It felt like only a momentary lapse of consciousness when I startled awake and opened my eyes. My mouth was still filled with bits of meat and clogged with the cloying taste of blood. My vision was still blurry and indistinct, but something was moving above me. Something extremely large. Hot breath hit my face with a wave of heat like the interior of a kiln, and the smell of smoke was able to cut through the stench of death surrounding me. I belatedly realized that that awful smell was probably coming from me and not the corpse piled on top of me. What was even going on right now? Moving my single functional arm to try and scrub some of the gunk out of my vision took a momentous effort on my part.
Drawing my hand back, I was better able to see what was over me, and I abruptly let out a wheezing croak of a laugh. Either I was hallucinating, or my brain was giving me a narcotics trip. Two ruby-red eyes with black slit pupils regarded me over a muzzle adorned with smoking nostrils and a horn-studded jaw. A chaotic array of huge black horns swept backwards from the dragon’s head as if they had been shaped by a headlong gale. I couldn’t fathom the size of the dragon, because all I could see of it from over the corpse was its head, but I knew it had to be titanic in scale. Its head alone was the size of a building.
The rumble of his voice shook the bones in my body, the heat of his breath caused the blood soaking my face to crisp and crackle. Flames licked along the inside of the roof of his mouth and upper lip as he spoke:
“Does my appearance amuse you, soft-skinned ant?”
There was no further harm that could come from engaging with the dragon. When I went to speak though, I gagged a gob of blood up and hacked it up onto my face. My second attempt was more successful.
“There’s no way someone like you could be on Floor 10.” I had to gasp for breath between sentences. Breathing was causing something to grind in my chest, and I couldn’t breathe in very deeply at all. “Have I already died, and you’re here to take me to the nine hells?”
My voice was weak at not much more than a whisper, but what I said seemed to amuse the apparition judging by the soot-laden snort that washed over me. I thought it was strange that I wasn’t in more pain than I was, but the painfully hot breath of the dragon actually felt comforting to me, as freezing cold as I was. The world outside the two of us was also eerily still and quiet. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was probably correct in my assumption that I’d passed on to the afterlife. Everything right now was too surreal to be reality.
“What is it that you seek here, ant?”
With my speaking ability so heavily impaired, I knew that I had to keep my answer short. I had a dozen, no, a hundred reasons to enter the tower. I was tired of living on bread and scraps of barely edible meat. I hated working in a slaughterhouse and having to put up with the unique blend of monotony and danger it presented for entirely too few coins each week. Sneaking around the neighborhoods I lived and worked in to avoid street gangs was bothersome. I wanted to be a successful adventurer, to earn riches and climb both levels and floors. To make a name for myself and gain fame or notoriety. But if you boiled all of those desires down to their most base elements, the thing I lacked that held me back from doing any of that was myself. I was short, lean bordering on unhealthily thin, and honestly just… weak. Bitter tears of shame collected and rolled out of the corners of my eyes, leaving less blood crusted trails in their wake.
I sucked in a partial breath and said: “I want to be strong, powerful-… “I wasn’t able to finish my thought as I was interrupted by a cough, but the dragon seemed to understand what I was saying.
“Yes, but why.” He replied.
I wanted to and tried to shout my answer: “So I can live on my terms!” I didn’t quite hit my mark; I barely made it to normal conversational volume. The effort it took left me breathless and somehow even weaker than I was previously. I wasn’t knowledgeable in the facial expressions of dragons, this being the first, and probably last that I’d ever see, but I thought the dragon looked thoughtful as he mulled over my answer.
“It’s been many years since I took on a new minion. I like to observe the training grounds for ants. Before they join a hive of other ants or think that they are a better kind of insect and that deserves respect.” The dragon shifted around outside my field of vision and breathed out two ash laden and sooty jets of air from his nostrils. He continued, saying: “I thought I heard a pitiful squeak coming from this floor, and what do I find when I turn my attention to the sound? A weak, useless, human meat bag wrestling around with a helpless pup of a wolf. I thought I glimpsed the tiniest spark when you had the audacity to bait it with your own arm and then tear it’s throat out with your teeth.”
I guess I’ll take the credit even if it feels like charity. All I was trying to do was stop the wolf from crunching into my skull like an apple.
“I can save your worthless life and grant you what you wish for, but it comes with costs. This… pact cannot be forced upon another; you must agree to it of your own will.”
I don’t know how much longer I even have… But I can’t blindly agree to some kind of offer to sell my soul!
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“Wh-what costs?”
The corners of the dragon’s eyes almost seemed to turn upwards at my question, and he answered cryptically: “There are a few: servitude is the first. You’ll live freely enough by your own will, but I will require little odds and ends taken care of from time to time. Do them well, and I might grace your existence with a reward.”
I was fairly sure that the heat of the dragon’s breath was probably burning my exposed skin, but I desperately clung on to the feeling of the stinging heat on my face. My chest was rattling and the grinding from my ribs was nearly enough to make me black out when I said: “Wh… else?”
A tongue bigger than my entire body was visible between the dragon’s lips as the flames of his breath lit the inside of his mouth like a furnace. “My rivals and those under their care will seek to snuff your flame, but only if you allow them to take it from you.” The dragon’s lips pulled back revealing a grin that would cause any sane being to quake. Almost like an afterthought, he added: “And there will have to be some alterations made to lump of flesh you call a body, otherwise the power of my gifts will consume you from within.”
