These people were all cowards. At least to the eyes of a dragon, however human their current shell might have been.
Alaxia Mystscale had finally managed to track down that damnable thief who’d dared pilfer the treasures she’d prepared in anticipation of having to make use of her bolthole.
Yet she couldn’t just go ahead and murder the bastard, no that would be too easy. A phantom that arrived before anyone could blink and obliterate the target might cause a stirr, but that could have been anyone. Anyone.
Showing up later to reveal herself would only result in a lukewarm response. And showing off during the fight, or standing over a dead body, that would not work. Posing in the battle would be dangerous even for her, with how she was still recovering, and making a declaration while covered in blood would send a slightly darker message than she wanted to.
It was better to be feared and loved, because love was fickle while fear lasted nigh-eternally, but if her subjects were so terrified of her that the prospect of continuing to live under her rule was a greater source of terror than the consequences of rebellion, they’d rebel.
As her previous domain had handily demonstrated.
This time, though, she’d do better. After all, it might have taken a near-death experience, banishment through the cosmos, and the very multiverse itself undergoing a fundamental shift, but even a being as old and set in its ways as her could learn.
Hence, the plan. Walk down the street of this strange and unfamiliar city in broad daylight, attracting as much attention as she could without outright misbehaving. Until someone decided to react in a way she could rightfully penalize as a demonstration of what happened to those who got in her way.
At that point, she could finally tear apart that gods-cursed thief, that misbegotten spawn of a bonnacon’s inbred cousin who’d dared to take what was rightfully hers.
Alaxia shivered as she thought of the creature she’d just brought up. Overgrown idiotic cows that could literally acres of land in their feces when startled, and they were startled by literally anything and everything. This world might be a mess devoid of energy and natural treasures, but at least it seemed to lack that particular pest. A pest that was somehow still more intelligent than that utter braindead moron who’d decided that her supplies were his to use.
Now all that she needed to was find someone to try and make a stand. The town watch who’d cordoned off the Jungle of the Verdant hells with a barricade that would fold at the first sign of a breakout had let her through.
Sure, they’d tried to hand her various cards and attempted to get her to stay behind for some manner of medical procedure, but overall, it wasn’t something she felt deserved consequences. Sadly. Really, it’d have been almost sweet, if she’d needed the help of such lowly beings. They were always causing all manner of issues but the one time she actually needed trouble, they were on their best behaviour.
She sighed and continued to march down the wide road, which was covered in some manner of sizeable, solid, rock-like, material. Based on the countless small chunks of rock stuck inside, it was an alchemical creation that had been poured over the ground.
Impressive. Very impressive. Creating something like this with such inferior materials … once she’d taken over, she knew which craftsmen would be the first to join her legion of personal alchemists.
But whoever had created these enchanted carriages would die a horrible death, she promised herself that. Granted, they worked, but by the gods, they stank. They were also loud, annoying, and several had almost crashed into her. Clearly, their drivers had the good sense to not run over royalty.
Alaxia rolled her eyes and continued to walk … until someone crashed into her rear.
The one good thing about doing this in the form of one of these hairless monkeys? She didn’t have a tail to run over. That would have been … unpleasant.
She stumbled several steps forward while the badly damaged machine began to whine. Loudly.
Oh, finally.
“How. Dare. YOU!” she roared, whirling around, raising a fist and bringing it down on the block of metal that likely served as the carriage’s means of propulsion, tearing clean through while her Verdant Soulflame transformed into multiple serpents of emerald flame that ripped the machine to bits.
Moving slowly, deliberately, full of regal grace, she drew her arm back and turned around, imperiously ignoring the driver of the vehicle scrambling out of it.
As the fool ran, she continued on her way, until an unearthly howling began to fill the air. She decided to likewise ignore it … until it became clear that the source of said howling was the vehicles of the local watch. At least that was what the uniforms suggested.
Alaxia still ignored them until they pulled out some kind of particularly noisy metal implements and metal projectiles began to bounce off her skin.
She sighed. Give her a good fight any day, this was just trying her patience, where she ignored the metallic, horizontal rain that might eventually ruin her clothing if she let it go on for long enough.
Sure, she unleashed the occasional firey serpent of heat lance to destroy an empty car, but annihilating the local watch en masse might send an overly extreme message, which she was trying to avoid.
