This chapter has been proof-read by: AnthonyL
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It had already been a month since we defeated the king dragon and in such a short period of time, so many things had changed. In only 30 short days, our town had became a dragon lair inhabited by tens of them. There was not a moment you could watch the sky without seeing one of them fly overhead.
Our first reactions to this had been quite chaotic and overly dramatic but soon, we realized that these dragons had no intention of harming us. I was also worried for Rambo but some unbelievable events eventually convinced me otherwise. After witnessing it a few times for myself, it seemed that Rambo was able to order these other dragons around as he pleased.
During these last weeks, even though the other dragons had grown considerably, Rambo's size had remained the same. Rambo was still the size he was when coming out of his egg while the other dragons had almost doubled in size. Also, every-time a dragon decided to approach Rambo and I, Rambo would never show fear or aggression toward them.
Instead, he would usually stare at them while remaining calm and composed. By the look of it, they seemed to treat him as being ranked higher in the hierarchy than themselves. It seemed, I was the number 1 and Rambo number 2. I was unsure on exactly how many dragons were living in town and didn't really care about it. All that mattered was that they had never behaved aggressively toward any of us.
Even if it was very unsettling, since these dragons had begun to coexist with us, we hadn't seen any monsters around. Our town was now a dragon land devoid of any other type of wildlife. By the look of it, if a dragon decided to live somewhere, the other creatures would instinctively leave the area.
In the first week after the king dragon's death, we had spotted a tiger striped t-rex that Robert then identified as being the one who had injured Emanuela. Not wanting such a creature to roam near our town, we took our armoured vehicles and gave chase, but before we could inflict any serious injury to the beast, dragons began to appear from everywhere and swarmed the giant t-rex creature.
The scene ended up being very gruesome and brutal. As you could imagine, seeing tens of small dragons clinging to the giant beast and ripping pieces of its body until it bled to death had been a rare spectacle. This time though, they began to eat it before giving me the first piece like they would usually do.
I hadn't seen this as anything worth making a fuss about, but seeing this, Rambo jumped out of the truck and began to growl at them. As I was panicking and rushing to grab my baby dragon, something remarkable happened. One of the dragons who had locked eyes with Rambo began to make some yapping sound which caught the attention of all the other dragons feasting on the giant carcass.
At this moment, I thought we were about to die, but Rambo would keep staring intensely at the other dragons without making a sound. Eventually, one of them brought me a big piece of meat and repeated the 'wait for the alpha to eat first' ritual. It was only after seeing the other dragons pay proper respect to me that Rambo finally decided to stop glaring at them.
I knew why Rambo had done this. It was important to always enforce my position in the hierarchy but as you could expect, playing that game with dragons was the most terrifying thing in the world. Luckily, I apparently had a fearless son capable of helping me do that.
How could such a small dragon give orders to these bigger dragons belonging to different species? After asking him, it seemed that even Rambo wasn't sure why they obeyed him. After these events, Rambo had kept interacting with them each time we were outside or on the rooftop. To me, it felt as if Rambo was the alpha and not me.
During this last month, I had also finished upgrading my equipment. My dragon skin riot suit had performed flawlessly so far, but this was not the only thing I had upgraded. I was now the proud owner of a king dragon necklace that the fat Alice took a week to complete. It was still the same red gold necklace as before but now had the yellow king dragon's eye embedded into it.
The only thing left to upgrade was a better blade. I needed a sword of some sort for close combat but I knew that making it out of steel was pointless. With that in mind, I began to experiment with red gold. From what Alice had said, gold was incredibly strong but was still weaker than diamond. Doping my body with red mist and trying to bend a link of my chain proved that I was strong enough to bend it, so red gold wasn't strong enough after all.
Since I couldn't make a sword out of diamonds, I decided to go for something even better. Alice had mentioned before that dragon bones had a black core that was even tougher than diamond. Curious to experiment with such an amazing material, I grabbed one of the king dragon's rib and threw it into a bonfire.
What I wanted was the core, but the core was covered with the usual white bony type of material, so burning them should theoretically burn the white stuff and only leave behind the black core I was after. A few hours later as I had expected, the black core had been completely unaffected by the flames but all the white stuff had been turned to ash.
Removing the bone around the core manually would have taken a lot of time and effort, so simply burning it had been the best idea after all. Now with a surprisingly light, elongated and slightly curved piece of black core, I could totally visualize the shape of a katana blade. Of course it would need a lot of work to turn this thing into a blade worthy of the name, but this was definitely a perfect raw material.
For weeks, I kept grinding away at this damned piece of black shit. Making a blade out of this material had ended up being much more challenging than expected as even a grinder which could eat away at steel as if it was cardboard could barely put a scratch on it. I was perplexed but then began to use the very expensive diamond grinding disks found at the stores. (Which were now free...)
Only then, did I begin to see some progress. I was able to grind 1 millimetre of it per hour, but at least now I could see some progress. I eventually ended up collecting the resulting 'core dust' and began to use it as abrasive for the rest of the grinding process which seemed to accelerate things up quite a bit.
Since I was spending hours everyday grinding away at my blade, the others (Marc) had begun to complain that I wasn't doing my share around, since they were all very busy building the mobile headquarters outside, in front of my garage door. To that, I told him that if he wanted to be the one protecting them during the travel, that I was willing to switch places with him. To that, he threw an angry look but then never mentioned it again.
The mobile head quarter was built like a giant sleigh. It was made out of heavy steel pontoons, welded together and shaped like a sleigh so it could be dragged/pushed around, but was also meant to float. Using this as a base, we would then build a two storey building on top of it and use a bunch of heavy duty winches at the front so we could move it around on its own. The goal was to build a road with heavy machinery and use bulldozers to drag the building along.
