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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Jcb112 on 2025-12-21 18:43:52+00:00.
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Dragon’s Lair. Foot of the Hill. Local Time: 2200 Hours.
Ignalius
“LOSANTIA!”
I bore no harsh feelings for the child playing mercenary.
Indeed, if he survived this, I’d have played the reticent deuteragonist in his story. A role — nay, a calling — that fate so often bestowed on its most deserving, to act as culler, separating the wheat from the chaff.
He’d grow stronger by my actions, become wiser to the world through my well-intentioned deceits, and perhaps even learn a valuable lesson — about things as they were outside of the colorful realm of delusions and flights of fantasy.
Today the boy playing Dreadwolf would die, and in his place would come forth a wiser man.
That was, of course, provided he did survive.
Which, in the flash that followed, didn’t seem likely.
I lowered my wand but only ever so slightly as I awaited the dust to settle amidst an otherwise unsettling sound that tickled my ears.
Dragon’s Lair. Cave Entrance. Local Time: 2200 Hours.
???
The air bristled with the wrath of a mother scorned.
Her features hidden, her presence muted, but her rage exposed through that sharp and steady droning — an elevating whiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrr that tickled my senses and nipped at my scales.
Energies swirled, manifested from nothing.
I opened my eyes — all of my eyes — watching through these pathetic restraints with a curled snarl.
Do it.
Dragon’s Lair. Foot of the Hill. Local Time: 2200 Hours.
Fisia the Swift
My job has always been simple.
Take care of the horses, stay behind with the mounts and wagons, be ready for any retreat no matter how sudden or swift… and of course, the dreaded cleanup duty. A job, which was clearly once again needed, because surprise surprise…
The boss had done it again, right in front of me this time, in fact.
Not that I minded.
In a repeat of the events at Rontalis, he’d disposed of another set of would-be travelers.
I could only hope that their deaths were of the corporeal variety, as I could already feel the tingly sensation of separating goop from armor when the call to loot eventually came.
Not that I cared much.
A ten, forty, fifty split was decent, and unlike some other travelers who I felt for, the uptight, self-assured aura this lupinor gave off simply made it impossible for me to sympathize with his demise.
So I waited, rubbing my eyes in an attempt to work out the ‘haze’ of that soul-splitting attac—
BANG!
The whole world shook, and my lungs gave in — air and wind forcibly squeezed out — as if some spiteful air elemental had claimed my breath as their own.
POP!
I heard… no… I felt something give, something inside my head, followed by a sharp piercing pain that sent me to my knees.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinngggggggggggg
I screamed out but heard nothing, only the ringing in one of my ears and my own cries echoing within my skull.
My hands reached out, grasping the sides of my head, deafened by the sound and blinded by the pain.
Only a few seconds later did I finally notice something else besides that infernal ringing.
It started as a thin mist of something warm and viscous, sticking and running down my exposed skin.
Then an unmistakable metallic tang forcibly entered my nostrils, filling my lungs with a faint rusty scent.
My whole body clenched, freezing in fear, before curiosity finally overtook uncertainty forcing me to open my eyes to assess what had—
…
No.
Nonononononononono…
I struggled to my feet only to find myself falling flat against my rump next to the pool of what had used to be the Alicorn.
My eyes quickly turned to the boss, who stood where his prized mount had just stood, that fancy armor actually doing what it was supposed to… or at least, I think it did.
Because despite the sacrificial swap, the boss should’ve still been wearing it.
It couldn’t have just disappeared.
It couldn’t have just vanished.
The only reason why it could’ve been lost in the swap was if it had been irreparably damaged in the attack.
…
…
Crap.
Dragon’s Lair. Cave Entrance. Local Time: 2200 Hours.
Emma
“What the hell?”
[RAILGUN DISCHARGE COMPLETE. AMMUNITION CYCLE… COMPLETE. CHARGE CYCLING IN PROGRESS...]
My eyes widened as, in what seemed like an instantaneous moment in time, I found that my target had quite literally just… swapped places.
