Everybody Loves Large Chests

“RRRAAAARGH!”

With a primal roar akin to that of a feral beast, Kora suddenly lunged forward.

“Wait, what are you doing?!” Fizzy called after her. “This wasn’t part of the plan!”

Boxxy’s entourage had been making their way over to where the dragon went down while keeping pace with their slowest members. The shapeshifter had told them to avoid splitting up en-route as it wanted to avoid a situation where they got picked off by the locals because someone fell behind. It was a very real concern considering the Isle of Light’s illusory environment could easily confuse one’s sense of direction, and Xera was the only one able to project a counter-illusory barrier.

And yet Kora had suddenly picked up speed, using her enormous stride and ridiculous athleticism to pull ahead considerably.

“She’s not the only one acting up,” the djinn noted. “The Meatball Brigade back there is going mental as well.”

Meatball and the ten or so corrupted dragonlings Boxxy had taken control of had gone almost literally rabid. They snarled and growled, their mutated throats producing alien howls while foam bubbled from their twisted jaws. The creatures dashed forward in a disorganized charge, slowly overtaking the group of Fizzy, Xera, and Jen. This part of the plan was supposed to have them stay back so they could burrow underground and launch a surprise attack at some point during the fight, but that was clearly no longer an option.

“What’s going on?” Jen asked while maintaining a low altitude.

“I don’t know what caused it, but I think Master has gone completely berserk,” Xera responded while wincing. “It’s flooding our mental link with pure, unyielding hatred. It seems to be making those morons go equally mad.”

“Can… Does it really work like that?” the golem questioned.

“Apparently.”

“Why are you not affected, then?”

“Who says I’m not?”

Though she was doing a good job of hiding it, the djinn was absolutely livid. Kora and the corrupted puppets were far more in-tune with Boxxy’s nature, so its anger resonated much more strongly with them. That said, ‘anger’ was putting it lightly. Xera wasn’t sure if she had ever felt this much raw animosity from her master before, aside from when it was still struggling with its demonic corruption. She couldn’t think of anything that would elicit such an intense response, but the cause was far less important than the consequences..

Boxxy T. Morningwood had always been a creature that put great importance on being in control of a situation, and its plans for taking down Azzyth were no different. If it had lost itself in a blind rage, then it would not last very long against the adult dragon. Jen seemed to realize this as well. She didn’t know Boxxy as well as Xera, but she was intimately familiar with the feeling of getting lost in the heat of battle and how that could screw up one’s plans for said battle.

“I’m going on ahead.”

With a dull mention of her intentions, the griffin-harpy darted forward. The group was now close enough to the extremely noisy battlefield that the illusory terrain ceased to be an issue. She glanced behind and saw that Fizzy in her jet-assisted Assault Mode also picked up the pace, though Xera’s relatively slow flying speed meant she would be the last on the scene. As for who would arrive to back up Boxxy first, that was clearly going to be Jen. Unlike the mad bunch that went ahead first, she could just ignore the difficult and uneven terrain. More importantly, her top flying speed was unmatched within Boxxy’s group of monsters and demons even before she had unlocked her latest Griffin Skill, Wind Tunnel.

A horizontal cyclone swirled around Jen, propelling her forward at a speed she could never achieve on her own. She tore through the air with a thunderous boom, easily overtaking Kora and the so-called Meatball Brigade. Scant seconds later, she saw a massive demon of green flame and molten rock trying to pin an adult dragon to the ground in a vicious headlock. She then spotted a vaguely chest-shaped mass of eyes, teeth, and weaponry clawing away at the dragon’s backside, just above the base of the tail. Glancing back to the dragon in the next instant, Jen saw that the beast’s maw was wide open.

One split-second decision later, and the harpy slammed into the temporarily immobilized dragon’s neck with all the feathered fury she could muster. She was intending to crush Azzyth’s airway while she was charging her terrifying breath weapon, potentially making it backfire and blow up in her throat. She had no idea whether that was possible, but Boxxy had brought the idea to her previously, and she agreed it was worth a shot.

Jen had been marginally successful in her endeavor. Her metal staff broke through the already damaged scales and sank into the vulnerable flesh underneath with tremendous force. The impact had been so great that every bone in her arms creaked and screamed in protest, but the dragon felt it much worse. Her long and thick neck recoiled painfully, even as the demon was grappling her by the base of the head. For better or for worse, however, there was no fiery laser-breath involved. The dragon had opened her maw because she was attempting to summon her brood to her side with a high-pitched roar, but Jen’s impact had cut it short.

Deciding that she couldn’t rely on a bunch of wyrmlings to do a real dragon’s job, Azzyth finally got serious. Her defensive barrier expanded outward, throwing off the demon grabbing her by the skull, the insect that had just stung her neck, and the pest that was incessantly ripping scales out of her backside. She rose to her feet and spun around, swinging her spiked tail in a wide sweeping motion. It cleaved clean through the demon’s abdomen, separating his top half from his bottom half. This did little to slow him down, however, as the two parts reconnected instantly in a blaze of green flame.

“AH-HAHAH! FOOLISH LIZARD!” he gloated. “DID YOU REALLY THINK- OOF!”

Zingronath was then cut off by a dragon-claw-swipe to the face, followed up by Azzyth’s jaws clamping down on one of his horns. She had been aiming for his skull, but the demon flinched back further than expected from her first hit. Her jaws still tightly clamped, she forced Zingronath’s head down and dragged his face across the ground like an oily rag. She then lifted him up and slammed him back down, making his semi-solid form splash around like a puddle that had just been stepped in.

She released the demon and then swung her head around to fire two eye beams towards her rear. One of them had been aimed at Boxxy, but the shapeshifter avoided it with a nimble side-step and kept charging along the ground towards the dragon’s right hindleg. The other beam struck one of Jen’s wings just as she was preparing for another fly-by, vaporizing most of the limb. The crippled harpy lost the ability to control her trajectory and immediately crashed into a boulder.

“DAEMONFIRE!”

Meanwhile Zingronath had reformed and blasted the dragon with his otherworldly flames. They burned through the defensive barrier and enveloped the front half of her body. Azzyth then inhaled them, sucking them in as if they were little more than the fragrant smoke of a scented candle. The dragon had a smug, toothy grin, clearly gloating over the impotency of the demon’s fire. It was a decision that she came to regret almost immediately as she started hacking and coughing. This wasn’t Zingronath’s first time tangling with a dragon, and he knew just how to hurt the prideful lizards. He expected Azzyth to take his Daemonfire lightly just because it was a fire-based attack, but in reality it was also loaded with the dragons’ Bane - scourge magic.