“Where are your champions?” she bellowed, then fixing a single cowering woman with a hard stare. “Do your leaders care so little for you that all they send to defend you are these weaklings?”
The woman just withdrew further, wilting under her gaze, and began to cry.
Urgh. It seemed the watch wasn’t the only pathetic thing in this world.
Slowly, she was starting to doubt whether she even wanted to rule this trash heap. And eventually, as she reached the outside of the city, the area where people still lived, she was greeted with actual trash heaps. As if her opinion of these hairless monkeys couldn’t get any lower.
But if she saw something that offended her eyes to a degree she truly could not overlook, she could just annihilate it.
Growing ever more annoyed, Alaxia closed the distance to her target, more and more metal projectiles bouncing off her, including heavier ones, and some that exploded, until someone finally stepped in her path who wasn’t a powerless weakling.
***
Some kind of madwoman had emerged from the jungle. A haughty, arrogant, magic-slinging madwoman.
Won. Der. Ful.
Jaclyn sighed. Another cultivator. At least that was the hope, because she could almost certainly beat another person hopped-up on natural treasures, only skilled at the magically learned techniques powered by their cultivation.
Everything else … it might just be the fear of the unknown, but Jaclyn had to admit, the other possibilities did scare her.
Some kind of magical beast that only looked human, someone who’d somehow found another System out in the Dungeon, or an actual human mutated by some kind of magical … thing to gain the ability to laugh off bullets and unleash constructs of emerald flame, while also, on occasion, sealing off entire streets with whatever plantlife could be found.
All horror scenarios.
Though there was one thought that refused to leave her head, stubbornly reminding her of the one threat she knew to be out there. Well, other than the Dungeon.
The phrase “snake made of fire” made alarm bells shrill in her head. Sure, she’d expected the dragon to look like, well, a dragon, but weren’t there plenty of stories of dragons turning into humans?
Jaclyn knew better than to psych herself out before she even knew what was up with a given situation, she really did. But something about this whole affair just made every single one of her instincts scream dire warnings.
And even then, running was not an option.
She didn’t even have to tell Granger to redirect the car to the sight of the incident, he’d already done that all on his own.
So Jaclyn removed her jacket and carefully folded it under the passenger seat where it wouldn’t shift and thereby risk the vials, swept up the mess of paperwork she’d spread out all across the back seats into a halfway-orderly pile which she then placed upon the jacket, jamming it into place so that it would hopefully not make a mess. And then she called Owens, asking he send Gula her way, for the emergency healing she might need, or even help, if the car was far enough.
That should be it for preparations, shouldn’t it?
She paused for a moment, then retrieved a single vial and passed it to the young man in the driver’s seat.
“If something happens, give this to me,” she told him.
“Define ‘something’,” Granger said.
“If I physically can’t tell you not to use it, give it to me,” Jaclyn said. She sincerely hoped this would go well, if not perfectly, but she was also more than aware of how badly things could have gone last time. A sword to the stomach was incredibly dangerous, even if it was a straight through-and-through that hadn’t nicked even a single internal organ.
But she’d done all the planning she could, and had now turned to just fervently hoping things would go well in between trying to make plans. Jaclyn wasn’t a religious person in general, but it was still essentially a prayer, a deep yearning for the intangible factors that lay well beyond humanity’s ability to affect to fall in her favor. Because as much as it galled her to say so, much as it galled any experts and professional … anythings to say, sometimes shit just came down to luck, your hard-earned skills be damned.
The car continued to roar down London’s streets, lights flashing, sirens howling, and after just thirty seconds, the sound of combat reached Jaclyn’s ears. Or at least what she was assuming was combat. She knew what gunshots sounded like, but those other sounds … what was that? Magic?
Possibly, but not any she was familiar with.
“Stop here, watch, make sure to tell anyone who needs to know what’s going on gets the information,” she ordered and leaped out of the car, easily landing on her feet despite the vehicle having been going almost eighty miles an hour.
She charged towards the site of the carnage and … stopped.
A woman slightly taller than she was, clad in an emerald green outfit best described as the bastard lovechild of a gi and a ballroom dress covered in more gemstones than Jaclyn had ever seen on an entire ballroom’s worth of high society ladies, with impractically long blond hair cascading down her back.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Despite looking utterly out of place in combat, the woman was tearing her way through anyone who was trying to stop her with both her bare hands and energy attacks.
