Just because you can heal through physical pain and damage doesn’t mean the trauma just goes away. We had been burned by fire and acid, frozen in ice, zapped by electricity, had our bones broken and our bodies nearly rent asunder from sharp claws, fierce teeth, powerful blows from a tail, and more. Nanu seemingly delighted in the carnage of battle, and even with the three dozen or so of us versus just her, we had yet to inflict any sort of serious blow against her. Granted, a large part of our roster was kobolds, and they are not very useful in a straight up brawl, but I had hoped The Boys would at least have made her sweat.
The Boys had been decapitated far too many times in the past four weeks. Fortunately, not all of their hydra heads had been decapitated at the same time, otherwise, they would have died. Diogenes was the most frustrated of the bunch, for when he finally hit Nanu with his strongest attack, it was likewise as impotent as anything else we had tried. Socrates spent much of the time playing defense. He used his neck as a shield by wrapping it around their main body. One good hit there could kill them, so protecting their core remained their primary concern in a fight. Aristotle’s reckless and pyromantic tendencies were slowly being reined in, but thanks to the leadership of Plato, they were working better as a team as the days passed. If only that fat bump where their necks met their body would mature into a new head, they may have a chance of lasting a little longer before they lost the fight.
Hopper and Ribbette, my two [Giant Frog] pets, fared better mostly because they are more nimble. That is to say their base Blessing is that of [Giant Frog], not that the creature itself is specifically named ‘Giant Frog’, like how one species of weasel is the ‘Least Weasel’. Likewise, they are not just larger than average frogs and just called ‘giant frogs’. Any number of magical beast species of frogs have the Blessing of [Giant Frog], and though they are now [Kaeru Kenshi] and [Kiri No Kaeru] respectively, their advanced Blessings have not helped them actually hurt Nanu.
As for the Kobolds, the best among them for combat were the [Kuroko]. Each one wore black ninja outfits and would seemingly pop up out of nowhere to distract Nanu. Despite them posing no real threat to her, she still retaliated when she saw them, so either they had some Skill to force her attention onto them or she acted as opponents on our level would act towards them. Either way, they bought us breathing room and deployed smokescreens. The rest of the kobolds, sans Gambino, typically worked in a choir and orchestra. There were perhaps a dozen of them, but the variety of musical instruments and voices I heard seemed more like several hundred. I don’t know for certain what effect their intense and thematic music had on the fight, but it did keep our spirits up. However, we did learn to get nervous when they start singing in some language we don’t understand. It usually means Nanu is about to get serious and thrash us.
Skull fared the best out of everyone. She could shrug off hits that would turn most Platinum Adventurers to pulp. Considering she was Dual-Blessed with both [Divine Champion] in service of Gulthar, the Dark God of Fear and Courage, and a [Dragon Knight] in service to me, I would say she may stand a chance at being a Diamond Adventurer in the near future. She reveled in the thrill of battle and delighted in how Nanu could strike fear in the hearts of onlookers without any obvious and explicit Skills to do so. Her zweihänder, so empowered either by potent enchantments or her connection to her god, actually managed to do some damage to Nanu. The blows were shallow, but they added up and sapped Nanu’s strength more than they seemingly should. We still lost every time, but Skull was our frontrunner for taking down a difficult foe.
Others in the camp would also try their luck from time to time in sparring matches, either with us or each other. We had started a trend, and we even had to build actual training fields for people to spar and try out their Skills. Some of the normal citizens, which is to say, not Adventures or military personnel, even took up training in their spare time, much to the delight of the more competitive among them. Orcs especially turned out in droves to let off steam with a good brawl. The more the merrier, for if our little mobile city ever got raided, we would need people who could pull their weight to defend the rest.
The wai’fudo with It-Has-Pockets came and went without much issue. It had been absolutely exhausting, even with Nanu’s help. It-Has-Pockets did not become pregnant in the conventional sense, well, at least not for more than a few moments, but I did now have two eggs that were incubating. I had yet to actually start the process of constructing what children of mine they would yield, for they still needed more time to mature to that point, but it would soon be a new and exciting opportunity to learn more about dragons. Basically, some fancy dragon sex-magic turned our indulgences of intimacy into fertilized eggs, which I did not lay like some kind of bird, but rather I sort of materialized or teleported them into existence. They, along with a few lesser eggs for whelps, sat safely in my home with my hoard. Typically, someone from my inner circle stayed with them so that they were protected at all hours of the day, for fertilized dragon eggs were a rare and valuable commodity, even more so for those created by an Emperor.
Chooka found herself in her element as the guildmaster for our local branch of the Adventurer Guild. It was not big enough to separate out the various roles of guards, exterminators, harvesters, scouts, and mercenaries to different buildings, but she somehow made the wheels of such bureaucracy continue to turn with ease. They had plenty of work to keep them busy, and most of the coin that came through our camp went to pay those Adventurers, only for it to end up back in the local brothels or taverns, from which I collected a tax.
