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Late Evening - Late Fall : The Tree of Prayer

- Vernados Peroti ~ (The dragon who originally came to arrest Vasilias and Amara for the murder of Cyrus Aetos in Chapter 201)

*Fwooosh* *flap-fwoosh* *flap-fwoosh* I zipped through the evening sky as I made my way toward the center of Valtivar with great haste. -The ceremony should be starting soon. I hope I can catch them before they leave...-

Technically, I was still on a mission that involved the destruction of the Helvig estate, but instead of the mission being to find and arrest the culprits, the investigation was reset, and the aforementioned culprits were to be questioned without punishment.

It was quite a sharp change in direction, but with the information I stumbled across, such a shift was to be expected.

The only problem was that the information I planned to report wasn't what caused the change.

-For the higher-ups to reset the investigation yet not know of the blatant manipulation of information. .. Just what is going on?-

A few days prior, I had met up with a young dragon named Vasilias Whyte, who was closely associated with the culprits. But instead of arresting him like I was ordered, he pointed out an incredible discrepancy in the information I was provided, which, in turn, made their arrests impossible.

Regardless, as I was flying back to Bahamut to report it, I was still quite nervous that the information he gave me could have been false and that I would be punished for not following orders, but thankfully that wasn't the case.

By the time I arrived, the investigation had already been reset, and we were ordered to reinvestigate everything from the ground up while purging our prior knowledge because of something called Suspicion of Honesty.

It was basically a protocol normally used when a witness or investigator is caught or suspected of lying.

At the time, I thought it all made sense, thinking someone must have just reported some other kind of information discrepancy before I could.

But when I finally reported my observations directly to Miss Exypnos (his boss's boss), she started panicking and sent her direct subordinates to oversee the investigation personally.

It was a worrying reaction, to say the least. -If Miss Exypnos didn't know about an investigator or group of investigators lying, then what caused the Suspicion of Honesty?-

I quickly fell into a rabbit hole of inexplicable questions as I hopelessly tried to figure out the situation.

But, in the next instant, the walls of the hole I would have struggled to escape vanished like they were never around me in the first place.

"Huh?" My eyes went wide as I looked at the horizon and saw an absolutely colossal beam of light stretch into the sky like a rising sun. -W..what.. is that...-

The blinding light alone made me feel like death was looming over me and made the beat of my heart start to slow down, but I only started to panic when I realized where the beam came from. -The Tree of Prayer should be just over the horizon.. don't tell me...-

I immediately sped up, using every ounce of strength in my wings to fly as fast as possible, and darted over the horizon.

Several minutes later, when I finally got close to the tree, I noticed the fog was slightly less voluminous than usual, and that some of the outskirts of the canopy were visible.

But that only made me see something I was likely never meant to. -I..is that a dragon's tail?-

-

- Vasilias ~

*crack-Fwoosh* *tap-crackle* -W..why are there so many?- *crackle-Fwoosh* Jumping between branches in the dense fog, I was slowly working my way up through the canopy, where the fog never actually uncovered, to see if anything was different.

But nothing was.

The higher I went, the larger the skeletons became and the more uncomfortable I got.

-That goddess wasn't kidding when she said the fog would kill just about anything that went inside of it, huh.

..- Some of the skeletons I had seen in my slow climb would have easily been over a hundred meters tall, but around 120 meters seemed to be the limit.

-120 meters... That would be an ancient over 2,000 years old.

. yet it died helplessly here even with the mountain of artifacts it brought. ..-

*crackle-Fwoosh* Throwing myself up to the next branch above me, I came face to face with a nearly 112-meter-tall dragon loaded to the teeth with artifacts and even a few scales that had long since lost their luster. -They clearly didn't come here with the intent to die.. so.. why?-

I felt like there were countless possible answers, with curiosity being one of the most believable, but at the same time, I didn't think things were so simple.

-These ancients were practically all close to or over 2,000 years old.

. they wouldn't succumb to their curiosity like the animals and younger dragons on the lower branches would.

..- But the more I looked around, the more confused I got trying to explain it.

Eventually, I found myself at the top edge of the fog, only a few dozen meters from the outside edge of the canopy, but that was when I saw something a bit unusual. "Hm?" -What is that?-

Through a few tiny gaps in the leaves of the dense canopy, I saw some bone, but its placement was quite odd. Instead of being strewn across countless branches like the other skeletons, it was simply sticking into the air.

-What am I looking at?- Too curious to leave it as a mystery, I hastily worked my way out of the canopy and flew toward it. But that only made me more confused.

*Fwoosh* "Huh?" Just in front of me was a dragon's tail sticking several meters out of the canopy. -Did it really dive into the canopy head-first and die that quickly?-

But instead of looking into the canopy and seeing its body just within the edge of the fog, I only saw the tail continue until I couldn't see it anymore. -W..what?-

At the very least, it was the tail of a dragon that was simply incomparable to anything I had seen before, but its full size was something I was gravely underestimated, even then.

*crunch-crunch-crackle-crunch* Slamming my way through the smaller branches, I followed the tail through the fog, but it kept going until I had gone just short of half a kilometer into the canopy.

-T..the tail alone is nearly 400 meters long.

.. Is this really a dragon?!- Continuing down the spine that was barely being held together by a trace, yet still considerably large amount of lingering divinity, a knot of anxiety grew in my stomach.

-Just how much divinity did it have when it was alive for not all of it to have dissipated already? -

I found it hard to believe it could be a dragon with how massive it was, as even the biggest ancients ever recorded were only around 130 meters tall, but there was simply nothing about the skeleton that didn't seem draconic.

At least that was the case until I got to the base of the neck and saw something that made assuming it was a dragon much more outlandish.

*crackle* Landing on a sizable branch that had grown through the skeleton over the countless years it laid there, I turned to the base of the skeleton's neck with a look of confusion. "What the f*ck am I looking at?"

In the area where the base of the neck should have been, the spine split apart and formed three identical, smaller vertebrae that then grew out to form three distinctly different necks. -So it's not a dragon, but a creature with multiple heads? How would that even work?-

With my curiosity quickly blotting out my other emotions, I promptly stepped off the branch and descended farther into the canopy to try and find one of the detached necks of the creature.

But when I eventually stumbled across one of them, my confusion returned like a wave. "I must be hallucinating.. r..right?" Drooped across a large branch with countless smaller branches woven through it was a massive, and distinctly draconian neck and head.

The size of it made me shiver, as its head alone was nearly as big as I was, but I was so intrigued that I simply ignored the fear.

-A multi-headed dragon, hundreds of meters larger than even the largest and oldest of ancients...- Only a single theory made sense. -So there really is a stage beyond Ancient...-

As I crept closer to the colossal, hanging skull of the dragon, I finally noticed a large, but deteriorated golden ring around one of its countless massive horns, with the only remaining legible text reading: 'Lernaean~'

-Lernaean... Was that.. its name?- I memorized the word in a heartbeat, hoping it would eventually lead me to some information about the colossal, multi-headed dragon when I returned to Bahamut.

But I was still left in a pit full of questions with no answers. -Could the other ancients have come into the fog out of curiosity fueled by the tail sticking out of the canopy? Or did they come here for a different reason…-

Quickly getting lost in thought, I glanced down toward the rune within the tree trunk that remained far out of sight. -I wonder...-