Dragonslayer, Inc.

It was wild.

I had never seen a more energetic crowd. I had never seen a more hostile crowd.

It was Inauguration Day. This used to be a day of quiet respect and contemplation. Arge turned it into a spectacle.

Sitting in the back of the crowd with Steph and Machen, underneath a cloth veranda, I felt sorry for the old President. Alone and frail, he was paraded in front of a crowd that hated his guts. The least they could have done is shown him some human decency. Instead, they took his cane and beat him with it.

After the torture show was done, Arge gave a speech. These speeches used to be short affairs where the new leader congratulated the old and announced a vague agenda to lead the country into prosperity. Arge gave a three-hour-long rambling harangue in which he provided details by the bucketload while slandering the Dragonslayers and the old order in any way he knew how.

It was terrifying, not least because it worked. I hated Arge with every fiber of his body, but even so, I couldn’t help getting into some of his rhetoric. Steph told me, “This ceremony is wrecked forever. Even when we depose this psychopath from power, people are gonna be copying his rhetoric.” The years have proven her right, for better or worse.

When Arge gave the indication that he was heading into the tail end of his speech, his most ardent supporters ran on stage and bowed down to him. They were more than putty in his hands; they were his own personal human machines. They would have done whatever he told them to do.

If he had told them to run off a cliff, they would have done it. If he had told them to act like bears, they would have done it. More frightening, if he had told them to kill every man, woman, and child who didn’t support him, they would have done it.

The end of his speech rings through my mind to this day: And so, my compatriots, let us storm the battlements of the establishment and usher in a revolutionary new age. The streets will run red. The gilded terraces will be torn down. The elites will be burned at the stake. In a single year’s time, this city will be completely unrecognizable. It will no longer be the demented plaything of the rich and famous. It will belong to you, my brothers and sisters.

The Dragonslayers will try to run and hide. They are cowards. They would rather have it not be known, but it is the truth. Once we make it clear- painfully clear- that there is nowhere for them to run, they will beg for mercy. They will grovel at our feet. But will we give it to them? No. We will cut them to pieces.

They and their sycophantic allies want you to believe that dragons are this huge threat that only they can deal with, but that is not the case. Anyone can slay a dragon. I’ve slain five myself. Dragons are not the real threat. Terrible leadership that holds up the elites while condemning us real citizens to a life of servitude; that’s the real threat, and it will be eliminated with haste under my rule.

I believe in this glorious country of Mayorna.

I believe in the destruction of our oppressors.

I believe in the restoration of this country to the principles on which it was founded.

I believe…

He didn’t get to finish that statement. A dragon came barreling in from the south. Its wings blotted out the sun.

“This is great,” I said. “If we save the day, his statements are gonna be discredited, and he’s gonna lose his power. He’ll have to abandon his crusade against the Slayers.” I don’t know if I believed that, but I certainly wanted it to be true.

“Hold up,” said Machen.

“What?”

“Maybe we should… leave the dragon alone for a couple hours.”

“How could you say something like that?” asked Steph.

“Do you want him to destroy the Slayers, love?”

“Of course not,” said Steph. “But what does that have to do with anything? And I’m not your lover, Machen. Try to remember that.”

“All right, love.”

“I’m gonna kill you.”

“I have a point though.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I think he does, actually,” I said, scratching my chin. “Hear me out: if we kill the dragon before it can cause destruction, the status quo will eventually come back, and when it does, Arge will enforce his agenda and get rid of us. However, if we kill it after it goes on a rampage, the status quo will not come back. This country will be forced to remember why it needs the Slayers. We’d be safe. He couldn’t go after us. If he did, he might be forced out of office by angry mobs.”

“Don’t even think about it,” said Steph. “It’s our responsibility to kill harmful dragons as soon as they appear. You can’t compromise people’s lives for your schemes. What’s wrong with you?”

“But don’t you…” I trailed off. The dragon was getting close. My eyes bugged out. I started spluttering.

It was more than huge. It was gargantuan: four hundred feet from head to tail. It was not only the largest dragon I had ever seen. It was arguably the largest dragon that has ever existed. It was bigger than the two-hundred-sixty-five-footer that the early Dragonslayers famously slayed one hundred and ninety years ago. It was far bigger than the one-hundred-and-fifty-four-foot-long behemoth that Ironwall killed during the greatest dragon battle of the modern era.

