“You’se gotta marry my sister. She’s pretty; you’ll like her,” Geeku offered as we made our way back into the camp. Word had spread fast, almost magically so.

  “Chief!” called an Orlic almost as large as Geeku as he strode out of the throng to slap me hard in the face. I blinked, then laid him out with an open palm to the side of his skull. His body twitched slightly, and he farted noisily.

  “You did him too much honour,” grumbled Geeku. “Guntes will be braggin; fer days. When he wakes up.” We had made it to the edge of the tents, and more and more Orlic were gathering around to watch us as we headed towards the chief's pavilion.

  “I’m not marrying your sister, Geeku,” I said amicably. “Not a fucking chance.” Esme would not approve of that at all, and Kat would laugh at me.

  “Gots to. Dey don’t know yer a, ya know.” He mimed wings flapping with his arms. “Dey fink yer just a scrote, just a part of da horde. So you’se got to marry me sis.”

  “And your sister would be fine with this?” Political marriages were as old as time, but a people who preferred to slap each other rather than a simple handshake struck me as the sort of people who wouldn’t be bothered with such tricks.

  “She not care. Doesn’t like current husband anyway.” He shrugged his massive shoulders.

  “Riiigghhht. It’s still a no. What’s this warband called anyway?”

  “Called? It’s just da horde. Don’t need stoopid Oomie names.” He adopted a squeaky voice and an accent that wasn’t that far off the more cultured Imperial ones I’d heard in the city. “We are the fourth Brigandines of the Army of Lord Wossname, known as the ‘shits who run away like pussies and shoot magic behind us’. Pricks.”

  We arrived outside the chief's tent. It was just as ramshackle and patched as the rest. I wasn’t sure how it could hold itself upright. The supports I could see through the open flap were worm-eaten and flaking apart. It must be decades old, but was somehow holding together despite only the crudest of maintenance.

  “Fine Orlic! Gather round!” I yelled and waited for the crowd to form around me osmotically. Another brave Orlic stepped out to slap me in greeting, but I kicked him in the balls before he could manage it and tossed him bodily back into the crowd. The muttering I could hear was generally approving. Along the lines of ‘don’t fuck with da new boss’.

  “Mighty warriors! No one fucks with the hoard!” I yelled.

  “The horde!” they chanted back. Nice.

  “I am your Boss!” I declared loudly, and an affirmative roar went up. Gods, I loved these green bastards. They changed everything for me. So many possibilities had unfurled in my mind now that I was in control of them. But staying in charge was the trick, especially if I wasn’t going to be wasting my time going off to deal with the Dwarven slavers. I needed them to be utterly committed to my cause, and for the ambitious among them to be too terrified of what I could do to dare make a move.

  “But I’m not just any Boss! Geeku is a fine warrior and mighty champion! We had tested each other before this day. When we first met, we fought a duel, pushing each other to our limits!” A small fib, but not one that would tarnish my soul. “He used his final form, and it was still a draw! Can you believe that? Do you want to see us fight again?” In the corner of my eye, I saw Geeku pale slightly, but the crowd roared its assent.

  “Fuck you, Bob. Just eat me,” Geeku muttered. “Don’t oomilate me.” They really didn’t like Oomies, it seemed, so much so that the name for humans had become part of 'humiliate'. That, or they struggled to pronounce the ‘H’ at the start of words. It could be either, to be fair.

  “I want you leading this warband. You didn’t fight me and force me to kill you; I owe you one for that. So I’m going to do you a solid,” I said out of the corner of my mouth, all the while waving my arms and working up the crowd.

  “Give my sister a solid, dat’s all I need!” he grumbled.

  “So it’s only fair you should see my final form, the one that brought our duel to a draw!” I called out loudly. As I finished, I shifted back into my proper body, shedding mammalian weakness, emerging clad in gleaming midnight scales. The clear space around Geeku and me was soon filled with, well, with myself, but the glorious reptilian version of me. My tails fanned out behind me, razor-sharp tips gleaming as they danced like snakes.

  I curled my neck so I looked down on the stunned crowd, then turned my nostrils to the sky and sent out a stream of orange and green fire with a roar that shook the tents around us.

  “Geeku fought a dragon and lived! Have any of you done the same?” Frantic headshakes were their silent response. “He is your warleader! Your Boss. But I’m his Boss!”

  This time, the whispers and the mutterings were much clearer to me, having resumed my physical perfection. They had all thought he’d been lying about facing a dragon and were more than a little impressed that I had corroborated at least some of his lies.

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  “FOR THE HOARD!” I roared, deafening the closest Orlics in the process. It took them a moment to realise the full implications of having a dragon as their boss, but the green loonies quickly took to the idea, judging by the broad grins and happy chanting.

  “Fer da Dragonz Horde! Fer da Dragonz Horde! Fer da Dragonz Horse!” Repetition was clearly not one of their strong suits, but all I needed them for right now was stomping some Dwarven slavers and staying the hell away from the Mill. This left me with only the other human army to deal with, and I couldn’t think of an easy way to cut that particular Gordian Knot without ruining my karma.

  “Geeku. Lead my warriors east. Hunt Dwarven Slavers. Make them pay for snatching Oomies and Orlics!” I had swiveled my neck to bring my jaws close to his face, and smoke still rose from my nostrils.