However, the strange sight wasn’t what had stopped Jaclyn, not at all. No, that was due to her instincts warning her.
She primarily used the defensive portion of her Spirit Bond, the raw durability, being hard to grab a hold of and even harder to be hit in her vitals, with her also occasionally taking full advantage of her heightened hearing and sense of smell.
But during the most dangerous fight of her life, against the cultivator, it was the “know if you have a chance” portion that had kept her going. It had insisted she had a chance.
Admittedly, that chance might just have been that of a fifty-year-old couch potato trying to take down a champion heavyweight boxer, which was only possible by burning a lifetime’s worth of luck, but it was a chance nonetheless.
Here and now, though, all she saw was her death approaching.
And normally, that would have given her pause. Sacrificing herself, throwing her body into the path of something as inexorable as an onrushing train for what seemed like zero return, that would have been a step too far. The kind of choice a tragic action hero would have made, not a real person with friends and a child to take care of.
Doing the job was one thing. Committing literal suicide was a very different situation.
But not today. Today, she was sad to realize, there was much more at stake than whatever she normally ran into. No back alley brawl that escalated, no gunman who might not have had a hostage or anyone else he could hurt but would put a bullet in the brain of the first person who tried to apprehend him, nothing like that.
People were already terrified enough, and if this lady tore through every person who stood in her way, it would prove just how overwhelmed the forces of law and order were. Especially if it got out that the Deputy Director of the agency meant to handle everything hadn’t done anything.
Besides, who was she to stand by and watch as people who lacked her knowledge of just how screwed they were stood and fought?
All of that flooded her mind, damn near paralyzing her while her power continued to pulse away in her neural circuits, incessantly screaming “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!” over and over again.
And yet, after barely five seconds, Jaclyn stepped out into the woman’s path and advanced.
“Stop!” she snapped. “Hold it right there, cut that out, and stand down.”
Not the most thought-out demand, but this was only ever going to end one way.
“Oh, and who are you?” the woman asked in an oddly cheerful tone, studying Jaclny as though she were some kind of … honestly, normally people only used that tone when spotting a cute dog or maybe a hamster.
“Insp- …” Jaclyn cut herself off before she used her old title, then introduced herself properly. “Deputy Director Abrams, of the Bureau of Preternatural Affairs. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“Why, I’m looking for someone,” the woman grinned, actually standing a little straighter as she introduced herself. “Alaxia Mystscale, future empress of these lands, off to punish a little thief who stole from me.”
Well, that was … a statement. What was the proper response to that?
“Yeah, we don’t allow vigilantism here,” Jaclyn shook her head, hoping to delay this until, somehow, things grew less grim. Even when everything else was gone, hope remained and she clung to it stubbornly, no matter how thoroughly her senses were screaming at her to run.
“Ever hear of the rule of law?”
“Oh, you’re misunderstanding, I am the law,” the woman, who’d never stopped walking, grinned at her. And then, she suddenly wasn’t standing five meters from Jaclyn, she was right in her face.
A hand shot out and grasped Jaclyn’s shoulder, pushing her backwards with enough force that her legs whipped up as her torso flew away, while fingers like hydraulic presses dug into her shoulder.
At least that was something she could work with. Her strength had skyrocketed while her weight had remained the same, so it was an easy matter to continue to swing her legs up, kick the self-proclaimed “empress” in the face with both legs, and then roll off the other side of the arm holding onto her.
Her opponent’s fingers slammed shut, shredding her blouse and tearing bloody furrows into her shoulder, but in that constellation, not even this monster could keep a hold of her.
And before her feet had even returned to the ground, Jaclyn was already preparing for her next move, and when she did land, she spun and launched a punch under her opponent’s still-outstretched arm, throwing her entire body behind a blow aimed straight at her foe’s throat.
With her fingers forming a leopard fist for maximum concentration of force.
It should have been a lethal blow. This was what the fist form was meant for. Minimized surface area for maximized penetration power, applied straight to whichever vulnerable spot was available to be hit.
Throw in the fact that the spectral badger’s claws above her knuckles provided an even smaller point of contact and her enemy should have been on the ground, struggling to breathe through a crushed throat, if she wasn’t choking on her own blood from where the claws had ripped clean through the windpipe and everything behind it until they were scraping against her spine.
