“My mouth lay agape witnessing the man, the great huntsman, stripped to nothing but ionized atoms, curling and fluttering into blackened moths in the air, vaporized in an instant like he was engulfed by the void of death itself…”

Ominous, ghastly smog billowed from the barren surroundings, settling across the mountains and painting the jagged horizon in shades of sage dusk. The winding dirt trail snaked through the gathering darkness, surrounded by silhouetted decaying hills and towers of cracked stone, the trail Adder and I flew over now. It was eerily quiet, the silence punctuated by the alertful squawks of my mount and howling winds tainted with yeasty miasma that burned to breathe.

“You could take a butter knife and cut the air, the atmosphere is so thick…” said Adder. The vapor picks at the synthetic meat of my lungs like a dismantling machine with every shallow breath I take. I caught the cough in my throat when Adder spoke again, his low oily voice reverberating off the staggering rock walls as he shared his caution.

“Hark,”  he waved his gloved hand to garner my focus. “To the east, those sheddings…” he prods the mustard air with his cane, pointing our gaze to veils of shed skin dancing in the wind, caught upon the jutting, sharp bulwarks of minerals and ore that trapped us.

“Dragon skin,” he muttered… Dragon. The name sent my heart straight to my throat.

Suddenly, I was back in that tipsy boat, gently paddling in a narrow river among crystallized bioenergy to my next quest, shifting uncomfortably between my crewmate, the same I flew with today, packed like sardines fully suited in my low-tier armor with a hefty sledge hammer in hand. I was in no state to fight, no state to prepare myself for what was to come, but how could I? When you’re scooped up in the dead of night, told to pack your best weapons and armor, and take along a satchel of the strongest potions the devs has to offer, you know. You know it’s something big you couldn’t possibly ever prepare for.

When the cramped, wooden ferry skidded against the rock ledge where land and sea met, we stumbled upon the nest. It was buried deep in a cave that reeked of fresh river water and rot, isolated from the rest of humanity, awaiting in the cradle of a ribcage from fallen elder dragons of the ages… A giant egg, bigger than any deserted building I had ever seen before. It was… nerve-wracking to be in the same room as it, to say the least.

Just as I was scooping up shards of bone from the mulchy ground, suddenly came a booming crack, reverberating through the rocky walls of the cave and my bones like a resonant chord of a choir bouncing off the walls of an auditorium. Then came another, and another, the egg was hatching before our eyes. It was a twisted miracle of birth, a birth of death and malice itself.

Before I could scramble to any sort of defensive stance, the shell burst open, and out came an infant dragon thrashing violently against the strong thread that bound it like a Cicadeer in a pitfall trap, shooting giant whips of fire bursting through and cascading along the reflective walls.

A monstrous fleshy newborn of flame emerged, adorned with baby blue, soft scales, transparent like glass to reveal vulnerable, squishy organs radiating a mysterious coral red, as if its thundering heart was pumping luciferin instead of hemoglobin through its veins. It clumsily fluttered free like a newly hatched butterfly from its cocoon before a terrible ear-splitting shriek erupted from the abhorrence, one like none before and none ever again, unimprisoning a plague of heartache and war unto us all.

Contrary to any prior enemy’s articulated, repetitive attacks, easy to avoid once you familiarize yourself, its attacks were sporadic and unpredictable, plasma offset and following no specific pattern, vomiting out hordes of magma in all directions, leaving us scrambling like frightened bugs, narrowly avoiding the mighty boot of the alien, eager to squash us like the puny critters we were in its eyes.

From its throat came piercing shrieks and wails I was sure to never forget, and beams of seething energy that nearly annihilated us to ash. And it was understandable, the first thing this infant felt when it was introduced into this world was pain.

But we had to slaughter it, for who knows what this thing could grow into if it was already this massive and powerful fresh out of the egg. When we assumed it was charging for an attack and darted out of range, the ground gave into its weight and buckled, and every time we thought it was going to repeat the mistake, it tricked us, allowing us to get close before sending its fist crashing into the geodes and blasting us away.

Mischievous, cheeky, like a child… So, the hunters tested the child’s patience.

Instead of violent blows or lacerations, I pounded its head in with hammers to give it a mind-splitting headache, and Adder sprayed it with poison darts potent enough to sting, rather than kill. With this risky tactic, we hoped that the frustration would cave it in, make its childish temper boil over, and cause it to pull a move far too powerful for its capabilities, and luckily… it did.

