“Jim, try ice!” I yell. I don’t actually know if Dragons have some sort of weakness to cold damage, but in Earth lore, Western style dragons like this are usually found inside of mountains or hanging around volcanoes, so I think it’s at least worth a try. I may not have wanted this fight, but it’s here, and I don’t feel like I’m picking on a cute little baby anymore.

I was originally confident we’d be able to kill it pretty easily. That, was a mistake. Despite its age and its relatively tiny size, this thing is very much a viable threat to our entire group. I run up to the dragon, hitting it with the old razzle dazzle of my claws and my chomp. My claws scrape off its scales ineffectively, but my bite pushes through its scales far enough that I taste blood. I wasn't able to rip off a clump of flesh or anything, but at least I was able to bite hard enough to draw a bit of blood. On a target like this, the damage I'll have inflicted with that attack is negligible, but I think it probably did count as system recognized damage.

Bucky also charges the dragon. Considering that he’s hurt at least as badly as I am, and that our healer is out of the fight, that boy possesses cojones the size of Texas. His longsword bites deep into the dragon’s right wing, nearly cutting it off. Yeah, that's what a good hit looks like. The dragons left wing has a noteworthy tear in it courtesy of Regina, and his right wing is nearly severed courtesy of Bucky, broken and doing little more than flopping around weakly. If the physics of flight here work anything like physics back home, he won’t be flying anywhere. Though to be honest, if physics here worked the same as on earth, he should not have been able to fly in the first place. Even if his bones are hollow there is far too much mass packed into that 2 meter frame for his 4 or so meter wingspan to lift.

Regina is comfortable with her current strategy, and she strafes counterclockwise around the dragon while launching another arrow into the dragon hatchling, driving deep into its long neck. Finally, Jim takes action. He is also moving, opposite to Regina, swinging clockwise around the dragon, opposite to her. I was hoping he would have an ice or frost spell that he could leverage, but instead what bursts forth from his hands is a line of some sort of green goop, which starts sizzling as soon as it lands on the wyrmlings neck.

You may wonder, why are we all attacking the wings and the neck? The head moves around far too quickly, whipping around like, well, a whip. And the body of this creature, although tiny for a dragon, possesses mass that is simply incomparable to that of a human. This thing weighs at least a couple hundred kilos: getting a telling blow against that body would be tricky. But the neck? Closer to the base of the neck it doesn’t shift around to nearly as great of an extent as the head does, and is thin enough that you can be sure you’re causing real harm any time you make it past the scales. As much as an armor encased living tank like this has any weaknesses at all, the neck is the best compromise between being able to hit it where you want to hit, and that hit causing real damage.

Unfortunately for us this little red hatchling does not stand there, politely allowing us kill it. With me and Bucky having closed the distance to it, working together to harry it from both sides, and Jim and Regina having had enough time to spread out as well, it decides that more fire won’t be the best way to handle the current situation. It bites down on Bucky, teeth ripping into his midsection and giving him a shake to really jar those organs up. Apparently not satisfied with that level of damage, it rakes his stomach with a claw. As the baby dragon pulls away from him, many of those internal organs I mentioned spill out of him, covering the ground where his body falls. He’s probably dead, though in a world where people have superhuman vitality and magical healing can be powerful enough to bring back the dead, I can’t be certain of that until I check him.

Oh, right. There’s another claw, and this one is trying to liberate my body of its organs. I duck under the claw and it wizzes just past my head, so close I can feel the change in air pressure. I think I’m ok, only to discover that he hasn’t run out of body parts to attack with, his left wing slamming into me and forcing me back over a meter. I don’t have to look at my remaining health to know I’m lucky that I’m still conscious. His wings are clearly not as powerful as his teeth or claws, but that still knocked the wind out of me, and I'm having an awful lot of body reteaching my body how to draw in breath. I’m very lucky that Bucky was able to cripple the other wing before he fell, because there's no possibility whatsoever that I can take any more hits and remain standing.

I know I can’t fight this thing. I won’t remain standing for another exchange. I can’t turn around and run either; if he attacks me I’m going down, and if I give him my back he can just finish the job with a casual swipe without needing to even split his attention elsewhere. Reginas next arrow comes sailing by only to catch the dragons neck at a bad angle and careens off into the distance, having failed to cause noteworthy harm. Jim returns to his arcane missiles, once again delivering punishing harm to the dragon. And me? There’s nothing I can do. My attacks are just so very ineffective against this monstrosity that there’s no point behind trying to hurt it.

Right. I’m as good as dead, so I might as well do what I can to try and give someone else a chance. Hopefully Jim and Regina can finish this fight. As for me? I dive over to Bucky and starting scooping his guts back into his stomach. For reference, you absolutely don’t do that for a gut wound on Earth: it is guaranteed to lead to a major infection and death, even if you’re lucky enough to have folded the intestines back into the right location, which isn't as easy as it sounds either. The correct approach to a gut wound is to gather said guts and pile them up beside or on top of the victim, leaving the intestines outside of their body until you are able to get them to an operating room for actual surgery. But we have magical healing here, so if I can get his body parts into the right vicinity and stop him from bleeding the rest of the way out, he might possibly have a slim chance. Is he still alive right now? I think so, but only barely. If I wait to begin treatment, he won’t be.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

The dragon, either realizing that I’m out of the fight or simply not caring because I was by far and away the least effective contributor to this fight, doesn’t bother to waste any further time on me. Although it's still feisty, our efforts must have been causing it notable injury. Instead of finishing me off the way that I'd expected it to, it uses its powerful hind legs to launch past me at a fearsome speed, latching its mouth onto Jims face and savaging his back with fierce claws. It is… Gruesome. Once again, if he isn’t dead now, he’ll be close to it. The dragon turns towards the last person still fighting, Regina, who had just finished lining up her next shot. Her arrow fires straight and true, landing in the midst of the still bubbling acid on its neck, and driving deeper than any of her arrows up to now, the entire length of the arrows shaft embeds somewhere within its neck. The dragons breathing becomes immediately labored, and he begins gurgling, then it twitches strangely a few times before, with a heaving, whistling, shuddering and wet, pained moan, it collapses beside Jim.

