Reduce threat target to basics, possibly multiple tens of tonnes. Flash emotions to check mana usage, none of the known ones are reacting to said dragon. Eliminate fire, water, earth, metal and nature as possibilities. State of qi shield is solid, should be able to withstand multiple hundreds of kilotons of force, no problem.
Start active target negation. Structural integrity of threats’ body must be high to withstand forces observed so far. Blunt force can be applied in high amounts, fun! Link to circle formation, extend shield to cover self. Impact in 3 seconds. Anchor sphere to… where? Qi anchors embedded in Tower won’t work, lose any qi that contacts Tower. Grab volume of air? Calculate… Must grab volume bigger than current reach in order to negate momentum of threat. Alternate options?
Can grab air surrounding tower, leave single centimetre of untouched air as impact buffer. 2 seconds to impact now. Threat assessment suggests that body is now strong enough to withstand impact thanks to heartcore at first crunch. Ponder this important question. This is a very important question. One second till impact.
Can spare half a second to ponder the most important question: Do I want to punch a dragon?
⁂
A glorious white creature glides through the sky. Massive wings carry several tonnes of meat, bones, scales and fangs into a diving trajectory. It speeds up while falling towards the broken remnants of the white pillar sticking from a medium sized city. The dragon produces deep growls from its throat, but the wind scatters the sounds before it can reach any ears. Honestly, it kind of sounds like the petulant mutterings of an oversized baby. Not that the overgrown lizard in question will ever admit to something like that.
The swirling gas of doom surrounding the tower has retreated, giving the glistening beast the courage to employ its usual tactics, namely shock and awe. The dive down is all about the shock, many weeks and even months practising has led the dragon to its fool-proof strategy. That strategy could very well be described as “bombing the shit out of them.”
In a way, smashing at maximum speed into the designated intimidation target is something extremely dragon-like. If the target dies, it wasn’t worth intimidating in the first place. If it lives, at the very least it should be peeing its pants and negotiations can be started off on the right foot. Working with a target that’s scared shitless is much more relaxing.
These types of mind games are in large part why the Flight is so feared in the first place. “There is always a sky above the sky,” as the saying goes, but not a single creature dares to fly over a dragon.
The dragon squints its eyes as it sees the small insignificant figure moving around. The air seems to shimmer around it. Is it casting an air barrier? The dragon opens itself to the wind but feels no amazement or loathing radiating from the small figure. No air magic then. The dragon decides to speed up a little anyway.
The small figure gets bigger, faster and faster, the wind shrieking around every scale and ridge jutting out of the sleek body. The wide grin of the human man fills the dragon’s entire vision just before the massive beast loses sight of the figure.
A massive spray of stone shrapnel launches from the Tower, carried by the shockwave of a fleshy smacking sound. The rain of white shards dissolves the further it gets from the Tower, leaving sparkling trails. Looking back at the point of impact, a dragon is draped over the edge. White scales along with red-golden blood splatters now decorate the uneven break. A figure wearing drab clothes is seen walking over to the massive dangling beast. A single hand yanks it back from the edge, laying it beside the spinning formation.
Eyes bigger than basketballs flutter open. A fist shaped indent is seen on the dragon’s forehead, making it a very weird reversed unicorn. The human walks over with shaking shoulders and studies the laying form with interested eyes.
“Hello dragon, do you speak this language?”
The rough song without any rhythm wakes the dragon from its stupor. Its eyes open widely, and a flame ignites behind its dark pupils. A visible wave of white-purple mana starts flowing off its body in strands, like a slow-motion full body fire.
“I am Re-Haan Ra-Lush-Neer Hu…”
A stately voice made up of pride and gravel sounds from the beast’s throat. The slowly spoken name filled with audible capitalization gets rudely interrupted by a carefree voice.
“I am pretty bad at names already; I am not even going to try to remember such a long one. Can I call you Rhea?”
The dragon snaps its mouth shut. Never in all of its many hundreds of years has a mortal dared to interrupt it.
