The first task on my list for the day was to get back at that dang snail. Now that Karl knew the trick, he was confident he could handle the thing, and I wasn’t about to argue against that. If he thought he could take it, then chances were he could.

After not too long, Karl and I arrived at the same high school from before. We did another quick sweep of the building, but all we found were some cruddy goblins that Karl quickly massacred and shoved roughly into the back of my car– fourteen this time, as expected. Since it was just goblins, we gained nothing from the encounter other than that feeling Karl always got when he fed on Echoes.

Once that had been handled, it was time to move onto the snail.

I stepped into the cafeteria and stared down at the snail, about twenty feet away and almost up to eye level with me. Luckily, the thing hadn’t moved too far– without any people to harass, it probably just stayed in the one room.

Excruciatingly slowly, the carloch started closing in towards us.

Then Karl took over and slowly moved towards it as well.

The giant snail’s face tentacles stretched out towards us, but Karl casually cut them all off, the cauterization halting any physical regeneration it might’ve had.

“You caught me off guard last time, I’ll give you that,” my voice growled out, “But you’re still nothing. Having a different weakness than I thought just means you still have a weakness.”

Karl punched repeatedly at the carloch, burning scar after scar into its weird jelly-like flesh before eventually slicing a flaming katar along the cuts he’d already made, then repeating the motion at a slightly different angle.

The carloch’s head fell off.

Dang, you were right. That wasn’t too bad.

“Just because you fail once doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get back up and try again,” Karl suggested. “In this case, I lacked some critical information, but we survived and returned smarter. Now, let me actually kill this thing. Beasts with regenerative properties are the worst.”

You already cut off its head, though. Shouldn’t it be dead?

“Eh, not quite. That works on most things since they can’t heal and their soul is connected to their body through their brains, but much like the troll, the carloch doesn’t have that problem. The brain is the most common place, and the heart is a close second. I’ll have to destroy the heart of this thing to kill it permanently.”

An image flashed into my mind: a snail’s anatomy shining onto the teacher’s projector screen. The part I’d been most interested in at the time was how the snails literally defecated onto their own heads, but I remembered the vague location of the heart.

Looking at the size of the carloch, I grimaced in preemptive disgust.

“Yup,” Karl noted with a smirk, “All the way in the back of the shell. Don’t worry too much, though. I’m gonna try to pull the shell off first.”

Relieved, I sent a wave of appreciation to Karl, who quickly got to work pulling and twisting on the shell. Being an integral part of its body, it wasn’t exactly easy to cleanly remove the shell, but after a few minutes, Karl managed, only needing to give the exposed body a slight prick to permanently end the carloch.

We elected not to lug the body back to the car, both because it smelled really bad and because it was a bit large for that. Karl did gain two points of Strength, though, one of which transferred over to me.

We searched the high school a bit more, breaking into back rooms and checking storage closets, but found nothing, so we decided to move on.

“There’s a Suncash in town,” I mentioned to Karl, “That might be a good spot to check. Should be pretty easy to tell if they’re having problems– that place is always busy. Even on doomsday, people will still be ordering coffee.”

Turns out, the Suncash was thriving. I stopped to ask a few questions and apparently some monsters had spawned there, cats with barbed tails or something, but the people had ganged up on the beasts, refusing to let the apocalypse stop them from getting their steamy brown ambrosia.

Personally, I didn’t get it, but then again I’d only had coffee once and then didn’t touch it again after that, so who was I to judge?

I figured that a nearby hotel was a good enough place to take a look at as any, and found that the management had locked down an entire section of the building because someone had died there.

I offered to handle the problem, but the guy at the front desk just laughed at me. Then I handed him a twenty and he raised the gate briefly so I could slip through.

People were weird. Twenty dollars is all it takes for you to let me kill myself? I mean, nah, I’d win, but still, he clearly didn’t think I could handle a newborn kitten, much less a man-slaying beast.

“Alright Karl, any idea what we might find here?” I walked through the hallway slowly, listening carefully for any sounds that might give away my prey’s position.

What sorts of people normally stay at this sort of establishment?

“Uh, basically just travellers and people having one-night stands or cheating on their spouses, probably more of the former than the latter. Sometimes people might stay at a hotel while they’re visiting family or looking at a job in the area, but that sort of falls under the traveller category.”

I assumed as much. We’ll most likely be looking at something related to the idea of travel– think flying creatures or humanoids. There’s also a chance of there being an association with the demonic. Unlikely, but plausible.

“Okay, so probably some sort of bird.” I shrugged. “We should be able to handle that.”

