Chapter 54: DD3 Chapter 000 – Prologue

The distinctive sound of thrashing flesh slamming against steel was not one that Alphonse had ever thought he could get used to. But as the goblin on the table strained against its restraints, the alchemist had to admit that he’d come to find the predictably familiar noises of struggle reassuring. They meant that this was just a normal monster, unlike one of the aberrations beyond the walls who talked. More importantly, it meant that the experiment could carry on without any last minute disruptions.

He carefully slid the wide-gauge needle beneath the creature’s green skin—only bothering to find a vein out of good practice—and depressed the plunger. The captive audience in their cages, shrieked even louder in their warbling fury as they watched helplessly while the Capstone Solution flooded into the restrained goblin’s arm. 

Trading the empty syringe for a pencil and notepad, Alphonse stepped back and waited patiently while a network of spidering black veins quickly spread from the injection site.

Within a span of five seconds the goblin began to noisily seize. It made tight fists with its hands, scoring its palms bloody with its own claws. Its skull repeatedly cracked against the unyielding metal behind it while foam flecked from its too-large mouth, and the alchemist was delighted to see that this subject managed to retain the contents of its bowels. 

The sturdy chains that were securely bolted to the table, rapidly alternated between being stretched taut and falling slack, while the monster continued to spasm on the flat surface of the bed. Its sickly green pallor stayed much the same, but as the alchemical solution worked its way through the creature’s small body, the resulting black veins contrasted so sharply with its natural tones that it made the goblin’s skin look significantly paler. 

With its racing heart spurred on by the palpable levels of the creature’s anticipatory fear, the Capstone Solution’s spread was quick. The contaminated arteries carrying the alchemical substance swiftly reached up past its thin neck, around rows upon rows of needle-like teeth, and towards what passed for the monster’s brain. The alchemist knew when it had happened as the goblin’s struggles immediately ceased, and its wide eyes retreated into sunken pits of shadowy darkness that almost seemed to draw in the light.

Perhaps if the creature had been less scared by the whole ordeal, then the transformation might have taken longer, but that hypothesis would require further testing and a lab large enough for more privacy. Alphonse made a quick note on his pad to request additional funding to do just that before moving on.

“The addition of harpy’s bile to the rendering process seems to have resulted in a significantly shorter bout of struggling. Remind me to thank Bilaris for the suggestion,” the alchemist muttered.

“Of course, Alph,” Everine said, uncoiling himself from his favoured perch in the corner of the room and slithering across the clean floor towards Alphonse where he began to worm his way up the alchemist’s trouser leg. “Although now that this dreadful experiment is a roaring success, can we finally go out and feed me something more interesting than stunned mice?”

The man ignored the unpleasant sensation of his familiar’s scales rubbing against the coarse hairs of his leg. He finally breathed an involuntary sigh of relief when the arcane creature found its way to a more comfortable spot wrapped around his forearm.

“For the last time, no. I will not feed you leftovers from the experiments. You’re not even a real snake. You don’t need to eat, so stop looking at me like that,” Alphonse chastened.

“But I hungersss…” Everine hissed emphatically.

“No you don’t, and quit it with the elongated ‘s’ sounds. It’s annoying and we have work to do.”

“Fine, but I’m going to hide my sheddings in your bed again if you don’t at least improve on mice. They’re too chewy,” the faux-snake threatened. The alchemist merely grunted his acknowledgement, and decided not to mention that real snakes don't chew their food. Instead, he turned his attention towards the far more important creature who was currently lying supine on his table. 

His petulant familiar’s imaginary appetite could wait—he had science to do.

The augmented goblin was conscious and totally silent as it stared vacantly up at the ceiling. The self-inflicted wounds to its hands had already healed, and if there was ever any bruising to its shaved skull then it was gone now. If Alphonse didn’t know better, then he would suspect that it had suffered some form of lingering damage from the seizure, but all the tests they could think of had yet to reveal any kind of cognitive deficiencies that arose from the process. 

The goblin was just more docile now—waiting to be activated, he thought with a shudder.

“Are you ready for the next stage?” his familiar asked.

“Almost, just let me take a few measurements first,” he said, ignoring the frustrated hisses that arose from his reptilian assistant.

“That’s not what I meant…” the snake trailed off, while Alphonse retrieved a separate notebook from a nearby desk.

The alchemist paced around the central table, enthusiastically jotting down the relevant measurements from the docile goblin—his theory on host mothers and goblin height wasn’t going to write itself!—before he reluctantly returned his notebook to his desk. With a sigh, he produced a second syringe and dosed the creature. Every point of data he had seen suggested that the sedative was entirely unnecessary. The Capstone Solution removed all initial aggression towards humans in every variation they had tested, but it was Alphonse who administered the trials and he wasn’t taking any unnecessary chances.