“I bet I’m the first human to ever punch you in the face.”
More stifled laughter follows this statement, much to the stricken dragon’s fury. It spends a moment thinking things through. Then it narrows its eyes and is enveloped by a white glow.
⁂
THAT WAS AWESOME! I have punched a dragon in the face. Just in case you didn’t follow me there, I PUNCHED A FUCKING DRAGON IN THE FUCKING FACE! I hold my bleeding right fist behind my back as I look at the changing figure with my spiritual sense. Hard-headed is an understatement, my right-hand bones have cracks all over them. Never punch with your fists, kids, they are way too fragile for that kind of stuff. Use your elbows or legs or something.
I flooded my skull, spine and pelvis bones with liquid qi while I was but a simple braincore user. My heartcore has been infusing the rest of my bones since its creation, but the rest of my skeletal structure is not fully reinforced yet. My fist would have been turned into tomato soup if the dragon had been ten percent bigger.
The dragon is changing forms now. I suspect that it thinks that if it can’t beat me physically, it will try doing so magically. Very little mana radiated from the lizard’s big form, I think it is changing to its caster form now. I am very curious about what types of magic it’ll throw at me. It is shrinking down rapidly. Questions like, where does all that mass go, don’t even cross my mind anymore. You just accept these things as magic and move on.
What the dimming light reveals is a pretty good sight. A tall female in her mid-twenties, with a lithe figure wearing white leather armour with violet and gold trimmings. Scaled leather armour actually, those seem to be her own dragon scales covering her important and vulnerable parts. Long white hair and eyebrows frame an angular face. C-cup, my breast measurement process chimes in. That’s pretty good info, this is why I love mental automation.
The flame inside her grey eyes starts burning brighter as her hair starts whipping around. I still feel no recognisable mana around her, she must be using something outside of my known mana types. Air is the most likely candidate.
Let’s fight air with air then. I stretch a hand towards the spinning formation and call a thin strand of qi my way. No need to use my own while my cores are growing nicely. I spread it out around me in a shell and imagine a sub-molecular grid holding every single molecule in place. The whipping wind stops a metre in front of me. Resisting an immense force is a lot easier if you divide the entire impact over billions of tiny connections.
I cough and expand the air lock over a bigger area, turning the flowing wind into a rigid shape with my thoughts. The dust caught inside the grid falls to the ground slowly, the sub-molecular bonds not strong enough to hold solid objects in place. The female looks at me with narrowed eyes.
She opens her mouth and I assume she is going to speak. Instead of audible words, her lips undulate as she screams at me. The concussive blast batters uselessly against my shield. I let my smirk grow a little, I want to know what she is capable of.
“Ru-aan nu kudnir…”
She starts chanting some language I don’t know. I don’t pay it any conscious attention; my language process will record it anyway. I focus on the area in front of her mouth. I feel the vibrations of her voice flowing through my qi, it is a simple application of will to stop the spread of these vibrations. The air just in front of her mouth starts to glow. Any air that her voice is traveling through is being affected by the spe
ll. She shouts the last phrase of the spell and the air shoots forward.
A rather disappointing ball of air makes a small dent in my qi shield. I can only imagine how embarrassing that must have been. I check my threat assessment for the numbers. My face pales a little when I realise that that little ball of air had the punching power of a full howitzer artillery barrage. If that ball had fallen onto any other target it would have hit like a few tonnes of TNT.
It seems like she is preparing an even longer spell. I didn’t fail to notice it because her intake of breath made her boobs jiggle under the armour, no, not at all.
“What does the Flight want with me?”
She stops her intake of air and speaks. “I have no business with you worm, my business is with the Root.”
I file away the bit of information for later. “Then do your business, no need to land so roughly, yeah?”
I need to handle this delicately. I keep looking her in the eyes the entire time, studying them. There is a certain quality about them, a certain disconnect from the real world. I recognise that look anywhere, those eyes have seen a lot, those eyes are pretty old.
