Chapter 688 — Dragon and Sky
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
"Transform into one... let me see..."
Maggie stared at the "Her Royal Highness" before her with a somewhat stiff expression. Accustomed to conventional ways of thinking, she found herself completely unable to keep pace with Rebecca in that moment. Only after confirming she had not misheard did she begin to feel a flicker of irritation.
Transform into one for her to see!
Was she being treated as some rare specimen, some amusing spectacle to be gawked at?!
Already harboring a certain aversion to her dragon form due to her physical deformity, Maggie now heard Rebecca's words—which sounded for all the world like the thoughtless demand of a noble's spoiled child—and felt every blood vessel in her body throb. Yet reason forced her to suppress the anger in her heart. After all, the girl before her was the legally recognized heir to this newborn empire; even her own mistress had to remain courteous in the presence of this princess. So she held her emotions in check and replied as calmly as she could: "Why do you wish to see my dragon form?"
Unfortunately, the thick-skinned Rebecca did not sense the slightest shift in Maggie's mood—if she could read others' emotions, she would not have gotten herself beaten up every few days for her stubborn recklessness. The girl simply kept smiling brightly, her face radiant: "I want to fly too!!"
All of Maggie's follow-up words condensed into six dots and a question mark: "...?"
Then, under the even more bewildered and astonished gaze of this young lady of the black dragon, Rebecca suddenly produced a large scroll from somewhere and unfurled it with a flourish before Maggie's eyes—it was unmistakably a hand-drawn mechanical design blueprint, complete with numerous runic array patterns.
The next second, Rebecca spread the blueprint flat on the ground and began explaining with great enthusiasm to the utterly dumbfounded Maggie: "Look at this—this isn't a spike, this is a flying machine I designed. The ring at the bottom is called an anti-gravity ring; it provides lift, already sorted out, very stable. Then over here is the arcane energy wing panel... you know about arcane energy wing panels, right? Warships have them too. This is the flying machine version I designed... Hey, why don't you squat down? Can you even see clearly standing up like that?"
Maggie mentally rifled through her knowledge of attendant etiquette—how an attendant should wait upon a noble who is standing, how an attendant should wait upon a noble who is seated—but what about when a noble squats down in the middle of an open courtyard? There didn't seem to be any rule for that...
Because no noble in their right mind would squat on the ground in public!
After careful consideration, Maggie still squatted down beside Rebecca—after all, Rebecca had spoken first...
"That's more like it," Rebecca glanced at Maggie with satisfaction, her finger continuing to trace across the peculiar conical machine on the blueprint. "I referenced elven anti-gravity technology here. Their levitation spells are far more efficient than human ones, but I still haven't figured out how to make this thing move freely. The anti-gravity ring can only provide lift—or strictly speaking, it can only provide reverse gravity. That's where it differs from a repulsion cantrip: if you tilt the anti-gravity ring's force field, it won't gain a tilted thrust; it'll just lose control entirely. Last time I sent the prototype slamming into the ceiling...