It was a cold and tasteless morning meal between the three of us. I ‘enjoyed’ the fruits of our collective labour in the form of a handful of dried meat that we had preserved off of Tahar’s recent kills. I would have preferred to get a fire started and have something fresh, but there was an urgency to our mission. We needed to find and eliminate the drake before it moved to a new location. It had taken us a long time to get up to the village, and I didn’t want to have wasted those precious hours for nothing.

“I don’t know much about drakes, do you?” I asked Cali as we huddled over the table in Sandra’s kitchen.

“Our family’s library did contain subject matter regarding them. I have read some scholarly information about them, though the depth of my knowledge is not exhaustive. What were you hoping to learn?”

“Basic stuff, how big they are, whether they can fly, what kind of things they do to protect themselves.”

Cali tapped her index finger against the wooden surface, “They come in all shapes and sizes. The larger ones are not capable of flight. And they frequently use elemental magic in combat.”

“Larger ones?”

“There are dozens of different species. Some have four legs, others come with wings, they live in different places and behave in different ways. Some are docile enough to approach without a risk to your health, I would not suggest trying lest you have a fetish for gambling with your life.”

I laughed, “And that’s coming from you, huh?”

“I enjoy life threatening situations. To approach a drake is not a matter of controllable risk. It would be equivalent to stabbing myself with a dagger and hoping that I do not puncture an important organ.”

That didn’t sound like much of a difference to me. The more Cali explained her strange behavioural patterns, the more confused I became about them. She didn’t even know how they worked. Introspection was only helpful when you could properly state the issue at hand. Ultimately, I wasn’t her therapist; she had shown signs of improvement in terms of expressing emotion though.

“How do we kill one? It looked pretty big judging from the size of its footprint.”

“Drakes have an extremely hard exterior hide, with scales on essential parts of their body. With that said – their internal organs are not so well protected. A well-placed blow to the stomach utilising Tahar’s technique should cut right through and injure it. As a creature of significant size, an injury most would assume glancing can cripple it.”

“The more we fight, the easier it gets.”

Tahar intertwined her claws, “I shall deliver the first blow from a distance. My skill with a bow is unmatched.”

“We need to find it first, and then pick a spot to lure it to. Somewhere it can’t manoeuvre as easily, with spots for us to hide if we need to. That’s why I took one of the explosive bottles from the camp yesterday.”

There was no certainty that the drake would come to seek out the source of the noise again. We were flying blind on many things, including the place where it had made its den since arriving near the village. The serious discussion taking place at the table was interrupted by the arrival of Sandra. She was hoisting a heavy pale of water between her gloved hands. She slammed it down onto one of the counters.

“Phew. That took a while!” she chirped happily. It was odd considering that she had just been caught in the crossfire of an intense village-wide argument. She opened one of the cupboards and started to assemble all the pieces she needed for her morning meal. A small clay bowl, some variety of grain, and a small pestle to grind it together with some of the water. Working people did enjoy a bowl of porridge from time to time. “Are you all heading out to find that drake?” she asked as she started to turn it into an edible mush.

“Once we’re ready,” I said, “Have they calmed down a little out there?”

Sandra waved away my concerns, “Ah. They do enjoy a good argument from time to time. They’ll make up and be all the better for it soon enough. Harold has been in a foul mood since Francis died.”

“Harold? Is he the one giving me the warm welcome?”

Sandra nodded, “He’s always been a bristly sort. This village suits him just fine as it is – he doesn’t like things changing.”

Cali picked at her food with a slight frown. She didn’t like to hear that.

“Not much he can do about it. We have a lot of able-bodied folks moving up north to try something new and work in the quarry. The couples around here don’t have enough kids to keep things stable. I like to throw welcoming parties for them, share some drinks and food…” Sandra wistfully recalled greetings of days gone as her hands slowed to a crawl.

I was conscious of her reaction when I asked my next question, “What were they arguing about?” True to my expectations, she stiffened up in place like a board and quickly busied herself with the task once again.

