Chapter 83: DD3 Chapter 029 – Legends

The Royal Adventurer’s Academy, known colloquially as the Academy—and far more recently, the Dragon’s Academy—had seen better days. Originally built to house no more than a few dozen novice classers at a time, the physical grounds of the school consisted of just three large buildings and the ample amount of space that fell between them. Typh’s efforts to spread the System’s classes throughout Terythia had required that to change. With an influx of classers to Helion, there had been a comparable influx of students to the Academy, and so the modest campus had needed to undergo a radical expansion in order to accommodate them.

The finest stonemasons money could buy had worked tirelessly to add five freestanding buildings to the preexisting three. Together, they made the Academy the largest compound in the city beyond the palace’s fortified walls. It was one of the first places that had been warded up to the new standard, and its early successes counted amongst Typh’s greatest accomplishments since taking the capital.

Deciding to house the noble hostages in the dorms meant for burgeoning adventurers had been Arilla’s suggestion, and though Typh cursed it now, it had been a roaring success. It was simply impractical to keep so many nobles—especially those in their teenage years—under house arrest. Collectively, they were the most petulant, spoiled, and demanding group of people Typh had ever encountered. What's worse, they also had the nightmarishly annoying tendency to either impregnate one another or declare a blood feud against their dynastic rivals whenever their guards’ backs were turned.

While forcing the noble brats to cohabitate with commoners hadn’t come close to solving those problems—quite the opposite in one respect—it had significantly reduced both the frequency and volume of their incessant complaints. Now that the hostages had something to do with their time besides whining, feuding, and fucking, they had as a group thrown themselves into their academic studies. Apparently, there were standards to be upheld, and without fail, the nobles had strived to outperform their lowborn peers in every class and competition the Academy’s instructors could come up with.

From duelling tournaments to advanced runic theory, Typh’s academy had spent months educating—indoctrinating—the next generation of nobility and adventurers. She had initially been reluctant to include all of her secrets in their curriculum. Training humans to be better killers was an anxiety-inducing prospect, but again, Arilla had made the frustratingly salient point that Typh would be relying on the school’s graduates in the not-too-distant future. So she’d relented, and now her wealth of runic knowledge was transcribed and entrusted to the Academy’s librarians. 

While the ultimate aim was to make more competent classers, trying to teach the students to be more tolerant of nonhumans was an added, but very important bonus. The diverse collection of species that made up both the student cohort and the teaching staff were largely responsible for that gruelling task. It was simply harder to think of a ratling as ‘subhuman scum’ when one of them teaches ‘An Introduction to Modern Siegecraft’ and another let you copy their homework for that same class. Typh had been expecting the hostages to fight her obvious social manipulation more, and while there had been incidents, their almost daily escape attempts had steadily dwindled down to zero.

The humans were learning frighteningly fast, and within the warded grounds of her school, the future of Terythia—if not Astresia—was changing for the better. It was everything Typh had wanted for Helion, albeit confined to an academic institution only a tiny percentage of humanity would ever see, let alone attend.

And now its grounds were on fire. 

It hurt her to watch and wait as all of her hard work was systematically destroyed. It wasn’t a total loss, and a large part of her knew that the school’s hypothetical destruction was meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but its story had been tainted and that stung. The new warding had so far managed to keep the structural damage to a minimum, but Typh knew that once a place of learning was tainted with the stink of needless death, it was hard to come back from that.

The iron rankers had proven to be remarkably proficient in penetrating the wards etched into the Academy’s walls. They should have taken hours to batter down, but by the time Typh had arrived on the scene, the adventurers were already inside the school’s grounds and the majority of her soldiers were dead. The ‘battle’ had been swift and definitively one-sided. Close to a hundred corpses were scattered across the path leading to the main courtyard and all of the deceased bore Typh’s colours.

Still, the fighting wasn’t over. The staff, surviving guards, and a surprisingly large number of students had all taken up arms against the invading adventurers. Despite the overwhelming advantage the iron rankers possessed, they were progressing slowly and were currently holding a defensive position in the courtyard while small teams branched off from the bulk of adventurers to sweep the surrounding buildings for noble hostages.

