The Grand Azathoth Hotel - Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Ddraig had long since stopped expecting greatness from his wielders. His glory days were dead and buried, along with the last warrior worthy of his fire. Instead of kings, conquerors, or even halfway competent fighters, he was now shackled to this sack of human disappointment.

He had endured imbeciles before, but this one? This one was special. This one was so spectacularly, cosmically pathetic that Ddraig could hardly believe God Himself had signed off on this mistake. A weakling, a sniveling pervert, a creature whose greatest ambition in life was to grope breasts before dying in a puddle of his own mediocrity. This was the fool fate had chosen to wield him?

A disgrace. An embarrassment to dragons, to warriors, to existence itself.

And now, of course, the piss-poor excuse for a host was about to get himself slaughtered like a worm beneath a boot. Because what else would he do? Fight? Survive? Grow a spine? No, no, of course not. Instead, he had followed a clearly suspicious woman into a café, drooling over her as if she wasn’t radiating the predatory glee of a cat about to rip the wings off a fly.

Ddraig sighed, resting a massive claw against his snout. He could already imagine Albion’s laughter, that insufferable, gloating rasp drilling into his skull.

“Oh, Ddraig. How far you’ve fallen. Is your wielder about to die before he’s even gotten a proper taste of power? Tragic. But not unexpected.”

It took all of Ddraig’s willpower not to self-combust out of sheer frustration. Albion was never going to let this go if he found out. But it didn’t matter. The boy would die. His soul would be ripped from his fragile mortal shell, and Ddraig would go back to rotting inside this damn seal until fate handed him another halfwit to disappoint him all over again.

And then—

Then the barista moved.

Not the Fallen Angel. Not his pathetic host.

The barista. A nobody. Just some random man behind the counter, polishing cups and wiping down tables like he wasn’t in the same room as a goddamn legend. Ddraig barely paid him any mind—until the man reached out. Not toward the Fallen Angel. Not toward Issei. Toward the seal.

And then, with all the effort of a man plucking a leaf off his jacket, the barista—this absolute non-entity in the grand scheme of things—grabbed hold of the divine prison the Biblical God Himself had placed upon Ddraig… and pulled.

The seal shattered.

Ddraig blinked.

For a solid thirty seconds, he just stood there, utterly flabbergasted.

One moment, he had been trapped, bound by unbreakable divine law, forced to watch through the eyes of a pervert as his legacy was dragged through the mud. The next? He was standing in a café. The sheer absurdity of the situation made his brain short-circuit.

The Monk woman, one of the most powerful human sorcerers alive, a being who should have been freaking the hell out over the utter violation of divine law she had just witnessed, instead barely reacted. She sighed into her coffee, muttering, “I will just have to get used to this…” like James had merely forgotten to add sugar, not unmade a god’s decree.

The Fallen Angel, who had been strutting around like a lion among prey mere seconds ago, now stood frozen, her face drained of all color. Her pupils were shrunk to pinpricks, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps. And then—a sharp, unmistakable scent hit the air.

She had pissed herself. Literally.

Ddraig watched, fascinated, as her whole existence unraveled before his eyes. He had seen countless creatures break before. Warriors facing their mortality. Kings watching their empires collapse. Gods abandoned by their own believers. This? This was something different.

She wasn’t simply afraid. She had seen something she wasn’t supposed to. Something so incomprehensible, so far beyond her understanding, that her body had defaulted to the most primal reaction possible— submission, paralysis, and voiding herself like a feeble, cornered beast.

As for his so-called host?

Collapsed, limbs sprawled awkwardly, mouth slightly open as if he had passed out mid-thought. Completely, utterly useless.

And him? The Red Dragon of Domination, the Emperor of Flames, the living nightmare of Gods and Devils alike—was standing comfortably in a café that should have been far too small to contain him. Yet, it didn’t feel cramped. The space around him did not bend, did not break, did not strain under his size. He simply… existed.

Ddraig stared.

The barista—the impossible, incomprehensible thing in the shape of a barista—tilted his head and, as if he had just helped a kitten out of a tree, patted Ddraig’s snout.

“Here you are, buddy.”

Ddraig turned his gaze onto him, and for the first time in thousands of years, he felt something deep inside him recoil. Because James looked human. At a glance, he was just a man. But then Ddraig looked into his eyes. And something looked back. It was not a god’s gaze. It was not a king’s authority. It was older. Deeper. A thing that did not move, because it had never needed to. A thing that did not speak, because everything already understood. A thing that did not exist within time, because time was merely a suggestion. The universe did not contain him. He contained it.

Ddraig felt something twist inside his very essence, something that told him to lower his head, to avert his gaze, to acknowledge what stood before him.

His pride rebelled.

No.

This would not stand.

He was Ddraig, the Red Dragon Emperor, the Tyrant of Flame, the Wyrm of Domination. He had razed cities to the ground for lesser slights. He had turned entire pantheons into whispers of ash for daring to challenge his supremacy. His fire had scarred the land so deeply that the echoes of his wrath could still be felt in realms that no longer even existed.

And this thing—this mockery, this insult—thought to touch him like a pet?

A pat on the snout. Like he was some tamed beast. Like he was a mere dog, leashed and waiting for his master’s command. Unacceptable. He did not know what this creature was—this thing in the shape of a man—but it did not matter. There was no being in all of existence that could touch him without consequence.

