Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 189: Trauma

The forest of Cassia in autumn was akin to a cathedral of decay.

Golden leaves fell in silent, endless spirals, carpeting the forest floor in layers of amber and rust. The air was cold, damp, thick with the smell of earth and the sweet, quiet rot of the season.

Arzhen moved through it alone.

His boots sank into the wet mulch with each step, the sound a soft, rhythmic squelch that accompanied his steady, purposeful gait. Above him, skeletal branches clawed at a sky the colour of old pewter. No birds sang. The forest held its breath, watching the trespasser indifferently.

He should have been excited.

This was the moment he had been waiting for. His rise to power.

Here, in this forgotten stretch of woodland, miles from any road or village, lay the corpse of the Dragon Lord. The mighty Oathran Alicei, sovereign of the skies, fallen and forgotten in a ditch.

He should have been thrilled.

Instead, his chest felt like a hollow drum.

The dreams had started a while ago. At first, the dreams were uncomfortable dreams about Cecilia. Of her... becoming someone else’s. Mere splinters.

But then, it progressed. Flashes of white, the sensation of impact, the taste of blood. But each night, they grew longer, sharper, more vivid. He would find himself in a void of grey mist, and then something would emerge from it. A shape. A presence.

Eyes the colour of misty storms, cold and absolute. He never saw the face clearly. He never saw the strikes coming. But he felt them, each impact a thunderclap of force that shattered bone and rattled his teeth in their sockets. Thirty impacts. Forty. He lost count. He always lost count.

And every morning, he woke with a gasp, drenched in sweat, his heart slamming against his ribs like a caged animal. The details would evaporate instantly, leaving only terror and the phantom ache in his jaw, his ribs, his pride.

Night terrors. Stress. Whatever.

Arzhen had accepted it. He had to.

But now, walking through this silent, dying wood, the dream pressed against the back of his mind like a blade held to skin. The mist. The cold. The eyes.

He shook his head, forcing the thought down. Ruby’s words were his lantern, his compass. He clung to them as he pushed through a thicket of brambles, the thorns catching at his hunting coat.

"Follow the old logging road until it ends. Then walk east, toward the sound of running water. You will find a clearing with a single, lightning-struck oak. Beyond it, in the ditch, is where his body lies."

The logging road had ended a mile back. He had been walking east since, the distant murmur of an unseen stream his only guide. His breath misted in the cold air. His fingers, even within his gloves, were numb.

And still, the dread grew.

It didn’t feel like the natural caution of a predator entering another’s territory. It was something... older, deeper. Perhaps... a bone-memory of defeat, of insignificance, of being comprehensively unmade.

He did not understand it. He had never faced the Dragon Lord. He had never even seen him.

So why did his hands tremble as he pushed aside a curtain of hanging moss?

Why did his breath catch at the sight of a single, blackened oak, its limbs twisted and stark against the grey sky?

Why did the murmur of the stream behind it sound less like water and more like the whisper of distant, forgotten voices?

Oathran Alicei... that name was clearly the Dragon Lord’s name. But why... Why did he feel like he had heard it somewhere else? Somewhere... in a dream?

Arzhen stepped into the clearing.

The grass here was dead, beaten flat by wind and time. The oak stood cold. Beyond it, the ground sloped downward into a shallow depression. A ditch, overgrown with brown ferns and the skeletal remains of wildflowers.

He walked toward it, each step heavier than the last. His pulse was a war drum in his ears. The mist from his dreams coiled at the edges of his vision, thin tendrils of grey that dissolved when he tried to focus on them.

It’s just fog, he told himself. Just the weather. Just your mind playing tricks.

He reached the edge of the ditch and looked down.

It was... empty.

Nothing. No body, no bones, no trace that anything—anyone—had ever lain here.

Just damp earth and dead leaves and the indifference of the forest.

Arzhen stared at the emptiness for a long, suspended moment.

And then, from behind him, a voice. Soft. Polite. Completely wrong.

"Looking for something?"

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, threaded through the mist, coiled around the skeletal branches of the oak, breathed into the space just behind Arzhen’s ear.