Typh supposed their difficulties were largely down to their reluctance to attack children. Which, given her previous interactions with adventurers, was a genuine surprise. The dragon was unused to human classers being anything other than mercenary, and to see them retain a little decency was… unsettling.

A fresh wave of coordinated spellfire rippled out from the third-story windows facing the courtyard. Multi-toned lights of attack spells and skills shot out from a variety of different hands and rained down on the adventurers sheltering in the square below. Their arcane shields flared amber beneath the assault as the smell of ozone and burning rose up into the air to the sound of crackling lightning. Eventually, the barrage ceased and by the time the dust had cleared the magical dome protecting the adventurers had already turned back to an almost transparent hue. 

The thirty or so adventurers moving about beneath the defensive spell seemed unperturbed by the magical attack and made only a token effort at returning fire with a short volley of skill-enhanced arrows and manabolts of their own. Most of their attacks splashed or bounced harmlessly off of the school's masonry, but even with the powerful defensive wards etched deep into the buildings, it was clear to Typh that the adventurers were holding back.

“Tsk.”

“I take it you don’t approve?” Typh asked, and the woman beside her shook her head in confirmation.

“Of course, I don’t! If they were fighting back in earnest they’d be done by now. We stalled you plenty—no offence—but this part of the plan wasn’t supposed to take half as long. Look at them. They’re hunkered down behind barriers when they should be storming through walls. This doesn’t exactly look like a quick smash and grab,” Yara complained.

“They’re fighting children. They’re slowing down to avoid casualties. The level of restraint they’re showing is almost commendable,” Typh said.

“Teenagers with classes aren’t children. They’re mages, warriors, rogues, and worse. If they’re old enough to attack an iron-ranker then they’re old enough to accept what comes after,” Yara answered. “Besides, you’re giving them too much credit. Regix is a cold bastard. If he could easily tell which students were hostages and which were commoners, he’d have torn through this place by now.”

“Well then, I’m glad you’re here to soothe my conscience with your callous words,” the dragon said, and the one-eyed mercenary winked back at her salaciously.

“Whatever would you do without me?” the adventurer drawled.

“Be considerably wealthier,” Typh answered without hesitating.

“Please, you can afford it.”

Typh decided against dignifying that with a response. Not because Yara was wrong—the cannon sales to Tolis were doing wonders for her treasury—but because Typh loathed the idea of giving so much gold to someone she’d already beaten. Typh was the dragon. She should be demanding payment from her prey, not letting them bargain their way into her service. She tried to put the thoughts out of her head. Her instincts to hoard wealth were never helpful, and yet they stubbornly persisted in the growing face of logic, reality, and her ever-changing needs.

Typh tried to distract herself by watching the scene below unfold in a surprisingly comfortable silence. Despite Yara’s uncouth company to help break up the monotony, it was slow going. Adventurers trickled back and forth from the main bulk in the courtyard, often returning with a bound hostage in tow who would then be roughly deposited in the centre of their formation. It was frustrating to watch as they were using her own tactics against her. Typh had missed the window to send in her soldiers. If she gave the order now, then it was a near certainty that the noble scions she needed would be harmed. 

Iron rankers could extract them with far less collateral damage, but Typh simply didn’t have enough to match the adventurers. Which meant she’d have to use bronzes. In theory, four hundred would grant her a stalemate, and she’d need at least eight hundred for an easy victory. The reality was unsurprisingly more complicated than that. Adventurers arranged in a wedge would have an easy time of breaking through a bronze-ranked encirclement no matter what she did, and while she’d arranged for suitable numbers to lie in wait a few streets away, that kind of battle would be far too disorganised to get her the neat outcome she wanted.

Hence Yara’s recent employment.

Typh looked over her shoulder in time to catch the warrior about to poke the illusion they were hiding behind with a probing finger.