But no, the woman just took a single step backwards, looking perfectly fine.
That was when she retaliated, slamming a basic fist against Jaclyn’s chest.
Jaclyn managed to get her arms up, crossing them in front of the blow. An idiotic stance for regular combat, just asking to get her own limbs tangled, but her power formed a spectral furry shield above each arm, the lower limb projecting a forcefield past the upper limb to put two layers of energy between her flesh and the incoming fist. It helped … a little.
Both force fields shattered like glass but by the time the fist connected with her left forearm, she’d already been moving backwards, having let the forcefield transfer some of the kinetic energy impacting them to her.
Arm aching, Jaclyn hit the ground ten meters back, groaning, but she was already moving, rolling over her right shoulder straight back into a standing position, fists raised into a combat stance despite the pain, shimmering badger paws manifested.
“Whatever you’re going to do, I can’t let you,” she growled. Chances were she was going to die here, but she wasn’t going to go down without a fight, damnit. If she had to go, she was going out a martyr, an inspiration for whoever was going to eventually take down that bitch of a … whatever the fuck she was.
“A woman of principles,” the “empress” grinned. Right at that moment, Jaclyn had to admit she wouldn’t have been particularly surprised to be petted on the head as though she were a dog, considering how she was being looked at.
She didn’t respond, just kept her fists up, waiting until something happened she could come up with proper responses to. Because somehow, that statement had left her tongue-tied.
“Tell me, Abrams, why are you willing to die for a thief?”
“It’s not my job to pick who lives and who dies,” Jaclyn shook her head. “We have a division of powers for a reason. My job is to stop people from doing bad things, someone else decides the punishment. And right now, I’m looking at a woman tearing her way through a city full of people, not a thief.”
God, that was a terrible set of lines. But her heart was currently attempting to hammer its way out of her chest, she was hyper-aware of the sweat dripping down her back, and there was a tiny little terrified hamster squeaking away in the back of her mind, reminding her of just how screwed she was.
At this point, she was half hoping to just get thrown through the nearest wall and get too injured to fight anymore, just so that she didn’t have to stand in this monster’s path anymore. That would even get her out of the risk of making her new agency look ineffective and costing the people their confidence.
But she’d made the decision to stand between regular people and monsters like the one who stood before her long ago, and reaffirmed it not even a single minute previously.
“Then show me what you’re capable of,” the “empress” grinned, throwing herself at Jaclyn. “Show me your worth.”
The first fist slammed into Jaclyn’s stomach, and even though she’d managed to get her arm in the way and manifest another force field, she could feel something go “pop” in her insides, and yet even as she folder around her foe’s fist like yesterday’s laundry, she snapped her teeth at the empty air, causing spectral badger’s jaws to clamp down on her opponent’s arm, altering her trajectory to the point where she wound up flipping over her enemy, around the place here phantasmal teeth were deforming ludicrously durable flesh.
Both of them whirled to face each other, but Jaclyn managed to land a straight shot to the other woman’s kidney, barely drawing a wince.
But the retaliation was a blast of emerald light that threw her through a nearby shop window.
She rose, glass crunching beneath her but unable to inflict any damage due to her heightened stats.
That short span of time was all it had taken for her attacker to turn around and keep moving in the direction she’d been moving before.
Jaclyn just charged, simultaneously channeling her mana into her right middle and index finger.
The otherworldly invader heard her coming, obviously, but she managed to duck under a hurled snake of emerald light and jam both fingers into her target’s eyes, discharging the only spell she’d practiced. Cleanse.
It might not have been able to do any damage, but scrubbing a surface clean was perfectly possible. And where did it say that said surface couldn’t be someone’s eyeball?
Being poked in the eye sucked. Suddenly having an eyeball that had also been poked be bone-dry all around, including the inside of the socket?
Excruciating.
The “empress” was suddenly blinking so rapidly she looked like a wonky bit of CGI, but even blind, she was far from helpless, bringing her leg around and slamming it into Jaclyn’s side. It was a bad kick, only striking with the side of her ankle, but with her power, that wasn’t much of a detriment.
The unmistakable sound of one’s own ribs breaking was the kind of thing you’d never forget.