I’m not so sure, Karl commented with a hum, This location isn’t very open and has no air access, so birds are less likely. It’s probably a giant bug or bloodsucking bat, or something along those lines.

“Greaaat, now I’m dealing with a vampire. If I get bit and turn into one of them, you’re coming with me.”

Improbable. Vampires are considered sentient, and aren’t typically summoned. Additionally, they cannot actually turn into bats, most just like the aesthetic. If it’s actually a batlike humanoid you’re looking for, then a camazotz is far more likely.

“Can you just… stop? Let me know what it is when we find it and stop making me panic with thoughts of what it could be.”

Fine, fine.

With that, I started checking doors. Most of them were open to some degree or another, seemingly lacking the automated closing mechanisms that most hotels seemed to have. Most likely, people had left their rooms in a rush when they learned about– or possibly heard– the hotel’s monster killing someone. I couldn’t exactly blame them.

“You know, I probably should’ve asked the guy at the front desk for details on the monster,” I realized a bit too late.

He seemed rude. I doubt he would have given you much information, if he knows anything at all.

“Eh, maybe you’re right.” Not like I'd wanted to interact with him any more than necessary.

It didn't take too long to locate the spawned creature, the visage of which was surprising to say the least.

I have to be honest, I wasn't expecting it to be a carnivorous horse.

True to Karl's words, inside the room was a giant jet-black horse, bent over a dead body.

The angle wasn't great, positioned directly behind the monster as we were, but peeking beneath the beast revealed that the corpse was half eaten and half ridden with flies.

Any ideas? I queried Karl silently.

Try to stab it where its torso meets its hind legs. That should disable some of its mobility.

Wait, what? You want me to do that?

Just try. I'll jump in right after, Karl assured me.

Carefully and slowly, I unsheathed both katars and moved forward.

It raised its head and sniffed, sounding more like a dog than a horse, and I almost froze, but a mental nudge from Karl had me lunge forward, punching with all my strength into the horse’s legs.

Punching out with both arms at the same time had been a mistake, and I started to lose my balance as the horse tilted and fell onto its rear, but Karl swapped with me and quickly recovered.

“Good job,” he praised with a grunt, “Next time, though, go one arm at a time. Lets you react faster and won't delay you much, what with all our Dexterity.”

I silently watched Karl completely dismantle the horse in seconds, chopping into critical points with precision and force that I wouldn't have been able to replicate if the thing had been completely still, much less with it bucking and writhing against me like Karl was doing.

You know, for a dragon, you're much better at using a human body to fight than I'd expect, I commented as Karl finished up the fight by jabbing a Katar through the horse’s neck and into its skull.

Karl handed my body back over, then replied, It's less about combat experience and more about mixing instinct with knowledge. Human fighters train themselves for decades to align their instincts with efficient, deady movement. I have much less experience with your body than they might, but I do have more knowledge and overall battle intelligence.

I shrugged as he ventured out of my body to absorb the soul of the weird horse thing. Now that I got a better look at it, the ears and eyes were both facing forwards, and its mouth was slimmer and sharper than it had any right to be.

“I just mean I figured you'd probably mostly respond with overwhelming force and literal firepower, rather than all the careful precision you show with my body.”

A dragon's body is large and unwieldy. For us, at least as we grow to the size of mountains, precision means not accidentally flapping our wings hard enough to flatten kingdoms.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

I thought about that for a second. “So, it's like resistance training, kind of? You've been doing things the hard way for so long that now, with a smaller, more fluidly moving body, you're already an expert?”

There's a bit more to it than that but yes. Your own knowledge of your body also assists me. You are capable of many of the same things that I am, you simply doubt your movements, exhibit far too much caution for fear of hurting yourself, and most of all, need more experience.

I grimaced. “Yeah, I'd really rather just let you do all the fighting, if that's okay.”

Karl laughed uproariously. You may not always have that choice, boy, but for now I'll let it slide.

Dragging the well-beaten horse through the hallway was a bit annoying. No matter how I tried to carry it, it kept bumping into the walls.

Eventually, though, I got it to the gate, where the guy at the register was staring in shock.

“Mind letting me through?” I raised an eyebrow. He continued to stare for a second, then quickly rushed over to unlock and raise the gate for me, staring in awe as I dragged the huge beast behind me.

We exchanged no words past that. He was too busy gawking and I was too busy not caring what he had to say.

Karl and I then faced an interesting conundrum.

There was no way this thing was going to fit in the trunk.

You could chop it into several pieces and arrange them to make better use of the space, Karl helpfully suggested.