The Alicorn… was gone; no sign of its existence remained save for the mist of red that caked the entire area.
And in the space that it had once occupied was now an armorless Ignalius, his pure-white gambeson and pants stained, as was much of the left side of his face.
Indeed, quite a few personal effects had scattered from his person following the swap and apparent disappearance of his armor. From sacks of gold to belts of potions to even daggers and…
…
No…
I motioned silently for the EVI to hone in on a particular bloodied artifact caked in dried blood at Ignalius’ feet.
A brief zoom and a cursory glance, even without the EVI’s forensics suite, was enough for me to tell what it was.
Its suede brown cover, the built-in bookmark resembling a forked tongue, and that handwriting complete with a signature that looped around resembling the four ‘horns’ of a kobold… it beckoned a master that was no longer with us.
If there was any lingering doubt as to Ignalius’ involvement with Togor’s murder, then all of it, every last shred of it, died the moment my eyes landed on that book.
The whole world went silent.
But while all were shocked by the power of the railgun — raw, unmitigated, and loud — I remained silent because of something else entirely.
I fell silent… for silence. Or more accurately, the loss of a voice.
My breath escaped in a seething huff, my piercing eyes watching, staring, and glaring through tinted lenses at the sadist playing adventurer who’d just narrowly escaped that very thing he so wantonly loved committing.
Then I unholstered my pistol, glancing momentarily towards Thalmin who seemed fixated not on the book but on some coins that had similarly scattered — each minted with a different face, symbol, and heraldry — no two alike.
Dragon’s Lair. Foot of the Hill. Local Time: 2200 Hours.
Katiya
I couldn’t see.
I couldn’t hear.
My whole body trembled as the golem sent the skies cracking with the sounds of terrible thunder.
Then and only when the world had calmed did I see the beast of beasts, the Master of the Skies second only to the dragonkin… disappear.
I… couldn’t describe it as anything else.
There was, without a shadow of a doubt, nothing else with which to describe what had happened.
A creature that should have been a nightmare for a fully outfitted adventuring party to dispatch, synonymous with an adventuring rank just beneath that of the draconics, had just vanished to an invisible thunder.
I felt my knees wobble as the golem’s master moved forward to match its posture.
Then and only then did the world go mad.
Dragon’s Lair. Cave Entrance. Local Time: 2201 Hours.
Thalmin
Shock and awe.
That was what Ignalius had attempted with his first strike, an attack whose shock served pure theatrics and whose awe was to be inflicted on allies, all to serve the vapidness of ego, not the utility of battle.
Then came Emma’s rebuttal.
A single strike that brought the army of cartmen and riders at the foot of the hill to their knees. Their blood-curdling screams now filled the air as all clutched desperately to their bleeding ears.
The footmen fared no better, leaving only the patrolling mercenaries relatively unaffected by what was an air elemental’s attack in all but name.
The latter even managed to regroup despite the veritable stampede of mounts and beasts having fallen to panic and instinct in the wake of Emma’s attack.
I kept my silencing spells active, Emma’s clever battle cry serving not as a mechanism of ego but as a tactical warning as to the horrors she was to unleash.
Indeed, we’d drilled for this very occasion — for a time in which our communication would be done solely through that manaless conch, as the world around me would be deafened for my own safety.
Suffice it to say, that drilling was now being tested in a trial by fire. One that I couldn’t help but excitedly partake in. That familiar surge of hot blood pumped through my veins, my senses sharpening, and the world becoming ever clearer in what all Havenbrockians understood to be the thrill of the hunt.
The likes of which… felt even more pronounced than it ever did in Havenbrock, let alone in the field of battle.
My ears perked as my fur bristled with the richness of mana unheard of back home. I focused leftwards towards a shatorealmer who’d surprisingly survived this sonic attack by virtue of distance, luck, and perhaps sheer tenacity.
And in a testament to Ignalius’ competence as commander, his left-attending swooped in, flying in sp...
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