Rows of soldiers and cavalry stood south of the capital, with adventurers spotted amongst them. Mages and ranged specialists stood on top of the wall. Behind the wall, priests and priestesses were ready to provide healing and get bodies back in the fight. In the city, the citizens were hunkered down, hoping to stay safe in case the city was overrun. My party and I were staged near the wall, a last line of defense if things went bad, though we would move up to engage if the army managed to hold down the threat before it reached us, in order to help finish it off.
A murmur rose through the defensive lines as a small, shining object grew on the horizon.
“Here it comes,” I muttered. My party—my friends and family—shifted beside and behind me.
Commanders began to bark out orders, and I saw polearms come forward, arrows being nocked, and tarands shifting as the soldiers prepared for the beast to arrive.
It was growing quickly in the distance, closing the gap with a shocking speed. It’s more fighter jet than beast, I thought in awe.
Shaking off the astonishment, I focused my magic on a 3-point magic circle in order to appraise the oncoming threat. If I could see it, I should be able to appraise it, even at that distance.
I froze solid at the information that filled my mind.
“Pilus?” Sera asked quietly when I stilled. “Are you all right?”
My mouth flapped uselessly as I processed, but time was against us. The dragon was rapidly nearing the army.
“It’s… not a beast,” I managed to say.
“What?!” Rena said, snapping her head towards me.
I had no idea how to explain it in so little time. I had been appraising beasts for decades at this point, and they followed a pattern. Beasts had a maximum potential strength which capped at Level 10. Beyond that, the only way to grow stronger was evolution. That was the whole premise behind the rank system, even if there was variability within ranks. My appraisal also told me the name of the species, as well as some minimal information about the beast’s state.
When I appraised the golden dragon, I did not gain the name of the species. Instead, it had an actual name, like a human: Raevynui Igvysdaes. It’s not a beast, it’s a… sapient being.
And it also had a level. One that was, definitively, not a beast’s level.
Level 131.
“Oh no,” I managed to say, just before the dragon reached the army.
It let out a bellowing roar, the sound of a jet engine chewing glass washing over us. Soldiers winced and hands slapped over exposed ears, but the sound paled in comparison to what came next.
The dragon opened its mouth, and a whole section of the army disappeared in flames.
White gouts of dragon breath poured onto the field, immolating those it came into contact with like they had been flung into the center of a sun.
“Oh my goodness,” Sera muttered, as dozens of lives were immediately snuffed out.
“If that reaches the city…” Nodel trailed off.
I looked back at my friends, my father, and my wife. She looked at me with tears in her eyes, an unspoken conversation passing between us, before she nodded. “Go.”
Leaping onto Pegamus’s back, we flew forward to meet it.
* * *
The dragon’s eyes met us as we approached, but I was already pulling prepared metal spikes out of my inventory and firing them at the dragon. The tips were sharpened diamond, and I poured magic into them so that they fired like missiles into the golden scales.
Unlike Estorra’s ice and Rashir’s arrows against the wyvern, my projectiles largely struck true. The dragon hollered as my diamond-tipped javelins pierced into it, and I pushed Pegamus forward faster still.
The dragon’s neck snaked around, trying to track me, but the soldiers below were peppering it with a fog of arrows and javelins, and small birds were swarming and slamming into it—kamikaze attacks from their tamers—attempting to distract or down the monster which had just killed so many of their friends. I set off a magical flashbang in front of the creature’s face, and while it reeled, got in close to the dragon’s back.
Unlike the wyvern, which had wings acting as the beast’s forelimbs, the dragon had two wings which sprouted out of its back. I dropped from Pegamus’s saddle down onto the dragon’s back, and pulled my greatsword from my inventory as I dropped, slamming it down onto the point where the wing connected to its body.
The dragon’s scales protected it from that kind of slashing damage, but all I needed to do was break something and prevent it from staying airborne. Without knowing if I had succeeded, I pulled the dozens of smaller diamond darts I had prepared from my inventory and used my magic to shotgun blast them at the thin part of the dragon’s wings.
It flipped in the air as I tore into it, sending me falling to the ground. Pegamus swooped past me, and I grabbed ahold of the saddle horn as it did, pulling myself into the seat as he corrected for my fall and lifted me back into the air. Glad we practiced that so much above the farm.
The dragon was teetering, so I went with something basic to try and finish the job. Pegamus climbed back above the dragon, and after flashbanging the dragon again, I pulled a massive ball of iron from my inventory. I fired the cannonball down at the dragon’s back while it was distracted, and it let out a cry of pain as it fell out of the sky and collided into the ground.
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“Now!” I shouted, my voice amplified with 5-point magic.
The cavalry was already charging, polearms pointed forward to spear the beast, and foot soldiers swarmed behind. The tarands did a pass, and while most of the spears bounced off the surface of the scales, a few found purchase in the wounds I had already made. The dragon cried and thrashed, and it lashed out with its tail, sending a unit of soldiers and their tarands flying. I winced as they landed, knowing most had likely broken bones, and hoped the priests and priestesses could get them healed and back in the fight.
As the tarand cavalry circled back to re-arm themselves and do another charge, the soldiers swarmed the downed dragon, hacking and slashing. Tamed beasts also attacked, and I saw some of Rena’s clawing and biting at the dragon.
It was far from enough. The dragon lifted its head a certain way, a motion that I was familiar with from my battle with the wyvern.