“Don't touch it,” the dragon chastised.

“I wasn’t!” Yara lied, and Typh couldn’t help but roll her eyes while the warrior discreetly withdrew her hand. “So… What exactly are we waiting for? Not that I don’t appreciate some alone time with a beauty such as yourself, but… shouldn’t I be down there by now?”

“No, not yet. We’re waiting for our moment,” Typh explained. 

“That sounds needlessly complex.”

“It isn’t,” the dragon stated as she turned to face her human companion. “You know, it genuinely frightens me how little your kind understands about our world.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of poorly veiled jibe? Because I understand ‘our world’ plenty. Might makes right. The strong rule over the weak, and gold is just about the only thing that can compel someone like me into listening to those I could crush under my heel,” the adventurer said with a mirthless grin.

“How very trite. I’m going to ignore the implication that you think you could take me—you can’t—and instead, I’m going to educate you further.”

“Why?”

“Because watching your peers round up hostages is boring. That, and I’m feeling generous.”

“Are you sure it's not because you're tempted to indulge your baser urges, and you think you’re more likely to have your wicked way with me if I’m suitably impressed by your draconic intelligence?” Yara asked.

“Hardly. We both know you’re a sure thing,” Typh said, and the other woman laughed. “Besides, even if I were interested—your eye socket is leaking.” 

It wasn’t, but for a moment the warrior lost all of her blustering self-confidence and cautiously dabbed at her cheek beneath her ruined eye.

“Bitch!” Yara eventually spat, but Typh had heard far worse thrown at her and with far more venom. Then the human started to chuckle and the dragon decided to carry on. 

“Tell me, warrior. What do they say about me in the south?” Typh asked.

“A lot of different and often conflicting things.” Yara shrugged. “Some say that you're just a normal mage with a unique class skill to let you take on the form of a dragon. Others claim that you're the real thing but bound by the Dragonrider’s will. There’s the one about a magical horn that controls your thoughts, allowing whoever blows it to rule Terythia. That you’re a living cataclysm sent by the Gods and that you’ll rule over the continent until we’ve atoned for our many, many sins. That you want to be Queen and rule over humanity—”

“That's nice, but what do the stories all have in common?” Typh interrupted.

“That you’re a powerful, man-eating monster who controls the Terythian throne… and fucks women,” Yara answered.

“And that belief helps make it true,” the dragon said with a smile.

“I don’t understand what you’re on about.”

“I know…” Typh said with a barely suppressed groan. “If you take one thing away from today, Yara, it should be this: if you can tell a good enough story, Creation itself will listen to you.” The warrior stared at Typh with a look of absolute confusion on her blood-splattered face. The dragon sighed and then continued. “Do you ever wonder why some adventurers can do more than others? How the ones with legends attached to their names seem to never die, or at least not at the same rate as those who don’t?”

“Everyone dies in the end. But yeah I know what you mean. There’s nothing to it though. Everyone—classed or not—has a story, we just remember the lucky ones who live big and forget those who die trying to do the same,” Yara said.

“You’re only half right. Everyone does die in the end, and trying for greatness is a good way to speed that end up. But sometimes a story gets big enough to take on a little life of its own. You can call that ‘luck’ if you want, but mark my words: someday when I’m up against an enemy I can’t beat, the fact that most of Terythia thinks I’m an all-powerful calamity sent by the Gods, an unstoppable force of nature, or just a mean bitch that you don’t fuck with, that belief will help me win against a no-name classer who happens to have a few levels on me,” Typh said and the adventurer was silent for a while.

“So what? You’re waiting for a suitably dramatic moment to save your people because you believe building a story is more important than winning?”

“Building a story and getting what I want is winning. How many many people would believe that I’m a ‘living cataclysm’ if I went down there now and very publicly struggled to beat the forty or so iron ranks trashing my school?”

“I think plenty would, not many monsters could handle half as many.”