Arzhen turned.

The fog had thickened, rolling in from the edges of the clearing like slow, silent tide. And within it, taking shape with the terrible, gradual clarity of a nightmare solidifying into flesh, was a silhouette.

White.

Tall.

A pair of black horns, curved and elegant, catching the dim light like polished bone. And beneath them—eyes. Grey. Cold. The colour of the mist that had haunted his sleep for three weeks.

Arzhen froze.

His body, trained from childhood to react, to fight, to dominate, locked solid. His lungs seized. His heart, that war drum, stuttered into a single, deafening thud of pure, primal terror.

W-who?

What?

Was he... dreaming?

His gaze darted to the ground, the trees, his own trembling hands. The fog. The cold. The ditch. This was the place. But how could... how could this be so clearly the moment from his nightmares?

The void, the impact, the endless, soundless beating—

This was not a man. He was in the presence of a god!

Was this a dream?!

The figure moved.

Not quickly. It was unhurried, a leisurely stroll through the dead grass. Each step was measured, the gait of a being that had never once needed to rush toward violence because violence was simply a decision it made, and the world obeyed.

Like that dream—

No.

No, no, no, no.

He was going to die. He was going to die—

Then, a sentence surfaced from the depths of his consciousness, dragged up from the wreckage of a memory he hadn’t known he possessed. A voice asking a question in a crowded hall. A face, pale and beautiful, turning toward him with those same cold, grey eyes.

"Did you just touch me where she just did?"

The figure emerged fully from the fog. The horns. The white hair, long and flowing, cascading like a misty waterfall. The face, ageless, carved from marble and sorrow. The eyes, fixed on him with an expression that held no anger, no hatred, no passion at all. Like the mild curiosity of a god observing an insect that had wandered into its temple.

Arzhen’s eyes rolled back.

The last thing he saw was that face between the flashes of white, framed by mist and dying light. Then his vision went white. His knees buckled. His body, which had forgotten how to breathe or flee or fight, simply surrendered to gravity and collapsed backward into the ditch.

...

...

...

"Huh?"

Oathran stood at the edge of the ditch. He peered down at the unconscious prince sprawled among the ferns. He tilted his head, genuinely perplexed.

"I hadn’t... even done anything to you yet?"

Oathran frowned.

He had shown up for a scheduled confrontation and discovered his opponent had already defeated himself before a single blow was landed.

He stood at the edge of the ditch, hands on his hips, staring down at Arzhen’s unconscious, leaf-dusted form. He felt disappointed now. What use of the prepared good speech now without an audience?

"This is bad," he muttered.

He crouched, peering at the prince’s slack, terror-etched face. The man’s lips were slightly parted, a thin thread of saliva connecting them to a crumpled fern. His eyelids twitched, clearly having a bad nightmare.

"Could it be... he thought I was a ghost?"

It wasn’t unreasonable. He had emerged from fog, wreathed in mist, his draconic features fully manifested. The setting was straight from a haunting. The dead oak, the forgotten ditch, the grey, weeping sky.

Cecilia too had thought he was a ghost in the school library. But this was worse. This was a grown man fainting dead away at the mere sight of him.

How was he supposed to explain this to Cecilia?

"My love, I successfully located Arzhen and prepared to execute your strategic beating, but unfortunately he took one look at my magnificent draconic visage and immediately collapsed into a vegetative state. No, I did not touch him."

No. How was he supposed to prove that he was alive, not dead as prophesied?

Oathran sighed and it fogged in the cold air.

He nudged Arzhen’s shoulder with the toe of his boot. Nothing. The prince didn’t even twitch.

"Don’t tell me I need to wait until he wakes up to beat him up...?"

The trees offered no answer. A single golden leaf detached from a branch and drifted down, settling delicately on Arzhen’s face.

Oathran stared at it.

Well.

"Wait it is."

After all, he couldn’t beat up an unconscious man and stuck a memo on him, saying, "I’m not dead. My corpse is off limits."

He’d sound even more like a ghost then.