Yes, even out here, taxes were a thing, but I didn’t pocket it. Chooka helped me manage the books, but I kept the records of taxes public and transparent. Still, taxes alone did not keep us afloat, and every now and then a flier would arrive with a new shipment of funds, with much of it being spent on sundries to keep the camp running. As such, Chooka also worked heavily as a bit of a treasurer for our community, at least for certain accounts. She kept our operating costs in the black, and that is what mattered to most people of note who financed our expedition.
The progress on the tunnel had slowed to a crawl. The dwarves, ever skilled at mining, had detected a large vein of mithrilic ores ahead. Digging the ore out with magical means would taint them, so more mundane methods, such as pickaxes and drills, were employed once we reached the minimum range where my magical digging Skills would no longer be allowed.
I would have faced mutiny and riots had I suggested we dig straight through it. Even joking that we just go around and ignore it had resulted in a scuffle that ended in no fewer than three dwarves needing to be hogtied for the safety of all involved. I had never seen a dwarf froth at the mouth before while muttering about ‘gold in them thar hills’ until that day, but the whole experience did reinforce how seriously dwarves take their mining.
In the end, an elite team of only the most experienced dwarves dug a mine shaft to the ore. We still awaited them clearing it out so that we could continue the tunnel. That is not to say that we sat around doing nothing, for most of the camp moved past that stretch of mountain to continue building the road and to dig the tunnel from the other side. This being the second time we had to perform this maneuver, people knew what to expect.
Junior Chief Engineer Torborg personally managed that offshoot of our camp, for the value of the ore was such that it would finance the entire camp for at least six months of operating expenses. With a camp of around 5,000 people, and the average person consuming perhaps 2 gold a day in expenses and wages, and considering a year was 432 days across twelve months, that was just over 2 million gold worth of ore! And that was just a conservative estimate of the value of the ore.
Some darker circles of individuals had betting pools for how many miners would need to be hanged for trying to steal bits of the precious ore. It was a serious offense, not just legally, but also socially for the dwarves, but opportunities at such wealth can corrupt the most respectable of individuals with greed. Personally, I found such wagers to be in bad taste, but I also had 20 gold riding on it being 3 hangings, so let the discipline be harsh but restrained in usage.
I was slowly learning more about the cultures of the various races. I had a few confederates to help me blend in and mingle when I shapeshifted into other humanoid races. The kobolds flat out could tell from one glance that I was not a true kobold, but they still humored me. I could pass for a socially awkward elf as long as I behaved with grace and dignity. Gnomes fell for it completely, and all I had to do was demonstrate a few eccentric interests or hobbies to be one of them. Miccen were impossible because I could not follow that many conversations at once, and I didn’t understand the local thieves' cant of riccen to blend in. Dwarves were tricky because they have so many cultural references to great dwarves of old and their many deeds as told in their oral traditions. I had yet to try orcs, for they were a difficult lot to understand. They can be prim and proper one moment and violent and savage the next, so I needed to understand them better before trying. No other races were present in ample numbers where everyone didn’t already know everyone, so I held off on trying them.
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Animals, magical beasts, monsters, and other creatures I could not categorize correctly were outside what my shape-shifting Skills could match. For instance, someone had convinced a fire elemental and his ‘harem’ (as is the proper term) of ice elementals to work in our freezer. The fire elemental is clearly older and in charge, with the ice elementals being the equivalent of children or adolescents. They can and do talk, with pretty much every single sentence having a fire-themed pun, and their bodies are roughly humanoid in shape most of the time, but I guess they don’t count as humanoids somehow. I’m not certain what they get out of standing around in our freezers all day keeping things cold, but they do seem to be rather content to chill there.
The Boys like to spend time talking to them, not that The Boys can speak in actual words that humanoids understand, but the elementals have no problem. I suspect The Boys mostly wanted the food that the elementals loosely guarded, at least in the sense that they would snitch on The Boys if food were stolen. And it was for that reason that I found myself in the freezer talking to a fire elemental, for The Boys had gone missing and my Skill to know their location was not working for some reason.
“So do you or do you not know where The Boys went?” I asked for the fifth time.
“They were really fired up to leave all of a sudden,” one ice elemental responded.
“They had a burning desire to head out of camp in the middle of conversation,” answered another.
“I think they blazed a trail to the east if I rem-ember correctly,” came yet another response.
“Indeed, they ash-celerated in that direction,” answered the only fire elemental. “They were stoked by something they heard, for they res-cindered their desire to stay for a chat and departed without saying anything.”
“Thank you for your help. If you don’t mind me asking, why is a fire elemental in a freezer with a bunch of ice elementals?”
“A fair question for the ignorant. You have kindled my desire to illuminate you on the subject. I escort them on their odyssey, for they must learn of the world and how to manage temperature anywhere. They push thermal energy to me to stay cool, and I absorb it to stay warm. We would normally have a water elemental with us to help heal them and to absorb the condensation, but the last one we had experienced burnout for the job. I know your kind think we would be antagonistic, but you rarely see a fire elemental without an ice elemental. You can talk to them for more details if you want, for they will not give you the cold shoulder.”
Okay, so they make terrible puns, the kind that make me want to groan but also happy at the same time.
