unusual?”

“Unusual? Hmm… Now that you mention it, yeah. She seemed a little off.”

“Off?”

“Yeah. I thought maybe it was just how she naturally was since someone at her level wouldn’t be affected by mental domination or charm effects, but now that I think about it, there were some odd things.”

Davey considered the possibility of Valphors lying, but there was no real reason for him to do so.

Besides, if his account was accurate, it would explain why the dragons of Yosh Continent were there, why there were traces of Odin, and why the constellations had fled to Davey for help.

“She was… protecting that bastard.”

“The one with ice-colored hair?”

“Yeah. That one. I don’t know anything about him, but there was one thing that set him apart from humans.”

“What was it?”

“One of his eyes…”

Valphors clenched his fist, his entire body trembling.

“One. One of them was… Damn it, why can’t I say it?!”

“Enough.”

Davey cut him off, letting out a dry chuckle.

He could read between the lines of those speech symptoms.

An eye with pitch-black sclera and an abyssal white pupil that seemed to drag souls in…

‘Damn it… Even at this point, remembering it properly is so difficult.’

It wasn’t that Davey couldn’t remember—it felt more like something was actively rejecting his attempts to imagine it in his mind.

He had heard that the eye was more of a curse, passed down through blood.

With a flick of his wrist, Davey pulled out an elixir from his Pocket Plane and tossed it to Valphors.

“That’s enough. Get lost.”

“You’re not going to hear more?”

“What you saw—you couldn’t manage to say it, could you?”

A single eye infused with power so overwhelming that even a dragon lord recoiled in its presence.

There were several distinct characteristics of that eye, but one thing was certain.

It could be seen, but those who laid eyes upon it would be unable to consciously recall or discuss it. And that eye was inherited through the blood of a certain individual.

Among those Davey knew, there was only one person who covered one of their eyes because of something like that.

“Are you really sure you don’t want to hear more?”

“Yeah. I’m done.”

“But I still have more to tell—”

“I said I’m done!!”

‘Yep. He’s definitely a Morziana type—one of those who just can’t keep their damn mouths shut.’

For someone who seemed so staunchly protective and tight-lipped, he sure spilled everything he knew pretty fast.

“I bet his mouth would be the only thing floating if I drowned him…”

“Ah, wait! Are you planning to go after the monarch?”

Davey halted in response.

“The monarch? Not interested.”

There were still a lot of things that he didn’t understand—why Odin and that damn bastard had sent dragons there, and why they had gone out of their way to awaken dormant dragons just to cause this ruckus. But the key element in all of it was Odin.

“Are you sure about that? The power that bastard wields—it’s hers. I don’t know what kind of relationship you have with that woman, but at the very least, don’t you think it’s worth considering why she, whether willingly or not, woke the sleeping dragons here and used us to stir up this mess?”

Davey silently stared at Valphors.

He was right; he wanted to know why she had caused such chaos in this place.

Even if it wasn’t her but that bastard's influence instead, there was no way it was just some random act of destruction for the hell of it.

“Talk. If you’re saying this, you must know something.”

“Then first, let me tell you about when I met that monarch bastard—”

“Just get to the damn point already!!”

‘Goddamn it. This insufferable yapper!’

“I actually don’t know.”

Valphors burst into laughter.

‘Yep. I’m putting up a tombstone today. It’ll say [here lies this piece of crap lizard. Buried for being a pain in the ass.]’

Crack!!

The earth twisted violently, and two massive arms shot out from the ground, wrapping around the dragon lord’s throat in a death grip and throttling him.

“Die, you bastard! Just drop dead already!!”

“Gaaa!! Gak!!”

* * *

“Hey, let’s slow down a bit. If we get caught, it’ll just turn into a massive headache.”

“Just shut up and follow me.”

“Well, let’s think about it—do we really have to go there in the first place? The moment we spilled the information, we were as good as dead. Honestly, I’m thinking of using this opportunity to join the moderates or even just disappear altogether.”

“Shh.”

