Staring deep into a white-hot jet engine as it descends towards you isn’t the place you want to be. When that engine is part of a monstrous creature twisted by the apocalypse into something infinitely more dangerous than any plane could ever be… well, I guess all I can do is count my lucky stars that it isn’t a fighter plane. Magic ammunition combined with the speed of a fighter plane and the maneuverability of a hummingbird makes for quite possibly the most terrifying monster of all.

Of course, all this could just be the product of my brain trying its damndest to justify how this plane-dragon isn’t going to kill the ever-loving hell out of me. Pearl screams at me to move, but it really doesn’t matter. These machines-turned-monsters are running on magic and technology as if they were real, living things. As crazy as that might sound.

“We need to do something!” Pearl shakes my shoulder with one hand and points vigorously at the plane-dragon with the other. “Throw coins at it or something! Don’t just give up for no reason!”

I flip a coin through my fingers and flick it as hard as I can off into the streets. “Give up? Hell no. But running isn’t going to do anything. I’m not super familiar with this exact model of monster, but I’m pretty damn sure it can move way faster than we can even after it crash-lands. Most planes have radar on them, too, so it’ll be able to follow us no matter where we go. Then you add in all the general dragon stereotypes, and you get the absolute freak of the apocalypse you see before us.”

Pearl stares at me blankly for a few seconds. “How do you know all this? I thought Earth wasn’t magical?”

“Oh, Earth isn’t. The apocalypse DEFINITELY WAS!” I raise my voice over the roar of the engines as the dragon descends on us, the horrific heat billowing off the jet engines in its throat foreshadowing something more. A snap of my awareness activates the relocation I sent into the moments before a deluge of dirty fire bursts free of the plane-dragon’s mouth, bringing us just to safety.

“AHHHHhhhh?!” Pearl screams and covers her face. When she doesn’t die right away, she lowers them and slows down the scream. “Oh, um, right. I kind of forgot about that. So, what happens when it crash–”

The plane-dragon slams feet-first into the street, shearing off the corner of a building and leaving long, deep gouges in the pavement as it skids itself to a stop. Blistering winds whip around its wings to help slow it down–magic inspired by the engines that are now lodged deep in its body. It obviously doesn’t need them to fly, or else it’d still have them on its wings, but that doesn’t mean it won’t pull out some shit it really doesn’t look like it should be able to do. Creations of the apocalypse are unfair like that.

“We’re going to have to keep dodging it.” I say as I imbue more coins with relocation. Unfortunately, there’s an issue; my holster isn’t refilling with ghost quarters. It’s using actual Worth. “Ah, shit. The inventory lock means I don’t get any ghost quarter ammo while I’m on Earth. Unless… “

I trail off as I fling a coin behind the dragon, then activate it before it hits the ground. A massive wing scythes through where we just were, leaving a crescent wound in the pavement. The plane-dragon continues in a full spin, its tail smacking heavily against the ground and spitting up a cloud of sparks. A series of fins on its back that look like immovable rudders tremble slightly with the movement, but otherwise stay perfectly intact.

“Yeah, nevermind, no time to flip anything right now.” I chuckle to myself and flick one coin straight into the air while sending another as far down the street as possible. “Pearl, can you amplify my awareness? I know it’s not in great shape, but I kind of need better reactions right now.”

“How are you so calm about this?” Pearl asks calmly now that she sees we’re not in immediate danger. Hypocrite. “If you didn’t have any skills or spells before, how did you manage to survive here? This is more dangerous than a lot of things on my planet.”

I shrug and teleport to the coin I threw down the street. The dragon bellows a stream of fire at where I was, seemingly not realizing that I teleported away for a good thirty seconds. Its body starts to make even louder noises as the fire intensifies, but from watching a lot of news reports, I know it isn’t even close to damaging itself.

“I don’t know. Everyone just kind of keeps their heads down and tries not to get killed. That’s why you don’t see many cars out in the street; the longer they’re exposed to open air, the more likely they are to get apocalyzed.”

“So… things only get turned into monsters if they aren’t safely contained? Does that mean the magic is carried on air currents?”

