Gamond glared down at Poppy with burning blue eyes, her mere gaze freezing the ground into deep blue ice. Poppy struggled to look up at the towering Gamond, but still replied with a cheeky grin, followed by a gargle of blood and strange magic.

Not a single fraction of a second had passed before the two exploded into action again. Gamond wasn’t interested in listening to Poppy at all and just wanted her dead, frozen, and buried beneath layers upon layers of ice.

Temperature already dropped far enough that metal would crack and crumble, and yet, Poppy looked nearly unfazed by it. It was quite strange, ironic maybe. There are only two Pricolici in the entire universe, Arad and Poppy, and Gamond had now fought them both.

Like before, Gamond attempted to kick Poppy in the face and shatter her body, but to her surprise, the little thing managed to move and somewhat dodge. She had jumped, laid one hand on Gamond’s leg, and leaped over it.

Poppy was nowhere near as fast as Gamond, but she had seen such a kick before; dodging it wasn’t impossible. But she had made one mistake. In that tiny, insignificant fraction of a second that she touched Gamond’s leg, enough heat got sucked out of her, and her arm ended up frozen solid, then shattered before she could finish jumping over the kick.

Gamond’s entire body was already edging on the cusp of absolute zero, and a constant stream of cold magic flowed through her entire being, sucking heat from anything she touches at a rate unimaginable to mortals. A single touch is enough to freeze a titan solid and even make other white dragons shiver.

No one had ever survived her touch without freezing, except Arad Orion.

Poppy’s frozen arm shattered and separated from her shoulder as she moved. If she hadn’t cut her own arm with her blood, her entire body would’ve turned into a frozen statue. Gamond’s cold was so extreme that ice crystals formed around her entire body and fell to the ground. Knowing that those crystals were frozen air and not water, Poppy could estimate the extent of the world-level threat called Gamond.

She wanted to attack, but by the time she severed her own arm, Gamond was already coming at her with a second kick, forcing her back into the defensive. Using her second arm, Poppy blocked the kick and was blasted away at blinding speed, enough to heat up like a meteor and disintegrate into ash.

She quickly regenerated then threw another glance at Gamond. She was clearly outclassed by a lot, too much to even directly be able to resist. But that was the keyword, directly. She put one hand behind her back, and pointed the other toward Gamond with a smile.

From her fingernails, blood rushed out, forming several spinning bullets of boiling blood and magic. Those bullets all fired toward Gamond like a machine gun, and Gamond silently lifted one hand to deflect them all.

One bullet after another, Gamond slapped them all aside with deadly precision. Each bullet individually had no hope of scratching Gamond’s skin, but each of them was made of compressed blood, magic, and poison, making their damage slowly build up. After deflecting hundreds of them in a single fraction of a second, Gamond noticed that the scales on her palms were getting loose and slowly losing their rigidity.

At the start of this fight, Gamond was enraged. But now, she had started to calm down after remembering that Selina should be fine. The insult of someone being able to headshot one of Arad’s wives in her presence still burned, but she wasn’t a young drakaina and could swallow her pride to focus on what really mattered.

She was fully aware that Poppy wouldn’t take the risk and initiate a fight if she didn’t at least have an escape route. If she pressed her too hard, Poppy might just run away. So instead of focusing on killing her, Gamond had shifted her attention to another objective. She wanted to slowly push Poppy harder and harder to learn about her abilities and mentality.

She wanted to know what this freak wants, what she believes in, and how she fights. Like all other dragons, Gamond was a paranoid freak who hated to leave anything unplanned for. This fight with Poppy was outside her expectations, so now she was planning for a second rematch.

As Gamond notices the number of blood bullets increasing, she rushes forward through the barrage to reach Poppy before her scales start falling off. Poppy gasped, stopped firing, and lifted both of her hands, barely blocking Gamond’s elbow at the last moment.

Both of Poppy’s arms froze and shattered in the blink of an eye, and she could see Gamond’s hand reaching toward her neck. She could regenerate from grave wounds, even from being turned to ash, but she might not be able to escape if Gamond froze and sealed her in ice.

Poppy took a deep breath, and her chest inflated like a balloon as her lungs filled with enough air for a thousand men, and then, her mouth exploded open with a deafening roar. Gamond plugged her ears with ice, and kept reaching toward Poppy’s neck, only for her scales to rip apart her arm to get skinned by the violent vibrations of the air.

One moment, she was reaching toward Poppy’s neck, and in the next second, she was staring at Kory’s corpse, with Arad standing above her. She remained still for a second and could feel several of her long-frozen emotions starting to boil. Rage, sadness, wrath, madness.

Poppy’s maddening scream wasn’t a physical attack, but a mental attack that reached the brain through vibrations in the air. She can both control and modify memories and emotions, using them to twist and control those she sets her eyes upon. That was how she preyed on mortals for blood and flesh, and she managed to get so many corpses for her horrid monsters.

"Now, I’m not your enemy. Go, kill that dragon for me." As Poppy smiled, so did Gamond, and the little one almost shat herself. Gamond wasn’t angry at Arad for killing Kory; she was angry at herself for giving birth to such a weak daughter who wasn’t worth his time. She wasn’t sad at Kory’s death, but sad that her daughter failed to stand by Arad’s side. Her wrath wasn’t directed at Arad, but at her failure of a daughter, and the madness brewing in her brain was just her twisted elder brain seeking a new spawn of the void lord.

Gamond’s hand caught Poppy by the neck, and lifted her up with ease. "Sorry, it didn’t work."

Poppy’s scream vibrated the air, and used their vibrations to tickle the brains of targets and force them to release hormones and neurotransmitters. So by precisely controlling those vibrations, she could control the brains of her targets.

While the scream itself was magical, the effect on the target brain was purely chemical, which allowed it to bypass all magical mental defenses, but that is also the reason it lost to Gamond’s harrowing biology.

Gamond was already informed that Poppy might be a mental monster, and so, she already had a plan. The moment she sensed Poppy’s interference with her brain, she used cold magic to cool her brain down to near freezing, throwing both Poppy’s control and mind reading out of sync.

What Poppy wanted Gamond to feel and what Gamond felt weren’t the same, and what Poppy saw Gamond seeing, and what Gamond truly saw weren’t the same either.

"Now, how come you weren’t affected? No, I’m certain you got affected." As Poppy asked, Gamond glared at her with a grin. "What are you after? Speak or I’ll freeze you. You know that you won’t escape in that case, right?"

"Tell that black dragon that there can never be two kings. This world is too small for the two of us to coexist." With those words, Poppy’s expressions faded, her eyes lost their light, and her entire body went limp. Gamond froze her anyway so the others could take a look at her, but she wasn’t sure if Poppy was alive or dead. She felt as if the girl’s soul had left her body, but she was certain that her heart was still beating.

Far away in an unknown land, a little girl was traveling with her mother through a dense forest to collect medical herbs when she started twitching. The worried mother rushed to check on her daughter, only to get bitten in the neck by her.

As the mother died, the little girl stood, licked her bloodied lips, and smiled as her hair and eyes changed color. "A fresh body, a fresh me. Have fun with that vegetable corpse."