“Retreat!” I shouted, but it was too late. A second blast of white fire washed over the soldiers and tamed beasts, immolating more of those who had offered their lives to protect the capital. I cursed and dove, chugging an MP potion and drawing more projectiles to fire at the dragon.
We were doing damage, and it was adding up. We were also losing people by the dozen, but if we could keep this up, we could defend the city. We would defend the city.
You’re not so tough, I thought, glaring at the Level 131 dragon.
The dragon thrashed again, knocking away the soldiers around it, and it looked up at me. In that mere moment of being unmolested, I could almost swear I saw it smirk.
“Take it down!” I shouted, firing another barrage at the beast.
The battle dragged out, and men and women died in the defense of the city, but the dragon was not going unscathed. Mages hammered it with a shower of stone and burned at it with flaming coal, but the dragon inched forward, closer and closer to the city.
Something about its behavior seemed wrong to me. In a battle of attrition, we seemed to be winning. If this really was an intelligent creature, it should understand that, and should be retreating, or at least fighting more defensively to protect its health.
It kind of reminded me of some of my own past battles, where I allowed myself to take damage because…
My eyes widened, and I pushed Pegamus to fly back to my party. I mentally glanced at the dragon’s health again, and saw it was about to cross the halfway mark, but this time I also paid attention to its magic. All it had done was fire its breath a few times, which had not used much of its magic considering how powerful of an attack it was, but at Level 131 it would no doubt be a master of its dragon breath skill, or however that worked for this species.
There was only one reason it would be preserving its magic while fighting a battle where it seemed unconcerned about taking damage.
When my party was within range, I called out. “We have to take it out now! Before it…”
My words died in my mouth as I saw the dragon’s MP quickly nosedive, and the wounds started to close up as javelins squeezed back out of its body. Within mere moments, it was recovered back to full health, as if the battle had not even happened.
It beat its wings, now intact once again, and lifted off the ground, already dangerously close to the city.
“What the fuck?!” Rena shouted.
“It can heal?” Nodel asked, incredulous.
I shook my head. Somehow, I felt like I should have seen this coming. Was a dragon like this how to Horuthian people had learned how to heal? If humans could heal, of course an intelligent dragon could. It would be even more critical for them to have healing magic, since they probably lived much longer lives than humans, hibernating away in the desert for all these years.
“What are we going to do?” Atlessoa asked.
“So many have already fallen,” Horg said, his voice thick.
I could probably ground it again, but judging by its MP, it could heal again, too. Assuming it did not have a way to rapidly recover MP—and that was no longer a totally safe assumption, given how rapidly things had been changing in this battle—I was not sure who would outlast who. In the meanwhile, how many more would die? Would it make it to the city, and kill everyone within, before I could stop it?
What does it want?
I no longer thought this had anything to do with me. The dragon was trying to get into the capital, and aside from when we were actively fighting, it was ignoring me just like it had ignored everything on its way north. It had no hesitation when it came to killing people, but that also did not seem to be its actual goal. I racked my brain trying to come up with an answer. What changed? Ringfall, which elevated the world’s level of magic, and also caused a bunch of new dungeons to form.
“Oh, fuck. The dungeons.”
My party looked at me in confusion, but I ignored them for a moment. Was there time enough before the dragon broke through the wall?
If fighting won’t work… perhaps a parley.
Pegamus spun, and I ignored the cries of the people I loved behind me as I flew back to the dragon. Its gaze lifted, and met mine, but this time I opened my empty hands out to the sides and tried something different.
The dragon paused, lowering its head slightly as it kept its gaze on me. We floated in the air in front of each other, tense, but unmoving.
I was sending the words, because I was used to communicating with words, but I was also trying to send the meaning across as well, even pictures. Anything to bridge the communication gap.
The dragon snorted. Is that an affirmation?
I turned my attention to Sera.
The Adventurer Guild had been collecting dungeon core for almost a year now, and we had a never-before-seen hoard of the stuff locked away in the capital. The idea had been to convert it into fertilizer and healing potions, but we had dallied.
Dungeons had not been managed by humans before, as far as I was aware, and in fact seemed to keep humanity away. Yes, even before ringfall, red crystal had landed on this world, and over potentially millions of years it could have been quite a lot. Why were there not dozens of dungeons, hundreds, littering the wilds? Something else must have preyed on them, at some point. Perhaps a species which had since gone into hibernation, only awakening after the recent events.
The dragon growled, and I begged it again to wait. I was scrying Sera, who was organizing the priests to bring the crystal out. It was not coming as fast as I, and probably the dragon, would have liked, but it was coming.
Our tentative truce stretched, but soon the people of the Church had deposited the red crystal below us. The dragon looked down at it, then met my eyes again, and snorted. I guided Pegamus back, away from the dragon and its hoard, and it flew down towards the pile of red crystal.
Its throat bulged, and it let out another gout of dragon breath, but it was not an attack this time. The white flames engulfed the red crystal, and I recognized it for what it was: purification.
Perhaps 6-point magic had been derived from dragon magic, then.
The crystal gleamed gold when it was done, and the dragon landed next to the pile and lowered its head, scooping up crystals in its mouth and swallowing them whole. I winced at the lost value, but it was not worth the cost of more lives trying to kill the creature. Soon, the pile was depleted, and the dragon lifted its head, scenting the air.
Satisfied, its eyes found me again, and it snorted once before lifting off the ground and turning to fly away.
We watched the dragon fly south in silence until it was out of sight.