“GHAH-HAH-HAHA!”

The ancient ifrit let out a mocking cackle as his opponent choked on a lungful of toxic flames. He then laid into her with his massive fists, both of them sheathed in yet more Daemonfire. Each bone-rattling blow made the dragon’s scales flake off her face and turned the exposed flesh underneath a putrid green color. Though it was unlikely he’d win solely because of this, the demon definitely had the upper hand at that moment, and he was enjoying it. Unfortunately for Zingronath, he was so focused on smacking the dragon around that he failed to notice something green, red, and black hurtling towards him.

“MIIIIINE!”

With a loud roar that echoed Boxxy’s abnormal state of mind, Kora slammed into the towering demon’s chestplate. Though the green flames burned away at her, she ignored the damage and clambered upwards, propelling herself towards Zingronath’s blazing skull with the power of spite alone.

“GNAT!”

Noticing her, the taller demon tried to flick her away with a finger as if she were a harmless ladybug. Except that Kora grabbed onto his finger - which was almost as big as one of her arms - and refused to let go. Zingronath clearly hadn’t been expecting this, as he tried to shake her off with an awkward motion, which only ended in his digit being ripped off. A new one sprouted from his hand almost immediately, but his ego had been injured severely. The distraction also proved to be just enough for Azzyth to gather enough strength to blast him with her laser-breath, though this was a much smaller discharge than the one she had used earlier. The blast blew off a significant part of the demon’s upper torso. It was a wound that he would need a lot more time to recover from than a lost finger.

While the ifrit reeled, the dragon then spread her wings wide. The one Boxxy had cut open about a minute or two ago had already healed, and she was getting ready to lift off. She also sensed some dragonoid underlings were on their way, which she assumed would keep the small ones busy on the ground while she obliterated them from above. She was, of course, unaware that her ‘backup’ were Boxxy’s twisted meat-puppets, but even without their assistance an adult dragon’s air superiority was absolute. All she had to do was to avoid getting grounded again and victory would eventually be hers.

However, Azzyth had been so preoccupied with the demon’s poisonous pyrotechnics that she hadn’t noticed Boxxy had been burrowing into her backside the entire time. Frenzied or not, the shapeshifter was still every bit as merciless and relentless as it usually was, perhaps even more so. It seemed entirely fixated on returning the pain it felt at the loss of its shiny a hundredfold, and it knew just how to do it. Even in Boxxy’s irrational state of mind, it still remembered most of the anti-dragon tricks and countermeasures it had come up with in the months leading to the Dragon Festival. Especially the one it was about to employ, which was one of its more… inspired ideas.

With a gap in the dragon’s scales and a freshly cut open wound directly in front of it, Boxxy reached into its Storage and pulled out a nail-like device about three meters in length. This was thrust deep into the bleeding gash in a single motion, and a literal bucket full of healing potion was dumped on top of it. The dragon felt that as little more than a needle prick, but the shapeshifter wasn’t giving her time to react. It twisted and pulled out the object’s flat end, triggering the Dragon Thorn’s internal mechanism.

Much like when it was used on that Old God’s serpentine avatar, the device fired several rods of hardened mithril that anchored it firmly into the dragon’s flesh. That was only the start of it, as the sadistic shapeshifter had improved upon the design ever since its debut. Once deployed, this new Dragon Thorn released a ravenous flesh-eating disease from the depths of the Velos jungles. Perhaps the worst part of all this was that, through either skill, luck, or instinct, Boxxy had managed to lodge the thing into a sweet spot between two of the dragon’s vertebrae.

Azzyth absolutely felt that. It was a sharp pain completely unlike anything she’d ever experienced, and that unknown sensation caught her by surprise. She wobbled and shuddered, trying to contract her muscles in a way that would eject the foreign object from her body. With the entry wound forcibly healed shut via healing potion, all her efforts accomplished was to fracture the thorn into yet more splinters. This, in turn, sped up the spread of its payload.

Within seconds the pain had grown to such severity that the dragon’s panicked take-off attempt ended with her smashing into the ground almost immediately. Every motion was absolute agony, yet the aggressive disease now crawling up her spinal column was making her extremities feel numb. The adult dragon’s absurd vitality would have normally fought off this infection quite easily, but these weren’t normal circumstances. Azzyth had already expended a lot of energy, and her body was struggling to deal with all of the damage she’d taken.

Temporarily incapacitated, the dragon could do little as Boxxy made its way up her back, along her neck, and up to her face. It clung to her face, right in front of her left eye. Seeing the creature that close for the first time, the dragon was finally made aware of just what had been giving her so much trouble. The shifting mass of flesh and teeth was so foreign and unknown to her, it might as well have been from an entirely different world. The thing was so disgusting to her that she felt grossed out, almost like a housewife who had just seen a weird insect up close.

The dragon couldn’t help but notice that this vile creature was nevertheless clinging onto some rather impressive items. Aside from the several large tentacles with all the teeth and eyes, it also had about a dozen much smaller ones growing out of it at random. These held an array of powerful magical blades - mostly swords and axes - each of which was coated with copious amounts of dragon’s blood.

“See what you did?!” Boxxy bellowed into the dragon’s eye.

Without even waiting for a response the shapeshifter lifted one of its armed appendages, but this one wasn’t holding a high-end weapon capable of cleaving through a dragon’s scales. It was coiled around a short metal rod made out of a solid black metal. On one end it had two red gems that had lost their magical luster. The other end was jagged and warped as a result of being melted through by dragon fire.

This was all that remained of the once-powerful Voidcaller staff, now reduced to little more than an absurdly expensive pointed stick.

“See what you did!”

With another, more commanding shout the shapeshifter swung the thing at the dragon’s eye. She tried to blink on reflex, but Boxxy wasn’t having it and held the eyelids open as it stabbed the metal rod into her iris.

“SEE! WHAT! YOU! DID!” Boxxy howled, each word punctuated with a sorrowful, resentful stab. “MINE! SHINY! GIVE! MINE! BACK! SHINY! NOW! MINE!”

