I squinted as I looked through the rapidly-dissipating green haze at the remaining ants just beyond the reach of my gas cloud. Though I had killed a sizable chunk of the swarm, there were still dozens of them left. A minute ago, they had seemed formidable. But from where I was, they suddenly all looked small.

I drummed my claws on the dragon scale beneath my feet. It was large – that fact hadn't changed – but I was now nearly as large as the scale itself. Well, perhaps being as large as a single Elder Dragon scale wasn't a feat to be proud of. But from where I stood, I certainly felt proud.

I gave my newly-grown wings another flap as I looked back and grinned at Anne and Octavia. Octavia's eight legs were all aflutter, dancing in place with her two front legs raised. "Well done!" she called.

Anne, standing next to her, looked considerably less pleased. "You disobeyed my instructions."

I shook my head. "If I recall, you told me to use my breath attack. And that's exactly what I did. I'm sorry if the timing was different from what you expected."

"You disrupted my plans," said Anne.

"Time and indecision disrupted your plans," I said. "I killed close to half of them. Now, shall I kill the rest?"

"No," said Anne.

"You have a better plan?"

"Allow me to handle the remainder," said Anne. "You have done enough. Octavia!"

As the gas cloud dissipated, Octavia stepped forward. I watched the rows of fire ants, waiting for them to step forward now that the breath attack was gone, but they stayed fixed at a distance. Apparently the remaining fire ants were cautious enough to learn from the mistake of the first wave.

"Seems like I scared them off," I said. "Or killed off all the most aggressive ones."

Octavia, following Anne's direction, laid down a web carpet covering the ground west of the scale as the black armored ants surrounded the scale.

I leapt down from the dragon scale, and Anne's ant army surrounded the dragon scale and lifted it off the ground. The fire ants, apparently reacting to the movement of the dragon scale, overcame their sense of caution and began to march forward. Octavia's newly-placed web forced them to split: half made a detour to the north, the other half wrapped around from the south. As the red fire ants forces split, they ran against the multitudinous ranks of Anne's army: while several dozen ants carried the dragon scale away, more than a hundred held the flanks, sandwiching the fire ants between them.

I nodded in approval. "Divide and conquer."

The writhing mass of ants quickly became too dense for me to see what exactly was happening, but with each passing second, Anne's flanking forces seemed to squeeze the fire ants tighter as their numbers dwindled.

As Anne's legions of armored ants tightened around the remaining fire ants, I noticed a few casualties on Anne's side, but the armored ant casualties paled in comparison to the growing number of dead fire ant husks.

"Need any help?" I asked.

"Absolutely not," said Anne. "I have matters well in hand. The only conceivable way this could falter is if you unleash another one of your infernal breath attacks."

I shrugged and began gobbling up some of the ant remains that still lay around where the dragon scale had been. My jaws, I realized, were now larger than they had been before, and I could lap up and crunch through the ants' exoskeletons with even greater efficiency than before.

"Let me know if you need anything," I said between bites.

"You may observe the fight," said Anne. "I will take care of the dragon scale. Octavia, accompany me."

I continued to snack on the ants as Anne's ants continued to crush the remaining fire ants. There did seem to be more armored ant casualties than was strictly necessary, but if Anne wanted to handle things this way, I had no objection.

I glanced back, and the dragon scale receded, the buff it offered waning with each passing moment as the ants carried it further east. I noticed Octavia trailing the dragon scale, following the ants that carried it, up toward the lip of the crater.

Ancient Dragon Scale aura buff lost

The armored ants, now impervious to the bites of the fire ants, made short work of the few that remained, and I rushed in to lap up the remains, bringing my satiety levels nearly up to full. I decided to stop as soon as my satiety meter hit 100% – even if my stomach could hold more, I didn't want to spend the rest of the day with a 'bloated' debuff.

Besides, there was one more thing I wanted to try, and didn't want to do it on an overstuffed belly. I raised my wings and flapped them.

Flight!

I stood and flapped my wings, but all that I succeeded in doing was scattering the dust around me.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I raised myself on my legs and leapt into the air, frantically flapping my wings, but whatever lift they generated wasn't enough to keep me in the air, or even enough to noticeably slow my descent. Perhaps the power of flight was a discovery for another day.

I glanced around the valley and spotted the plateau that had been my home on the day I'd hatched: that might be a good location for a 'test flight.' I couldn't achieve ground liftoff, but maybe gliding was a better place to start. Then again, maybe jumping off a plateau and trusting my wings to start working on the way down wasn't the best survival strategy. Still, there were plenty of tall rocks that could serve as a more conservative "launch point." It was certainly something I was eager to try out when the opportunity presented itself.

By now, Anne's ground forces had left the battlefield behind. They marched east to rejoin the ants carrying the scale, and I went along with them, quickly catching up to the ants that were carrying the dragon scale, now descending from the lip of the crater.

"We won," I said.

"Not yet," said Anne. "I will not declare this battle won until this dragon scale is securely underground."

"Come on," I said. "We'll be at the hole in under a minute. Are you really expecting something to go wrong between now and then?"

"No," said Anne. "Ahead of us, we face a different type of task. And I will be the one supplying all of the labor."

"What kind of work?"

"Digging, of course," said Anne.