If there is one true fetish I have, it is a female with an old soul. The body’s shape is largely irrelevant to me. Any person younger than two hundred years or so can be perfectly predicted when all the backstory is provided. After a few hundred years of life, though, people start to recognise life for what it truly is, a lot of stuff just happening, action and reaction on all scales. This allows them to take a step back and see things from a truly objective perspective. All the subjectivity scrubbed clean by life happening around them. And this sexy dragon lady has eyes old enough to see quite a lot.
I manually restrict blood flow to a certain part of my body. No need to show her what hold she has over me. I have found a new goal and I place it rather high up on my list, find out everything there is to be found out about this lovely being. And maybe fuck her.
Chapter twenty-nine
Slice
Multiple miniature suns cast their life-giving radiation upon a small clearing. In said clearing is a big Tree. This Tree is seriously big, towering over the surrounding plant life by multiple folds. A massive whirlwind of white qi is flowing from the branching crown into the sky. Smaller golden threads surround the Tree like a flowing web.
A pond is located beside this wooden behemoth, reeds and various aquatic plants forming a picturesque scene. Two small streams of water flow from the small body of water, creating two babbling brooks that run through the forest. Two clothed figures are sitting in the pond opposite each other, a black-haired boy and girl are half submerged. The boy has his eyes closed while the girl swirls her hands through the water surface. A black knife and a few metal balls are laying on the shoreline, seemingly forgotten.
“You are right, normally I’d have started shivering by now. I feel fine. How many hours has it been now?”
The boy just grunts in reply, apparently too occupied in his meditation to give a proper answer. If you listen closely enough, a muttering can be heard from the boy. The majority of it is an undecipherable mess, but occasionally numbers can be heard. His entire face is twitching like mad as if his mouth can’t move fast enough to keep up with his thoughts.
“So, I solved all those stupid sums we were given, but why are you so obsessed with that stuff?”
Standing up the girl wades through the pond until she stands right in front of him. She bends down a bit to look him in the eye but gets no reaction whatsoever.
“Okay then, I am going to figure out what the deal is with my knife.”
A dark sheen flashes over her body, leaving dry skin and cloth where it travels. She snickers a bit as she walks out of the pond and picks up the black knife.
“Angeta is kind of funny, and so frustrated. I got on top of that thing after a few seconds. Everything casts a shadow, after all.”
Twirling the knife through her fingers she saunters away. Behind her, steam starts coming from the boy’s head, almost as if the organ inside said head is starting to overheat through overuse.
In front of the pond is a clearing a few hundred metres wide. It is surrounded by a ring of trees and underbrush. It must be said that none of the current occupants suspect that this luscious environment is just a few days old. The aged appearance of the entire space can be explained by examining the floating seedlings carried by golden strands of qi. With budding leaves swaying in the breeze, the stream of little plants is carried further out. The ring of green in the middle of the large earthen disk growing with each newly planted sapling.
The microcosm hasn’t gotten any bigger in the past few days, but it has gotten a lot richer in terms of qi. Maybe the fact that Tree has been syphoning off any qi it can get its branches on has something to do with this. As a result, the previously barren soil has exploded with life. Various plant mutations have sprung up, attempts of the local plant life to adapt to qi usage. Samples are being kept in the growing garden behind the Tree, the previously planted herb seeds now bursting their first growths through the dark soil.
A girl with blue fuzz on top of her head is slowly walking through said garden, occasionally bending down and studying the growing plants. A fruit carried from afar speeds its way over to the Tree, only to be smashed into a gloopy paste as it is smashed into a wooden bowl. Golden energy pulls the solids from the pulp, leaving a small amount of clear juice. This bowl then floats over to the girl, who accepts it with a smile on her face. She sips some of its contents while the wooden rim bumps against her glasses and the girl smiles wider.