“I will have to take a rain check on that offer,” I responded as the fire elemental raised a fiery and disembodied eyebrow at the apparently water-themed pun I had made on accident. “I know working here may not be all shock and thaw,” I added as his expression turned more approving with a slight smile, “but I appreciate how you help them instead of going into early re-pyre-ment.” He tilted his head side-to-side in contemplation of that last terrible pun, but ultimately slapped me on the back and gave a hearty chuckle.
“I see you are learning. Take care and good luck finding your pet. If you need us, we will only be a stone’s throw away.”
Okay, so apparently older elementals are not picky about which element their puns are themed around. Surely there was more nuance to it all, but I would need to figure that out later. For now, The Boys were unaccounted for.
I left the freezer and literally scooped up the closest kobold I could find so he or she could not scurry away on whatever errand was important at the time.
“Round up all the kobolds.” I commanded. “The Boys have gone missing and we need to track them down.”
The startled kobold, still dangling in my outstretched arms, nodded quickly in understanding as he also tried to salute, and as I set him down, he ran off to find the others.
Before I even made it to the gates of the camp, kobolds popped out of the woodwork to join us. Gambino, their leader, and Bambina, his lover and second-in-command, arrived wearing long black boots and gloves over long tan trousers, a white shirt with a tan vest, and a plinth helmet. Gambino also sported a monocle and a rather fancy curled mustache, despite the fact that kobolds do not have hair.
“I say, old chap, are we up for a spot of hunting today, wot wot?”
How he and Bambina managed to get into costume so quickly or how they knew what a safari outfit should be would remain one of the many mysteries about them.
“Just tracking down The Boys. Nanu should be here soon, and then we set out to find them.”
“Tally-ho, good sir. My beaters will put on a drive for you. We will find your wayward pet quick as you like.”
Some three or four dozen kobolds had assembled around me before Bambina organized them into rank and file. They are a short race, on par with goblins and gnomes, but most of them are faster in a sprint than your average humanoid. A good number of them were in their ninja outfits, but a smattering of other ones were visible. One had on a Sou'wester and a yellow jacket, complete with a pipe and a short white beard. Another wore a ghillie suit, with another wearing a headdress of many colored feathers and an elaborate loincloth that hung almost to the ground.
I had no idea what they were rehearsing for, but my little collection of obedient and anthropomorphic geckos and skinks did put on plays from time to time. Well, they constantly lived a play; they just formally made coordinated performances for the masses at set times.
Before long, Nanu walked over to us with Hopper and Ribbette in tow. Some kobolds cowered slightly in fear, for many still sported bruises from our latest sparring match. Still, they seemed happy to be in service of dragons, especially ones that treated them well, and though they looked on with thinly veiled adoration at Nanu and I most of the time, they remained serious and on-task when I had specific orders for them. The idle chatter cut out as soon as she made it to my side, and in the distance, I witnessed It-Has-Pockets hustling to make it over to us from the same direction Nanu arrived. I waited a moment for It-Has-Pockets to arrive on my other side before giving the briefing.
“Alright, you lot. The Boys have gone missing and my Skill to track them is not working for some mysterious reason. We need to track them down. Gambino, send out your best trackers to pick up their trail. They wander in and out of camp all the time, so find a trail that leads out to the wilderness. I have some evidence to suggest they headed east, but that was also the direction of the closest gate from where they were last seen. Once the trail is found, report back and we will set out to follow and find them. That is all, so get to it.”
A menagerie of different terms of acknowledgement greeted my ears, each one themed to the character each individual was dressed as. A score of kobolds took off out of the gate without prompting. Minutes passed in silence as we awaited word. While Nanu and I could have turned into our draconic forms to fly off and find The Boys, we did not have an approved flight path and escort. It would be dangerous for us to venture off into the wilderness, for the body parts of dragons fetch a good price and my location and identity as a dragon was well-known. Nanu took my hand in hers to comfort me, for The Boys were rather domesticated and had never wandered off into the wilderness before and probably did not have very good and practical survival skills. Hopefully, hunters saw hydras as less valuable or at least not worth the risk.
“I say. old bean, one of my scouts has found the trail of The Boys. Shall we set forth?”
I nodded to Gambino, and he sounded a hunting horn. Our little band hustled after him, with me trusting that some Skill had enabled communication between Gambino and those of his troupe who were out scouting. We made our way northeast, then the trail turned due east, to finally hook southeast. The Boys’ footprints stood out plain as day, each one making a deep impression in the earth. At times, their stride seemed to slow or change direction suddenly, so they must be following something that is moving. I had my [Observer] and [Overseer] Skills scouting the way, but The Boys had at least a two-hour lead on us.
Three hours later, the terrain had transitioned from grasslands to forest and then to marshlands. The kobolds seemingly had no trouble navigating the terrain, but It-Has-Pockets started to slow us down as she got bogged down up to her knees for the third time. Having enough of that, I scooped her up into a princess carry, for Nanu and I had the Skills to navigate the terrain and Skull remained safe in my shadow. After another hour, I heard an all too familiar quartet. The Boys were singing, and as I listened, I could hear something else singing back in the same style.