My Taboo Harem!-Chapter 255: Dragoness Stare Vs Dominance Aura!

Dravenna Ashford.

Even the name sounded like a warning carved into dragon bone. Dravenna—from the old tongue for dragon. A label that had trailed her through decades of quiet conquests, through the years when she’d made Paradise itself flinch and look away, through whatever black abyss had finally dragged her down to play puppet in this gilded cage.

Dean of Ashford Elite Academy. Puppet.

Phei had walked in expecting a monster.

What he got was something infinitely worse.

She was soft. Delicate, almost, in that obscene way only genuinely lethal things can afford to be.

She looked like the kind of woman who could erase your entire family tree with one bored phone call and still make it home in time for afternoon tea and a light murder mystery.

And then her eyes found him.

Phei took an involuntary step back.

Fuck.

They weren’t just green. They were a goddamn whirlpool of jade and emerald with something blacker churning at the bottom—something that had been ancient and hungry before his great-grandparents were even a wet dream in their ancestors’ pants.

Ancient. Starving.

And if you stared too long—if you were stupid enough to stare too long—the pupils were slightly slitted. Almost unnoticeable. The kind of detail you’d miss unless you were already falling into the abyss.

The abyss was staring back.

And it looked mildly entertained.

Then the aura hit.

It wasn’t pressure. It was submersion into an ocean made of midnight itself—black, bottomless, alive with the slow, deliberate malice of something ancient that had waited eons just to taste fear like this.

The air didn’t merely thicken; it turned traitor. It conspired against him, thickening into tar that clung to his lungs, coating every alveolus in suffocating frost. Each breath he tried to steal felt like swallowing shards of obsidian—sharp, cold, cutting deeper the harder he fought.

His windpipe narrowed to a razor slit; oxygen became a forbidden thing, rationed by something that enjoyed watching him beg for it.

The weight wasn’t on his shoulders. It was inside them. It wormed into the marrow of his bones, into the hollows between vertebrae, into the fragile cage of ribs that suddenly felt paper-thin against the crush.

His heart stuttered—each beat now a war drum struck underwater, sluggish, drowning in viscous dark. Blood crawled instead of flowed; every pulse had to claw through frozen sludge to reach his temples, his fingertips, his tongue.

His knees didn’t merely tremble—they betrayed him. Tendons screamed as gravity itself seemed to multiply tenfold, ten thousandfold, pulling downward with the patient cruelty of tectonic plates deciding a mountain no longer deserved to stand.

His spine arched involuntarily, vertebrae grinding like millstones under the force that wanted them to shatter into dust.

Every muscle fiber twitched with the animal imperative to collapse, to prostrate, to offer throat and belly and make himself so small, so insignificant, that perhaps the abyss staring through her eyes would grow bored and look away.

This was no metaphor.

This was what the students had whispered about in trembling voices, calling it suffocation, calling it dread, calling it the moment you realize gods can hate.

They had no fucking idea.

The aura wasn’t content to merely oppress. It invaded. It remembered every secret shame he’d ever buried, every nightmare he’d outrun, every time he’d told himself he was untouchable. It dragged them up like corpses from a lake bed—wet, bloated, reeking—and pressed them against the inside of his skull until he could taste copper and ash and the sour rot of his own mortality.

His vision tunneled. The edges of the world frayed into violet-black static, as though reality itself was fraying at the seams where she stood. Shadows that should not have moved slithered along the floor toward him—long, liquid fingers reaching to wrap around his ankles, his wrists, promising to pull him under if he so much as blinked.

Phei’s hand shot to his throat.

Fingers—shaking, bloodless—hooked beneath the silk noose of his tie. For one heartbeat the knot felt like iron forged in the heart of a dying star. Then he yanked—hard, vicious, tearing silk and skin alike.

System, he thought, and the word came out desperate inside his skull, raw and ugly. Dominance Aura. Level six. Now.

[DOMINANCE AURA: Level 5 → Level 6

Cost: 200 EXP]

The pressure eased.

Slightly. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Not nearly fucking enough.

Level seven. Do it. Fucking do it.

