After my killing of the Red Dragon, I had an extremely short time window in which I could continue my current offensive without the Grand Dragons realizing something was up and moving back towards my liberated areas. Fortunately for me, my network of surveillance satellites from the ill-conceived Space Station project was still intact, which rather handily informed me of the locations of the nearly 130,000 Grand Dragons who continued to bicker over the planet.

As such, I dropped four shuttles full of Clockworks from my hangars on Regno's capitol, and set them the task of freeing political prisoners and taking over the machinery of state as effectively as they could. With that, I activated my main engines and rocketed off towards my next target, a young gold-scaled Grand Dragon who seemed to have done an even worse job of running their country than the Blue Dragon! At least the Blue Dragon had assembled some moderately functional state institutions, but this particular Dragon was just a thug.

Said Grand Dragon was over sparsely populated countryside when I found them, so I didn't bother with collateral damage mitigation in the slightest; instead of blowing a wing off to try and control their trajectory as they fell, I just shot them in the face with energy equal to a few kilotons of TNT, caving in their skull and killing them instantly. With that, it was off to the next target, a purple-scaled Tyrant who I was absolutely sure had no sort of heroic destiny whatsoever.

As I flew, I also took the opportunity to launch a salvo of around twenty missiles at another Grand Dragon some distance away from my current main target; my guided munitions had an extremely long range, and satellite target data had revealed that a certain Green Wyrm was sufficiently far from any sort of civilization that I didn't think smashing them with a couple megatons would hurt anyone else.

Thus, flying in a concentric pattern around Regno, I quickly managed to take out around thirty Grand Dragons with surprise attacks overwhelming their defenses quickly enough for an instant kill. During this little blitzkrieg of mine, I was boarded five times, most often disposing of the boarders by spinning into some insane maneuver and letting gee-forces do my dirty work for me. In one case the group of Adventurers managed to abscond immediately after mugging a couple Clockwork Knights for their weapons, as I didn't react fast enough to keep them from escaping.

That said, after clearing out a region nearly 300 miles wide I began retreating back to Regno. I had no illusions that I would be able to take on the entire world all in one go, for a few major reasons. In order to clear out room for my development of the country, I had been flying in a concentric pattern; this meant that the further out I got, the longer it would be before I got back to a given angle relative to Regno, meaning there would be more and more time for news to propagate to the still surviving Grand Dragons. This was especially the case as the effective velocity of news was likely boosted to a significant degree by magic; after all, I had real-time global communications, so it wasn't much of a stretch for there to be other methods of magical messaging.

Quickly, I fell back to a radius of about one hundred and fifty miles around Regno Prima, and began hurriedly constructing defensive emplacements for Anti-Grand-Dragon use; this pretty much amounted to a copy of one of my main turrets, a battery of Relative Conjuration Autocannons for defense, enough reactor capacity for running everything including self-repair, and an armored casing that could stand up to Dragonfire for plenty long enough to finish the job. Each such emplacement except the ones directly on the coast had line of sight to two other emplacements, meaning that they could give each other supporting fire if needed. I had just put the finishing touches on the last one by sunset on the day of my offensive, before flying back to Regno to actually get down to the business of nation-building.

As I returned, I made a resolution to myself; there would be elections for the government in six months, those elections would be as fair and democratic as I could manage, and I would be making damn sure no would-be authoritarians would be using this as an opportunity to grab power.

On the opposite side of the planet, Grand Dragon Samathin was subduing an upstart, intending to add them to her Draconic Empire as a subordinate. Normally, this would be a risky endeavor, since most Grand Dragons were fairly evenly matched when it came to combat capabilities. Samathin was not most Grand Dragons, being one of the only members of her species who was also an accomplished spellcaster. Samathin intended to keep it that way; if any other Grand Dragons learned to cast like she did, her empire would surely disintegrate, and so would she, in all likelihood.

Today, Samathin's newest subject-to-be was a black-scaled Grand Dragon by the name of Rost. As she closed in on Rost's capital, the feel of the Mana easily informed her when her opponent noticed her presence. Samathin was of course ready for Rost's retaliation, as the black-scaled dragon launched themselves into the air from the arena where they had been resting, blasting Dragonfire at the intruder the instant they had Line Of Sight.

Samathin simply grinned savagely as the spell circle lit up in front of her, capturing the stream of Dragonfire and using it to pull her opponent in like it were a rope. Roth quickly cut off the stream, but the damage to his flight control was already done, sending Roth tumbling downwards. Samathin ruthlessly capitalized on this, as a dozen carefully focused streams of Dragonfire lanced out from her spell circle, shearing away the membranes of Roth's wings. It would heal in about a month or so, but until then Roth's mobility would be seriously impaired.

Thus, the black-scaled Dragon tumbled uncontrollably to earth, only barely managing to lift his head out of the dirt when he felt the weight of the gold-scaled Samathin press onto his back. The gold-scaled mage quickly retrieved an object from her harness with one claw, while the other slammed Roth's head back into the ground. There was a click as Samathin placed the specially-prepared collar around Roth's neck, and informed him "The collar around your neck contains a sealed vial of Dragonfire more than sufficient to blow your head clean off. If you attempt to remove it, it will kill you. If you disobey me, it will kill you. I hope you understand."

Reluctantly, sounding defeated, Roth answered "What is your command, mistress?"

Samathin grinned a vicious grin exposing all of her extremely sharp teeth, saying "Well first, I really don't trust you not to try removing that collar sometime, so I'll be needing to give you a kill switch that's a bit harder to remove. Given that, I am ordering you to swallow this device."