This agonizing and increasingly erratic onslaught proved too much for Azzyth, who could no longer hold back her wails of pain.

Meanwhile Kora and the freshly arrived Meatbag Brigade were throwing themselves at Zingronath like rabid dogs. They seemed to be hurting themselves more than they were harming the demon, right up until the former fiend broke off the horn that the dragon had bitten earlier. This was something the living inferno felt more severely, if the angry bellow he let out was any indication. Once in the material realm, a demon’s power was concentrated in their horns. This was true even for an ancient ifrit sultan. Without that one, Zingronath’s unnatural green flames mellowed out in both color and intensity to a more mundane orange-red simmer. The demon then decided it was perhaps time to leave this place and return to the Beyond. He’d been away for too long, and clearly wasn’t bringing his A-game, so to speak.

That said, Zingronath wouldn’t be able to call himself a demon of concentrated anger unless he spitefully took everyone else with him.

“LIBERO FACILISIS LIGULA, IN ELEMENTUM PULVINAR MI TINCIDUNT VESTIBULUM!”

His blazing body seemed to flare up once more as he chanted a certain Spell.

“PORTTITOR INTERDUM DICTUM EGET LACUS!”

It wasn’t exactly his style, and he hated to borrow things from that upstart Nagnamor’s book.

“ORCI VARIUS NATOQUE PENATIBUS ET MAGNIS DIS PARTURIENT MONTES, MAURIS URNA SAPIEN ALIQUAM!”

However, he couldn’t deny that this particular incantation was quite… satisfying.

“NEQUE AT PLACERAT BLANDIT!”

Besides, nobody would know he used this if there were no survivors left to speak of it.

“ZINGRONATH UTRICIA PRAESENT-!”

*KER-KLUNK*

A hammer pierced clean through the demon’s head. It flew into one of his four eyes and exploded out from the back of his flaming skull, interrupting his invocation of the Armageddon Spell. The self-proclaimed Voidcaller stood agape as molten rock oozed out of the wound like blood. A few dumbfounded moments later, he roared and lurched backwards, his amorphous lower body seemingly incapable of supporting the rest of him. Kora and what was left of the Meatball Brigade, including their namesake, momentarily halted their borderline suicidal assault. A few of the mutated four-legged dragonoids ran off in the same direction as that hammer, as if dogs that had been told to fetch a thrown stick.

“THIS… THIS PAIN…” the demon wailed. “WHAT TRICKERY IS THIS!?”

“MINE!”

His answer came in the form of a still-enraged Boxxy who was hurtling towards the demon’s face. It had been the one to hurl that hammer, and that cursed weapon was far from the only one of its kind. The shapeshifter had expected to run into other Warlocks during the Dragon Festival, and had come prepared. Admittedly it hadn’t used that particular trump card against the giantess with the archfiend familiar, but that was because it wasn’t sure if that fight was worth the risk involved. However, it was no longer in a state of mind that would even consider those concerns.

As such, the shapeshifter did not hesitate to bring its Demonbane weaponry to bear against Zingronath. That hammer had been the first one, and the ominous spear it was gripping was the second. It swung the latter at Zingronath, but the ifrit retreated with speed and cowardice unbefitting of his size and station. Though the weapons were relatively small and their curse wasn’t quite as effective as it would have been against a lesser demon, he couldn’t risk getting hit by those. He needed to buy some time until he could figure out how to safely return to the Beyond, which meant keeping his distance from that accursed weapon.

“MIIIIINE!”

“BAH! GET AWAY YOU WRETCHED THING!”

Boxxy immediately gave chase and, fortunately for the current target of its ire, it wasn’t quite fast enough. The shapeshifter could only hack away at the ifrit’s lower body, slowly whittling him down to size but failing to do any serious damage. Zingronath, for his part, was only just realizing where he was. He had already made several attempts to open a rift to the Beyond so he could flee through it, but couldn’t get past the Shattered Isles’ spatial interference. His attempts to summon up random ifrit to serve as his minions had been just as fruitless, and he didn’t fancy his chances of defeating the rampaging abomination before it could permanently scar his soul.

“You’re the one!” a metallic shriek rang out.

Whatever control Zingronath might have had of the situation disappeared when Fizzy arrived at the scene. She had seen Boxxy’s hammer toss from afar and had gone out of her way to snatch the weapon out of the sky. She knew full well that this hammer was cursed with Demonbane. After all, unless she missed her guess, it was the same mace that the previous Hero of Justice had used to cripple her. Knowing that, it didn’t take much for her to deduce that the big flaming guy was a demon and was somehow responsible for Boxxy’s current condition..

Her assumption hadn’t been quite right, but it wasn’t entirely wrong either.

The self-proclaimed Voidcaller was caught off-guard by the jet-propelled golem’s arrival and couldn’t avoid getting hammered in the face once more. The powerful blow made it lurch dangerously to one side, right into Boxxy’s poleaxe. A few more rapid hits left the demon significantly weakened and stunned. It had stopped moving around and could barely stand upright, its battered skull cracking up and falling apart with every passing moment.

“MINE!”

Boxxy, naturally, showed no signs of stopping.

“Wait! Boxxy, wait!”

Fizzy called out to the shapeshifter as she landed in front of it with her hand raised. It seemed to do the trick, as Boxxy ground to halt to stare at her with every eye on its body. However, it was still visibly agitated and clearly raring to go.

“Think about this, yeah?” the golem cautioned. “You know what will happen if you go through with this.”

Demonbane weapons were cursed items, which meant the power they offered came at a cost. Should a mortal use such a weapon to permanently destroy a demon, then part of that demon’s essence would cling to the mortal. Best case scenario, the wielder would suffer from mood swings for a few decades. Worst case scenario, they would become corrupted and descend into madness, much like what Boxxy had gone through not too long ago. Admittedly the shapeshifter had since discovered a method to cure itself of the condition, but it wasn’t something it wished to go through again unless absolutely necessary.

“NO! MINE!”

However, it appeared as if the shapeshifter had either forgotten or no longer cared about the consequences. It ignored Fizzy’s warning and the worries of its past self as it undulated forward. The golem tried her best to grab onto and stop it, but the creature was far beyond the doppelganger it used to be. The mound of flesh washed over her like a river passing over a pebble. Thankfully, it didn’t seem as though Boxxy was planning to destroy the demon. Rather than strike it down with furious anger, it discarded its weapon and leapt up to envelop the demon’s head in a layer of its malleable mass.

