342 - Slay the Dragon Pt. 2/The Governor Gets a Call [Sturmblitz] (Patreon)

Plates all across the armor slid out of the way, revealing a mixture of vents, heatsinks, and thrusters on the back and legs, inspired by Zero’s G-3 refit. A deluge of bloody Fog erupted from the suit, trailing behind it as Makhus shattered the ground and went soaring skyward.

The taste of blood and the burn of gastric acid filled his mouth.

He didn’t care.

This was the only way he could be good enough.

Pinning the dragon the way Lydia had done was one thing; it was a well-documented weakness, but one that could not be used to deliver a lethal blow. The beast’s braincase was far too resilient, absurdly thick and impervious to concussion. The only way was beheading, and due to the beast’s interlocked vertebrae, that was a feat comparable to severing a solid beam of high-grade cold-iron.

A matte-black bullet crashed down upon the beast, possessing a white tail formed from Fog and a burning blade of white light. In a single cut, the Wildfire Kite’s head was parted from its body, and the slash carried forward into the forest, splitting trees and boulders and wounding the earth; not as a ponderous shockwave, but an instantaneous flash of killing light.

SEVERING SCRIPTURE FRAGMENT

CLAD IN IRON WITHOUT

AND FIRE COURSING WITHIN

WITH TOTAL CLARITY OF MIND

SURPASS THE LIMITS EARTHLY

BREAK THEM

A DESCENDANT OF DRAGONS

BEHEADED WITH ONE CUT

THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH

PARTED BY A STUBBORN FOOL

SOUL-SWORD-SINGLE-STRIKE

HURRICANE THUNDERCLAP GUILLOTINE

All fell silent and still.

As the Wildfire Kite's body froze solid in the moment of its death and its lifeblood fountained out of the stump of its neck, the three-eyed figure of Elder Makhus stood just as motionless. It appeared as if he was challenging the dragon-descendant's body to make an attempt at reunion with its head, or vice versa.

It didn't matter what Makhus was actually thinking.

It didn't matter how he felt, or how he saw himself, or the mixture of elation, surprise, and pain coursing through him.

At that moment, he had taken another step away from the shores of humanity.

Makhus Newman, the Dragon-beheading Sword.

Dazed and confused, for more reasons than the enormous G-forces and the cocktail of elixirs coursing through him, Makhus dropped his sword, muttering into his helmet: “Helmet, off.”

Kept upright only by his armour, Makhus ambled over to the great beast’s gushing neck-stump and slotted a storage tablet into his belt. From his palm erupted a vortex of Fog, manifesting a giant tub of rune-inscribed copper to catch the blood.

He pinged Lydia asking for help, while he half-mindedly pulled items out of storage tablets and observed his surroundings.

The possibility of the dragon feigning death remained, and they could not afford to damage its vital organs to the degree that would be required to ensure a true death no matter what.

Thus, they had to guard the corpse until the sect’s harvesters came, tending to their wounds as they did so. Having access to tens of liters in fresh dragon blood certainly helped.

______________________________________________________________________________

The sound of ringing ripped Crovacus Estoras from his peaceful slumber. He instantly shot up in his chair, his mind already racing - he had fallen asleep at his desk, and had even dreamt of the matters at hand. The moment he was awake, he was ready. Without a moment’s thought, he downed the contents of his mug, this being about a deciliter and a half of faintly-glowing blue liquid. Tengri’s Tears; a fancy liquid vigor spiked with daytime dust.

He turned off the alarm clock, poured himself another cup of Tengri’s Tears, and returned to his paperwork.

But no more than twenty minutes later, he heard that ringing again. For a few moments he wondered if he was trapped in a multi-layered dream, but then he realized it was the aetherwave receiver. He stared into empty space for a moment, sipping his drink before setting it back down. Then, he got up and made his way to the receiver.

Several minutes passed as Crovacus listened to the voice at the other end, during which he quickly went from standing at the machine to pacing nervously like a tiger, dragging the handset’s serpentlike cable behind himself. He took out a terribly expensive imported cigar and began smoking it.

“...Less than a thousand civilian survivors? What of-”

Silence reigned for minutes more as Crovacus listened with bated breath to a very rough and only mostly accurate account of the incident.

“Demonic cultivators? Iusticia spare us. Rigport is as good as lost, then… I suppose it solves the issue of housing the displaced, assuming the city’s infrastructure hasn’t been destroyed beyond use. Contact the others in the Free Cities Alliance. Yes, even the Red Lady. We must ensure whatever is left of the city comes under our control, even if that means shipping a gaggle of war veterans there - you know as well as I the value of such a trade hub just by virtue of its location. I hope we can at least leverage the incident’s potential damage to obtain some relief. You seem awfully hesitant to speak of her. Do we have another Blue Moon War situation at hand?”

In his mind, if the threat was resolved, it wasn’t even a question whether Zelsys Newman was alive or not. He had learned that her relationship with death was a purely cordial one the year prior, after all. Whether she would be in any state to fight again in the next six months, however… That was anyone’s guess.

The voice at the other end spoke up again.

“...Her lungs? Coughed them up, you say?”

In the end, that turned out to be an immense overstatement, but the Newman Sect’s founder was nonetheless incapacitated for some time. It was no wonder; all individuals involved in the incident were, at best, utterly drained and severely rattled by the incident.

And so, as the aftermath of the Eberheim Incident rang out through the country and news of it carried across the continent, those involved in that historical event spent their days resting in a manner that would seem psychotic to any normal mortal. Elixirs, medicinal baths, meditative trances deep in the sect’s Leyline Well, numerous small tournaments, all of this and more fell under the umbrella of “rest and recovery” for the Newman Sect’s brave heroes.