V2Ch58-Draconic Heights
The wind whipped through Chad’s hair as he grabbed another fistful of rock and pulled himself up with the strength of his arms.
Yes, perhaps he should have bought some of that climbing gear the so-called experts at the base of the mountain had offered to sell him. But he had been offended by the dwarves’ exorbitant equipment prices - frankly, slightly offended that they even wanted to sell him something. Shouldn’t these people know that the Hero was here to slay a wicked dragon?
No, the dragon wasn’t directly threatening the Dwarven Lands just yet, only trying to bring one village under her control, but this was a dragon. There was no way she would be content with just a tiny slice of territory.
The locals should be offering him every bit of support they could.
He gritted his teeth and shook his head.
I’ll bring back the beast’s head, impress Chimeg and Sayana, and maybe get the dwarves to make me a nice suit of armor from the scales. That, I’d be willing to pay for. Not that it was his gold, anyway. The Great Temple of Astara and the Great Temple of Vika had both been very generous with their gods’ champion.
It was the principle of the thing.
He allowed himself to forget the fact that he had mostly pursued the dragon, rather than waiting for her to try and attack the village again, because the aforementioned girls, who had been sharing his bed, had hinted how impressed they would be if he defeated the creature sooner rather than later.
He pulled himself up another few feet and arrived at another level on the steep mountainside. This space was immediately different from the grim, gray expanse of the frigid mountain that he had scaled thus far. First was the existence of a large opening in the mountainside ahead of him - a span large enough for a dozen horses to walk through it side by side, except that it was closed off by a massive iron gate. Through the gate, Chad thought he saw an improbably verdant space full of flowering and fruiting plants. The odor of citrus hung faintly in the air.
Second was the fact that his tracking skill indicated that the dragon was here - at roughly this elevation, at least.
As he stared at the gate, he saw what appeared to be a horse and rider approaching through the gaps in the iron.
Then the gate opened, and as his eyes trailed up, Chad saw that it wasn’t horse and rider at all. Rather, the lower half of the figure was a horse, and as his eyes trailed up from the hooves and up the horse’s side, the animal fur abruptly shifted to a bare, flat stomach, small, perky breasts, and small nibbles, that quickly grew hard as pebbles as the mountain breeze struck the woman. Only after he had observed her bare chest did the Hero notice that she carried a bow and a quiver of arrows on one shoulder. Lastly, he saw her face, cherubic, gentle, and cute, with soft-looking skin and rosy cheeks, her dark hair trimmed to a pixie cut.
So, this is a centaur, he thought. He hadn’t encountered a lot of demihumans before, and although he would have preferred to run into a hot elf, he couldn’t deny she was fascinating to look at.
As he stared for longer than he meant to without saying anything, the centaur flushed and then covered her chest with one arm, looking away as if embarrassed.
“Forgive me, kind stranger, we don’t often receive… guests who wear clothing. And I must ask you to leave.”
There was something slightly odd about her speech. Was it that slight, lilting accent?
“Um, my apologies for my wandering eye, fair maiden,” Chad said. “I’ve never encountered such a beautiful demihuman before.”
There, that’ll solve it, women love compliments. It was even true. In the Discontented Lands, he’d mainly seen ogres, and dwarven women weren’t to his taste either.
“A centaur, am I right?” he continued.
She simply nodded.
“Well, you see, I think there’s a monster in this place- ”
“I am afraid that I know what you seek. Please leave this place, or climb on, to the peak. I don’t want to stop anyone from mountaineering. My only concern is poor creatures disappearing.”
Oh, is she… speaking in rhymes? Uh, all right. A bit odd, but I guess you get a little eccentric living without any human - er, intelligent? - company in an isolated place like this.
“I hate to think I’ve offended you, dear centaur,” he said. “I think perhaps there’s some misunderstanding. Maybe we can start over. Hi, my name is Chad. I’m the Hero. And you are?”
She paused and looked at him for a long, searching moment before she answered, and he thought it might be because of the word “Hero,” which he knew made a lot of humans give him a second look.
“Hello, I am called Sara, I speak for the trees. I fight for things great and small, from dragons to bees.”