“Mine. Mine. MINE! Mine…. Mine. Mine!” its mouthed tentacles started chanting. They were disjointed at first but slowly unifying their various voices until they all spoke in a chorus, “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!”

Then, from within that wriggling mass came Boxxy’s voice, loud and clear.

“Enslave Demon!”

It was, of course, extremely unlikely that a mortal would dominate a demonic being of that magnitude, but Boxxy had always been one to defy the odds. As the contest of wills began, the monster’s obsessive single-minded frenzy actually worked to its favor. The only thought in its mind at that point was to claim Zingronath as its belonging, to take back that which the monster perceived as ‘mine.’ As a result, its considerable psychic might was sharpened to a degree that Boxxy would normally have been unable to achieve. On the other hand, the ifrit’s tangle with the Demonbane curse had left him severely weakened, both mentally and physically.

And yet, even with all of these factors in play, Boxxy was unable to ‘regain ownership’ of the Voidcaller.

“SHHHKKRRRAAAAAAH!”

The abomination let out a shriek of frustration as it squeezed down on the dazed demon’s skull until it cracked and crumbled under the strain. The now headless ifrit collapsed in a pile of smoldering lava, no longer able to retain its form. Boxxy landed next to it and started kicking at the inanimate sludge.

“Sarkahraskah! Krakhapt! Kfurgahaer!”

The abomination kept making incoherent sounds, signifying that its state of mind had deteriorated even further. This worried Fizzy even more. She approached the rampaging shapeshifter and reached out as if to grab it, but she had no idea what to do. Boxxy was ignoring her for the first time since her transformation, and the self-centered golem found herself at a loss.

“Uh, hey!” Xera shouted over. “If you’re done over there, we could really use some help finishing off this FUCKING dragon!”

The djinn, Kora, and Jen were currently occupying the lizard’s attention. The harpy had regrown her wing, courtesy of a Rejuvenation Potion, and was working with the others to keep the pressure on. The dragon, on the other hand, had used her tail to gouge out a significant portion of her rump in order to remove the Dragon Thorn Mk 2. Azzyth’s tail hung limply behind her and her hindlegs seemed quite wobbly, likely a result of having to rip part of her spine out. The rest of her seemed to still be going strong for the most part, aside from the invasive disease dulling her movements. As for the Meatball Brigade, it was more or less down to just Meatball since the mutated dragonoids had either killed themselves on the demon’s burning hide or had gotten stomped on.

“Ah! Mine! Yes! All mine!”

Having realized there was more it could claim as its own, Boxxy seemed to regain that frenzied focus from just moments ago. It hurled itself at the dragon, with Meatball immediately following suit. Having little choice, Fizzy gave up on trying to get through to the creature and reached for the Artifact-grade storage-belt slung across her shoulder.

“I swear,” she grumbled to herself, “if that asshole dies because it was throwing the mother of all hissy fits, I’m going to resurrect it just so I can kill it again.”

Do you actually have a way of doing that? Plus’s voice echoed in her head.

Heh. Pretty sure she was being sarcastic there, Minus chimed in with a chuckle.

Sarcasm is an unreliable method of transmitting data, Null remarked.

“Yeah, yeah,” the main personality said dismissively. “More importantly, how long until you girls are done on your end?”

The target landed outside my estimations. I am currently recalculating all the vectors and-

“That’s not what I asked, Null.”

… Approximately three minutes and eighteen seconds.

“Alright.”

The golem finished pulling the Gnomish Death Ray out of the Aethereal Repository and began hooking it up to her chest plate. Though she wanted to avoid using that thing if at all possible, she felt the current situation demanded it. She had to do everything in her power to ensure the dragon got taken down before that moron got itself killed, even at significant risk to herself. Fizzy was strangely content with that, though. After all, she wouldn’t be able to call herself an equal partner in that relationship if she didn’t shoulder at least some of the burden.

Said burden was a hefty one indeed. Though she was missing a chunk of her lower back and one of her main weapons was out of commission as a result, Azzyth was still significantly deadly. The size, speed, and weight of her motions meant that every swipe of her claws or snap of her jaws was a lethal strike… unless one happened to be a rampaging greed-fiend. Kora’s sheer bulk and hardiness meant that it would take two, maybe three direct hits for her to go down. This gave Fizzy just enough time to throw on a healing spell or two while she struggled to strap that volatile Artifact to herself. Her efforts barely kept the demon alive as she relentlessly tenderized Azzyth’s lower limbs. It was an uphill battle though. Every swipe of those claws cleaved away at more and more of Kora’s armor, meaning each subsequent hit would hurt a lot more.

Meatball was in a very similar situation. The body it controlled was still that of a double-ranker, so it was just as much of a threat. Unlike the red-skinned moron, however, Meatball had retained enough logical thinking to not stand in front of the dragon. It had realized that, with the tail currently out of commission, it had more impunity to attack from the sides and from the rear. The dragon still retaliated against the armored flesh-heap through her innate magic. Every time Azzyth struck the devastated ground, she sent explosive shock waves through it. These detonated under and around Meatball’s feet, but did little to deter the enraged creature as it blindly threw itself at the dragon’s belly scales.

Xera was without a doubt the least threatened by Azzyth’s efforts, as her ability to float freely put her well out of harm’s reach. Conversely, her Pyromancer magic was of very little threat as dragons were either highly resistant to fire or outright immune to it, depending on their subspecies. Thankfully diamond dragons like Azzyth were the former case, and the Penetration Expertise Skill from the djinn’s racial Job allowed her magic to be almost twice as effective as it would normally be. That said, Xera’s damage output was still the least of the dragon’s concerns.

Jen, on the other hand, was at the very top of her shit-list. Azzyth clearly identified her as a threat, given how she seemed to focus on the Monk the most. To the dragon’s mounting frustration, however, she was unable to even clip the griffin-harpy. This was partly due to the mounting damage hampering the dragon’s swipes, but it was mostly because of Jen’s extreme agility and mobility. The Monk danced between the colossal attacks like a leaf in the wind, and even in those few situations where she would have been struck, her Ultimate Skill bailed her out.