[DOMINANCE AURA: Level 6 → Level 7

Cost: 200 EXP]

He didn’t bother reading the full notifications. Didn’t give a rat’s ass about the fine print. All that mattered was the golden heat exploding in his chest—spreading outward like wildfire on dry tinder, wrapping around him in protective coils of pure, arrogant will.

His aura didn’t attack hers.

It simply existed.

Swirled around him like armor forged from something older than bloodlines, something meaner than etiquette.

The pressure eased.

For the first time since he’d crossed the threshold, Phei could actually breathe without feeling like his lungs were being crushed in a vice.

He lifted his chin and met her eyes.

Those strange, slitted, vortex-green eyes that should’ve sent him scrambling for the hills like a prey animal.

Usually, Phei thought dimly through the haze of adrenaline and leftover terror, I’m the one with the eyes that make people forget how to blink.

Now he understood what it felt like from the other side.

Her gaze pulled. Drew him forward like gravity with teeth. Made him want to step closer, to fall in, to drown in whatever ancient, starving thing lurked behind that jade-and-emerald surface. Hypnotic. Lethal.

The beautiful that came with hazard signs written in the blood of idiots who thought they could handle it.

He cleared his throat—once, sharply, like he was trying to remind himself he still had vocal cords.

Stepped fully into the office.

The door clicked shut behind him with the soft, final sound of a coffin lid settling into place.

She hadn’t moved.

Hadn’t spoken.

Hadn’t even blinked, as far as he could tell.

That was the truly terrifying part.

She’d just sat there—watching, waiting, patient as erosion—while he’d flailed like a fish on a hook, gasping and thrashing and burning EXP just to keep his spine straight.

How the bloody hell am I supposed to complete my mission like this?

The girls hadn’t warned him about this.

Not really.

They’d talked about intimidation, sure—about presence, about the way she compressed the oxygen in a room until breathing felt like asking permission. They hadn’t mentioned the eyes that could strip you naked without ever leaving your face, the way her silence alone made grown men reconsider their life choices.

This?

This was something else.

A crushing aura that didn’t just press down—it excavated. It reached inside your ribcage, found the soft parts you’d forgotten were still tender, and squeezed until you remembered every sin you’d ever committed in the dark.

Eyes that ate your soul and then spat out the receipts, itemized and annotated in perfect cursive.

She must hide it, Phei realized, the thought dropping into his gut like ice water.

She wore the puppet Dean mask for everyone else. The sanitized edition. The tamed dragon on a leash so short it had become decorative jewelry. Diminished. Civilized. Safe enough for board meetings and parent-teacher conferences.

But she wasn’t wearing it now.

The mask was gone.

Why?

Why him?

Had standing up to Marcus—to a Heavenchild, a golden-boy predator with divine sponsorship—been enough to make her drop the act? To peel back the pearls-and-silk veneer and show the charity-case bastard what ancient, starving thing actually lived underneath?

Well, Phei thought, and there was something almost like grim, vicious satisfaction threading through the fear like barbed wire wrapped in velvet, I’m not sorry.

Freedom isn’t a walk in the park.

Especially not for enslaved dragons.

Especially not when the first step is kicking the cage door in someone else’s face.

"You must be Phei Maxton..."

Her voice was silk wrapped around a freshly sharpened blade. Low. Measured. The exact timbre that had once made men twice her age forget how consonants worked and reduced boardroom titans to stammering schoolboys who suddenly remembered they had mothers.

"Phei Ryujin Tiamat," he corrected, calm as if he were ordering black coffee with room for cream.

Her eyebrow arched. Barely. A millimeter of aristocratic movement that somehow contained an entire universe of are you fucking serious right now?

"The ward playing at having a real name." Her lips curved—not quite a smile, something with more teeth and less mercy. "How... ambitious."

First blood drawn. Clean. Elegant. The way predators like her preferred it—quick, surgical, no mess on the carpet.

He pressed forward before she could twist the knife any deeper into the wound she’d just opened with surgical precision.

"And I too, didn’t know the Dean was a bully!"

Her eyes went wide.

The air between them thickened, shimmered with heat that had nothing to do with the thermostat.

Phei felt it in his bones.