Once he was satisfied that his subject was well and truly under, he unshackled the beast and carefully dragged it to the large pen at the end of the room where five other feral goblins slumbered in a narcotically induced haze. Ignoring the increasingly loud cries of outrage from the cages that lined the walls, he secured the pen’s doors and after triple checking the arcane seals, released the wake-up gas into the warded chamber.

The vents in the ceiling hissed and a yellow fog descended to blanket the small room, before it dissipated into more vents in the floor. At first nothing happened, but the goblin with the Capstone Solution running through its veins was the first to awaken despite it being the most recent recipient of the sedatives. Like all the others that had come before it, the creature rose smoothly to its feet, without even a trace of a hangover, and there it waited. When its peers started to wake minutes later, groggy and uncertain, the first thing each one of them did was attack. In a staggered wave of green skinned fury, the untreated goblins charged the alchemically augmented.

No matter how many times Alphonse watched goblins fight each other, he was always surprised by the depths of savagery the little monsters would sink to. Outnumbered five to one, the goblin who’d received the alchemical solution easily held their own. It was noticeably faster, stronger, and far more resilient than its peers, which at the low level of 4 was a truly significant increase in relative power. 

It was this absurd improvement in combative potential, not to mention the Capstone Solution’s tendency to placate monsters, which had earned the alchemical concoction the attention of the Guild’s greatest patron, the current Queen of Terythia—Constancia Mantios, long may she reign.

There were significant issues with the solution, and Alphonse dearly wished those were brought up with more frequency, but within the lofty halls of the Royal Alchemists’ Stables, the formula and its source were fast becoming their most prized asset.

When the augmented goblin was finally finished playing in the entrails of its kin which it had lazily dismembered, Alphonso realised that he was clutching his pencil with a whitenuckled grip and had failed to make any meaningful notes beyond the word ‘savagery’ which he had underlined three times.

“I don’t like it, Alph,” Everine commented.

“You don’t have to like it, you’re a snake,” Alphonse stated.

“I’m more than that and you know it—I’m a part of you,” his familiar replied. “We don’t like it. What we’re doing isn’t natural and you know it.”

“I’m an alchemist, nothing I do is natural,” he refuted, unable to tear his gaze away from the blood splattered goblin in the pen who was currently eating messy fistfuls of offal.

“This is different, Alph. You know they're moving too fast with the project.”

“Given the circumstances, mass-production isn’t ‘too fast’; there’s an army of monsters camped out beyond our walls. They could attack any day now. Besides… it doesn’t matter what I think, the Queen’s orders are absolute.”

“Nothing is absolute, you’re the alchemist, remember? The monsters claim to want peace, there are even humas living amongst them if the rumours are true. Manufacturing the Capstone Solution in such quantities is reckless. We don’t even know what went wrong with it in Rhelea.”

“We don’t know that anything went wrong in Rhelea!” the alchemist snapped.

“You don’t believe that. The Inquisition was clear, the batch of Alchemic Knights who received it all went bad,” the snake hissed.

“One Inquisitor who has since been censured claimed that. Why are we talking about this anyway? You’re just a snake, now shut-up!” Alphonse yelled.

“I’m your familiar. You know yelling at me is just a less-crazy way of arguing with yourself,” Everine correctly pointed out.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” he said, finally stepping away from the pen for long enough to retrieve the crossbow.

You are reading story Dragon’s Dilemma at novel35.com

“If that was true, I wouldn’t want to talk about it. I’m you, remember?” his familiar commented.

Alphonse ignored the frustrating little snake wrapped around his forearm, and carefully loaded the crossbow instead. He returned to the pen’s door and quickly opened the metal slide in the viewing port. He aimed at the goblin through the narrow opening, and squeezed the trigger. The runes on the limbs flared with orange light as they drew on his mana, and with an audible crack of the string, the bolt whizzed through the air to strike the goblin through the eye.

Practice makes perfect.

With the quarrel poking out from its bleeding socket, the goblin lunged for him. Discordant warbling cries sounded out, while the tide of gore streaming from the wound slowed in real time.  Before Alphonse could react, a scrawny green arm with elongated claws rammed its way through the open viewport.

Even with the tier difference in the alchemist’s favour, the crossbow was knocked out of his unsteady hands. It clattered noisily onto his polished floor while he fell to the ground clutching at a nasty gash on his arm. The goblin in the pen continued to make its unnatural cries as it flailed an arm through the hole in the viewing port, while its kin in their cages were suddenly eerily silent.

The pen doors held. Not that it was ever in any question. The goblin may have been freakishly strong for wood rank, but it was still the lowest-tiered goblin bred in the stables. His heart still racing, Alphonse retrieved the crossbow, wincing as he overextended his injured arm. He slowly loaded a second bolt, aimed and fired another quarrel through the green-skinned monster.