High to the heavens, it curled in a fetal position, festering all energy deep in its glowing chest, and with a ground-shaking screech, exploded, a final blow of unbridled voltage that would’ve surely one-shotted us if we hadn’t narrowly avoided it behind the large geodes strewn about the arena. Once we could finally blink away the flash, what lay before us was a pitifully squirming dragon, stunned.

The entire fight was a long haze, and nobody remembers who delivered the killing blow, but one thing was for certain. The disaster of a newborn was gone, and we stood victorious before the lifeless creature, and the rest… was history. Once I logged my save, and returned to my spawn, I was greeted with a cutscene of cheer, praise, drinks, and celebration, but despite my best efforts to occupy myself with the party for slaying the possibly world-ending monster, I couldn’t shake the underlying unease creeping in the back of my mind like a stalking nocturnal speartail cloaked in its iconic shade.

This was an unseen boss, not even in logs you could find its asset. Was this a bug? A manifestation of ones and zeros that came to life to fight us? It was a frightening thing to think about…

I looked at the dragon of fire, deep into its amber eyes, and I saw no boss. I saw a monster. A being that made no sense, on any level I could conceptualize. There was only death and brimstone, a vessel for wrath itself, a cast iron cannon.

Fighting that thing, it felt as if I was fighting something not meant for me. Maybe I was overreacting, it was just a game, and yet… It shook me.

And now, the hollow skin of the beast lay before me, swaying gently in the wind like a waving red flag, a declaration of war. It was an eye-opener that hit us like a tidal wave, a realization that sent a torrential downpour of dread upon us.

The beast we defeated all those moons ago, it wasn’t the only of its kind, and the tyrant's matured, vengeful brother… was waiting.

Something large bellowed off the rugged walls in a trickle of stone. And then came another noise, weight colliding against stone, and before we even realized what was happening, a boulder came barreling from above, near bludgeoning Adder who narrowly managed to swoop away in time.

Panic amongst the mounts ensued, the alarmed shrieks and frenzied flaps of their vibrant wings echoed in the chamber of rot, desperate to avoid the crumbling tor, and even over the clamor, I could hear the whining ting of oncoming meteors flying wild from the rubble and plummeting downward for us. I fisted the harness and swerved sharply to the side, avoiding another pelting rock.

And then there was a change in sound, a strange hum that rose quickly into a howling scream. I looked up and saw a mammoth, red blur dip down, spiked tail swinging around in an erratic, jerking arc, teetering sideways, blades slamming into the packed mud of the mountains with a tremendous crash.

The winged brute laden with imperishable vermillion scales plowed across in a curtain of screeching sparks and earth, practically ripping the air apart to the very molecule as it dove down. Its wings shoot open in a wide, catch-all stance as it dove down, and the tip of its taloned wing finger sliced effortlessly through my mount, viciously halving it and sending it twirling below with me, followed by the Adder who couldn’t withstand the whipping surge of heated wind. 

We crashed into the hungry abyss, swallowed whole by a sorrel mycobacterial haze, pursued by the seething dragon. With the swift descent, I had no time to brace myself and took a harsh tumble, rolling across the barren soil like a hunk of metal to a grindstone, and ultimately losing consciousness.

Chapter one

. . .

I awake alone to the pungent odor of rotten cabbage piercing my nostrils, fostering a cloud of nausea that rings around my head. My brain feels dead, swirling around like thick liquor in a shot glass, and I’m stumbling like a drunk to regain my balance.

I scrunch my nose, and cup my temple. It’s wet with the sweat on my brow, I thought, but when I glance at my hand, my fingertips are stained blue from the generous outpour of ichor.

Jets of blood, like beautiful liquid sapphire, spewed from a cut on my scaly head, accompanied by sparks and frayed wires jutting out.

“Owie…”

My trembling hand gingerly squeezes the laceration to gauge the severity, shooting a lighting bolt of electric pain down my entire left side.

I release a hissing mewl through my stained teeth and reel my head back.

Okay, come on, you can do this.

I sluggishly grope my bag, and shake it for all it's got. Potions fall and attempt to make a jailbreak down the askew rocky soil before I feverishly scoop them up and take a swig of two at once, double parking them. The chilled, lime-green essence rolls down my grimy chin, and my eyes glaze with relief.

Warmth flushes through my body like I’d just downed a pint of booze as the mystical potion works its magic, and I relish in this fleeting moment of bliss. I feel my wounds closing up, as my skin starts to tighten around the cut, pulled by invisible stitches, ready to reconnect. It takes a few minutes, but the laceration is gone, not even a scar left behind, proof of its existence only being the coagulating blood staining my metal arm.

I take a deep breath to steel myself and call out to Adder, and immediately hack up my lungs from breathing in the flesh-eating bacteria.