Ancient and fearless, this impossible beast landed on Arge’s stage and roared. Arge tried to fight it. I cheered for the dragon, which won easily. Even with all his hardcore supporters helping him, he never stood a chance. It was clear that he had never slain a dragon. It was clear he had never faced a dragon.

Surprisingly, the beast didn’t kill him. He got lucky. It picked him up with its mouth and tossed him through the wall of a nearby building. He was knocked unconscious, and he suffered heavy bruising and multiple broken bones, but he survived. Thousands of other citizens were not as lucky.

Needless to say, we sprang into action. Not even Machen hesitated. By the time the other Slayers arrived on the scene, we had engaged the beast.

I took out Ironwall’s dagger and tried to stab it in the beast’s foot, but I couldn’t even penetrate its skin. Machen and Steph had similar luck. We got it to focus on us rather than civilians, but that was it.

When Ironwall arrived on the scene, we flocked to him, asking for advice. He gave us and the other Slayers a few strategies and tactics, all of which were tried and all of which failed. Bewildered, he charged onto the fray himself, desperation scrawled across his face.

Facing off with the dragon, he tried a complicated maneuver that I had never seen before and can’t properly explain. It was like he was dancing around the dragon. It looked completely ridiculous, and yet it was strangely magnificent.

He landed a few good digs on the dragon’s tail, and a few more on its underside. He was winning. Confident, he climbed onto one of its legs and made a play for its back. The dragon smiled, and you don’t know how creepy it is to see a dragon smile. An average dragon has more teeth than ten tyrannosauruses put together. A dragon’s smile is the equivalent of a mysterious agent whipping open their longcoat to reveal they’ve got fifty-seven guns, knives, and swords strapped to their body.

In the case of this dragon, however, it was even more unsettling than normal. Its gums were black, its throat was white, and its teeth were a translucent blue. Its smile was the smile of a dream that turned into a nightmare. Its smile was the smile of oblivion.

Flashing that smile, it shook off Ironwall and let loose a jet of ice from its mouth. He was hit, freezing instantly and falling to the ground with a thunk. I ran to check on him. It took me five minutes to make sure he wasn’t dead.

The dragon continued to cause destruction for another eight hours. Andes the shimmering metropolis was dead. Andes the ruined city was born. I tried everything I could think of to stop the rampaging beast. When nothing worked, I hid behind the broken remains of a glass skyscraper and came up with a handful of new plans.

I tried these plans.

They were the best my languid, addled mind could come up with.

I executed them as best I could.

They didn’t work.

The dragon did not fly off because it was forced to, or because it ran out of steam. It flew off because it was bored. I swear it locked eyes with me as it flew out of sight. I was the only one who had spent more than fifteen minutes fighting it.

Machen was rushed to the hospital after one pass at the creature. It scratched him with one of its claws and tore open a gash in his leg. He would recover quicker than I expected, but he would never be the same physically.

Steph took a few cautious passes, using two spindly swords to slice and dice at its stomach to no avail. When its ice breath passed only inches over her head, she changed course and took to helping the hundreds of injured Slayers who lay sprawled amidst the rubble.

I saw hundreds of civilians die before my eyes. As usual, I wasn’t in control of myself during the actual fighting, so it wasn’t as painful to watch as it otherwise could have been, but that isn’t saying much. I felt my heart break hundreds of times during the fighting, but the heartbreak that broke me was seeing the dragon disappear into the ether.

Though I didn’t know where it was going, I was fairly certain it wasn’t returning to wherever it came from. I was fairly certain it was going to cause more chaos and destruction elsewhere.

The fact that ‘elsewhere’ could be anywhere struck fearful rage into my heart. Immediately, I thought of Natura. I thought of that grand behemoth killing Acady. My veins bulged. I forced myself to calm down over fear that if I didn’t, I would collapse and maybe even die.

Drinking two entire bottles of water, I sat down on top of a half-burnt piece of cloth that used to be a tarp and crossed my legs. The dragon got further away. I shook my fist in defiance, but I was quivering, both out of fear and out of misery. My fist dropped to my side.