“Plenty isn’t enough,” Typh snapped. “I’m not a monster—mere or otherwise—I am a dragon who intends to rule this country. I must be seen as unstoppable and unassailable. The survivors from this need to think that they never stood a chance, that they only survived through my grace. 

“I don’t have the luxury of building loyalty let alone legitimacy, all I have is fear and I will use it well. Below us, iron rankers are stealing back the children of Terythia’s Southern Lords and I need to teach everyone involved how very bad an idea it is to cross me. You lot are all centuries-old creatures, more classer than human, and I want you and your kin to be so terrified of me that you’ll spread my name in hushed whispers for a thousand years to come. 

“Today is the day I’ll build my legend. It wasn’t how I planned it, but this confrontation you’ve forced on me will serve me well, and if the cost is limited to my school, then I’ll gladly pay it.”

“That's uhm… You’ve thought about this a lot haven’t you?” Yara asked.

“Only every waking moment of every day... Unlike you adventurers who travel the continent chasing gold and women, I’m actually building something here. And a large part of that is dependent on a story. Later when the dust has settled, I’ll grieve for my school and the blood that was spilt here, but not half as much as I would grieve if mere iron-ranks walked away from this spreading the word that I can be killed.”

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“That’s all well and good, but you realise that this whole watching and waiting for the right moment to step in while your people are dying isn’t particularly heroic? It would be one thing if you were waiting until you could win, but to delay just so others can tell a story about how ‘unstoppable’ you were… that’s not just cold—I’m pretty sure that’s evil,” Yara said.

“Most mercenaries don’t agree to betray their allies for gold and then go on to immediately criticise their employer’s morality.”

The warrior shrugged.

“I’m not most people. I know that I’m not a saint, but you realise that this makes you worse than me, right?”

“I have never once claimed to be any shade of heroic. I’m happy to be considered evil—just so long as I get to be queen,” Typh answered and once again, Yara laughed.

“You know, in all the stories you seem so fond of, evil queens never get to sit on the throne for long.”

The dragon smiled wide, flashing her teeth at her temporary companion.

“Watch me.”

***

When it was time, and the number of hostages in the centre of the adventurers’ formation had grown to include nearly all of those studying at the academy, Typh sent Yara down to earn her gold. The warrior quickly floated to the ground on motes of mana from behind the relative safety of yet another illusion. If anyone had been watching carefully, then they might have seen a faint shimmer falling through the air, but illusion-piercing skills were rare, and humans who looked up were even rarer still. 

When she hit the ground, the spell broke and Yara started to sprint down the road towards the Academy’s gates. She unceremoniously stepped over the shattered wards and ruined gates, past the corpses that littered the ground, and made a beeline for the adventurers in the square. By now, fires had raged to consume most of the three original buildings facing the courtyard with only the newer five remaining intact. The dragon experienced a brief moment of trepidation while she surveyed the damage and waited on her traitor-adventurer to do their job. 

Yara certainly couldn’t be trusted, and while Typh hoped that the warrior was swayed by the large amount of gold on offer, there was no way to know for sure, and that ate at her. From her vantage point in the clouds, Typh could only watch and imagine the words that were exchanged while Yara spoke with Regix, this group’s leader. Typh knew the plan, or at least, she knew what the warrior had said she would say, but as the minutes trickled past the dragon’s anxiety grew. 

Yara was supposed to request reinforcements to help the rest of her group cut their way through an encirclement after one of them had ‘scored a lucky hit’ that had stunned the ‘dragon’ and allowed it to be captured. The lie was simple and hopefully effective. The twenty iron rankers Typh had already faced were all equipped with dragonslaying weapons and the idea that Yara’s group had been successful, but were currently pinned inside a house should be believable enough.

Typh had tasked Yara with pulling four squads of adventurers away from the Academy, reducing the number searching the grounds from forty down to twenty. Given how close Regix was to being done rounding up the hostages, Typh had good reason to hope that Yara would be successful in this. But in the end, the warrior left the crumbling campus with just ten adventurers trailing in her wake. The thirty or so remaining under Regix’s command were considerably more than Typh was comfortable handling, but their numbers were reduced enough that she couldn’t justify waiting much longer.