Damnit, get it together, Larry!

WHOOOOSH

Flame springs up after an immediate sputtering boom, lighting the parched soil in a burning titian glow. At the same instant, something in the floor gave with a rending crunch, as the brawny leg of the same crimson leviathan plunged into the earth to mount itself up from its fall.

It was back.

I stood up on legs I barely felt, staring in disbelief at the leaping fire that suddenly dominated almost half of the land in a daunting circle. It all happened too fast for me to feel like it happened at all, and the smoking, burning evidence in front of me only made a sense of unreality greater. The acrid, sickly sweet odor of burning meat wafted over me in a wave of heated air, making my stomach churn at the prospect of it being the five members in curling, popping flames I was smelling.

The beast had landed within the wedge of two mountains, and was worming its way free, before it paused. Its disdainful slit pupils locked with my terrified gaze, and it craned its slender neck high to glare me down. If looks could kill, I’d be a dead man. It felt like I already was, my stomach was gutted with dread like cattle and I had already suffered a beating by the elements. The dragon gracefully leapt over and its landing shook the earth, and from its back stretched two speckled wings with a tremendous SWISH.

Its wing membrane curtains the rocky mountains and flashes with dazzling constellations, and it felt as if I was chained by my wrists watching a bull, a tank with hooves, furiously swinging its gargantuan horns on the sand toward me.

Fear speared deep into my hammering heart, spurring a deep, primal instinct within, and I did something foolish. I ran.

A hare, a puny animal of prey, sprinting across the gouged earth in hot pursuit of this terrible wolf, the ground trembling with each mighty footstep and throwing my rabbiting pace crooked. Something in the beast’s brain switched from standing guard to hunting, and it was hot on my tail.

Then, there was my savior, a large mound of hardened mud with a hollowed out den from within, my glimmer of hope.

Oh, thank the Lord!

I dive into the muck like an olympic swimmer, though much less graciously. The behemoth follows, shoving its armored snout into the entrance, gnashing, sharp teeth grinding against the stone, maw reeking of evil-smelling slime. It’s forked tongue flurries into the crevice, just barely grazing my leg, exerted to feast upon my supple flesh. The entrance began to give, cracking and groaning like old bones carrying too many years, and a cloud of loose filth dusted my shoulders from the ceiling.

Panic seized my heart and without thinking, I snagged a flashbang from my bag and hurled it with all my strength to the ground, squeezing my eyes shut. It erupts into a blinding gleam, and the stunned beast roars in pain, violently shaking my eardrums.

Rrriiinnnngggg….

I loll my head back and clasp my ears, gone near completely deaf. For a moment, there's a horrible, whining trill that slowly drones into silence when I’m regaining my composure, and once I tentatively lower my hands, only the sound of blood rushing through my ears and a palpitating heart beating against my bruised ribs greets me.

My squeezed, teary eyes peek at the entrance, and I find that it's gone, having made a begrudging escape.

A shaky sighed escaped my parted lips, a breath that felt like a roar in the eerie silence. Then it hit me. Adder was somewhere amidst the devouring flames, he could still be alive, but now the dragon was looking for them too… Maybe I could save his stuff before it's eaten by the flames to return to him, if he is dead.

I have to find him.

Reluctantly crawling out my hidey-hole, I rose to my clumsy feet, and called out to my lost comrade. I was a baby bird that plummeted from the nest, crying for mama.

“Adder!”  I yell, but the snarl of flame drowns out my cries,

“Adder?! I’m here, I’m alive!” and the cavern echoed to me, a mocking “I’m here, I’m alive,”

I stare beyond the inferno with a bitter, hopeless gaze, and the hot air dances into warped faces that flicker into waning moths in the sky, teasing me, whispering in that oily, crackling voice “All your friends are past you now. Give in.”

I swallowed the lump building in my throat.

If I’m still alive, he must be too—

The contents in my stomach threaten to stain the dry dirt beneath my heavy boots with bile, urging me to disconnect myself.

No! Not when I’m this far, I have to do this, or I’ll lose it all.

I march toward the blaze, suddenly filled with vigor.

Chapter two

. . .

“Adder?!” I cried. “Adder, where are you?”

“Larry!” echoed back, and I whipped my head back to find, under a pile of rubble, a gloved paw waving me over. “Larry! Oh, you’re alive!” I hastily dust off the rocks from the avian and pull him free. He shakes soil clinging to his beak and wearily rests his head on my shoulder.

“I was suffocating in there, good thing you came, I was about to quit,” he chuckles.