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Anyway, going back to the sword. In the end, it took me 3 weeks to complete but the end result was a thing of beauty. I had ended up polishing the blade for hours, and had left an unpolished area near the cutting edge to make it look like the usual hamon of a katana. What I was left with was a beautiful black blade that seemed to be made out of glass, or black obsidian.
The blade weighed almost nothing and its incredibly sharp edge should never become dull since the material it was made of was virtually indestructible. I had tried to break another piece of core while making this blade, but had failed at it. Even putting it under a 5 ton press had failed to damage it, so I knew I could use my full strength with this one without worries.
Of course, grinding my blade had not been the only thing I had done during all this time. Only four days after challenging Annie to master the expulsion technique, the little girl had come to my place with a giant grin on her face. Guessing what it was about, I asked her to show me before I gave her her reward.
She sat on the ground and closed her eyes as if she was about to meditate, then a soft current of red mist began to gently leak from the pores of her skin. She had succeeded, as expected of the one I had chosen to be my disciple. Proud of her, I patted her head while telling her how proud I was but jumped back in fear when she opened her eyes.
Her eyes were glowing red like those of a dragon. Then remembering that you couldn't see red mist through a mirror, I anxiously asked her. “Do my eyes glow red when I use red mist?” The response was an instantaneous nod. No wonder she had been scared of me in the beginning. If I saw a guy popping out of nowhere with glowing red eyes, I would have been scared shit-less as well.
Finally understanding a lot of things, I was caught up in my thoughts, recalling past events and Annie's past reactions to certain things. Feeling Annie tugging on my clothes brought my attention back to her only to be met by the glaring eyes of a young girl expecting her reward. Giggling a bit, I went to one of my drawers and pulled out what I had prepared beforehand.
Her reward was a gold ring, but not any kind of gold ring. This one was made out of red gold similar to my necklace. My experiments on dragon blood had given me some interesting results, and this red gold ring was part of it. I leaned closer to her as she seemed perplexed to get another ring and said with a smile. “When you get back to earth, this ring will be worth a fortune. You will be a very rich girl.”
The smile on her face almost blinded me with cuteness. Making this ring had cost me an entire barrel of dragon blood, so it was indeed valuable. It all began with the dragon dust experiments. I had all this dragon dust, and realized that if I ever ran out of red mist during a battle, that I could use dragon dust to refuel myself, a bit like those mana potions in games.
More precisely, I was predicting dragon dust to come in handy after we made it back to earth, where there was no red mist in the air. Without a way to replenish the red mist in my body, I would eventually lose my powers. The problem was that having it in powder form was inconvenient.
Because of that, I began to press the powder into pills with a machine found at a nearby drug dealer's house. I pressed hundreds of 500 mg pills but soon realized that not only were these pills annoyingly big to swallow, but also that I needed 4 or more of these pills to completely refill my body with red mist.
As I grew stronger, the necessary amount would keep going up as well. Seeing this as inefficient, I began some experiments to create a concentrated version of dragon dust. I needed to find a way to refine dragon dust even more than it currently was. This idea eventually led me to red gold. The amount of red mist gold could contain was simply mind boggling.
My thoughts were like this; since I could absorb red mist though red meat, this meant that red mist could be absorbed through the digestive system and not only through the respiratory system. With that in mind, I ground the equivalent of 3 grains of salt of red gold from my necklace and placed the small red gold particles on a glass plate.
Next, I dropped a drop of acid on it to recreate what would happen in the stomach but got an unexpected result. A giant cloud of red mist burst out from the gold, filling my garage in a dense red fog so thick, you could barely see your hands in front of your face. I quickly opened my garage door to let the mist out but ended up summoning the surrounding dragons in the process.
The creatures were all standing in front of the door, staring at me with curiosity in their eyes when Rambo rose from his nap and without a word, “stared them away”. Rambo seemed very good at ordering them around. I patted Rambo on the head and went back to what I was doing. Red gold was definitely the answer to obtain a huge amount of red mist in a very condensed form.
The only problem was that it seemed to be a bit too condensed. Seemed like I would need to get a heck of a lot stronger before being able to stomach a red gold pill. I already had tons of regular dragon pills, so I placed a gold ring in each barrel of dragon blood to absorb all the red mist it contained. That way, I wasn't going to waste anything by letting the blood spoil.
Why bother with 6 huge barrels full of blood when you can contain the same amount of red mist in 6 small gold rings. One of the rings ended up being Annie's reward, the other ground into dust and made into thousands of pills. Each pills contained the equivalent of 1 grain of salt worth of gold but were already worth tens of regular pills when it came to red mist content.
To make sure not to mix the two kind of pills, I made the gold pills white, while the regular pills were brownish red. The gold pills were 99,9% powdered sugar with a tiny speck of red gold pressed into them. Back when I gave her reward to Annie, I had also asked her if she wanted to become my disciple. I told her that I could teach her how to become as strong as me. I was expecting her to jump at the opportunity but she didn't. She wasn't a young boy after all.
To convince her I had to play on her feelings, so after seeing her hesitate for a while, I added that she could protect the others instead of being the one needing to be protected. Hearing these words, the young girl had eventually accepted my offer. I then told her to come later that day for her first training.
She eventually left with Camille who had came looking for her. After all, Annie was always glued to her, so each time she lost sight of her, Camille would go on panic mode and search everywhere for the young girl. From then on, Annie kept coming to my place every evening to take some dragon pills and train her expulsion technique while I was doing the same but also training my telekinetic power as well.