I didn’t have much of a choice, but the thought of servitude would normally make my stomach turn. Granted, the awful job I worked and the bare tenement room I lived in was probably worse than most servants in the better quarters of the city. I only had one remaining question, but I wasn’t sure that the answer would really change my mind, given the fact that it came down to choosing oblivion or whatever this servitude would look like.
“…ow long?” was all I was able to whisper out.
The dragon threw his head back and blazing gouts of flame tore through the air as he guffawed at my question. Looking back down, his lips were again parted in a smile, but I couldn’t tell if it was the kind of smile that should make me relieved or terrified. I went with both. There was a gleam in his eyes when he gave me the answer that I feared the most: “Forever.” A tear rolled down my cheek, and I nodded.
“It must be spoken, ant.”
I started to speak, saying: “I will…” and I hacked up a frothy mix of spit and bloody foam.
I can’t die before I say it!
I was a fighter, gods damn it! I pushed with all my stamina and mana to flex [Fighter’s Grit] as hard as I could. I activated [Battle Cry] and used the force of the skill to shout my answer: “I will serve!”
Immediately an explosion of green life mana radiated out from my body, and it felt like I was yanked back from the precipice of death. I didn’t recognize the heal as anything I’d ever seen before, and it stabilized my current condition and filled me with energy. It felt like it at least stopped all my bleeding, but my body was still shattered and buried under the corpse of the Denmother. My savior used two claws to lift the corpse off me and dropped just a few feet away. Breathing immediately became far easier, and I felt like I’d actually be able to speak in more than a breathless whisper. I wanted to ask, ‘what now’ but when I took a breath to speak, the dragon cut me off: “Silence, ant. I must focus and shape your gift appropriately, otherwise you’ll be torn apart from within.”
I merely gulped and half-nodded. The dragon was staring at me, and it was hard to tell, but I didn’t feel like he was staring at me so much as he was staring into me. With the corpse no longer obstructing the bottom half of my vision, I glanced downwards to try and get a better look at him. The dragon—whose name I hadn’t bothered to ask before he saved my life—was gargantuan. He was sitting in, or on, the forest and had his upper body curled over and his long neck turned towards to hover his face a handful of meters above me. I couldn’t truly estimate his size, but his thighs were thicker than the trees in the forest were tall, and they had to be twenty-five yards or more in height. He had his wings tucked behind his back, and even mostly folded, they blotted out a major portion of the night sky. I had never seen anything so large besides the tower itself. Even the huge cargo airships that docked in Foundation would be smaller than this dragon, and some of those were more than five hundred feet long!
But it wasn’t simply his size that blew me away, it was his physicality and presence, too. His entire body bulged with layered muscle that was visible even through what was undoubtedly a massively thick and durable scaled hide. He was doing something with his hands now, and I focused my attention on it. Using one thumb claw, he pierced the palm of his other hand and turned it over so the blood could drip out. Two or three giant droplets fell out and slowed until they collided with one another, forming a sphere that floated in the air. With another burst of that green mana, he healed the puncture in his hand and then turned his attention to the floating crimson orb. It floated over to me and downwards until it came to a rest a yard above my chest.
The surface of the blood rippled and bubbled over me, and I could feel forces beyond my understanding working around me. The air felt thick like it was more of a liquid than a gas, and it rolled over me in a spinning breeze that rapidly intensified. Like the wind, the orb started to spin as well, which was visible by the way the surface stretched and distorted. Faster and faster the orb and the air spun around me until I was laying at the center of a windstorm. The orb proceeded to shrink down from a yard in diameter, and it condensed as it shrank. When it was nearly down to the size of my head, it shivered and collapsed inwards. The wind stopped and I was left staring at an all-too-familiar sight, albeit of a size and quality the likes of which I had never even heard of. It was a monster core with an almost egg-like shape, some six inches tall and three inches wide at its widest point. Rather than looking like a stone though, this looked like a perfectly smooth crystal of such purity that I could see through it. And it glowed with a painfully bright orange energy.
I was scared shitless at the sight of the monster core. Just what was this dragon planning on doing with that thing!? It wasn’t just radiating an insane amount of energy; it was also radiating an equally insane amount of heat.
I wanted to blame the force of his rumbling voice for the tremors shaking me when he said: “It’s time, little devotee.”
“T-time for what?!” I asked, the panic creeping into my voice.
The dragon gave me that tooth-lined grin once more. The core started to lower down towards my sternum around where my heart was. The interior surface of my leather chest armor was burning my skin from all the radiant heat it was absorbing.
“Rebirth.”
The core was only inches above my torn armor now, and there was a gash straight down the middle of my chest where it was headed. The exposed portions of my skin where the armor had been sliced burned like someone was pressing a hot iron pan against my chest. [Warrior’s Grit] wasn’t going to do anything to quell this level of pain coursing through my system.
“No, no! Wait! You… you can’t! AHH!” Nothing I said mattered and my desperate pleas turned into screams as the skin on my chest cooked, sizzled and then steamed as the orb came into contact with my skin. It wasn’t so much sinking down as it was being crushed straight into my chest cavity. My screaming was cut off as I cooked from the inside when the fist-sized object was inserted into my chest. I couldn’t breathe or move, and the steam escaping from my gaping mouth was the last thing I saw before my eyes rolled up into my head and I blacked out.