I scoop him up in my arms like a superhero to a rescue and assess his injuries. A few frayed wires and dents, but he otherwise appears in good health.

I grab a health potion from my tattered bag and offer it to him, but then feel a bit stupid when I realize he couldn’t drink it thanks to his mask.

“Uhh…” I resort to the next best thing and practically waterboard him with the health potion, and thankfully, his body readjusts itself back into shape. Adder didn’t look very happy about it though, hat soggy, and a furious glint in his goggles.

It takes him a moment, but he stands up and brushes himself off.

“What happened?” he groggily asks.

“Something attacked us, I don’t know where it is now,” I wince, eyes drawn to the curtain of flames in front of us. “But we have to call a rescue team, where’s a farcaster?”

His crooked tail twitches, and concern flickers on his grimy face.

“Do you still have your stuff?”

The plague doctor lazily pats himself down to find his pockets unusually hollow, and he frantically runs to the pile of earth that previously swallowed him up.

“Noo!” He yowls in anguish to see his belongings shattered and strewn across the rubble, drowned by the snarl of fire, and my eyebrows knit with sympathy for him.

He slumps down to his knees, and I awkwardly pat his back.

“Damn… Well, you can always get it back, you know?”

“It took me thirty hours to get all that stuff!”

I wince.

“We gotta reload,” he frantically suggests, to which I stomp my foot with a stern “Absolutely not! I’m not going through all this again,”

He huffs, and rises from the rubble. I see him cycle through his inventory, settling for his backup, dinky little sword. I hold back a snort at the sight of it.

The louring clouds roared, the air thickened with suffocating dread, and the ground quivered beneath our disoriented feet.

“Oh no,”

And true to our petrified anticipation, this storm brought a terrible monstrosity emerging from the fire, the dragon! Fiercely lunging at us to pull into its hungry, smokey maw dribbling with evil smelling slime. It was something out of a love-craftian horror, appalling beyond comprehension, and holding no will but to seek destruction, glinting clear in its bloodthirsty gaze and hefty yet weightlessly agile strides toward us.

The guttural, resounding bellow that escaped its gravelly throat was more than enough to drain the cochineal color from my cheeks and make my pounding heart stop, though immediately jumpstarting to a palpitating, rib-breaking pace like a sputtering, faulty engine when the great behemoth barreled toward him.

The earth groaned like old bones carrying too many years, craters forming with each thunderous step as it voraciously hurtled toward us terrified hunters like a famished wolf.

But I did not run this time, for now, I had my friend.

With a charged, sprinting swing of my unforgiving hammer, I send the blunt weapon crashing into its slender snout. CRUNCH!  The gruesome outcry of scales snapping like celery echoed through the bowels of the land, followed by a guttural, earth-rumbling screech from the behemoth. It countered this with a devastating swing that felt as if it sent me around the earth twice, before crashing into the water-forsaken dirt like a fiery comet, with halved health.

The carnal behemoth stretched its massive wings to the heavens and rose, knocking us back with a powerful gust of wind with one stupendous flap, riding the current of the foul, static air. We flailed to get our footing again.

I ungracefully toppled over myself, biting back a grunt of agony as rock jabbed deep into my ribs, knocking the breath straight out of my lungs. As I lay pathetically on the ground, wheezing raspily to replenish my stamina, I watch on in horror as the beast scythed pure energy from its chest and raise it to its taloned paws like the current of electricity in a power line, but much more fierce, and then, an orb no larger than a tooth of a compressed inferno formed in its palm.

I instinctively scrambled to the nearest boulder like a frightened hare, terrified of what was to come, waiting for Adder to follow, yet the sword-wielder was a second too late. With a guttural bellow, it sent the burning powder keg crashing to the dirt, and as soon as it made an impact, all was red.

Unadulterated, violent, pure energy blasted in every direction, like a dying neutron star bursting into a beautiful, glimmering supernova, and the unlucky swordsman… vanished. In a flicker, the man was gone, life extinguished like a dwindling tealight caught in a breeze.

In one moment, he was fighting this crimson-scaled elder dragon and the next, he was mere plasma particles drifting in the air, the only remaining essence of the extraordinary master-rank hunter.

My mouth lay agape witnessing the man, the great huntsman, stripped to nothing but ionized atoms, curling and fluttering into blackened moths in the air, vaporized in an instant like he was engulfed by the void of death itself… It was only when the beast glowered at me, enraged at how I had swiftly taken cover behind the now crumbling tor, and by this point… I was completely done.

I finally logged out without saving, and wished to forget this game ever existed.

Damnit, he’s not gonna be happy about that.