And despite how the protestations of an abused body joined the screaming panic of her power, Jaclyn stood back up. She’d made her choice, she wasn’t about to change it, especially when she seemed to have as clean a shot as she was ever likely to get.
This time, it was her knuckles that she drove into her target’s eyes, prompting a scream, and she dodged before the retaliation had even started, then stomped her foe’s instep, gaining far less of a response.
A wave of emerald light exploded from the empress, picking Jaclyn up and slamming her into a brick wall with enough force to leave a crater.
More light then wrapped the monster in human skin standing there, and before Jaclyn could do anything, that light coalesced into a pair of glowing bat’s wings, on which it fled.
Jaclyn painfully pushed herself to her feet, looking in the direction where her foe had vanished before finally acknowledging the uncharacteristically urgent System notification.
But when she read it, she almost forgot about the pain.
Getting kicked around like a football had earned her four Levels?
***
Alaxia Mystscale grinned as she took to the air. Finally, she’d found someone with a spine. That badger woman … she’d have to be thoroughly broken before she could be useful, but someone willing to stand against her, who’d been Empress of Wyrmroost through power alone, because they’d been ordered to was one abyss of a loyal soldier.
If she could be convinced to bend the knee without losing her spirit. That would be a balancing act, but one Alaxia had perfected over the millennium.
Sure, in hindsight, some, ok, most of that should have been spent focussing on properly dominating the population at large, but the peasants were so much less important than her elite warriors and artisans, how could she have known that things would go like that? Subordinating capable people should have let her handle everything indirectly yet properly. But at some point, that system had broken down, and she wasn’t even sure when exactly that had happened.
Still, she’d survived the aftermath and Wyrmroost, if it still existed, was so far away that she’d never suffer any more consequences from that disaster.
The current situation, though, there was no way she could allow a precedent to be established about how it was alright to steal from her. No way in the abyss.
At least she’d figured out how to create her wings again using a combination of her Verdant Soulflame and Manaborne Legion.
Some kind of screaming metal contraption flew towards her, unleashing another blast of metal projectiles as it whipped past, but more flames erased it from the sky.
Oh, this was a very annoying world. So many craftsmen to kill …
But there was that little leech, right down there, in what looked like a prison. Fully mundane. How could he still be this weak after using all the things he had pilfered?
Alaxia grinned and banked to the side, dropping like a stone and unleashing a ray of flame to blow clean through the barriers until she reached the floor in front of the thief in a single move.
She stood up, straightening her clothing as she did so, and marched clean through the bars of the cell. The thief jumped up, panicked, gathering his qi to react, but suddenly, some kind of magic caused him to suddenly jump in surprise and his concentration broke.
He’d let himself be chained, somehow. Pathetic.
At that point, Alaxia no longer saw any reason to hold back or try anything else.
Her hand punched clean through that low-life’s chest, fingers ripping his heart to shreds. And as she drew her hand back, dripping blood, black-colored flames erupted from her skin, gradually returning to their regular emerald green as the stain burned away.
Behind her, the corridor had already been filling with guards for a while, but until now, she’d been ignoring their presence and shouted orders.
With deliberate slowness, Alaxia turned around, still holding up her burning hand as it burned itself clean.
She grinned. “This man is a thief who stole more from me than you’ll all earn across ten lifetimes. No monarch could possibly let that go. But I bear you no ill will, and if anyone wishes to rise above their current station and claim real power, I’ll be waiting the Jungles of the Verdant Hells.”
They tried to stop her, of course they did, but all they managed to do was earn themselves a few broken bones by forcing her to clear her way out.
As she flew back towards her hideout in the jungle, Alaxia was saidly forced to obliterate a few more flying contraptions, including one that was kept aloft by a spinning circle of blades. An interesting variant of the standard flying sword, one that seemed to be far cheaper to use, requiring so little qi that she couldn’t even sense the enchantment, the same as it had been with literally every other machine she’d seen.
Alaxia grinned as she landed within the circle of broken-down vehicles that imbecile had built atop her bolthole, even that sight unable to break down her good move. She’d shown what would happen to those who crossed her, found a few interesting people to become her minions, and made it known what awaited those who did join her. She’d achieved everything she needed to be.
Just like that time she’d dethroned her mother, when countless people had come to swear their fealty to Wyrmroost’s new monarch. All she had to do was wait.