Dragonslayer, Inc.

We heard its heavy breathing before we saw it. We had just fought our way out of a confrontation with two trident-tongued lizards and ascended a series of white stone steps.

By this time, we had been in the cavern for half a week. The second half of the trip had been harder than the first, and we’d lost a day following a series of passageways that we eventually came to realize didn’t lead anywhere.

Our food supplies were holding strong, and we had plenty of water from the cavern, but we were growing weaker by the day. The mustiness of the air didn’t help matters. If it weren’t for the Litriol in the water we drank, I reckon one or more of us would have collapsed.

I loved Litriol. I’d soon learn to love it even more.

When we heard labored breathing, we stopped in our tracks. I was feeling two major emotions. The first was annoyance. We were almost out of the cavern, and here we were, being bothered by yet another creature. I grunted loudly.

The second was pure, blind fear. While this creature did not sound as large as Icithan, it sounded large enough to give us a real, competitive fight, and that was the last thing we needed or wanted. While the tunnel we were walking through was far from the narrowest tunnel in the cavern, it was too narrow for our liking.

Fights with large beasts are best in wide-open spaces, where your team can spread out and attack the creature from different angles. In tight spaces, the beast has the advantage. Your team can only fight what it gives you. If it only shows its head, you can only attack its ahead. If it only shows its tail, you can only attack its tail.

This can be a major problem. If the beast is smart enough to not show its weak spots, there’s next to nothing you can do. If the beast is smart enough to display only the parts of itself it uses to attack, there’s next to nothing you can do. If it can do both- most can- and it does so, you should run away as fast as you can.

That’s not a joke. In Dragonslayer training, I later learned, Slayers-in-training were taught to ‘enact last-ditch evasive maneuvers’ in these kinds of situations.

This beast- it looked like what you would get if you crossed a tank with an armadillo- was not showing its weak spots- its underbelly, neck, and a small slit in its ‘armor’ where its tail met its body- and it was showing the battering-ram-like feature on its forehead that it used to attack. But we couldn’t run. There was nowhere to run. We could have tried to make a break for the exit, but it would have caught us and smashed us into oblivion. It was faster than us, and significantly so.

The one advantage we had was the fire on the tunnel walls. It allowed us to see the arma-tank while hurting its vision, which was accustomed to the darkness. What’s more, I began calculating a plan to use this fire to defeat the arma-tank and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

This plan, however, was snuffed out when the arma-tank began radiating misty, frigid air. Within seconds, the fire was gone from our immediate vicinity. I couldn’t see my face, I couldn’t see the other Slayers, and I certainly couldn’t see the arma-tank.

It struck me that it was bothering us in the first place because we had lit the walls on fire. Wanting both information and to break the unwelcome silence that had settled in, I asked Ironwall, “Say, did anything like this happen to you the last time you went through this cavern?”

“If it had, I would have said something a long time ago. I didn’t know there were still creatures this big in these tunnels. I thought they’d all been wiped out.”

“Do you think it crossed over from the impossible route?” asked Machen.

“Still stuck on that, are you?” answered Ironwall. “It’s more than likely. I highly doubt it made its home in the non-impossible route, for what that’s worth. I’m gobsmacked it exists at all.” It began creeping closer. “I knew the impossible route was bad, but I didn’t think it had fostered a creature like this.”

Without letting off a roar or any other kind of noise, it made its first pass at us. I panicked. “What to do?” I repeated thrice under my breath. There was nowhere to hide. There was not even time to figure something out. My inner demon took control, but it didn’t help. If anything, it hindered me. It wanted to deliver a combo to the ‘battering ram’ of the arma-tank, a dangerous urge I had to resist with all my might. When I saw Steph drop to the ground and roll to the side, I did the same.

Machen used the same strategy, but only by accident. The air the arma-tank emitted to snuff the fire had also frozen the water on the ground. Machen slipped and fell on this newly formed ice and slid off to the side.

Our strategy worked. The arma-tank missed us, albeit barely. I would have felt relieved had the situation been over, but it was not. I did, however, manage to chuckle at the irony of Machen’s situation. He had always been the foremost proponent of rugged individualism and self-determination, yet he had only survived by pure luck and chance.

Not all of the others were so fortunate. The second oldest of our posse of Slayers stood his ground and tried to fight using his saber. He was hit and rocketed to the back wall of the cavern. We later found his body. It was barely recognizable.

Another Slayer, a quiet but funny woman who wore a single, distinctive sapphire earring much to Ironwall’s consternation, tried to step off to the side and slash the arma-tank’s neck with her waify, impossibly thin swords, but she slipped on the ice, and instead of sliding out of harm’s way, she slid into it. Her death was not as demonstrative or bloody as the saber-wielding Slayer’s, but it was a horrific sight nonetheless.

A lot more Slayers would have died had it not been for the heroics of Ironwall.

Our leader faced the arma-tank with the furious determination of someone who knew what the stakes were. His eyes were lit with an unstable, confused, impossibly grand fire.

When the saber-wielding Slayer got hit, Ironwall gave a pained shout and charged at the beast, which was as surprised at his brazen behavior as we were. Right before he would have smashed against the arma-tank’s ‘battering ram’, he slid, and as he slid, he grabbed his matchbook and lit another match.

The sight of fire spooked the beast, which reared up just enough for Ironwall to slide under its ‘battering ram’, under its head, and under its midsection, where he stuck his falchion- the same falchion he used to free me from the grasp of that test dragon back at HQ- into the arma-tank’s soft underbelly.