*Congratulations on defeating a level 4 Feral Goblin, experience is awarded.*

*Congratulations on defeating a tainted creature. For your service to the System additional experience is awarded.*

“That was close,” the alchemist muttered, his arm starting to ache as his adrenaline quickly faded.

“Are we not going to talk about it?” his familiar asked.

“That system message doesn’t mean anything.”

“I think, and therefore you think, that it means we’re messing with things we shouldn’t be.”

Alphonse hesitated with a denial on his lips, but with his aching arm and a mountain of paperwork ahead of him, he couldn’t bring himself to vocalise the lie. Silently, he brushed himself off, taking great pains not to get his blood on his clean floor, and left the cooling goblin corpses in the lab while he went to find a healer to take care of his wound.

Passing through the soundproofed doors and into the wide corridors of the stables, he was always struck by how quiet it was in comparison to the noise of his lab. Maybe listening to caged monsters screaming all day, with only a talking snake for company wasn’t the healthiest thing in Creation. Sighing, he walked down the hall, keeping a wide berth from any of the other alchemists who populated the shared space.

He exited another long hallway and entered the crowded atrium at the heart of the Royal Alchemists’ Stables. Alphonse pinched his nose with his good hand, grateful that the blood on his fingers masked the more peppery odour that permeated the cavernous chamber. He swiftly walked past the teams of high-level butchers who were carving into the great hall's sole permanent resident, and made sure to avoid eye-contact with everyone present. 

There were never any screams in the atrium, but somehow that made it worse. If it screamed then what the beast went through would be torture, but it endured in perpetual silence as it had done for centuries, and the knowledge that its bestial mind had long since broken was a cold comfort for his ailing conscience.

Refusing to look, Alphonse kept his brown eyes fixed squarely on the healer’s quarters at the far side of the large room. Hopefully there would be someone with enough mana left for his wound after today's harvest.

“Maybe you’re right. But orders are orders,” he said as he joined the short queue of alchemists waiting to be seen.

“Sure they are… but you’re thinking too small again. You know the potential applications being bandied about. What happens when the Queen orders us to dose that with the Capstone Solution,” Everine asked. “A goblin is one thing, but we simply don’t have a big enough crossbow to deal with it when it turns.”

Alphonse tried not to look, but with his familiar’s tail pointing squarely at it, his eyes betrayed his will.

Huge didn’t even begin to cover it. At a little over eight-hundred feet long from tip to tail, the dragon was monstrously huge in every sense of the word. Even curled up as it was, large parts of the stables had to be built around it. Since its capture centuries ago, it had continued to grow at a perilous rate, and despite having large chunks carved out of it on a regular basis, its prodigious growth rate remained unaffected. 

Thick scales larger than heater shields adorned its flesh, casting a deep ruby red which was the namesake of the beast. Fangs longer than a man is tall, and claws at least twice that made it a truly terrifying beast, or at least it would, if those same teeth and fangs weren’t ripped out on a routine basis in this very chamber. Blanketed in chains, and pierced through with countless lances layered in arcane script, the dragon was thoroughly immobilised.

And with butchers currently carving it open, Alphonse prayed that it wouldn’t choose this moment to awake. It had been centuries since those restraints had been tested, and it had grown considerably since then. He was not the only alchemist to fear its awakening, and the docility offered by the Capstone Solution, not to mention how it halted the levelling process, was enough to make less cautious voices suggest dosing the dragon.

[Dragon level ???]

 

“She wouldn’t—it’s too risky,” Alphonse stated.

“You said exactly the same thing, when they asked you to hypothetically integrate a mysterious ichor derived from a secret, regenerating severed-hand into the Alchemic Knights’ treatment regime,” Everine sniped.

“I—I couldn’t have known they’d actually do it. I just did as I was told.”

“Liar. You knew they’d use it from the moment they asked about the possibility. Just as you know, once they read your reports, they’ll use it on the dragon.”

“What do we do?” the alchemist asked weakly.

“I think, and therefore you think, that we need to go talk to the other dragon,” the snake hissed.

If you liked this chapter, do make sure to rate, review, favourite, and follow as appropriate. Everything you do really helps get this fiction discovered, which gets it in the faces of new readers and keeps me writing.

If you really liked this chapter and can't wait for the next one. I have a Patreon where you can read up to 15 chapters ahead and contribute towards keeping the lights on.

If you want to chat with me your humble author in real-time, or other fans of the series feel free to join the discord .

If you want to help with my visibility and don't fancy any of the above then give me a .

And last but not least, Dragon's Dilemma Book 1: A Sovereign's Scorn, is on sale on  With the audiobook edition now available for 

You can find story with these keywords: Dragon’s Dilemma, Read Dragon’s Dilemma, Dragon’s Dilemma novel, Dragon’s Dilemma book, Dragon’s Dilemma story, Dragon’s Dilemma full, Dragon’s Dilemma Latest Chapter