Being able to stop an adult dragon’s attack with her Spirit Guardian was something that the old Jen would never have been able to accomplish. It was the intense training and growth she’d undertaken ever since accepting Boxxy’s bargain that had made that tremendous feat possible. Granted, she didn’t have enough Ki to pull it off more than once every thirty seconds, but every time she did it allowed her to deliver a scale-crushing counter-strike with either her staff or kicks. Each hit also further reinforced the notion that abandoning her humanity had been the right decision, allowing Jen to thoroughly enjoy fighting the most powerful being she’d ever encountered.

There was no ‘fun’ in it for Boxxy, though. As the creature joined the fray, those who had been with it the longest could feel a twinge of anguish buried between the cacophony of alien howls emanating from it. The sudden and unexpected loss of one of its most treasured possessions had introduced the shapeshifter to the emotion known as ‘grief’ in much in the same way that a hurled boulder introduced itself to a thatch hut. The abomination knew not how to deal with this foreign yet intense feeling and, much like a spoiled child, it ended up lashing out with fury and anger.

The writhing pile of screaming flesh launched itself straight at the dragon’s face. Azzyth’s still-bleeding eye twitched with pain when her other one saw that, causing her to flinch. She pulled her head back in a mild panic, but the shapeshifter launched a sticky tendril that latched onto the base of her jaw. The dragon let out a sharp roar as she twisted her neck and body around, swinging the dangling flesh-heap like a flail. The connecting limb snapped under the strain, making Boxxy go splat against the ground. The dragon’s sudden motion had also momentarily forced away the rest of her assailants as they were all unintentionally body-slammed by her immense bulk.

Feeling satisfied with how that went down, the dragon took a few short leaps away from them and recollected her thoughts. Or at least she tried to when her good eye noticed that the lump of dismembered flesh that had stuck to her chin was now climbing rapidly up her face, courtesy of Boxxy’s Corporeal Stability. The sheer persistence of that unsettling creature made Azzyth react brashly and she blasted the thing with an almost point-blank eye-beam, peeling off part of her cheek in the process. It was by all means a disproportionate response.

She looked back to the approaching monster brigade and, fearing what might happen should they all encircle her again, decided to let them have a taste of her breath. However, rather than risk charging a wide cone of absolute destruction, the dragon opted for a more controlled method of using her iconic weapon. Two needle-thin beams of white light shout out of her nostrils, instantly converging at a point somewhere above and in front of Kora, Meatball, and Boxxy. This caused a detonation of concussive force, blinding light, and scorching heat that caught both the ground-bound trio and the two floating ladies, all of whom had been caught by surprise. They suffered only moderate damage, but the burst of energy did its job of halting their advance and forcing them back.

Now that she had a few moments to herself, Azzyth activated yet another of her trump cards - a Skill called Dragon Soul. Raw magic that took the shape of yellow lightning crackled out of each of her wounds and sheathed around her body. Her mangled eye repaired itself and her damaged spine and back muscles mended themselves, all in a matter of seconds. A new coat of scales burst out from her hide, instantly replacing any that had been tarnished or ripped out. Any bleeding gashes still left were stitched closed, and her previously paralyzed tail swayed ominously behind her. All of the damage she had sustained at the hands of Boxxy’s group and the unshackled demon was being undone in a matter of seconds. The Skill even purged the flesh-eating disease that had been slowly eroding the dragon’s insides the whole time.

The unfairness of this turn of events was indicative of the main reason why adult dragons were considered borderline impossible to defeat. They always seemed to have some devastating ability to bail them out whenever they were pushed into a corner. Every time a group of adventurers seemed to be gaining the upper hand, the dragon would do something ridiculous to completely turn things around. Juvenile whelps were much easier to handle in that regard, but the older the dragon was, the larger its arsenal of hidden weapons and emergency responses would be. In essence, one needed to kill those tyrannical creatures several times over before they finally went down for good. It was an insurmountable task for mortal adventurers when considering the destructive power and merciless attitude that a being of Azzyth’s standing possessed.

That said, Boxxy’s group was a collection of unspeakable monsters that brought with them the most powerful weapons of the civilized world, and as such had some tricks of their own.

“Suck on this, ugly!” Fizzy shouted across the battlefield.

The golem had been far back enough that the crowd-suppressing attack hadn’t reached her, allowing her to carefully aim her fully-charged Gnomish Death Ray. Azzyth needed to remain still while Dragon Soul rejuvenated her body, making Fizzy’s shot that much easier to pull off. The Paladin pulled the trigger and a thick beam of bright blue energy shot out of the loudly buzzing device in her hands. It hit the dragon in the throat, punched right through her still-hardening scales, blasted a hole clean through her neck, and then went on to tear up one of her wings for good measure.

Fizzy had used her Static Field to supercharge the volatile contraption beyond its usual operating parameters, making it unleash power unlike anything else it had achieved before. It was a trick she had learned of after two years of testing and tinkering with the device. She also knew this would most likely irreparably damage the weapon, which was why she hadn’t attempted anything of that magnitude before. Indeed, simply looking at the Gnomish Death Ray made it clear that most of its components had melted and fused together as a result. The Artifact would most likely never function again, as not even Fizzy’s metal-mending magic would be able to restore it.

It had been worth it, however. As the golem discarded the smoldering scrap heap and reached for her hammer, she couldn’t help but gloat over Azzyth’s predicament. Fizzy’s attack had done more than inflict a massive wound on the dragon. It had also interrupted whatever Skill she was using before she could fully heal, as evidenced by how the gash at the base of her tail split open and started bleeding once more. The re-injured dragon naturally wailed and wavered from the sudden onslaught, but she was far from down for the count.

Azzyth reached up to her neck with a forelimb and grasped onto the gaping hole it now sported. White flames burst from around her palm and out the matching opening on the back, thoroughly cauterizing the wound. She then turned her attention to Boxxy’s crew, who had recovered from the earlier blast and were encroaching on her once more. This time they had also taken care to spread out so they wouldn’t all be caught up in a repeat attack.

The dragon reared back on its hindlegs for a moment and then slammed onto the ground with a sharp roar. Magic cascaded through the abused terrain, causing it to crack up even further. Explosions of molten rock erupted all over the place, though they seemed to be focused around Azzyth herself. The stuff coated much of her and then rapidly hardened into plates of tempered glass, coating the dragon in a translucent armor infused with magic. Though the added weight would hamper her mobility and diminish her radiance, this defensive layer would dampen impacts while also reflect any and all beam-type magical attacks. Azzyth had taken an unnecessary step towards protecting herself against that bizarre weapon as she wasn’t aware that it had been a one-shot wonder.

