The first indication that the Red Dragon had of my intentions was when I turned broadside and unloaded a full salvo of twenty-four Pulsed Proton Bolts into their left wing, my targeting computers enabling near-perfect placement of the c-fractional plasma shots, delivering a total kinetic energy roughly equivalent to six kilotons of TNT. Even the excessively durable scales of a Grand Dragon were hard-pressed to withstand such a pounding, and the plasma shots shredded the joint keeping the lifting surface attached.

Obviously, this caused the Dragon to immediately lose control of their flight path, tumbling out of control to faceplant in a field just outside the city walls of Regno Prima. This presented a minor issue, as with that proximity to the city I could not fire my main battery without causing unacceptable damage to the citizens of the place. On the other hand, I had my secondary weapons to make use of; swiftly, my Relative Conjuration broadside clicked into place for its firing solution.

I was indeed almost about to fire when the Red Dragon momentarily recovered, opening fire with the Grand Dragon's take on Proton Beam weaponry. The mana field I had surrounding my chassis held up to the blast admirably, but I didn't want to take any chances with how fast it was being worn down. Therefore, I slammed my thrusters to maximum acceleration, quickly dodging out of the beam.

WARNING!: Adventurers have teleported into the dungeon!

Briefly, I split my focus to the attractor panel in my forehull, even as I ordered my Relative Conjuration guns to fire. It looked like I had a group of about thirty heavily-armed individuals aboard, all wearing a distinctly familiar model of armor. Drake Guard.

Outside my hull, the first salvo of RC gun shots slammed home, shattering bones and punching large holes in the Grand Dragon's hide, though the dragon' skull and forward ribcage were apparently tough enough to bounce the shots. Seriously, who even designed these creatures!?

Internally, the situation was significantly more dire; the radiation trap in the teleport receiver room had fired for all of a few seconds before the boarding party had disabled it, applying healing magic before they continued on into a corridor. A corridor which I had coincidentally ordered obstructed by about eight Clockwork Knights. The casualties quickly began to mount among both my constructs and the adventuring party, as radswords removed limbs, various weapons put dents in Clockworks, and the corridor quickly became caked with a thick layer of deadly Sodium 24.

The situation with the Dragon outside meanwhile quickly resolved itself, as a Relative Conjuration shot went right down their throat in between bouts of nuclear firebreathing, punching a massive hole out the back of their neck in the process, and probably severing the spine since the Red Dragon stopped moving and keeled over.

This only left the contingent of Drake Guard, who were still going strong despite the quite bluntly excessive amount of radiation they were being exposed to, and had almost made it to the end of the corridor where they were currently held up. Admittedly they'd lost six members, but still. Fortunately, there wasn't anything too important in the room they were about to enter, but I would rather end this sooner instead of later.

Therefore, I pumped out all the oxygen present in that room, and replaced it with a mix of Hydrogen Cyanide and Hydrogen Sulphide. As the Drake Guard eventually bashed down my excessively reinforced door, I commented over the intercom "You know, both the blue dragon and the red dragon are dead now. If you surrender I'll let you live."

The first few to enter the room went down from the deadly cocktail of poison gas, before the rest quickly put up air bubble spells. One of them replied, saying "You lie! The country of Regno will ALWAYS be ruled by a Grand Dragon, for no other being can claim the life of one such as them!"

In response, I projected the footage of my final deadly shot against the Red Dragon against the wall, and noted "That image is not faked. It was pulled directly from my memories; I killed the Red Dragon myself, and if I'm not mistaken then the object he dropped when I shot his wing off was the severed head of the Blue Dragon who used to be here."

The Drake Guard continued on their attempt to reach my core and end me, unheeding of the advice I had offered; they lined up at one of the other armored doors, and began bashing away at it. Fine, if they wanted to be that way, I'd stop playing around. In the room opposite to the one the Drake Guard were attempting to enter, a Proton Tank was diverted. The door clicked open, and my war machine fired an unfocused continuous blast of nuclear death into the room, rated at around fifty gigawatts. When the Proton Tank stopped, the only sign that the Drake Guard had ever been here were carbon silhouettes on the opposite wall.

