The bad news was that he died. Of course he died. It was pretty much set in stone that Billy was going to die the moment the Emperor Dragon set its eyes  on him.

There was no trick that he could pull that could save him, no magic that wouldn’t have come with debilitating costs and with the price of him having to abandon both Argus and Edna. Even if he’d tried to run, there was nothing dragons loved more than a good chase.

They loved chases slightly less than they loved the thrill of the kill and they loved killing more than they loved sex. They were beings that were bred for the hunt. They were like some dreadful mixture of cat and dog that way. Every single part of them was honed for the purpose of stalking and shredding and burning.

Once he was stuck facing off against a killing machine several layers of existence above his own, there was no real recourse but death. The whole purpose of his deciding to fight was in the hopes of preserving his soul’s structural integrity and keeping Edna from getting caught up in the dragon’s rampage.

The good news was that he succeeded on that measure. The Ancient Beast was slain, falling from the sky like a star. Billy had to die to do it, but such things weren’t complete deal breakers or impossible hurdles.

Or rather they were but one could learn to deal with the impossible when you had a few trillion years to do so. A soul that was strong enough could ape all the functions and abilities of the living, feigning corporeality at the cost of sinking  a minimum of two-thirds of their power into the process.

Such was the nature of the creatures called loose immortals. It would be the second time he found himself in such a state. He'd forgotten how unpleasant it was. It was something akin to being naked in either the hottest desert or the coldest tundra.

Barely holding on to the last coherent parts of his being he put out the fire he’d set in his soul. He pulled the last living parts of his body together  and swept up the corpses of the dragons nearest to him and got out of there as fast he could.

Expending precious aether despite not having any aether to spare. After returning to the townhouse in Gene he then began the long and tedious task of bringing himself back over to the right side of the mortal veil.

*****

“Where are you?” said the text. Billy’s text

Edna frowned at the projected screen, watching it flicker as rain fell through it, but then feeling it turn solid as she put her finger down to press the key prompts.

“Working.” she said. Speaking aloud as she typed out the letters.

“Still doing that job in Bismark?” said the text.

“Yes.” she typed. Looking around to check that no one was paying her any attention. Asides from not feeling that texting on the job was very professional, what she was doing was the kind of thing that could get the wrong attention.

Especially since everyone knew that cell phones didn’t work outside of big cities. And no one had ever heard of a cell phone made nearly entirely of sigil work.

She was holding something precious in her hands and that was the kind of thing that often caught the wrong kind of attention. Tall trees caught wind and she wasn’t looking to catch wind.

Edna was out here on a standard security job, acting as an extra body for a merchant that had wanted a little more peace of mind.

Six months had passed since the Jelani Contract, but she wasn’t out here for money. The Jelani job had paid generously, though no one had expected it to pay at all. The Bone Tree Company made a clean five thousand gold dollars.

It didn’t sound like much and actually wasn’t much in terms of practitioner wealth, but in normal folk money, she and Billy were now at least ten times more wealthy than the entire Maddoc family. It was more than enough to pay for their basic needs.

What Edna was out here doing, was working to gain experience. This was the sixth job she’d taken in roughly half as many months.

Using skirmishes with bandits and demonbeasts to get used to the use of her AWs and gain some living aether to boost the growth of her core.

The good news was that they got out of the Jelani job alright. The good news was that Billy didn’t die. The good news was that Edna now knew what her primary power was.

A type of telekinetic vector control that primarily manifested itself as a sort of aim assist. Causing any projectile that she sent out to hit its target nearly unfailingly. A power that really “was” just perfect for the weapon system that was now a part of her body.

The bad news came in the form of constant headaches. Constant frustration with herself, after she’d reached a bottleneck with her cultivation. And a growing realization that camping and travel really sucked when you had to do it the old fashion way.

Riding on the road for long period of time. Sleeping inside an uncomfortable carriage.

She could have taken the company carriage and the company horse but somehow the contracts she took all ended up being group jobs. Which meant taking group transportation.

Something that she suspected was on purpose. A way of tacitly trying to see if she could handle herself without her childhood pal playing nursemaid and making everything so...easy.