The metamorphosis did little to deter Boxxy’s troupe, of course. Deep down, all of them agreed with the abomination’s philosophy that if violence wasn’t their last resort, then they hadn’t resorted to enough of it. They fell upon the dragon from all sides at once, smashing into her hide with all the force they could muster. The glass armor began to crack almost immediately, but refused to fall off. The melee combatants that were thinking rationally quickly realized that it would take a long time to punch through the stuff with pure force. Unfortunately that was none of them, as Jen was lost in the heat of battle while the rest were still attacking in a blind rage.

Meanwhile the dragon had changed her approach. Rather than wide, devastating sweeps, she now employed short and quick jabs with her claws while occasionally throwing in an eye beam or two. Though not quite as deadly, these compact attacks were hitting a lot more regularly. Within a few seconds Jen had lost a large chunk out of her left thigh while Kora was now missing what was left of her right arms. The intense pain that came with the loss of limb served to draw the harpy out of bloodlust while also finally making the demon come back to her senses. It was just in time too, as it helped Kora leap away from a precise strike that would’ve decapitated her.

“Fuuuck!” she screamed as she rapidly hopped backwards. “What in Nagnamor’s molten dick-hole was I doing?!”

“Figure it out later!” Fizzy yelled from behind. “Drink, then get busy!”

She tossed a Rejuvenation Potion at Kora’s face. The demon caught it with her sharp fangs and crunched down on it, swallowing both the elixir and its container. Her missing limbs began to grow back while the golem casted Holy Light at the injured harpy, who had been forced on the defensive. At least Boxxy seemed to be doing fine, as it was using the malleable nature of its body to easily dodge and weave through all the attacks aimed at it. Meatball didn’t look like it would last much longer, but its well-being wasn’t on the list of Fizzy’s concerns.

Literally.

As part of the initial plan, the golem had been given a list of priority targets. Keeping herself alive was at the very top of that list whilst Meatball’s survival wasn’t even on it. It and the other corrupted creatures Boxxy had taken control of were all deemed expendable and not worthy of the valuable time of the group’s only healer. Splitting her focus wouldn’t normally be an issue for Fizzy, but the aforementioned plan had her alternate egos otherwise preoccupied. That and Azzyth did not fail to send the odd crushing claw thrust or superheated eye-beam her way, though the radiant construct was able to anticipate and defend against each of those with ease.

It wasn’t long before the mutated freak that had once been Therian lay dead and broken on the ground, allowing Azzyth to put a bit more pressure on the others. On the upside, the group was starting to break through parts of the dragon’s glass armor and were once again able to strike her scales directly. The odd material hadn’t been all that resistant to Xera’s flames, allowing the djinn to finally cut loose and bombard Azzyth with Meteorites. Admittedly, that was technically a Spell that was best used during large scale military engagements, but it was impossible to call this drawn-out confrontation anything other than a siege.

Yet, however much progress the monsters and demons made, the dragon would always win the war of attrition. After about a minute of back-and-forth, Fizzy’s mana reserves were running dry. She was incapable of utilizing her self-damaging mana-generating combination of Skills to its full potential, since it required that she constantly heal herself. She couldn’t do that while also keeping others alive without the aid of Parallel Plot, and there was also a limit to how many Rejuvenation Potions could be consumed before crippling side-effects took place. Fizzy couldn’t even drink any magical elixirs herself, as they would just pass through her mechanical innards without doing anything other than make her slosh around.

At the very least she had managed to buy the group enough time for her ‘sisters’ to finish preparing for the next step of the dragon-slaying plan.

Done on our end, boss! Plus cheerfully declared.

“About time! You’re fifteen seconds late!” Fizzy snapped back.

The target caused seismic activity that-

“Forget the excuses, Null! Just fire the damn thing!” the golem demanded

We already did, though, Minus said matter-of-factly.

A split second later, a projectile moving at six times the speed of sound finished its eight kilometer journey by colliding with the dragon’s torso. It went right through glass, scale, muscle, and bone, as did the chunky pieces of shrapnel it broke apart into. By the time the sonic boom finally caught up with the round, Azzyth was sporting a gaping hole in her right upper torso, a myriad of smaller openings on the left side, and about five foreign objects lodged in one internal organ or another. Not only that but the sheer force of the impact had knocked the dragon off her feet, setting her up to land on her freshly injured left side.

Which was precisely what happened. An unrivaled screech of pain erupted from the dragon’s throat as it crashed into the dirt. Whatever was left of her glass armor flew off in every direction, littering the area. Boxxy and the other ‘meatbags’ felt the combined force of this entire sequence of events rattle their bones, squeeze their lungs, and shake their brains. When the dust settled and they had been able to catch their breaths, they witnessed a sight that only existed in wildly unrealistic stories.

Azzyth, the fully-grown, centuries-old broodmother, was wailing and writhing around on the ground. She tried desperately to stand up, but her limbs had grown too weak to support her massive bulk. She attempted to spew flames upon her enemies, but her lungs were too ravaged to hold her breath. She struggled to blast the invaders with magic, but her mind was too rattled to produce anything more than a few sparks. The mighty dragon had been brought low, all her pride and power oozing out of her body along with a literal river of her crimson red blood.

“Yeaaaheaah!”

The feeling of triumph that welled up within Fizzy was indescribable, but she still gave voice to it with a loud cheer. The shapeshifter had initially dismissed her idea of building a railgun on the Shattered Isles. It claimed that the construction would take too much time, then argued that it would be far too difficult to actually hit the dragon even if it was completed. It remained adamant that it was too much of a risk, especially since Fizzy’s Parallels would have had to spend much of the fight operating the weapon remotely through their remote-controlled shells. They would only have one shot too, since rushing the construction meant the cannon would fall apart after the first attempt.

And yet, for better or for worse, the shapeshifter had been unable to say ‘no’ to its most shiniest of shinies.

“Suck it, Boxxy!” the golem continued to shout. “I fucking told you it would work!”

Her smile then faded somewhat as she realized the creature in question wasn’t even listening to her. It was, in fact, charging headlong at the gravely injured dragon with the rest of the group hot on its hinges.