"Did something happen to the tunnel while we were fighting?" I asked.

"No," said Anne. "Look."

By now, we had arrived at the entrance to Anne's tunnel, and suddenly, I understood the problem: as I had observed earlier, the massive dragon scale was about the same size as I was in my new drake form. And that made it quite a bit bigger than any of the three of us had been when we were going up the tunnel.

"Oh," I said. "You're going to widen the tunnel?" I could see that Anne had already dispatched several of her ant minions, who had already widened the tunnel entrance, but every bit of the tunnel leading all the way down to her lair would also need to be widened in order to accommodate the dragon scale.

Octavia did her best to counter Anne's sour mood. "On the plus side, this does answer the question of how Drew is going to get back down underground. I'm pretty sure that the tunnel is too small for your new body to fit down there, but any tunnel that's big enough for the dragon scale will be big enough for our not-so-little dragon friend." Octavia turned to me. "What's your new class, by the way?"

"I'm a drake," I said.

"Exciting!" said Octavia.

"Drake still seems like a small-time version of a dragon," I said.

"I know," said Octavia. "That's what's exciting about it! It means that you still have plenty of opportunity for growth!"

"I mean, we already knew that, didn't we?" I pointed at the massive dragon scale. If a single Elder Dragon scale were the size of a young drake like me, then the entire Elder Dragon...well, there were probably multiple tiers of class progression between where I stood and the form of an Elder Dragon.

Octavia nodded. "Of course you've got a long way to grow. Dragons live for centuries, and you're still less than a month old. I wonder if–"

"Would you both please focus on the task at hand?" said Anne.

"Oh," I said. "I thought you were the one handling all the digging."

"Indeed," said Anne. "And I hope that my hardworking ants will labor with you to safeguard them against any future waves of foes. Octavia, it occurs to me that this should be your specialty. You are capable of laying down a web perimeter."

"Oh, of course," said Octavia. "I'll get right on that." She began spinning her signature silk.

"Delightful," said Anne, in a tone that sounded less than delighted. "For the time being, construct for us a web perimeter that extends…this far." She directed one of her ants, indicating a radius of approximately five feet. "But this is just a temporary measure. Once you have completed that, we will require a larger radius that extends…this far." Her "buoy" ant walked nearly twenty feet away and turned to face us.

"Whoa," I said. "The tunnel doesn't have to be that big, right? The entrance could be a quarter of this size and still fit the dragon scale."

"I am not delineating the area for the hole itself," said Anne. "I am marking out the area for the construction zone I that will be required to dig the hole."

"What does that mean?" I said. "It's not like you've got any heavy equipment, right?"

"Drew," said Anne, "I think too highly of your intelligence for you to make such a basic error in comprehension. Please, don't tell me that you lack an understand what is required to dig a tunnel."

I glanced at the swarm of ants that were busy excavating the hole. A row of them emerged from the hole, carrying dirt, and deposited it in an ever-growing pile.

"Oh," I said. "To widen the tunnel, you have to remove dirt."

"Indeed," said Anne. She pointed to the growing pile of dirt, which was now about one meter high. "Given the size of the dragon scale, and the length of the tunnel that will be required to reach my lair, according to my calculations it will be necessary for us to excavate approximately 400 to 500 times that amount of dirt.."

"Wow," I said. "How long is that going to take?"

"Approximately one day. Perhaps as long as a day and and a quarter."

"W-what?" I said. I tried my best to visualize that amount of dirt, piled in a mound big enough to fill the 40-foot diameter Anne had laid out. I watched as the ants emerged, one-by-one, each carrying their small clumps of dirt, doing my own mental arithmetic to confirm Anne's estimate. My numbers seemed to square with hers: if her calculations were off, it probably wasn't by much.

"How are we going to protect your ants for a full day long?" I asked.

"Actually, no, wait a moment." Anne's antennae twitched. "My previous time estimate was based on the number of ants at my disposal prior to the recent altercation. Because of your hasty decision, I suffered some losses in my ranks when eliminating the last of that batch of fire ants, and that means I have fewer workers. Consequently, it will take…approximately a day and a third. Longer, if you and Octavia are unable to handle the perimeter on your own. Any ants that I divert to fight will of course not be able to participate in the digging. So, perhaps a more conservative estimate would be a day and a half."

"Same question," I asked. "A day is more than enough time for the fire ants to assemble another wave. Maybe multiple waves, given that we're going to be out here for over an hour. We should expect another attack. How are we going to hold them off?"

"Drew. Did you think I did not consider this question when formulating my strategy? I have been planning for this."

"But your plan has had to change, based on how the fight went."

"Indeed." Anne sighed. "And the problem is exacerbated by the the fact that I now have fewer tools and assets at my disposal than I did an hour ago."

"What are you talking about?" said Octavia. "Anne, you've lost some ants. But you've gained something new: now you've got a drake on your side. That upgrade has got to be worth something. Let's talk about what Drew can do to help."

Anne glanced at Octavia, who had just finished constructing her inner "safety perimeter," and had already begun constructing the larger massive web perimeter that Anne had marked out.

"Very well," said Anne. "I suppose now is as opportune a moment as any to acquaint ourselves with your newfound abilities. Let us see what you are capable of."

I grinned, flapping my wings.