“No thanks.” I instead started digging around beneath the goblins corpses and, to my relief, found rope.

Putting the thing on top of the car would probably cause the roof to cave in, even if I was gentle. I could, however…

“You know, they say there's no point in beating a dead horse, but I wonder what they'd say about dragging one across several miles of asphalt?” I chuckled to myself.

It stopped being funny the second I got in my car and realized how slowly I'd need to take the turns and how garbage my acceleration was.

It continued to be unfunny when I stopped driving and was left having to carry the thing’s half flayed body to the back yard.

Figuring that I'd make things easier on myself, I first went back and started digging a mass grave. At this point, I was nearly out of room in my backyard and would have to expand. I did, however, possess the space to bury the beefcake of a horse and the goblins Karl had slain earlier.

The process only grew smoother and smoother as time passed, the Garden working with me to fuel their own growth.

I hosed some blood off my upper body so as not to scare Olive and headed inside. Karl and I weren't quite done with the day, but we'd had to unload anyways so I figured making a pit stop wouldn't hurt.

Olive was sitting on the couch, watching something on her phone.

“Doomscrolling?” I guessed.

“No, actually.” She turned her phone around, showing some anime characters. “I figure now's as good a time as any to start catching up on Second Part.”

I blinked at her. “Isn't that over a thousand episodes long?”

“Yup!” She grinned. “I've never been able to get enough time to binge it– three hundred and sixty hours is a hard ask– but the end of the world as we know it is a wonderful excuse!”

She seemed surprisingly… cheerful.

“Alright,” I said with a resigned tone, “Just make sure you eat, sleep, and drink enough. I don't want to have to bury you out back.”

Her face paled a bit, but the smile remained plastered on her face. “You got it, boss man.”

I furrowed my eyebrows at her. “There's some ice cream in the freezer if yo–”

Before I even finished the sentence, Olive dashed into the kitchen and started rummaging around in the freezer. I followed, grabbing a microwave burrito and quickly shoving it in.

Then a thought came to my mind.

“Hey, what are you going to do if the Internet goes out again?”

Olive paused from her gremlin-esque I've cream hunt– apparently I'd done a poor job at putting things away in a reasonable fashion– and stared into the distance.

“I'll download the series, just to be sure,” she said with far less energy than before.

Then she ripped the tub of ice cream out of the freezer, popped it open, and took a big lick.

“Mine, you no touchy!” She kicked the freezer shut and practically threw herself across the room and onto the couch.

I just stared. “Forgetting something?” I pulled a spoon out of the utensils drawer.

“Nope!” She took another lick straight from the carton.

This is an odd one, Captain Karl Obvious interjected.

“Alright, I'm gonna head back out.” I took a big bite of my burrito and threw a quick wave in her direction. Seconds later, I was standing outside staring at my car.

Where to next?

“To be honest? Not sure. We haven't gotten a single Skill up today, which puts us a bit behind schedule. Any ideas to better use our newer stuff?” I was, of course, referring to Devouring Phantasm and Avatar Reinforcement’s new additions. One seemed entirely passive, and the other let me set stuff on fire.

…I may have a thought.

“Well, let's hear it. Better than sitting here thinking instead of doing.”

We'll see about that.

----------------------------------------

It was, in fact, not better than thinking up a new plan.

I'd been immediately suspicious when Karl asked me to grab all the chip bags and google the nearest apiary.

My suspicions were confirmed when he had me kick one of the hives.

I swatted my limbs around wildly like… well, like I was getting mobbed by bees.

Relax. They're not making it through the barrier, and they catch fire and die the second they touch it. He metaphysically grabbed my body and forced me to stay still, instantly halting my “Oh no there's bees here” dance and slowing down my heart rate.

Now sit down. Criss cross.

I quickly moved to follow his instructions, like I was in a yoga class and the teacher was moving way too fast.

Close your eyes.

“But the–” one of the bees flew into my mouth, forcing me to spit out a charred bee husk.

Your Skill mentioned that it grants you an aspect of whatever Echo you utilize as your Avatar. You possess the aspect of a dragon, boy. Not just any dragon, either, but my aspect. Now act like it!

My mouth snapped shut, my eyelids flicked down, and I did my utmost to immerse myself in the idea of a dragon. They were big. They had scales. They breathed fire. They could fl–

Not like that, you idiot. You must think like a dragon!

The bees buzzed and hummed all around me. It was more than just one colony, too. The others had flown over to join the assault when, in my panic to escape the first army, I'd accidentally knocked over an entire row of them.

What was Karl trying to teach me? What would a dragon even think here?