She counted down the seconds while she waited for Yara to reach her destination—a lovely little townhouse not too far from the Academy, which just so happened to be suffering from a particularly nasty vampire infestation. Typh refused to feel guilty for sending the warrior into that deathtrap unaware. Yara thought she was leading her peers into a house where iron-ranks loyal to Typh were lying in wait. While it was true that there were iron-ranks in the building, none of them were under Typh’s command nor were they prone to accepting surrenders from those they saw as food. But that was Yara’s problem to deal with. Maybe next time—if there was one—she’d pay attention when Typh explained her intention to teach adventurers the consequences of crossing a dragon.

Once enough time had passed to guarantee no adventurers would be dashing back to the Academy, Typh started casting spells. The mana answered her call as it always did, but this working was particularly complex and a far cry from the simple applications of heat and force that she usually favoured. She held a myriad of different runes in her head, as she chained overlapping spells together to create a tapestry of interwoven intents that was more than just deadly—it was a piece of art. 

Violent storm clouds grew to fill the otherwise empty sky. They gave birth to jagged forks of golden lightning that struck the grounds of the Academy almost at random. Each strike caused great eruptions of molten soil to rise up into the air, only to rain down on those below them while the sound of crashing thunder grew to cacophonous levels.

It was dark as night when Typh allowed herself to drop from the sky. She fell to earth with a golden corona of light illuminating her against the dark. She could feel the eyes of her city upon her as her dress billowed in the tempestuous winds and the storm she had conjured blew through her outstretched fingers. Her gold-flecked eyes blazed with arcane power that leaked out from her body, crackling into visible spectrums of vibrant mana that raced over her skin in an electric display of casual power she hoped nobody would see through.

Fighting thirty well-prepared iron ranks by herself was suicide. No trick she had would let her overcome that numerical obstacle. She knew that, but they didn’t. Typh was a sovereign dragon. The rarest of a rare breed of ‘monsters’ rarely seen in Terythia. Their comings and goings were legendary occurrences and Typh had put a lot of effort into building on that legend. Dragons killed cities or claimed them for their own. They decimated armies, stole princesses and princes. They demanded tributes and offered only tribulations, but what they never did was lose. 

While runes for dragonslaying were well known amongst human runescribes, actual dragonslayers were rare enough that the names of those mythic few could be counted on one hand. Looking down at the adventurers cowering beneath the arcane dome, Typh knew that none of those esteemed classers were present.

With a twist of will, the sky cracked and vomited forth a barrage of golden lightning. Each jagged bolt struck the arcane dome in rapid succession and was accompanied by the overlapping crash of nearby thunder. The transparent barrier rapidly transitioned through a rainbow of colours before it finally hit red and dramatically shattered. A pair of mages fell to the ground streaming blood from their eyes, and then the spell stopped.

Typh halted her descent while she was still some thirty feet above the ground, and it was then that she decided to talk.

“You are all trespassing in my city,” Typh warned. Her voice boomed and rumbled with the crack of lightning splitting the sky. 

The dragon watched the humans below her flinch in response to every harsh syllable. Their reaction was so intense, that for once, hearing her own voice plunge into the bassy lows barely even caused a wave of internalised revulsion. She slowly turned her head over the gathered thirty and inhaled the delicious stench of their collective fear. Each one of the adventurers standing before her was mighty. A living legend in deed if not in story. The challenges they had to overcome to reach iron rank were not trivial, but that carefully cultivated patience which had done so well to keep them alive for centuries had made them cautious when they needed to be bold.

They should have struck then. They had the mages to swat her from the sky, and the warriors to carve her to shreds once she transformed. Instead, the humans did the stupid thing and spoke to her like she could be negotiated with.

“We’ll be leaving then. And we’ll take these brats with us in case you’re having any ideas,” Regix said, effortlessly lifting one such ‘brat’ to their feet and placing a surprisingly brutish weapon against their jugular for emphasis. 