With no time to worry about anything else, I call out to Regina and tell her to see if Joaqim is still breathing, and if he is I tell her to see if he needs treatment. A few moments later she says he’s alive and as far as she can tell he’s stable. Burn wounds really do tend to worsen over the first few hours so I don’t consider her preliminary check to be gospel, but there are other pressing concerns. I tell her to check Jim next. She does, but having taken partial damage from both rounds of dragons fire without healing, followed by taking a full serving of the dragons melee capabilities… Jim won’t be returning home. Not to Diamond Lake, not to his family in Anival. Not today, not ever. Jim is dead.

With regards to Bucky, I have done what I can to get his organs back inside of him, but it is nowhere near enough to save his life. I imbue a spell trigger on my armor. After a minute of grueling concentration trying to force the imbuement into my armor, I fail to charge a healing spell into it. I can’t feel Bucky’s pulse anymore, he has lost too much blood, but I still see small bubbles occasionally foaming and frothing in the blood around his pale lips. I try again. This time I succeed at cramming a healing spell into my armor, which I immediately release into Bucky. Like magic (because it is), I see his organs rearranging themselves into their appropriate locations, and his bleeding slows to a manageable level. His chest begins to visibly move again. He’s still hurt. Very hurt. I have no idea if he will eventually wake up or not, usually when someone is as injured as he was, they just die. But now, after having been magically healed, he should be able to live for a little while longer. If nothing else, this should have bought enough time to keep trying.

I move over to Joaqim and try to repeat my spell trigger. Unsurprisingly, this one also fails. I do what I can by applying clean, dry linens to the injured parts of his body… Meaning I dress him up to look like a mummy. Burn wounds are nasty, and it's a common misconception that you want to do things like apply water, but you really, really don't. For a severe burn, improper handling might be enough to cause the burned skin to slough off completely, which is far more disgusting than it sounds, and leaving the insides of your body exposed to the elements is a far more serious injury than even a severe burn is. Joaqim looks like his body was nearly completely covered in third and fourth degree burns, it would be easy to make things worse. Once Joaqim looks like he belongs in a pyramid, I return to Bucky and give him some nonmagical healing in the form of clean bandages and compresses.

I explain to Regina that we can’t move them in their current condition. She nods. I say that I will do my best to provide another magical healing effect after a rest if I’m able to, but that my ability to replicate spells is very difficult and I fail far more often than I succeed. She knows I’m right about not being able to move them, too, and so we set up camp where we’re at. After a few minutes of a jittery and strained near silence, when the adrenaline is gone and the worst of the shock is over, I lay down and take the first rest.

You may think some variation on "Oh come on, there's no way someone could sleep just a few minutes after something like that!!"

No, you really can. Most people can't after the first time they narrowly survive a shit show like that. The blood and viscera, the panic and fear, the sheer immediacy of your or their demise, it truly is harrowing. Most people will end up staying up half the night even after half a dozen of those brushes with death. I'd be lying if I said this was an everyday occurrence for me, in either life. It isn't.

But… I truly wish this was only the first or second or sixth time I've held the insides of a person's body, a friends at that, in my hands. I wish that this was only the first or second time that I'd gotten to see and smell fourth degree burns up close and personal. But it's not. We're not doing anything productive anymore: I'm out of imbuements, I'm physically and mentally exhausted, that dragon brought me down to 1 health, and I was barely conscious even without accounting for the exhaustion that comes with expending all of my imbuements for the day. There are many, many reasons why I'm able to go to sleep so soon after. Once the adrenaline is gone, there is little more I ever want to do than sleep, and right now I'm actively incentivized to succumb to that exhaustion, because I need the rest to recover my imbuements and stand a chance of saving the others. I'm not worried about nightmares, I rarely dream about anything after something like this. Falling asleep now would just be a cessation of consciousness. The dreams don't bother with me right away; no, those come on the nights that are peaceful and calm.

As for Regina? Out of all of us, she is the only person in the tattered remains of our group that is relatively hale and hearty… Physically, at least. That's part of why she gets to keep watch while I sleep. Another part is because she hasn't been here as often as I have. She wouldn't be able to sleep yet even if it were her spellcasting that we'd need to rely on to patch things up. But judging by the expression of horror and shock on her face, combined with a newly manifested inclination towards getting lost inside of her own head, I suspect that this might not be the first time she was the only one left healthy in her group.

I get it. The detachment, the silent disbelief. This was unexpected and terrifying, and our losses were severe. I'm not exactly in the greatest mental space right now either, not really. But for her? There's more to it than shock and adrenaline, she has moved into a very personal form of horror. I know that mental space well. This isn't the time to talk unnecessarily. She's not me, but this isn't her first time. Right now, she's not just dealing with the current losses, she's reliving previous trauma. I’d wondered before why someone as experienced as her wasn’t already part of a group. I think I may have found the answer.