The long stint in her... cage for lack of a better term had not been kind to Urist McSmith. She hadn't been informed of anything whatsoever, and aside from the person assigned to feeding the potentially useful prisoners, it seemed that basically everyone had forgotten about the dwarf in the tower. As far as Urist could tell, a few hours ago there had been several extremely loud booming sounds, including the roar of a Grand Dragon, but she didn't dare hope that the Titan had come to her rescue.

Still, something unusual was definitely going on; she heard the footsteps of the person charged with feeding her approaching, but there was a second set of footsteps following them. A set of footsteps that sounded distinctly metallic.

There was some muffled conversation outside, before the door swung open. Not the small hatch that food was shoved through either, the big main door that hadn't opened since the day Urist was put in here. The man with the food tray entered, accompanied by a light gray automaton with a rifle slung over its shoulder. Unbidden, the machine spoke, saying "You're free to go; the hallway has been painted with arrows leading to the exit, though you can take your time if there's anything you wish to do in here before you depart."

Afterwards, Urist would swear that she had not impulsively hugged the cold, unyielding metal, merely that she had jumped in surprise, happened to collide with the automaton, and held on tight as she could. That didn't make the return hug any less well-received, if a bit lumpy.

It was the man with the food tray who spoke up and interrupted the moment, saying "Not that this isn't touching and all, but there's still about fifty prisoners who need to be freed today, and only so much time to do it in."

A bit embarrassedly, Urist released the automaton, grabbed her food tray, and headed for the hallway. As she passed through the doorway though, she couldn't help but ask "Curiously, why am I being released today all of a sudden?"

The automaton answered simply "Because there will never again be a Grand Dragon ruling this country." before continuing on to the next cell.

The newcomer to the town of Rofe was strange; they just showed up one day, with no apparent history of any sort. They weren't seeming to do much of anything, aside from collect gossip, hang out in the tavern, and generally just be around. They had proceeded to set up a machinery store and were indeed selling small devices of varying usefulness to anyone who came by, but they never seemed to require any actual time to make their devices, and there were none of the tools in their shop that a Tinker might normally be expected to have.

For Sherry Rosotz, everything about this situation screamed that this was a Deceiver, but other things didn't fit. First, the behavior pattern made no sense for a Daemon of any sort; they just sort of existed and did what they did without hurting anyone. Sure, there was that one idiot who tried to pummel the newcomer in a bar fight and got decked, but they started it.

However, the final nails in the coffin of the Daemon hypothesis were revealed by Sherry's sensory magic. First and foremost, her anti-illusion Eyes of Truth spell showed a being that still looked human, while a Deceiver would have been easily found out by such a method. The other major piece of evidence was the theme-ping spell, revealing that the oddity had a thematic type of Atomic Clockwork. No Daemonic components whatsoever.

As she looked through her previous writings to find where the theme Atomic Clockwork might have come up, Sherry's gaze happened upon her latest issue of the Titanomicon. It took her mere minutes to recollect that the theme had apparently only so far been used by the Titan of Steel. From there, it was a simple matter of deciding on a course of action.

The next day, Sherry went to the mystery man's store, and as soon as the other customers had left, she said bluntly "I know you probably aren't actually human. That said, you haven't yet hurt anyone, so I just want to know what you actually are, and what your intentions are for this town."

The newcomer tensed and relaxed, before they noted "This might take a while, but you are indeed correct about the fact that I am non-human."

It took several minutes for Sherry to tease the whole story out of the newcomer, revealing that he was a Dungeon minion working for the Titan of Steel, that he was in fact a Clockwork hybridized with an organic minion, and even the fact that the Titan of Steel did in fact run on Dragonfire.

Still, when she was done, Sherry couldn't help but ask "Curiously, would you be able to get me in contact with the Titan of Steel? I think that a text describing things from a Titan's point of view would be a great addition to the next edition of the Titanomicon, and I generally do like talking to interesting people."