“Move it, Sparkle-butt!” Kora called out to Fizzy. “We still have a dragon to skull-fuck!”

The golem slapped her cheeks, producing a bell-like ding. The demon had a point. Cranial intercourse aside, it was paramount that they finished Azzyth off before she pulled another game-changing secret weapon out of her ass. As the golem picked up her weapon and charged forward, however, it seemed as though that was precisely what was going to happen. The dragon’s halo of horns suddenly lit up and a golden illusory duplicate of herself rose up from her limp body.

“Oh, come on!” Xera wailed in frustration. “Just fucking die already! Scorching Ray!”

Figuring that this construct of light wouldn’t have the same resistances as the original, the djinn invoked one of her favorite Spells at it. The fiery beam struck the shimmering colossus, only to split up into seven smaller beams as it passed through its shell. These bounced around its hollow body for a few fractions of a second before being shot back at the group with surreal accuracy. Two of them struck one of Kora’s knees each while the other five converged on Jen, tripping up the former and grounding the latter.

“Hhhekh! Khek! Kheeok!”

Azzyth chuckled as menacingly as one could while choking on their own blood. Without giving her would-be slayers a chance to fully grasp the effects of her Prismatic Avatar Skill, she poured every drop of power she could muster into her eyes. More of those blinding white beams shot out of her face and into the radiant facsimile. Much like with Xera’s Spell, they split apart and bounced around its chest cavity for a split second before being redirected at her enemies.

Xera instantly received two solid hits to her torso, which punched through her dragon-scale armor and pulverized her lungs. Jen barely avoided a fatal blow to the heart, but her wings were ripped to shreds. Fizzy deflected one beam with a precognitive Rebound, but three more pierced holes clean through her mithril frame. Kora’s legs were further crippled before she even got the chance to stand.

It immediately became apparent that whatever that Skill was, it did more than simply split her beams. It also amplified their power so that each refracted beam was just as damaging as the original while delivering them with a degree of pinpoint accuracy that Azzyth herself hadn’t displayed before. And since she didn’t have to do any of the aiming herself, the dragon was free to unleash her eye-beams as rapidly as she could.

The resulting hail of lasers forced the gang to scramble for whatever cover they could find. This was made even more difficult by the revelation that the Prismatic Avatar could bounce its attacks off of the shattered pieces of the dragon’s glass armor, pushing them even further back. The sheer reach of those attacks made it so any semblance of a plan had disappeared entirely from Boxxy’s group. They were just barely able to survive thanks to Fizzy, whose Parallels were pulling overtime to try and keep the rest of them alive through a rapid stream of Holy Lights.

Or at least it seemed that way until Jen caught a laser to the back of the head and fell flat on her face, right in front of the mithril golem. Fizzy’s immediate reaction was to attempt a healing Spell, but realized mid-chant it would be pointless. The harpy sported a smoldering fist-sized circular hole that went straight through her skull, right where her right eye used to be. What was left of her mouth was curved in a hauntingly happy smile, suggesting she had been having the time of her life. It was an expression that didn’t fail to piss Fizzy off.

“Oh, no you don’t!”

She pulled the harpy’s body into the little hidey-hole she’d found for herself. Doing so would most likely doom Xera and Kora to be annihilated by the laser shower, but Jen was higher than both of them on the healing priority list. The Paladin hurriedly took out the last Rejuvenation Potion she was carrying in the Aethereal Repository and dumped the pink liquid over the harpy’s head. She wasn’t even sure if the Monk could still be saved, but she felt there was a chance. And if there was one thing among Killimanjaro’s teachings that she believed in the most, it would have been that chances existed to be taken.

It then dawned on Fizzy that even though everyone else had done everything they could to fall back, the most important among them hadn’t.

“That square-brained retard!” she swore loudly. “It didn’t run away!”

In the heat of the moment the golem had forgotten that Boxxy was currently in full-on murder-mode and would not have taken steps to ensure its own safety. Even that absurdly powerful creature would not survive if it charged head-first into that unceasing volley of attacks. She dropped Jen’s body like a bag of month-old laundry and peeked out from her cover, fearing the worst. First she saw Kora’s rapidly evaporating corpse, the hoarder having finally succumbed to the intense punishment she had been weathering the entire time. She then noticed an odd blue cloud that seemed to flit from one rock pile to the next, most likely the djinn in her Mist Form trying to escape notice.

Fizzy’s eyes finally swung towards the source of all that destruction, and what she saw defied belief. Boxxy was right in the thick of it, getting literally showered by a downpour of the dragon’s laser beams. And yet, despite their previously demonstrated accuracy, none of them managed to land a direct hit. The shapeshifter’s body had gone completely soft to the point of resembling a sentient blob of water. It shook, bent, warped, flexed, twisted, and contorted with speed and precision that seemed impossible even for Boxxy. There were even strips of flesh that split off from the main body so that it could squeeze through the next gap, only to melt back into it a moment later. All of that combined allowed the creature to slip perfectly between the beams as it pushed ever onwards.

Fizzy knew firsthand how impossible that seemed. Those attacks travelled at what was essentially the speed of light. It was impossible to dodge something like that through reflexes alone. The only reason she’d managed to reflect a few was because of the pseudo-precognitive effects of her Champion of Chaos Skill. Even then it had taken only three or four simultaneous attacks to overwhelm her ability to deal with them. And yet Boxxy was anticipating and handling dozens of them each second with such ease and fluidity that it was almost hypnotizing. The golem had no idea how it was managing to pull that off, especially in its current mental state.

In truth, said mental state was the thing that made it all possible. When the shapeshifter snapped at the destruction of its staff, it hadn’t lost its ability to think rationally. It had willingly detached that sensible part of its psyche, retreating deep into itself as a means of dealing with this intense and foreign pain called grief. Any veneer of a personality had taken a back seat to the most basic, most primal instincts that dwelled in its subconscious. Honed by countless life-or-death struggles and tempered by pain and hardship that would have driven others mad, the monstrous impulses that lay beneath the entity called Boxxy T. Morningwood had taken control. There was no sense of self to be found within the creature’s mind, only the pure, undiluted essence of what it meant to be a monster. It was an entity most cruel, calculating, and unforgiving - a machine of flesh wholly unhindered by concerns or thoughts other than achieving its goal.