“Thanks, mister Tree, this is really good! Did you use pruk-ito fruit in this one? Those are the soft fuzzy fruits with blue pits. Ooh, this is a pretty flower. It smells wrong though, ouch, it bit me! No, no, mister plant, that is not nice.”
A frown wipes the girls smile from her face while she sucks on her finger. The plant she was stroking wilts in front of her, a clear water bubble rising from the dying flower.
“If you are going to be mean, your water will be used for nicer plants. Mister Tree! I think this flower got nasty from trying out the qi. Also, has the stem-fruit changed yet? No? That’s my favourite, so let me know when it starts to do qi stuff, please. Wow, these leaves are round! Where did these come…”
The girl keeps monologuing to herself while strands of golden qi float around her. A small sphere of golden energy is hovering a metre in front of the talkative girl, bobbing up and down with the flow of the one-sided conversation.
Besides the happy chattering sounds, another noise can be heard. Further into the forest, these noises become louder and clearer, the soft rumbling turning into smashing and splintering sounds. Shouts interweave with noises of violence, creating a cacophony of violence.
In the middle of this cacophony is a furry figure. Angeta is venting an entire life of frustrations on the tree in front of her. Big dents appear in the brown bark, showing lighter wood underneath. Falling leaves get caught in the woman’s slipstream as she rains down punch after punch on the hapless tree. She gives a bestial roar as she steps back to wind up a kick. The remnants of the tree splinter in an explosion of wood as the fur-covered leg passes through its trunk. Breathing heavily, she turns around and walks over to a tea set.
“I fucking hate tea, why was this stupid thing on top of my pillar? It took me hours to get a grip on that slippery fucking thing.”
She continues to mutter about qi control, having to spread it over her claws to get a grip and then followed by more cursing at her kidnapper. She clumsily pours steaming water into a small glass pot, black leaves unfurling and swirling through the yellowing liquid. Any person from Earth would recognise the scent wafting from the steaming pot as jasmine tea. She pours some into a small cup, sniffs it and drinks the entire thing in one gulp.
“What the fuck is so special about this stu… whoa…”
Stumbling a bit, she sits down. Eyes that normally shine with suppressed rage seem to calm down. Green fog se
eps from her body as she sinks into meditation. Meanwhile, a golden web of energy brings over a few seeds while pulling every scrap of wood underground. As the green glow around the beastwoman grows, the ground around her is cleaned with remarkable efficiency. Seeds glow golden for a second before they plunge into the grass-covered soil, small saplings sprouting up seconds later.
Back in the clearing, some man-made structures have appeared. In contrast with the perfect vibrancy of nature, these buildings ooze an amateurish air. Rough cut wooden logs make up six huts, with a much bigger stone castle towering over the lodgings. The castle is a mix of tower and castle in one; a square wall surrounds the building; a large tower sticking up from between them. The top of the tower is a glistening dome.
The relevant thing here are the soft sobs and sniffling coming from one of the huts. A redheaded man is walking in circles before the entrance. He sighs to himself, takes a moment to compose himself and enters the hut. He is greeted by a crying blob on a straw bed, curled into a ball. Vox stands there for half an hour, unsure of what actions to take.
“Go -hic-away.”
Soft words come out of the boy’s mouth. He tries to make himself smaller by curling up, with mixed results. Vox walks over to the pile of depression and lays his hand on Bord’s back.
“Fellis is the reason Selis and I were in jail. He has two well-known methods of entertainment. The major one is raising children under his protective care in an isolated part of his estate. There are still three boys in the other parts of the garden being raised by him. Were you ever allowed out of the compound? Didn’t think so.
“Alternatively, he puts some poor schmucks in jail on false charges while giving them the death sentence, that was Selis and me. After letting them rot in their cell for a few weeks, he shows up, all smiles. With a serious face, he will tell these poor guys that they are about to be publicly hanged. He will then extend an offer of slavery. Afterwards, those people are his to do with as he pleases, no matter their background.”
The DAO of Magic Page 23