  “Yes, Dragon-boss!” he yelled. “You! Start breaking da camp. We run East now! Run froo da nights and sleep in da morning. Da Dragonz Horde runs to WAAAARRRRRR!”

  “WAAAAAARRRRRRRCCCCRRIIIIIMMMMMEEESSSS!” I winced at the answering battle cry from the now enraged Orlics. The seemingly disorganised creatures were suddenly moving with purpose. Tents began to fall as I watched, dumbfounded by the frenetic, highly efficient activity.

  “You’ll do as I’ve asked?” I asked Geeku.

  “Yer Boss. Trust Geeku.”

  “Trust is earned, Orlic.” My tongue flicked out to taste the scents in the air. Plenty of the musty, unwashed rugby-kit flavour that I’d come to associate with the green humanoids, but it was tinged with something almost euphoric. “Back here in three months, and bring loot for the hoard.”

  “Fer da Horde!” he replied happily. I wasn’t going to correct him. “You gots it, boss. Whats you doing while we gone?”

  “Settling matters with da Oom-the humans. Then I’m going to expand my dungeon, get richer, and sleep on a golden mattress. Oh, and there’s a human banker I need to settle accounts with.”

  “Tree munfs, den. We’ll be back wiv da loot.”

  “I’ll come find you if I need you. Or want to check up on you.” He nodded his understanding of the tacit threat and grinned back at me. He winced as I shared a smile of my own. Draconic dentistry for the win! “Be seeing you, Geeku the Super Cyan.”

  “Boss.” He nodded his head, the closest to a bow I’d seen from the combative species. I spread my wings and crouched before launching myself back into the freedom of the skies and circling for altitude. One problem solved. As a bonus, I’d taken over a warband as well. This left me in bed with the sociopathic Glaswegian gangster in Ankmapak, running a bar and eatery with the intent of bankrupting a villainous banker, and now warboss to a tribe of crazy green bastards.

  How many rescued puppies, kids saved from being trapped in a well, or cattle rustling rings defeated would I need to do to balance that lot out? I should have paid more attention to Lassie and Flipper when I saw them on TV as a kid.

  I circled back to my lair with my thoughts buzzing. Scenarios appeared, were run through, and discarded in my mind. Nuking the humans from the sky at night was right out. It would probably work, but I was trying to be a good dragon. Maybe some kind of challenge? I’d have to check with Johnson if duels between champions were an acceptable way to settle this kind of thing. A dozen other possibilities were considered and marked either as viable options or discarded in the time it took me to arrive back home.

  “How much biomass?” Kat asked as soon as I flopped down on my hoard.

  “Enough for one more level. How’s the dungeon doing?” Even as I asked, I accessed the status screen for my lair.

  Unnamed Dungeon.

  Level: 10

  Floors: 13 (Residential (Industrial) (Agricultural) (TBCx10)

  Rooms: 15

  Sprite level: 17

  Minions: 21/50

  Hoard: 962,247 gold

  “Whoa! The Bonkers have been busy!”

  “Yup yup. Heaven's Fury, Bob, we need to start using the floors we’ve taken. That’s a lot of real estate left hanging,” she said from a small throne she’d built out of coins. A similarly shiny desk, composed of short stacks of my precious treasure, was covered in tiny documents.

  “How much?” I growled.

  “One hundred.” I blinked.

  “That’s not so bad.” The Greed-goblin in my mind was screeching, but I was starting to get some control over the demon.

  “Thousand. One hundred thousand.” A column of fire and acid shot out and blasted the wall of my home, leaving yet another scar on the stones. At this point, my greed had snapped the chains I’d built around it and was gleefully whipping my self-control angel from pillar to post.

  “Get wrecked, Kat.” It was more a primordial rumble than words.

  “You’re going to need the combat floors soon. If you act to stop the battle at the Mill, you’ll out yourself.”

  “I already did. Johnson knows I’m not human, but he doesn’t know what I am. It’s only a matter of time until he figures it out,” I grumbled to take my mind off her request. “That’s a lot of gold, Kat. What will it buy me?” I lay my chin down on my hoard, and thought shiny thoughts.

  “It’ll turn the bottom five levels into combat floors and populate them with monsters. We can use ones you’ve defeated before, or if we level up the core five more times, we get access to a better minion list. Remember the taste of the Arachnoshrooms? You can have a floor of marshmallowy bacon-flavoured monsters to farm for biomass as and when you want.” Don’t think about the price, don’t think about the price.

  “They were delicious,” I said slowly. “But the hunters are still months off, aren’t they?” She sighed and set a document to one side, then adjusted her bonnet to a coquettish angle and looked up at me.

  “It’s impossible to say. The Dwelvers have reached the bottom of the mountain. There’s a passage that runs right from the base to the dungeon. Sooner or later, someone is going to explore enough of it to figure out where it’s going.”

  “Did they find any more Arkendrite?” I asked, raising my head and perking up.

  “No, but the vein we’ve found is big. Very big. We need to push the dungeon down far enough to make sure it’s within your territory. They’ve found some gold, some silver, and an assortment of other valuable metals. Bob, the money spent on expanding the dungeon has always made a profit. It will be the same this time.” She pushed her glasses up her nose and laid her quill on her desk. Since when did she have glasses?

  “Take half.” Gods, that hurt to say. I could feel my tails vibrating and twining around themselves behind me. “We can discuss the rest once you’ve spent that. I need to speak to Reg and Gledna. And how many robo-bunnies are ready?”