I focused on a point deep within my mind, the place where Karl’s Echo spoke from, the place where his ethereal being interacted with my physical mind.

I approached it, and it appeared in the shape of an egg– small and vulnerable, everything that Karl was not– and tapped into that.

I had once wondered why Karl's mind seemed so intact. My Skill only promised to draw in memories related to the word I spoke, after all.

Power.

I'd been trying to extract as much strength from the dead dragon as I could at the time, but I couldn't have possibly grasped how perfectly suited it was.

Power was all Karl had ever known.

From the moment he hatched, he had seen it– true, unstoppable power. Unending fire, unyielding scales, claws that could rend the heavens themselves. He had known instantly that his fate led in only one direction.

From that moment on, his entire existence was devoted to the singular pursuit of might.

He died a few times, but that was to be expected. Perfection cannot not be achieved without torching a few villages, as the saying went.

Many dragons spent their time napping to passively accumulate power without risk. Karl was not one of those dragons.

Every moment was spent hunting, perfecting his technique, gathering resources, making connections with dragons in high places.

And then it happened.

Eventually, he achieved the mantle of an Ancient Dragon, a being capable of rivalling the gods thems–

What are you doing in there?!

A shockwave sent me back to myself.

“I, uhh–”

Nevermind, just concentrate, Karl commanded with a note of anger.

I tapped into the feelings I'd just read from Karl's past.

Power of all kinds.

Lethality.

Invulnerability.

That last one stuck out especially.

Insects like these could never harm a dragon, not if they were given a million years and a million hives.

And yet these mere thousands thought they could hurt me?

My eyes flicked open and I watched a wave of flame roll out in all directions, torching the grass and reducing the entire swarm to crisps in an instant.

Avatar Reinforcement (Lv. 7) → (Lv. 8)

+3 Mana Recovery

+1 Attribute Point (Human Versatility)

Now that’s some dragonfire!

I blinked, returning to myself. “What was that?”

Clearly, you burned everything in our surroundings, Karl pointed out helpfully.

“No duh,” I retorted, “What actually happened?”

My aspect doesn’t just “set things on fire.” The dragon scoffed. That would be far too simple for one such as I.

“Can you just get to the point and tell me what happened?”

Fine. Your ability is closer to actual dragonfire than we’d thought, though with some differences. For one, it can emanate from any part of you, but it’s not quite as hot as it would be from a true dragon.

“So, I’m hearing that my fire magic is a bit better than it was before. I have range now?” That could be useful, especially now that Olive had the gun.

Karl harrumphed. That is a drastic oversimplification of what just happened.

“But is it wrong?”

Factually? No. But if words could be harmed, those would be dragged straight to the abyss by yours truly.

I raised a hand to one of the beehives that hadn’t been destroyed by the initial blast and willed fire to exit my hand.

Nothing happened.

I frowned. “Am I doing something wrong?”

I felt Karl’s eyes roll. What were you doing the first time you conjured the flames? How did that influence it?

“Ohh, okay.” I sunk into my mind and tried to conjure that vicious self-assurance from before.

It was harder this time. Maybe because my heart wasn’t really in it.

Was that all it was? The heart?

“Karl, which organ produces dragonfire?”

Technically, dragonfire is produced by a gland in the throat, it’s a liquid until it interacts with oxygen, which causes it to undergo a powerful thermal reaction. The pressure that causes the dragonfire to escape the gland, however, is a matter of blood pressure rather than muscle. That’s why it usually takes a moment to charge– the heart needs to pump powerfully enough to cause it to escape with velocity. We dragons can alter our own blood pressure and heart rate at will, though.

TL;DR, yes. It was the heart.

I focused on the intact beehive once more, taking deep breaths and pouring all of my will into the action, imagining it reduced to a crisp before me.

A few seconds passed, but I held to my conviction, trusting that Avatar Reinforcement would do its job.

It did.

A blast of fire flew from my hand– smaller than I’d been hoping, but it did happen, which was a win in my books. The hive didn’t instantly reduce to ashes like I’d wanted, but it did catch fire and burn to the ground over a few minutes. My Mana had drained significantly just from that one wimpy fireball, but I would get better with time.

Karl and I watched the flames with satisfaction.

It will be good to have true dragonfire in my arsenal once again, he commented wistfully.

“I’m sure it will, man.” I stretched out, hearing something in my back pop as I did. “I think that’s good enough for today. We didn’t pull ahead of the counter, but we kept pace and that’s good enough for me.”

I got the impression of a nod from my Eidolon, and soon we were driving home with little in the way of progress, but much in the way of hope.