“Very helpful, oh, wise guide. I don’t have a huge amount of biomass stashed. Or I won’t after I evolve again. I need to hunt.” I rose from my pile of shinies and shook myself out. I missed the sense of precious metals pressed against my scales as soon as I stood to my feet, and my mood blackened once more, but it couldn’t be helped. “How long for Good-Reg-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Eaten to sort the portal into town out?”
The pixie shrugged, and I discovered that armoured breasts moving could be surprisingly eloquent.
“I’ll get him up here and working on it. Shouldn’t take too long.”
“Excellent. I’m going to level, then go hunt. Maybe try to scare off the Orlic warband as well. Kill two birds with one dragon.”
Biomass stored:
221.5 KG
Biomass required for evolution: 160 KG
Evolve: Y/N?
Rolling for evolution choices…
Please select from the following six options:
-
Ethical Inscrutability
-
Lordly Mien
-
Fashion Gacha
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Savage Disposition
-
Gilded Armour
-
Sword Arts Inline
“Damn. I wanted another Increase Mass.”
“What did you get?” Kat asked, perking up and looking my way.
I ran through the list. She chuckled at a few of them and gave me the rundown. Number one was the most tempting of the ones she described. I could live without gold highlights on my scales, making it hard for people to guess my motives, people thinking I looked important, being scarier, and downloading fencing into my brain.
“What about three?” I asked. “You didn’t mention that one.”
“It’s a hrmmpphh garummphh.”
“I’m sorry?” My snout swung down to float a couple of feet away from her diminutive form.
“It’s bullshit. Don’t bother with it. Just pick one or two. They’re the best options for you right now.”
“What is it, Kat?” She sighed, then sagged, collapsing to sit on the floor.
“It’s a dress-up roulette for me. Once a week, it’ll pick a new outfit for me. And… I get some bonus abilities while the outfit is active. It’s useless for you,” she ground out reluctantly. The chuckle started somewhere deep in my guts. Probably close to where my ascot and monocle were passing through my system. The shudders echoed out until my whole body was shaking, and I picked the evolution because why not? I was going to go feed enough to get another one before the siege anyway.
“Oh you dick!” Kat squeaked as a cloud of silver mist enveloped her up to the neck. She squirmed and flailed her limbs about, but it did her no good. When the clouds of metallic vapour settled and dispersed, she looked down at herself and unleashed one of, if not the, most impressive strings of curse words I had ever heard.
“That’s a lovely bonnet! Where are your sheep?” I snorted before collapsing onto my hoard and rolling back and forth. She was dressed in a white and blue shepherdess’ costume. However, this one wouldn’t stand up to a reality check. Real shepherds wore highly functional clothes, intended to keep them warm in the night while they watched the flocks or washed their socks. Whatever the Christmas carol said that they did in real life.
Kat had been gifted a stripper’s outfit. Thigh-high stockings, short skirt, low-cut top, stilettos, the whole deal. Her crook had pale blue leather tassels dangling from the hook bit at the top. She glared at me and flashed forward, bonking my snout with both her sword and bondage-crook in rapid succession. I didn’t care. I just kept laughing.
“Ah! God, I needed that! I’m sorry, Kat. Well, I’m kind of sorry.”
“I’m happy you’re happy.” I was not convinced she meant that. “You just pissed away all that biomass to prank me. You idiot.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“I’m gonna go get more in a minute. It’ll be fine. Where’s Inedible Reg?”
“He’s on his way. Portal magic takes a while to set up, and I don’t want to look at you right now. Some of the minions already had a weird thing about the armoured bikini. This?” She plucked at her very short skirt. “It isn’t helping. Go hunt. Good luck scaring off the Orlics.” She smirked in a way that made the scales on my back twitch. “We’ll be ready to set up the portal when you get back.”
I grinned at her, then slid over to the entrance before dropping out into the sky. I wheeled around to the right, riding the air ever higher as I circled my mountain, then flapped away to the north. The glow from the Orlic’s camp was visible already; they had crept closer to my home, but I moved off to the west, chasing the dying sun. I hunted for a few hours as darkness settled across the land. I ate Gambleprics, feral uni-bunnies and various shapes and sizes of wolves, foxes and wild goats.
I had nearly four hundred kilograms of biomass at the end, and only needed another one-eighty for my next level. I was fat and full. Stooping out of the sky to snatch my prey up with my claws or tails had completely refreshed me. The human parts of my mind that had recoiled at Kelsy’s death, Johnson’s injury and my subsequent actions had come back into equilibrium with the reptilian part of me that just shrugged and thought ‘mammals’ with a sneer.