It roared in pain and, in its confused rage, attempted to kick Ironwall with its stubby legs. Failing, it fell on its side. It tried to get up but only succeeded in falling onto its back. Its roars grew weaker. It knew it was done for. It kept trying to get up, but each time, it failed. This was not a creature meant to lie on its back.

Wasting no time, Ironwall ran up the arma-tank’s tail, onto its stomach, and pulled out his war hammer, which he drove into the beast’s soft neck tissue. Steph and I- Machen was still in shock- went to help him, but before we could even run onto its tail, it was already dead. Ironwall had killed it in three strikes of his hammer.

To say I didn’t respect Ironwall before that event would be a lie. I had a great level of respect for him. To not have had a great level respect for him after he saved me from that dragon and led us all the way from Andes to the end of Segrabi Cavern would have been pitifully callous. But seeing him singlehandedly rescue us from that impossible situation elevated him in my mind. He wasn’t a god to me, no. He wasn’t even a mythological figure. It was just that his name and image became intertwined with every grandiose word in my mind. That is still true to this day, by the way. The amount of admiration I have for that man is immense.

As I watched him stand on the arma-tank’s body, bloody hammer in hand, the frustration I felt toward him melted away. I wasn’t resentful toward him anymore. I wasn’t even annoyed with him. I was just thankful. His actions against the arma-tank shown like a beacon in my head, overpowering my problems with him.

I saw him as I had seen him as a kid watching the Dragonslayers on TV, and that was a wondrous thing.

Jumping down from the beast, he said, “That’s done with,” and headed up out of the cavern, and I followed him without a second thought.

This was not the case with Steph however. She asked, “What are we gonna do with this creature? We can’t leave it rotting away.”

“Sure we can.”

“What if another group of travelers comes passing by?”

“You really think that’s gonna happen?”

“There’s a chance.”

“Not in the time it’ll take this creature to decompose. Decomposition happens fast here. By my estimations, it’ll take two or three weeks. The likelihood of a group of adventurers ballyhooing through here in that period of time is extremely, extremely low.”

“Two or three weeks?” I asked, snapping out of my daze of awe. “How is that… wait, it’s Litriol, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely correct,” said Ironwall. “It’s amazing stuff. It’s hard to believe there are people in this world who don’t know of it. They’re missing out on so much.” He turned back to the arma-tank. “Besides, there isn’t anything we can do about this creature, unless you want to take the time to chop it up into little chunks, and speaking from experience, you don’t want to do that. It’s messy, morbid, and more trouble than it’s worth.”

It was not a long climb out of the cavern. When we got out, we were on a high overlook. We could see for miles. There were rivers and valleys and moors and floodplains. Winter had fallen while we were in the cave, and it showed, yet the land, while desolate, showed a sparkle of life that was not present in the jagged land we had crossed to enter the cavern.

Far in the distance, past all I have described, lay a region of sloping hills and stern plateaus that I correctly assumed was the Mulsor Highlands. It was to the north, where we were going. I wondered what adventures might await us there.

There was one feature of the highlands that utterly surprised me: snow. While I had seen snow before, I had never seen it at this time of year. Snow in Natura only came in early spring, when the weather had gotten wetter.

I always liked snow when we got it. My mother loved it. She had lived in Natura all her life, but she had never seen snow until the year she had Acady. For that reason, she always called her ‘My Snow Baby’. Acady didn’t like that. I hated it. For me, it was just another way of reminding me that I wasn’t ‘the special one’. She didn’t have any cute nickname for me, a fact that didn’t surprise me then and doesn’t surprise me now.

While snow was cold, and I always tripped and fell in it, I liked it because of what it did to the world around me. The day before it snowed, Natura was normal and boring. The day after it snowed, Natura was fresh and exciting. It was like I had been transported into another world. I took the time to connect that experience to the experience of becoming a Slayer, judging the latter to be more permanent and fulfilling.

“Though my apotheosis on the peak of Curam will be more fulfilling still,” I added aloud.

Honestly, I’m more surprised that I used the word apotheosis than that I made a statement of such colossal arrogance. I had a tendency to lapse into absurd grandeur whenever I was feeling excited, and coming out of that cavern, I was euphoric.

For the first time in days, sunlight danced upon my face. It was the nostalgic, yearning sunlight of the evening, orange and regal, revealing its true intentions to me for a few brief minutes before sinking into the horizon and being replaced with the romantic crimson contour of Mina, which rose up to join in the sky Deka, its ever-welcoming companion.

The sky became a crisp lavender, the color of the robes worn by the kings of old as seen for the first time by the eyes of a peasant. Clouds rolled through it like peaceful waves on the surface of the water. Like trained ballerinas of the Solanian Royal Court, they danced and performed but conspicuously endeavored to avoid disrupting anyone or anything.

We sat on the overlook, hanging our feet out over the edge, and contemplated these gorgeous sights and what they meant to us. There was little wind, but the air was bitterly cold. This chill gave it clarity, as if it were tasked to fill not only our lungs but our minds as well, filtering out the impurities that had been left to fester in the musty climate of the cavern.

Perhaps the greatest reward of completing a difficult challenge is the feeling you receive afterward. It is not quite relief, not quite joy, and not quite content. I’d come up with a word for it, but I’m no good at that sort of thing, and likely as not, there is one out there that I am simply ignorant of.

It is a quiet feeling, a deep feeling, and an unspeakably positive feeling. Sitting on that overlook, it was as if the entire world had opened up to us.