Nothing inside me had been enough, not my smarts or my skills or my instincts. We threw our best at the dragon, but it won anyway. It was better than us: there was no other way to put it. We let the people down. All our fancy weaponry, all our first-class training facilities, all our years of history; none of it mattered.

I kicked myself for thinking what I thought when I first saw the dragon approaching in the distance. This wasn’t our grand moment of triumph, the moment when we proved Arge and his entire ideology wrong. If anything, our failure proved him right in a sense. What use are Dragonslayers that can’t protect the people from dragons? We were disgraced.

But it wasn’t like we could curl up and fade off into the darkness. If we weren’t gonna kill this dragon, no one would. As tempting as it may have been to think otherwise, there was no mysterious legendary warrior waiting in the ether, ready to pop out, glowing sword in hand, and save the day. The burden fell on our shoulders, and it fell hard.

The next few days were the epitome of chaotic. I tried to help out, but there wasn’t much I could do. In fact, I caused more harm than good, leading Steph to send me back to HQ. When I got there, I saw a pillar collapsing in on itself and a mass of Slayers scrambling around, trying to figure out a plan.

Despite this foreboding start, I sauntered up to the front desk, curious if there was anyone manning it. There wasn’t, so I vaulted myself up on it and laid down. Slayers ran back and forth, panicking. Their faces were red, their eyes too. They didn’t know what to do. Then again, why would they?

This was a unique event in the history of the city. This was arguably a unique event in the history of the entire continent. Dragons had wreaked destruction, but never on a city of this size.

In the days before the Slayers, cities were smaller. This was not directly in response to the dragon attacks, but it wasn’t completely unrelated either. Buildings were rarely more than a couple stories high, and they never had much ornamentation. Whenever a city was wrecked, it was a crushing blow, but people would move on. They would build another city and live there.

The creation of the Slayers changed all that. People settled down and created cities that put those of the past to shame. Palaces and towers sprang up. Skyscrapers soon followed. No longer knowingly temporary, cities began to accrue culture and personality. New ideas and styles flourished. It was a golden age.

No one ever thought dragons would destroy one of these major metropolises. Dragon attacks were not rare, as they are today, but they were getting rarer. Their numbers had decreased in nine of out of the last ten years. Not only that, the attacking dragons were getting smaller. It seemed as though the truly awful days were long gone.

Occasionally, civilians would die in dragon attack, and so would Slayers, but while that’s horrible, it is a far cry from the complete destruction of an entire city. It is the difference between a culture heartbroken and a culture ruined.

In a very real way, what happened to Andes was far worse than what happened to the old cities of the pre-Slayer era, and not just because it had a much larger population and was much more culturally developed. Firstly, unlike the people of yore, the citizens of Andes didn’t know how to react to their lives being ripped to shreds. They weren’t nomadic, and neither were their parents or grandparents. It wasn’t like they could pick up their lives and move them elsewhere. They grew up in a different world, one that wasn’t prepared to handle widespread obliteration.

Secondly, it drove a crater into the golden age. The relative optimism that had defined the last several centuries was gone overnight. I’ve since found out it is gone for good. People may not be particularly observant, but they never forget.

Before the attack, there was a certain carefree optimism floating through the continent. The attack replaced it with an enraged musty gloom, a gloom I sensed was there to stay as I got off the front desk and slumped through what was left of the halls.

Rafters had punctured paintings. Golden chandeliers had shattered on ornate floors. Arge would have loved to see this. This is, I imagine, what he dreamt of when he went to sleep at night, only in his dreams, he was striding through these halls flanked by hundreds of supporters. As it was, he was nowhere to be found.

I entered the coliseum. It did not look any worse than it did at day’s start. The damage it showed was the damage it had sustained during the dragon attack that earned me my wings. That attack seemed so long ago- years even. I felt ancient.

Sitting down in the middle of the coliseum, I took out Ironwall’s dagger and threw it at my feet. It stuck in the sand. I rubbed my weary shoulders, but all that did was make me want to vomit, so I allowed my hands to run down my side, stopping at my hips.

A tear slid down from my face and landed in my lap. I closed my eyes. Not a sound could be heard, not even the torment outside. I was alone, and I was scared, and I was suffering, but I eventually found something resembling peace. I was as relaxed as I would be for the next several months.

I did not come out of that room for a long time.