She gave him a piercing look at the word “dragon,” so Chad was forced to conclude that she truly did know why he was there. And that spoiled the mood.
Here I was, hoping to play Hero to her too, he thought. Rid her of a scary monster. But somehow the centaur has convinced herself that it’s no threat. Perhaps she feels a sense of kinship to it, as a nonhuman herself.
He barely noticed it, but as he looked at her after this introduction, Chad’s eyes perceived her as a little less human than how he had seen her a minute before. His fingers strayed to his belt, where his sword was sheathed, but they did not touch the hilt of the holy sword. He was not yet ready to escalate this situation to violence.
“Why would you protect something as horrible as a dragon?” he asked bluntly.
“I am sworn to the service of Goddess Nastair, who protects all of nature, the foul and the fair.”
It wasn’t a deity Chad was familiar with, but there was a month of Nastarius, so it made sense she was some sort of minor goddess.
“Are you a priestess, then?”
The centaur wrinkled her nose.
Not a fan of organized religion, huh?
As she opened her mouth to speak, he ventured another guess. If he got it right, it would hopefully let her see that he understood her position a little.
“A druid?” he asked.
This time, she gave him a small smile and a nod.
“So, you’re sworn to protect monsters?”
“Well, this humble garden is a sanctuary for beasts, many exiled from their homes with the blessings of your priests.”
“Would you really want something as violent and dangerous as a dragon in a garden like this?”
“In this place, by commandment of Nastair, no blood is shed. Before her rule could be broken, I would see myself dead.”
“And you trust… a dragon, a savage, predatory creature, to keep to that command?”
Her voice softened, as she answered, “It is a sacred trust no guest would willingly break. If something died here, it could only be by mistake.”
I guess if it’s a sanctuary for monsters, you at least have to worry about a bigger, stronger monster fucking with you if you disturb the peace. Would a dragon really worry about that, though?
“Aoife has stayed with us for over a moon’s span,” Sara added. “And no manner of beast is more deadly than man.”
“Oh, so the fucking lizard has a name?” Chad asked, beginning to lose patience. “Forgive me, Miss Sara, but there are some villagers back at ground level who are living in terror of the beast you’re harboring. Either I am going in to get Aoife, or she is coming out to me.” He put his hand on the hilt of his sword with a stern look into the centaur’s eyes.
“Chad, please understand, no one trespasses here. I know what brought you, so you will not come near.”
In an instant, she had drawn her bow and nocked an arrow to the string, looking at him with what she clearly meant to signal was firm resolve.
But Chad saw how her hand shook slightly on the bowstring.
“Have you ever killed someone before, Sara?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “It’s not easy. It will eat at you. Assuming you succeed and don’t die instead.”
“I have never- ” the centaur began. Then she was interrupted.
“Sara, step away from the gate.” The voice was low and rumbling with an undercurrent of menace. It sounded younger than the Hero would have expected.
Chad had failed to notice the dragon approaching the gate.
“Good to see you, Aoife,” the Hero said, raising his voice so it would be certain to reach her over the mountain wind. “I believe we have some unfinished business.”
“I will come out to fight you, human,” the dragon said. “I am nothing if not honorable, and I always finish what I start. I am not sure when I granted you the privilege of using my name, however.” She turned to face the centaur and, in what seemed to Chad a genuinely apologetic tone, added, “My apologies for the trouble, Sara.”
“Aoife, you cannot- ”
“No need to worry on my account, dear one,” the dragon replied. “You have already done… too much for one such as me.”
“This is a sanctuary, Aoife, and your home as long as you desire- ”
The dragon leaped over the iron gates in a single motion and landed beside Sara, cutting off whatever the centaur had been about to say with the noise of her claws striking the stone.
“Don’t worry, dear Sara, I’ll drown this human in fire,” Aoife said, her voice cocky and amused.
But Chad couldn’t help noticing, now that she was on the other side of the gate, that the dragon was already injured. One of her wings looked badly torn, hanging in tatters on her left side. She had claw marks on her chest that had pierced her tough scales and looked fresh.