She was about done with that though, she’d camped rough and  traveled rough, seen it, done it, got the shitty t-shirt. After last night's plague of mosquitos she’d decided that her next trip would have her taking both the company horse and the company carriage.

Another headache came on. A moment of blinding pain and hyper arousal that turned the cotton on her skin to barb wire. Edna kind of just had to grit her teeth and bear it. Whining was an unprofessional thing for a bodyguard to do.

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She’d asked Billy and he’d said it was her nervous system adjusting to the changes the AW system had made to it. He said he’d adjust it when he had time, but he hadn’t time for quite a while now.

Mainly because he was dead or as close to it as one could get. It was a disturbing thing to watch him ghost through the walls. Pacing about unaware that he was losing grip on his corporeality.

There was a very unsettling moment where she realized that he too could die and leave her one day. She didn’t like that idea.

She’d just barely gotten someone worthwhile in her life again and there was a chance he could up and die on her. It wasn’t a good feeling. Especially when she considered how much she’d been relying on him.

Thus her desire to see what living on her own would be like. She was pleased to say it wasn’t as daunting as she’d thought it be.  She now knew that she could rely on herself. Now she could focus on stage two, seeing if she could get good enough for others to rely on her.

Perhaps then Billy wouldn’t take so many stupid risks. Hopefully if things were more equal he’d talk things through with her more. Or at the very least they could shore up their odds together.

Billy’s close call had had a detrimental effect on the mood of the house, making everything quieter and more somber. The two of them not really talking to one another. Though they did text a lot. The very first text he’d sent her had been the one that told her that he was okay.

An interesting thing she’d found was that the guy seemed to be more ‘talkative’ in text than he had to speak aloud. If she really got him going it was a lot like reading one of his notebooks.

All articulate and weirdly deep, like she was speaking to this whole other person. Which was why her current bottleneck wasn’t as big a worry as it would have been.

He just told her not to force it and to let what happens happen and because he’d yet to lie to her about anything that mattered and seemed to know his stuff, she believed him.

Honestly though, waiting wasn’t her forte but she’d didn’t want to break her core and turn herself into a cripple. Dandelions enjoyed the very worst positions in Mondian Society. So she wait she would.

She’d gotten used to the mercenaries. She’d gotten used to rough living. She’d also gotten used to her boosts in strength. No longer breaking things by accident or stumbling around like she was both drunk and fifty feet taller than she was used to. She was now Queen-Ranked.

Possessing a strength that was eighty times that of her base. Factor in her increased base strength thanks to the AW and one got a level of power that was neither too bad or too good.

She was on the higher end of average for the quote unquote “elite” contractors. .She could hold her head moderately high in most circles, but there were plenty of folk she’d have to yessir and no-sir to .

It was fine, if the worst came to worst and she ran into something that she couldn’t handle she had a handy dandy escape spell included in the phone-band. She hadn’t had to use it yet but it was comforting to have on hand.

*****

Back in Gene, Billy was finally seeing the fruits of all his efforts. Working around the clock fighting to stay corporeal  and bring himself back to this side of the mortal veil was an exhausting trial.

Yet finally he was down. Wet and naked and very alive. His heart beating frantically, his breaths labored, his skin seeming to vibrate as his new nervous system retuned itself. The world around him was loud, so incredibly loud. Loud and bright and full of too many sounds and colors for him to pay attention to.

A deafening, blinding assault on his conscious mind that he’d have to get re-accustomed to weathering.

Five hours ago he’d been expelled from the abominable cavity of the late great Dragon Emperor. Steaming and sticky, freshly baked, his body covered in some kind of bubbling, protein gelly.

By now he’d already bathed and showered and dressed but he couldn’t tell whether he was happy with the work he’d done or not. Aside  from the current expansion of his physical body’s ability to take in stimuli there were other changes.

He wasn’t entirely as human as he’d been before. Taking in massive amounts of the ancient dragon’s tissues and using it to replace and remake the corpse that he’d dragged into the body in the first place. Now the ancient beast was mostly bone. Most of its flesh brought down and distilled to make the brand new Billy, save for the parts that had been separated off for other purposes.  

