As a fake sapphire-category mage-swordsman, I was practically assigned to every role. For example, when a wall segment collapsed, I made mold constructs to search for survivors while spinning a sword through a crowd of diamond-categories, decapitating almost all of them. The only reason I actually passed as a sapphire-category was an aura title modulator I had bought on the black market. Technically, I wasn't normally supposed to have one, but Ipigal gave a lot of category impersonators permission to buy one. If someone attacked for having one, I could just use the official Ipigal government note. The reason it would work was that Ipigal made a unique reed paper that was impossible to grow without jade-categories and weather patterns exclusively found in Ipigal.

Soon, I found a new template ability.

Dragon Rider Artifact

Allows the user to summon a dragon mount. The mount has the same category as the skill. It has the powers Scales, The Bane of Attack and Firebreath. It will be affected by all positive effects the user has. The user may control the dragon while mounted, but while dismounted, the dragon will count as a pefigh.

I absorbed it, and summoned the dragon. We took off, teleporting my government-sanctioned silver-category pegasus to a stable. I hadn't really used the pegasus due to it only being silver-category. However, my titles and experience counted as positive effects, giving me an immediate edge. Cannonfire turned to the dragon, but it just incinerated all cannonballs.

It communicated to me that its name was Drai. That was actually the most common name for dragons in Ipigal, although there were only fourteen, all at silver-category. Rumor was that one of the jade-categories has this power as their go-to, but it was only that. Rumors. Six pefighs put considerable strain on the spirit, so I decided I'd get another title soon. To handle any more, I needed at least a late-sapphire-category soul. The artifact I had made was aiding the jade-categories.

From dragonback, I could get more of a clear view of the battlefield. I noticed a cosmic craft carrying off a dozen or so important logistics officers, so I commanded Drai to destroy the core. The method was, well, brutal, for a dragon to do something like that.

The dragon would first burn the ship, making it fly slowly. Seeing the heat made me realize that my dragon should be the one to tank heat attacks. If I could handle the surface of a star, the dragon could survive the core. Then, the dragon would wheel a claw back and strike the core. The ship being weakened from a fireblast, it would instantly fall to pieces. It was night and day to my discreet method of subtly cutting a few important pieces of the core and replacing them with nonfunctional replicas that seemed the same. I just used plastic, which wasn't a conduit of magic. Then, if technicians checked, nothing would seems amiss, me having changed the consistency of the plastic. They'd then have to replace the overly expensive core, costing me a normal coin and three or four mana, and them a few topaz coins. Drai's method cost at least fifty million normal-category mana, and them a ruby coin. Not worth it in my opinion, but dragons had billions of mana to burn. So their perspective was skewed. That was probably also why Drai kept asking me to use finisher attacks on everyone, saying they only cost a "measly" 10,000 mana.

Apparently, dragons were only considered adults at five hundred years old. Drai would live as long as me. And Drai came from a template ability, which didn't sync pefigh life spans to user life spans. Apparently, Drai was fourteen, making him an infant. When I came to Glassfay, fourteen seemed old, but now I knew it was a child.

After dive-bombing a few hundred enemy leaders and cosmic crafts, I told Drai to keep overpowering the defenses. I dismounted, going to wreak havoc on the enemies. It was affliction time.