Typh paused for a moment. 

Regix was rogue tagged, which was unusual for someone in a leadership position. He was tall, rugged, and classically handsome in all the ways that Typh found to be utterly uninteresting. The only thing she could say in the rogue's favour was that he’d chosen a poor hostage to threaten her with. Regix’s sharp knife dug in just a little bit, and a thin trickle of blood ran down the throat of Lady Sennia of House Nauron. 

Typh watched the woman who’d once been offered up as Arilla’s bride squirm, and saw her legs tremble in fear. Then the dragon’s stomach rumbled loudly as the rich scent of noble blood finally reached her nose. She didn’t even try to hold back a predatory grin as the object of a very short-lived rivalry was thrust into danger.

“I’m afraid that won’t be happening. Those hostages are mine. The only way I’ll be letting them go is in pieces or after their parents have sworn fealty to me,” Typh said. “In fact, I think I’ll offer you all a similar bargain.

“Kneel. Pledge yourselves to my cause and I’ll let you live. Anything else, and I’ll feed you to the vampires like I did with Yara.”

“Vampires aren’t real,” Regix said almost reflexively. Typh only grinned wider as the muttering started. They had an audience and the twenty-nine other adventurers clearly didn’t like where this was going.

“If we haven’t resolved this by nightfall you can tell them that yourself. But let's not get distracted. My soldiers have surrounded the Academy’s grounds. None of you will leave this city alive without my consent. You took too long rounding up your hostages, and now it's over.

“Submission or death is the only choice you have left,” Typh announced.

“Goblinshit! There’s thirty of us and only one of you!” Regix yelled.

“I’m a dragon, whereas you’re just a man.”

Regix still looked confident, but that really didn’t matter. It was the others that she cared about. Of the thirty, another four were steadfast—Regix’s original band of five if she had to guess—but of the remaining twenty-five… Typh saw doubts. They may have been fleeting, but they were there, and she could work with that.

“So, are you going to cut off her head or not? I really don’t like her, and I’ve been looking for an excuse to eat a hostage for a while now,” Typh explained. Lady Sennia chose this moment to scream loudly into Regix’s hand, and the adventurer finally realised that he wasn’t getting out of the square without a fight.

“You really are a bloodthirsty bitch aren’t you.”

“I am. Now if you want to live, get down and kneel for me.”

“I don’t think so… My boys and I have been free for too long to submit to the likes of you. We live a good life going where the gold is, and if it's a choice between dying violently and being chained to a tyrant's rule… I choose violence,” Regix said.

The adventurer dropped his hostage to the ground who meekly crawled away while all around him, adventurers stepped forwards and drew their weapons. The beginnings of spells blossomed into existence at the end of runestaves and wands. Swords rasped as they slid out of scabbards and the sound of creaking wood, oiled leather and clanking steel momentarily rose above the still crashing thunder.

They were actually going to fight her. Even if she won, she’d lost.

“The lady said kneel!”

The compulsion to obey caught Typh completely off guard. It was so strong and unexpected that it neatly slipped past her mental defences and saddled her with the urge to take a knee whilst hovering in the air. She knew immediately that it wasn’t mind magic—it was something far more dangerous. Typh’s skill-enhanced senses screamed with alarm as she felt Creation bend around her. For a brief, hair of a moment, the rules that underpinned everything broke, and a woman in a black cloak who was more story than human, rode a grumpy old horse down the broken flagstones of the Academy’s bloodstained path.

Arilla Foundling. 

[King level 104].

Typh swallowed. She didn’t know if it was with jealousy, fear, or lust. In consideration, it was definitely all three.

Below her, the adventurers who’d been willing to die rather than submit to her now knelt in the still-warm ashes next to the hostages they’d once taken. Without a drop of blood being spilt, Arilla had done what Typh couldn’t. It was all over, and with that last achievement a legend had been well and truly born.

It just wasn’t hers.

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