The new Billy was about a foot taller than the old one was and slightly broader. He thought he could reduce that ungainly growth to something around six inches or lower if he given time, but he wasn’t feeling optimistic about it.

There were some genetic artifacts that Billy wasn’t able to remove despite trying his best to keep his form as human as he could. As well as few other things that he figured he’d just have to get used to.  

An example would be his tongue, soft and pink and rough, covered in denticles like the tongue of a cat. A little bigger than he was used to, longer than thrice its original length while fully extended. His dentistry was aggressively carnivorous.

It was the best he could do to was allow himself the grinding teeth of an omnivore. If he smiled in the mirror what he’d see was a mouthful of sharp craggy peaks. Both smooth and serrated. Cleanly meshing together like some kind of horrific charnel house machine. Brushing would be an...experience.

His skin was darker now, slightly grayer in hue, with strange patches of scale and bony plate appearing here and there all over his body. But fortunately it was mostly in places that could hidden with clothes. On the sides of his forehead there were two bumpy ridges where horns seemed like they wanted to grow in.

He’d have to keep an eye on that, but asides from watching it he didn’t really know what else to do. The same codes responsible for those, were responsible for his new ultra-dense, bone structure.

His hair was fluffier than it used be. Still black, but very feathered almost like he was bird-kin. He figured he could live with that. He was a guy after all, he didn’t need to care that much about his hair.

The real concern was the projection that was coming out of end of his spine. A strange mixture of the masses of Billy’s true being that wouldn’t fit within regular three-dimensional reality and the Dragon Emperor’s Genetics.

In other words it was a tail. Or rather than a tail it was a growth, a long variable growth of muscle, bone, tangible-intangible nothingness, and dark-gray velvet  that extended out from his back and ended in hard bony ridges and a wicked looking spade.

He decided to be optimistic and believe he’d adjust to ‘that’ as well. At the very least it was prehensile so maybe he’d get some use out of it.

Looking on the brightside, performance-wise his new self was a vast improvement on the old. Humans were built for exploration and settlement and day to day living, like most sentients. Dragons on the other hand were war machines, they were made for tearing universes apart and flattening realities.

 The difference in what Billy had had to work with, was like the difference between working with a tractor or a minivan and working with some hybrid of race car and spacefaring super-dreadnought.

There were chains of re-moldable genetic encoding that were just perfect for an elderitch being looking to store some of his more unreasonable qualities. Fiddly bits and genetic modification opportunities aside,  his current self was simply much stronger than his old self had been. Sturdier, with a far more advanced neurological matrix.

Billy hadn’t realized that he’d been ‘dumbed down’ by his human brain till he had something slightly better to work with. People didn’t need to think beyond four dimension so it wasn’t something they could naturally.

Dragons on the other hand could think in all nine axises of subjective and objective reality. This was a big thing for someone who’d been ‘abroad’. It was the difference between using a sixteen bit-console and using a souped-up quantum gaming rig.

There were all these angles he could see now, things ran faster, conclusions were reached more cleanly. He didn’t need to think as hard as he used to, to remember all things he knew and forgot he knew.

Sure he could sense a few draconic influences effecting his thoughts and emotional stability, making him more aggressive, volatile and slightly megalomaniacal, but he was no stranger to outside elements clouding his judgement. He was pretty sure he could control it….Probably.

Best of all were the more mundane gains he’d gotten from being involved in that battle. If a normal person were to take in the living aether of being many times their better, a fair portion of it would be released as waste energy, returning the world unprocessed and unused. Billy wasn’t a normal person.

He used the entirety of the absorbed energies from both the Dragon Emperor and its kin to cultivate. Pushing himself forwards skipping through an entire layer. He was now currently a sixth-tier existence. Abyssal-Ranked.

When that was combined with the massive increases in his base strength, while he still didn’t consider himself strong, he knew he was much better off than he had been. Most importantly he was much less likely to be pushed into similarly dangerous life or death situation.

His increased metaphysical density allowing him to make more use of the things he knew and the world that lay within his shadows. The souls of many of the slain dragons accepting the plain-faced bargain that was offered by the world within his shadow.

He was now barely strong enough that he finally had a minimal measure of surety in his ability to protect himself and those things that were important to him.