“No, but seriously, why do you even care about that human? If the elders spot us, we’re as good as corpses—wait, what the hell…”

The two blue dragons, who had been muttering with stiff expressions, fell into silence.

Though currently in human form, their emotions surged, and their pupils split vertically.

“Hey. How much later did we arrive here, compared to that human?”

“About two hours.”

“You’re telling me all of this happened in just those two hours?”

Before their eyes stretched an endless field of silence—a scene so unsettling it made even thinking terrifying.

A completely obliterated forest without a single corpse.

No dragon could’ve single-handedly annihilated an entire force and turned the entire area into a wasteland like that in such a short time.

It wasn’t just devastation—it was as if an entire area had simply been erased from existence.

“Hey...”

“Yeah?”

“Should we just surrender…?”

At first, they had believed that luring the human here and letting their kin deal with him was the best plan.

But they had been wrong.

The monster they had encountered was a true calamity, and there was absolutely no answer or countermeasure capable of bringing something like that down.

“But would he even let us live just because we surrendered?”

“I don’t think the monarch’s been captured yet.”

The two dragons exchanged glances.

“Do you think he knows how to find the monarch?”

“Well, even if he doesn't, we do. If the monarch is alive, our lives are in danger. One of the two sides needs to die for the best outcome.”

They nodded in agreement.

“Yeah. That could work—”

“That’s a pretty interesting conversation you're having.”

A cold voice cut through their whispering, making them flinch and snap their heads around.

And then, they saw dozens of dragons surrounding them—dragons that had been their own kin at one point.

They were positive that there had been no one there just moments ago. They couldn’t comprehend when they had gotten so close.

As their bodies froze in terror, Davey stepped forward slowly.

“You said you know where the monarch is?”

His smile made them go pale as they frantically nodded.

At that moment, the two dragons recognized it as the perfect opportunity to switch sides.

The pride of a dragon? The stubborn instincts of their species?

The fools who held onto such notions clearly hadn’t yet come face-to-face with the crimson eyes gleaming with eerie light in front of them.

The being wasn’t human. Rather, he was a monster disguised as a human.

They knew better than anyone that pride wouldn’t keep them alive in the face of annihilation.

“W-We’re not completely certain, but we heard that a massive tower of our faction was transferred from another location to a remote area further north!”

“A tower?”

“Yes! The monarch can’t stray far from it for too long, because of some kind of ritual that has to be completed there!”

“That’s right! The moderate wimp—ah, no, no, I mean the lord of the moderate faction! Her power core is required for it, too!”

“And what exactly is it called?”

“Uh, my memory’s a bit hazy, but it was called…”

“Ouroboros.”

“That’s it! Ouroboros! They called it Ouroboros!”

At that, Davey muttered to himself, his expression shifting slightly.

“Ouroboros? The artificial god project? Those idiots are still chasing that damned pipe dream?”

* * *

“The preparations are complete, monarch.”

The monarch silently stared at the Dragon’s Nest as its subordinate dragons confidently declared their readiness.

Luring Davey O’Rowane into a trap had gone smoothly, just as the Great One had strictly ordered. But he wasn’t sure if it was even necessary.

In the end, it was just a human. And compared to himself—a being who had inherited even more of their master’s power—Davey shouldn’t be a real threat.

[That woman must be captured alive, no matter what.]

With the monarch’s command, all the remaining dragons of the reformist faction began charging their breath attacks.

The moment the order was given, the few remaining dragons within the Dragon’s Nest wouldn’t stand a chance.

Or so the monarch thought.

Until—

[Hey. Do you guys even know where you just walked into?]

[They must’ve thought this place would be easy prey without Contractor. Hey, Contractor. That one’s smiling.]

A new voice cut through the air.

“Boys, grab your tools. They were kind enough to come to us in person—I’m absolutely touched.”

The variable that was supposed to be tied up at their main base was here instead.

Something was wrong. Very, very wrong.

ChubbyCheeks & FriedNook's Thoughts

Editorb’s Thoughts

Whenever I try to take a nap, I wake up seven hours later, even if I’ve already slept for like 14 hours that day. This makes editing sometimes an ordeal :)