His fury ignited. Not anger—rage. Fire roared through his veins, a power so deep, so ancient, that reality itself had once trembled before it. This was no ordinary breath of flame, no idle display of draconic wrath. This was destruction incarnate.

He would not simply kill James. He would erase him.

Ddraig’s chest swelled, the air around him vibrating with raw power as he drew in a breath that would crack the sky. The world dimmed. His body pulsed with overwhelming heat, his scales reflecting the pure, molten inferno building within him. He was fire given will, ruin made flesh, the end of all things. The air twisted, the café around him distorting under the weight of his impending fury.

This would be the fire that turned legends into forgotten embers.

James raised a hand.

And bitchslapped him.

It was not a grand blow. It was not a strike meant to fell a beast of his caliber. It was a dismissal—a casual, effortless flick of the wrist. Like brushing away an irritating insect. The force cracked across his snout with absolute indifference. His fire died instantly, snuffed out as though it had never existed. The molten power, the impending cataclysm—gone. His jaw slammed shut, teeth grinding together as the force of the slap sent a ripple of pure, humiliating silence through the very core of his being.

The entire world went still.

The café was silent.

Ddraig did not move. He did not breathe. His body refused to acknowledge what had just occurred. His mind, vast and ancient, churned desperately for an answer, for an explanation, for any reality in which this made sense.

It didn’t.

He had been mid-roar. He had been seconds from unleashing an inferno that would leave nothing but charred remnants of existence in its wake. And now?

Now he stood there.

Like a fool.

Like a dog that had been scolded for barking too loudly.

He stared. James took another sip of his coffee. He did not look smug. He did not look victorious. He simply looked mildly inconvenienced.

“Man, I swear” James muttered, his voice thick with genuine annoyance. “Young lizards are loud.”

Ddraig, still standing there, still processing the absolute impossibility of what had just happened, had only one thought left.

…Huh.

He remained motionless, his great, terrible form frozen in something far too close to confusion. The fire within him, once a roaring maelstrom eager to consume and dominate, now flickered weakly—like a match struggling against a storm. His mind, vast and ancient, capable of parsing battle strategies, war cries, and the screams of dying gods, simply refused to function. He had prepared himself for retaliation, for counterattack, for some grand battle against an unfathomable opponent. But he had not prepared for this.

James, entirely unbothered by the fact that he had just humiliated a god-killing dragon with less effort than swatting a fly, turned his head toward the Fallen Angel, finally taking notice of her. His gaze drifted downward, then back up, then back down again. Something in his expression shifted, confusion settling across his face.

“…Wait. Did you—?” He blinked, tilting his head slightly. “Oh. Oh, Miss. Are you well?”

Raynare, still crouched like a prey animal caught in the jaws of something beyond comprehension, did not respond. She was shaking. Her hands clutched her arms, her breath shallow, quick, erratic. Her lips, parted slightly, moved with silent whispers, her eyes unfocused, staring into a void that no one else could see.

James frowned.

“Shit, shit,” he muttered, rubbing the back of his neck. “Are you having an attack?”

Ddraig, still deeply insulted, turned his great head slightly to observe what was happening. The Fallen Angel, who had moments ago exuded an aura of arrogance and predatory confidence, now looked as though she had been stripped of all ego, all certainty. She was muttering under her breath, words in a language even Ddraig had not heard in centuries—prayers, or maybe just raw, fragmented thoughts of a mind trying desperately to reassemble itself.

James, meanwhile, was panicking.

“Oh, shit. Oh, shit.” He snapped his fingers, pacing slightly. “Uh. How do we heal attacks? Do I, like, slap her too? No, no, that seems excessive. Uh. Is her heart beating? Wait, I have an idea!” He spun on his heel, finger raised in revelation. “Some of the milk that Yoggy-chan let me have!”

Ddraig had no idea what that meant.

Raynare, still locked in a frozen panic, gave no reaction.

James clapped his hands together and strode toward the bar. He moved with the casual ease of a man who had not just unmade divine law with a flick of his wrist, humming slightly as he rummaged behind the counter. His hands passed over various bottles, containers, and strange, softly pulsing vials. The entire time, Raynare continued her broken murmuring, her voice soft and distant, her mind clearly struggling to grasp anything tangible in the wake of what she had seen.

Ddraig, unwilling to admit that he was now invested, simply watched.

The bar whispered. Not in any way that normal wood should. It shifted, breathed, exhaled as James moved, as though the counter itself was waiting. He finally pulled out a deep blue glass vial, the liquid inside viscous and moving as if alive.

“Alright,” he muttered, pouring it into a cup. “Let’s hope this doesn’t, like, explode her soul or something.”

Ddraig did not find that reassuring. James, however, seemed entirely confident as he turned, walked back over, and knelt before Raynare. She didn’t react at first—her body still trembling, her breath uneven. Her wings, normally poised and proud, were now curled tightly against her back, as though they were afraid.

James held the cup out.

“Here. Drink this.”

Raynare’s vacant, terrified eyes slowly lifted. She looked at the coffee, then at James, then back at the coffee. Her lips trembled.

She took the cup.

For a moment, she just stared at it, as though unsure whether to trust reality itself. Then, with a sharp inhale, she brought it to her lips and drank.