This paradoxical being of pure logic driven by savage intent had already deduced that the incoming attacks would be targeted at spots where the monster was. This meant that the best way to avoid them was for the monster to be where it wasn’t. It had already grasped the seemingly erratic rhythm through which the attacks came, due in no small part to the Tick Counter Skill allowing its mind to perceive the passage with absolute accuracy. All that was left was to keep a close watch on the downed dragon’s face, as every beam attack was prefaced by a subtle facial twitch. As such, the instant it detected a volley was coming, Boxxy subtly shifted every single part of its body so that it no longer occupied the same space it used to. It was a feat that wouldn’t have been possible if there was any hesitation, concern, or idle thought to pollute the input of information and the output of motion. It also helped that the monster had ridiculously high Attributes across the board, with its sizeable Luck pitching in to fill the gaps.

Boxxy’s goal in all this was an objective most malicious. Its goal was to dominate, infest, and seize control of Azzyth through its Corrupting Influence. Only then would it truly be able to call the dragon ‘mine,’ a just punishment for her crime of taking away one of Boxxy’s most treasured shinies. In order to maximize its chances of success, the shapeshifter had to defeat its target not only in body, but also in mind. That was why the monster had not missed a single opportunity to chip away at Azzyth’s psyche, steadily unnerving and degrading her at every turn.

Its efforts certainly seemed to have had an effect, given the increasingly erratic and frantic responses it got from the dragon over the course of the battle. Seeing her ultimate weapon so wildly ineffective naturally pushed the dying lizard to greater depths of desperation. In fact, now that she thought about it, Azzyth realized she hadn’t done any significant damage to that inexplicable abomination ever since she used her breath for the first time. Though at first seemed as if her attacks had kept the thing at bay, she began to think that perhaps all she had accomplished was tiring herself out little by little. All of the mental pressure was starting to cloud the dragon’s judgement as she could feel death’s grip tighten around her neck like an invisible noose.

Azzyth wasn’t defeated quite yet, though. Though she hated to resort to doing so, the dragon had succeeded in sending out a distress call to her brood while she was covering herself in glass. Their blood calling out to their mother’s, dozens of her young had gathered in the skies above the lethal lightshow. They were swooping down, ready to swarm over and overwhelm what was left of the outsiders. Afterwards it was simply a matter of commanding them to pull the shrapnel out of her guts and drag her back to her lair, where she could start recovering in earnest. It wasn’t the most glorious of victories, but it would have been a victory nonetheless.

However, much like before, she wasn’t the only one with a final card to play.

“Remulus Secare.”

A chorus of voices rose up from the battered and bruised terrain all around Azzyth. She could scarcely believe her eyes as her children fell apart, cleaved in half by invisible forces that seemed to scar the very air they passed through. It was the same aberrant magic that the small terror had used when it went berserk. Far more concerning, however, was that it must have come from a completely different source since the shapeshifter still had its tentacles full dodging the laser rain.

The scorching hail then stopped abruptly, as Azzyth’s frenzied barrage had completely drained her MP. In a last ditch effort to stall for time, the dragon commanded her Prismatic Avatar charge forth and squash her enemy while she forced herself to stand despite the agony the motion brought her. For the first time in a short while she fully took in her surroundings. She saw many creatures lurking in the shadows of upturned rocks and newly-formed canyons. Each resembled a box with legs somewhat akin to that infuriating creature she’d been fighting, only much, much smaller. These were all body doubles made through Boxxy’s Mirror Image, which it had subtly been ‘seeding’ throughout the area over the past few minutes. They had been ordered to lay low and passively soak up the ambient mana to boost their MP as high as possible.

Azzyth had no way of knowing that, of course, and could only assume with growing shock and distress that these were Boxxy’s own brood. She swung her gaze back to her final bastion, only to see the Prismatic Avatar burst into fizzling sparks as a result of a mass-chanted De-spell. The dragon, now mostly upright, attempted to escape, but her broken body could only manage a few agonizing twitches. Her anxiety only grew when about twenty of the box-brood quickly gathered around her and began chanting in a Spell in a single voice. She opened her mouth to make a desperate breath attack, but the gaping holes in her chest made it so she merely coughed up boiling blood. She just needed to do the tiniest thing to break their formation and interrupt their Spell, but couldn’t muster the MP necessary to produce even a gust of wind.

The mighty dragon had finally run out of ‘outs’ to take.

“Gravity Well!”

With the collective power of nearly two-dozen Mirror Images behind it, the Spell encompaseed the entirety of Azzyth’s body and amplified her already considerable weight nearly ten times over. The dragon slammed into the ground like a bug squashed under a heel, her blood gushing outward in every direction. Though it was difficult to tell amidst the cacophony of pain she was in, Azzyth was fairly certain she only had a few bones left unbroken. As her body continued to squish her flat, the dragon could no longer even draw breath. It seemed as though death was mere moments away.

Then the Spell abated. No longer being crushed under its own weight, Azzyth’s chest expanded slightly and air once more flowed into it. It was a profoundly agonizing experience, but the dragon no longer had the energy to even scream. She could only barely register the sight and feeling of Boxxy walking up to her and climbing up her cheek. The shapeshifter then began literally eating its way into her face through her eye socket. The dragon thus learned what it felt like to have a ravenous abomination burrow its way through her head. It was a… less-than-wholesome sensation, to say the least.

It then dawned on Azzyth that the creature was aiming for her brain. A dragon’s skull was far too thick for anything but another dragon to punch through, so that was the only way the creature could get to it. Azzyth knew not what this miniature nightmare was aiming for, but she had a feeling it was something horrific. If she had the strength to, she would have clawed away at her own face in an effort to get it out even if it meant permanently disfiguring herself. But she didn’t, so she couldn’t. Her only remaining option was to hope that death claimed her before that thing accomplished whatever horrific intent it had in mind.

Well, that wasn’t quite true. There was one last trick the dragon could pull. It wouldn’t save her, but it would deprive her killer of whatever prize it sought within her skull. Drawing upon the final bit of vengeful strength she could muster, the dragon plugged one of the holes in her chest as best as her mangled forelimb would allow. Ignoring the excruciating pain as her insides filled with air one final time, Azzyth unleashed her dragon’s breath yet again.

This time, however, she made sure to keep her mouth firmly shut.