I moved back to the east, circling lower and lower until I was skimming the low rises of the grassland as I orbited their camp. I landed to the south of them. If this worked out, I wanted them to run the fuck in the other direction. So I landed between them and their destination, then slowly approached their sentries. If these pricks talked in rhyming couplets, I was going to take off and nuke them from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Kat hadn’t been wrong. Despite my bulk, I could move surprisingly quietly, and my jet black scales blended well with the early twilight. The moon was starting to rise, and might complicate my escape if I got stuck here for a few hours, but for now, I was just a giant, silent, scaly nightmare sneaking towards the camp.
“Ah, yeah, dat’s the stuff!”
The Orlic had hitched aside his leather skirt and was pissing against a tree when I crept up behind him. I waited, not out of any sense of decency or kindness, but because I didn’t want to get piss on my tails. After what felt like forever but was probably about three minutes in total, I set aside my speculations on just how much of the internal volume of an Orlic was occupied by their bladders and struck.
“Urk!” Two tails coiled around him just after he zipped himself to decency, or whatever an alien monster-human wearing a kilt did before facing the world after taking a leak.
I coiled a tail around his face as I scurried away from the camp, hauling my victim with me. Once I was half a mile away, I removed the tail from his face, frowned, then shook him for thirty seconds till he regained consciousness. His face went from an unhealthy-looking purple to blue, and finally resumed the pale green I expected from this species.
“Da scrote is you?” he snarled, struggling to break free. A Sisyphean task if ever there was one. The suckers that lined my tentacles sucked harder, and he froze. “Dat feels weird.”
“Where are you green fuckers going?” I growled, swinging my face in close and giving him a flash of the dental work.
“Teef.” He squeaked. Had I broken him?
“No, teeth. Where are you and your mates going?” I repeated slowly.
“Sowf.” For fucks sake. One claw reached up to adjust an ascot that wasn’t there, and I scowled.
“Narrow it down,” I growled. If the karmic debt I accrued for killing a sentient scaled with their intelligence, I was coming to the conclusion that eating this dude would be about as bad as forgetting to water a potted plant for a month.
“Hoomies are marching. Da Krabs saw dem weeks ago, little shiny pots with wiv squishy homies inside marching Norf. Where da fuck else dey going, ‘cept to hurt us?” I took a moment to parse his meaning as best I could. There was a lot of supposition on my part, but I think I got the gist of it.
“The humans are fighting among themselves. Those armies aren’t moving against the Fuderation.” He snorted.
“Proof, Scaly-git. You got nuffin.”
“How do I make this point clear to the people who matter?” I asked, resisting the urge to squeeze.
“Why bovva? Da tribes are walkin’ Sowf. Def or glory!”
“I don’t want to eat you.” He paled.
“Don’t want to be et.”
“So I’m going to ask you a slightly different question. How do I let your leaders know that I’m going to burn them and eat them if they don’t fuck off and mind their own business?”
“You eat burned stuff?” He cocked an eyebrow, one of the few things he still had the power to move from within his scaly cocoon. Gods, I hated these mad bastards.
“If I have to.” Toothy grin. “I’d rather your lot just went home. I might have some stuff to trade with you if you do.”
“Wot stuff?” His eyes, which I now noticed had pink irises, narrowed.
“Good stuff. But I need to speak to your boss before I start sharing the details,” I snapped.
“Boss won’t speak to you.” I lifted him closer to my face and gave him my best smile.
“Well, that’s a shame.”
“Da boss might speak to you. If it’s worth his while.” The faint notes of ‘don’t eat me’ hung in the air as his mouth closed. Also, the smell of piss. Wearing kilts was helpful sometimes, and he must not have emptied out his system before. The volume of an Orlic’s bladder had to be, what? Half a metre or something? What bizarre biology!
“Who’s your boss?” I asked as nicely as possible.
“Geeku.” Ah shit.
“I know the guy. How should I set up a meeting that doesn’t involve me getting mobbed and having to eat you?”
“Yer smile isn’t reassuring.”
“I know.”
“Well, bruva dragon, if you’se knows him, go say hi.” I did not like the look on his face as he advised me to walk into the midst of thousands of possible enemies. These Orlics were not the sharpest tools in the shed.
“Tell you what, I’ll pop over to say hi and keep you wrapped up like this. I’m afraid that if anything bad were to happen to me, I might just tighten my grip a bit and accidentally squeeze your insides out of both ends like you were a faulty tube of toothpaste. Sounds like a plan?” Not even a cricket chirped in the sudden silence.
“Hows about I fix a meeting?” he offered.
“Would that involve me letting you scurry off into the night to negotiate on my behalf? Because I’m not sure that plan will work for me.”
“Crafty monster!” He made it sound like I was a multi-generational genius for seeing through his very obvious plan.
“Not so much.” Kat would attest to that, and even with draconic arrogance, the human part of me was more than happy to accept the fact. “So we’ve got ourselves a bit of a pickle, don’t we? Either I eat you and go find another meatshield to get me into camp, or you figure out a way to make this work.”