Kese and Raan tucked themselves into one of the corners of the ravine with contented sighs.

  They'd had to leave half the carcass of the adult boar after eating the biggest boar and juvenile. In comparison to their normal consumption, eating barely their own body weight was nothing - but that was the nature of mana-infused beings. A single bite of meat from a Mortal stage monster was the equivalent of ten bites of meat from mundane beasts due to the sheer density of mana in its body.

  And so, for the first time in their lives, the two young dragons were completely full - overfull, even, because neither of them had fully considered the possibility that they wouldn't be able to finish the three corpses. If they had, they might have saved the adult boar for later.

  "We should...go somewhere that doesn't reek of meat and death," Raan commented, blearily.

  "Yes," Kese agreed. "We...should."

  Neither of them moved.

  "Your leg...looks better," Kese said, after a few moments.

  "Mmm. Feels...feels better, too. Must be the...mana, or something." He wiggled it, and then let it flop back to the ground with a groan. "Too full."

  Something rumbled from the main ravine.

  Something big.

  The two dragons pressed themselves against the edges of the side path, their mana bloating forgotten, craning their necks to peek past as a long mass of red scales wound past - and paused at the remains of the boar carcass for a moment.

  Flames erupted. Raan and Kese barely ducked back in time as white-hot fire rushed down the side path, scorching the stone.

  And then the Flamewinder Python slithered on, the scent of caramelised meat drifting behind it.

  The two dragons flopped down with sighs of relief.

  "It didn't even care something had killed the boars," Kese whispered. "Shouldn't it be scared it's on another Python's territory?"

  "Not if it's the most powerful one in the Domain."

  When Kese had told him about the Pythons, he'd imagined a plan to hunt them that simply amounted to him pouncing on its head and Kese its tail, and them stretching out the snake with their combined weight and strength so it could neither coil around either of them nor unleash its flames, leaving them free to rip it apart.

  Trying that tactic on the monster that had just almost incinerated them incidentally would lead to nothing more than their deaths. He doubted even the massive boar matriarch would've been able to overpower that thing.

  "I..." Kese stumbled over her words, for a reason that was nothing to do with her overstuffed mana. "I hate to say it, but Elder Beolkyax told me that the best place to find a Fire-Petal Rose old enough to be the centrepiece of the ritual would be in the lair of the strongest thing in the Domain."

  "He expects you to hunt that?!"

  "I don't know if he thought it would be quite...that big. But..." Her claws flicked in and out nervously and she trailed off. "I don't...if it was just me, I wouldn't mind risking it. But I have no right to risk your life for something that won't even benefit you!"

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  "No, you don't," Raan agreed. "But I do." He sighed. "I want to believe that I'll find a Bloodline that I can use, somewhere in the Hall. Or at least be able to modify one - somehow - enough that I can use it. But if I don't, if I'm going to live less than two centuries...I can at least help you and the others reach the Immortal stage. That way -"

  Kese bit him. Hard.

  "Don't you dare say something like you're less important than the rest of us!" she hissed, angrily. "If you want to help me, then of course I'll be glad of the help, you're the strongest fighter of all of us, but if you're going to risk your life because you think not having any affinities makes you...lesser...than us, somehow, we can leave the Domain right now."

  "And accept getting the handout from Elder Beolkyax?" Raan retorted, licking his shoulder. He was glad she'd avoided the one that had been hurt by the boar's tusks.

  "Better that than you getting hurt because you're being an idiot!" she snapped back, before her expression softened. "I don't care about...being a Bloodborn, and the Flame Calamity Bloodline, or any of it. Not if caring about that means my best friend gets hurt." She sighed. "So. Are we going after the Python?"

  He lowered his head for a moment, pushing away the parts of his mind that told him he should lie to her and just pretend that he was going to listen to her, that it was for her own good, that he was worth less than she was, an affinity-less youngling with no future compared to a Bloodborn with an Eternal's Bloodline.

  When he raised his head to meet her gaze, he nodded.

  "Yeah. Let's go."

  It wasn't hard to follow the giant python. It had no fear for anything in this Domain and made no effort to conceal itself the way its lesser kin would, and anything that had been in its path had either been eaten like the half-carcass of the boar or - more likely - simply made itself scarce, leaving the two dragons free to track it back to its lair without interruption.

  They could feel the heat emanating from the tunnel even from the mouth of the cave. Some of it might have been from the python itself, but the vast majority had to be from another source. There was no guarantee that it belonged to a mature Fire-Petal Rose, but it was the most likely explanation.

  "We are not going in there," Kese whispered. Dragons could see in the dark as well as they could the light, but entering unfamiliar tunnels occupied by a far more flexible and powerful creature than they were was as sure a death sentence as trying to fight the python directly.

  Raan looked around the ravine, and up the cliffs. "Maybe we don't have to." He spread his wings and took off, landing halfway up the ravine and climbing the rest of the way.

  Kese followed him up, curiously. "What are you looking for?"

  "We might not be heavy enough to pin that thing down. But that doesn't mean there's nothing in this entire Domain heavy enough. And if it coils up to burn any food it finds, like it did back where we hunted the boars..."

  "Then we can drop something on it," Kese nodded.

  "Exactly. Now we just need to find something heavy enough that even that thing won't be able to just shrug it off."

  It took them the better part of the day to find a boulder that was sufficiently heavy - heavy enough that they could barely lift it off the ground for more than a few seconds, forcing them to take a long, circuitous route back to the python's lair along the top of the cliffs. Thankfully, it didn't seem like many monsters lived at the top of the cliffs, so nothing interrupted them, and as night fell, they finally manoeuvred the boulder into position above the giant python's lair.

  "Now we just need to get the python out here," Kese panted.

  "Well...we do know one thing that will lure it out." Raan glanced at her storage bag. Kese saw his look and sighed, knowing that the Roses safely stored in it were probably the best bait they had.

  "We should catch another boar as well. It was the boar that caught its attention when we saw it in the first place."

  Compared to wrestling the boulder across the cliffs, hunting another Obsidian Tusk Boar was trivial - they couldn't see in the dark the way Raan and Kese could, and with the advantage of having already hunted some of the boars and knowing how they fought, the two young dragons brought down two more boars without suffering a scratch. Neither were as big as the giant boar matriarch, but both were bigger than the carcass that had attracted the python originally.

  And so, as the suns cast their dim night-light across the Domain, Kese and Raan arranged their trap.