“At least let me heal you, gentle friend,” Sara said, her brow furrowing with concern.
“You already tried, my wounds to tend,” the dragon replied, then quietly snorted. “Goodness, I’m starting to pick up your habits.”
The centaur tilted her head in a confused motion, apparently not realizing that Aoife had just replied to her sentence so it rhymed - or perhaps not even realizing that she herself always spoke in rhyme.
Chad felt a half-smile creep over his lips despite himself at the apparently sweet relationship between the dragon and the centaur. He had to shake his head, force a frown, and remind himself that the dragon was the enemy. To be destroyed… or forced to submit, at least.
“So, let’s do this,” Aoife said, approaching him. “Ready?”
“I would rather start our confrontation on the ground, if you’re willing,” Chad said.
“If this takes too long, I will miss the evening meal,” Aoife said.
“Oh, yes, you have to make sure you eat, or you won’t recover properly from whatever injured you,” the Hero said, prodding at the dragon’s pride. “What hurt you, anyway?”
“A fellow dragon. What else? He was looking to mate. I determined I was… not ready for such activity. And among our race, the female often tests the male’s strength prior to consenting. You should see the marks on him.”
He frowned. He’d been hoping there would be some tidbit of a clue there, if she answered the question. But it wasn’t anything he could use.
“All right.” He drew his sword and stepped backward onto the narrow mountainside path, guard up. The dragon moved out of the shadow of the gate to face him.
“Why are you so determined to fight me, anyway?” she asked, cracking her neck and rolling her front shoulders.
“You demanded that village’s submission to you. You stole their livestock.”
“I offered them my protection, and I took what they could not protect,” the dragon retorted. “These lands are cruel. I could have as easily carried off their children to eat, but I took livestock. And I offered to lend them what strength I have in exchange. A people with no protectors here is merely counting down the days until they are slaughtered.”
“Their village has its own warriors- ”
“Yet they called upon you. To face a juvenile dragon. How strong are these so-called warriors? And if these villagers could not defend themselves from me, how can they defend themselves from others after you have moved on?” Aoife asked, her voice full of genuine curiosity.
“Those are… not bad questions, honestly. But they didn’t want your protection. Temporary though it might be, they wanted mine. So I chased you up here to either force you to back off, or bring back your head.”
The dragon gave him a toothy grin.
“Very well, human. If you can make me submit, I will leave the villagers alone.”
Chad resisted the impulse to ask for some reassurance that she would keep her word. Dragons were magical creatures, the most profoundly magical of all monsters. He had read up on them over the last week before he ascended the mountain. Everything he had ever seen suggested that dragons never lied - might even be incapable of lying by their nature.
Then Aoife lunged, forcing Chad’s mind to focus entirely on the present moment. He deflected the swipe of one mighty claw with his holy sword, then darted in quickly and slashed, not aiming for the hard scale of the dragon’s shoulders or neck, but focusing on the places where she was already injured. The blade cut into the space where the other dragon had left its mark on her, and Aoife recoiled, pulling back at a speed no normal human could possibly match.
Yet she had gotten slower since her last fight with Chad, hadn’t she?
Those wounds…
They were the reason he might have a chance to defeat or even kill her. With her wing torn up, she was sticking to fighting him on the mountainside rather than using the obvious advantage of flight. With the claw marks to her chest, he didn’t have to get through her scales. And the terrain actually worked to his advantage, it turned out, with her size, because the ground they fought on was barely narrow enough for her to move back and forth, limiting her range of motion.
Then the dragon’s body glowed and shrank. Chad kept his gaze on her even as she shone brightly, and his eyes widened as she saw what she had become.
The wings, horns, and tail remained, but the dragon had shifted into a humanoid form. She wore a brown leather corset style top and a matching skirt with slits up both sides, and in place of her claws, she carried a sword in each hand.
Oh, she’s kind of… um… sexy.
It was a little strange to think that about a dragon, much less a dragon who still had visible wounds to her chest and wing… and who he had heard was technically considered a juvenile.
“This form should better suit the terrain!” the dragon declared, grinning, apparently oblivious to Chad’s thoughts.