“Apparently. Everyone buys high-grade air filters so their kitchen appliances don’t turn into goblins and start killing their families. But that doesn’t stop them from getting super unlucky when they open their front door.” I take a step back and toss two more coins to my right and left. “When I was eight, I beat a toaster to death that turned into some horrible little hellcat-thing when mom accidentally left the back window open. Of course she blamed me for it, and I had to pay for a new toaster with my allowance.”

Pearl nods along attentively. “I guess I should ask this now; what is a car, and what is a toaster? And, for the future, just assume I don’t know what any really specific appliance is.”

“Fair enough. Do you know what a stove is?”

“I do.”

“Well, a toaster is like a stovetop folded in two for the sole purpose of toasting bread. And bread-like foods.” I explain with a hand motion to go along with it. “They’re usually rectangles about yay big, made of metal, and pretty cheap compared to getting an actual stove. Or an oven.”

“I know what an oven is, too.”

Well, that saves me an explanation. My awareness lazily warns me that the dragon’s jet breath has run out, but my eyes tell me the exact same thing at the exact same time. I flex my fingers and quickly look to my left and my right, checking to see where each of the coins landed. And which one’s in the better place to teleport to. The one to my left handed in the gutter, along with some chunky runoff and what looks like a dead rat. The one on my right… isn’t there.

Because it rolled into a drainage grate. If I wasn’t one-hundred percent sure the dragon had radar, that would be perfect. …Actually, wouldn’t putting something completely solid between me and the dragon mess up its radar? Do I even have a single clue about how radar actually works?

Eh, I’ve got two backups out on the street. Might as well test my theory.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“So, a car is a four-wheeled vehicle powered by an engine.” I say as relocation brings us down into the sewers. My feet mercifully land on solid concrete, but the slurry of stuff next to me isn’t so kind. “I don’t know if you have carriages in your world, but you have ships. You probably… blurgh, this place is gross. It's almost half as bad as that pile of frozen sand.”

“No, it’s definitely not that bad.” Pearl shudders and ducks a little more into her shell. “That smell almost got to me. In comparison, this one is just regular, everyday disgusting. And yeah, we had carriages. We even powered a lot of them with magic, we just didn’t call them ‘cars’. Oh, is ‘car’ just a shorter way to say ‘carriage’?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s latin for something. Or maybe it is short for carriage.” I say as I start walking down the sewers, my mind ready to cast relocation at the first whiff of the dragon. “There’s probably some wonkiness in the system’s translation for all this. Since, by your own definition, you have cars in your world. The system should’ve translated it that way.”

“Well, we use the word ‘toast’, too, we just don’t have a device specifically for that purpose. Or… at least we didn’t when I was free.” Pearl hums in thought and taps her lip. “‘Toaster’ would just be any device that can toast something. But the translation provided by the system didn’t really convey that properly.”

“Really? What did it convey?”

“‘Toaster’.” Pearl repeats. “Just the word, with none of the context behind it. Like… imagine if you heard the word ‘shellraiser’ used as a noun without any point of reference. You’d think it was someone that lifted shells up into the air. So I just kind of assumed ‘toaster’ had more meaning than just… well… toaster.”

I raise an eyebrow at that. “Doesn’t that mean the system conveyed the definition perfectly?”

Crashes and crunches drown out whatever Pearl has to say. The world rumbles around us, shaking free tiny pieces of debris that come from years of shoddy maintenance and… let’s just call it buildup. We hold our breaths as the sound gets closer and closer until even the concrete above starts to buckle under the titanic weight of the plane-dragon. It bellows a mighty roar, sending the temperature of the very air around us into overdrive.

Then… it starts to leave. The crashing footfalls grow further and further away, accompanied by a rain of debris down the tunnel back towards where we first appeared. Pearl rapidly taps my shoulder to get my attention, then shoots me a look that’s both excited and a little worried. I hold up a finger for her to wait as I nod in agreement. The thing might not have been able to sense us with a layer of concrete between us, but if we pop out too soon, its magically-enhanced radar could detect us instantly.

“What’s it chasing?”

I snap to Pearl. “What?”

“I mean… it’s going in the direction we were. Doesn’t that mean it’s chasing after someone?” She nods to herself confidently. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s going after that person that bumped into us. Lucky break, right?”

I sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose. “Not helping with the guilt trip.”

She shrugs. “I’m not guilting you into anything. If you don’t have the power to save her, don’t save her. That’s not me being sarcastic, by the way–it’s the hard truth. Turning one casualty into two doesn’t win a war.”

“But if I did have the power to save her?”

Pearl smiles dangerously and clasps her hands together. “You win a war by having more people left standing. And, unless I’m wrong, zero casualties is infinitely better than any at all.”

“We’re not at war.” I say as I push spells into my coins and stare up at the concrete ceiling. “Saving that woman doesn’t add to our firepower. Hell, we might not even be able to protect her.”

“Or it could mean a whole lot.” Pearl leans into my neck and pats my jaw. “She might not be a soldier just yet. It doesn’t mean she won’t ever pick up a weapon. Say you found another class coin. And say you had someone indebted to you… well, that would be just nifty, wouldn’t it?”

She shrugs innocently as her shady suggestion hangs in the air. I want to chide her for her callous way of thinking, but honestly, it rings pretty damn true. Having someone who could see the other side of the system–the one that actually wants to help humanity for some reason–could be invaluable. And of course there’s the whole ‘saving her life’ part. That’s obviously the most important thing.

“Alright.” I say as the contingency plan clatters to the concrete between my feet. “I’ve got a few ideas I didn’t get to use against the teleporter. Let’s see if they’re repurposable.”

I activate one of the remaining relocation coins as I crack my knuckles. With the few free seconds I have I use shoreline risemutation to turn nine Worth into six ghost quarters and six skeletons, quickly flipping all of them to bring them to full power. I take a deep breath and bend down to set a skeleton on the ground, then push a projectile into a regular ghost quarter and set it on top of the skeleton.

Pearl watches the horizon as the air gets noticeably warmer. “Wow. It really hates you.”

“Us.” I correct her as I set down another pair of coins a few feet from the first. “It really hates us.”

“Fair. But why are we doing this over here? Don’t we want the woman to know it was us that saved her?” Pearl puts a hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun. “I can feel her pretty close to here. But, um, there’s a plane-dragon between us.”

I set down a third pair of coins and brush off my knees, then turn to mirror what I made on the other side of the road. I’m not a hundred percent sure this will work how I want it to, but if it does, this is definitely my best chance at bringing this thing down. There’s only one small issue; making sure the plane-dragon doesn’t destroy all the setup before I can set it off.

“It’s getting really close. I can’t enhance your awareness by much, but I’ll do the best I can.” Pearl informs me as black seeps into the edges of my vision. “Do you want a quick analysis of what I think the weak points are?”

I shake my head and strap the knife to my arm, then fill it with a five-Worth shield. “I’m going to try to identify it first. If it leaves any holes, fill them in the best you can.”

She nods in understanding and retreats into her shell. “I’ll warn you if anything happens outside of your range.”

“If anything happens outside of my range, it’ll be some kind of army swooping in to do my job for me. Probably the Preservation, since they’ve got a branch less than a hundred miles from here.” I say, then pause as I feel Pearl’s enhanced awareness latch onto the plane-dragon. “Wow. It seems a lot bigger when you can actually see all of it.”

“Yeah, it’s huge. Do you think this ‘Preservation’ can kill it?”

Do I think the Preservation can kill it? I snort and shake my head; if the Preservation couldn’t kill passenger planes tainted by the apocalypse, we’d all be dead and buried by now. I’ve watched them take down aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines turned apocalyptic monsters on TV. A passenger plane is nothing to them.

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that I’m about to be the one staring it down. Yet again. I take a deep breath and shake out my arms to try and loosen up, but my awareness won’t let that happen. It’s coiled inside of me like a garage door spring, under so much pressure that when it bursts I won’t be able to ignore it. The plane-dragon rears it’s ugly head above the buildings separating us, opens its engine-filled mouth, and screams at me. It presses on a building to try and brute force a direct path, but it doesn’t have the momentum or raw strength to easily do it. Even still, I watch as the front of a convenience store crumbles to ruin, and the plane-dragon struggles to soldier on.

I aim my finger at it and focus. “Identify.”

Identification Cost: 620 Worth.

‘See All’ available for use.