She lunged at him and swung both swords from either side.
The Hero dodged one and took the other on his own sword. The ring of the blades as they collided was almost deafening. Chad winced, his mind instantly back on task. The dragon had apparently lost none of her strength by changing shape.
He stepped back to escape the blade lock, then lunged in, stabbing at the chest wounds again with his sword fully extended.
Aoife stepped back, tried to bat the attack away with one of her swords, but only succeeded in redirecting it into her own shoulder. The holy sword drew blood in a place that would have been impossible if she still had her scale armor.
The dragon didn’t retreat. Instead, she dropped one of her swords to grab a firm hold of the Hero’s blade with her bare hand, and she simultaneously slashed at his neck with the sword she still held.
Chad ducked underneath it but recognized from the change in her posture as she swung the blade that it was just a distraction. She was gathering mana for something, and considering the previous bout, he knew exactly what it would be.
He hacked downward with the holy sword, and despite Aoife’s hand grasping it by the blade - the edge somehow not cutting her skin - it made slow downward progress along her shoulder and into her arm, gouging a long cut that made her grit her teeth.
Then she opened wide, her jaws spreading impossible far apart for a human, a smouldering vortex visible in the back of her mouth. Chad struck her hard, letting go of his sword in favor of a full force punch to her cheek. Her head whipped sideways, he felt her cheekbone shatter under his knuckles, and she staggered backward. Her tailed shot forward, trying to trip him up as he followed after her, but he jumped over it and then caught it between his ankles.
The two of them tumbled to the ground together, Chad on top of her, the dragon trying to unleash her fire breath again.
The Hero threw punch after punch directly at her head.
She might be a dragon, but she had taken on a human form, with all the weaknesses that implied.
She reached up, clawed at him with nails impossibly longer than a human’s. She smashed heavy rocks against his head.
Chad ignored it all and just kept punching, hitting as hard as he could every time. At some point, it transitioned from simply keeping her from using her dragon’s breath to letting out all the hatred and anger he felt. Not rage at Aoife specifically, but at everyone who he had ever looked down on him. The faces of his companions passed through his mind as he swung at her.
Samara’s gorgeous looks hovered over the dragon’s as Chad smashed her nose. Hailgrim’s know-it-all mysterious smile appeared when Chad smashed the other cheekbone. Mischa’s gentle eyes hovered over Aoife’s as a tooth flew from the dragon’s mouth.
Even Cecilia’s, Astrid’s, Chimeg’s, and Sayana’s faces joined the parade as Chad did what he wanted with the dragon.
“You- ” The dragon tried to speak, but he didn’t take much notice. She was a beast. Her words would be treacherous anyway.
“I- ”
“I surr- ”
“Stop it!” The harsh yell that echoed up and down the mountainside finally brought Chad out of his violent rage.
He let out a long, slow exhale and turned to look to the side, where the interloper stood. As he did so, he smoothed out his expression. For some reason, his lips had curled into a grin. To his right, he saw Sara the centaur holding her bow, fingers firm on her weapon now, tears in her eyes.
Not rhyming anymore? “Stop it” would be so easy to rhyme with.
“G-Get off of her, you brute!” Sara said, sniffling. “You… You won! She was tr-trying to surrender. For the last few minutes!”
“F-Fought well,” said a voice beneath him that was more like a gurgle, spoken around lost teeth and bubbles of mingled blood and saliva. “Y-You fought well, human.” He looked down and saw what was left of the dragon’s human face. It was a gory mess, but even as he watched, the flesh began knitting itself back together at a speed that would have been impossible for any human but a powerful healer. “I would not have lost if I had been able to fight you properly in my true form… but that is merely an excuse I’ll tell myself to preserve my pride. A loss is a loss. I… I will leave the village alone, unless they come and ask me for my assistance.”
Chad sat up, then stood, his eyes fixed on the notifications that began to stream in, the two women beside him forgotten. He didn’t even notice the injuries all over his own body - how his cheeks were clawed apart, his arms torn to ribbons and gushing blood, bone exposed in a few places. None of that mattered.
That’s right. I just… defeated a dragon.