“Nothing much. Just… money is a little tight – since we haven’t been able to export as much marble to the cities recently. You know how people can get when money is the subject.”

“Is that so? Well, hopefully we’ll find that drake and slay it successfully then.”

“Thank you.”

That was a textbook reaction that I’d expect from someone trying to hide something. Sandra was a small-town girl who looked after an old church – she didn’t know the first thing about subterfuge. A change in body language, the look on her face, and the way she hesitated when making an excuse to explain why tensions were so high. If we hadn’t already located evidence of the drake’s existence, now would be the time I doubted its legitimacy.

But I didn’t know if any of this interpersonal drama was actually related to the drake itself. Cali was very confident that the man in the quarry had been killed by an exploding bottle of Mana Stone, and that might have attracted the drake in question. Seeing something like that would be enough to scare them away from working there again until they were sure it was gone.

I didn’t want to push anyone’s buttons for no good reason. It could have been something small like she said – tensions ratcheting up thanks to an unfortunate death and a loss of work. They could have been debating over what the best flavour of gruel was for all I knew. That wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t here to exchange my effort for cash. The only thing I wanted was to eat a very powerful magical energy source so I could kick back and relax for a little while without worrying about my own soul getting thrown into the furnace. Discovering the minutiae of where, when and why this problem started was a waste of time.

Sandra took the last stool and started to shovel the warm mush into her mouth. I stepped back from the table and clapped my hands together, “Let’s get an early start. It’s going to take me an hour just to wrap myself up again.”

Indeed, it was a long and arduous process. Several layers under my sweater and armour, a coat over that, extra layers under my pants, triple stacked socks and a hat that reminded me of the type that you’d find in Russia, with two flaps covering my ears. Pile on the rest of my armour and my bag, and you have an extremely heavy and constricting loadout. Thank goodness for my inhuman strength. I could still feel the heft of it tugging on my back despite that. I was strong, but not strong enough to ignore the laws of physics just yet.

We left Sandra to her meal and returned to the cramped room which she had given us. We were packed in from wall to wall, with a messy jumble of weapons, bags and armour piled at one end of the bed. Cali was the first to dress herself. The blue-green coat that had become so familiar to me was assisted in its task with the addition of another. The furred collar of the leather brown trench coat was so poofy that it nearly engulfed her entire face and head.

With all three of us now ready to brave the cold once more, we departed through the main chapel and out onto the front steps. Several people were mulling around the village’s main road, some of them giving curious stares to the trio of strangers who had arrived and declared their intention to do the impossible. It was a rare sight for armed mercenaries to roll into a remote town like this.

Back up the winding mountain trail. We’d need to venture even further than yesterday to have a chance of spotting the beast. It would be making its home far away from the bustle of the village, since it had a clear distaste for the noise. An explosion ringing out in a quarry would project the blast for miles around, which meant we had a lot of ground to cover. I could only hope that Tahar’s incredible hunting skills would pay dividends again.

The journey back to the quarry was much faster the second time around – as we already knew the route we had to take. We used all of our strength and will to make the trip without delay. The light would fade early this far north, we needed to savour every minute and hour of day that we had. It was an eerie place to explore. The trees that surrounded us cast the land beyond in a pitch-black cloak. Our footsteps would echo off the surrounding hills again and again.

Even in the remotest places in Sull and the Federation, it never felt as isolating as this. But there were people here regardless, a village of a hundred eking out a living on the very edges of civilization. All the trouble about the war, and the daily churn of life in the cities, those were nothing more than faint rumours brought back alongside sacks of silver and gold. There was safety in obscurity. What reasonable military commander would waste his time travelling all the way here?

On the other hand, they couldn’t rely on the Federation for protection. Assigning guards and soldiers to such a tiny hamlet wasn’t reasonable. To live here you needed a certain level of grit and hardiness. You needed to protect yourself and your family above all else. Everything became your responsibility. There was nobody here to blame your mistakes on.

I couldn’t decide whether I envied that kind of life. I was always being dragged in fifty different directions by fifty different people and one malicious spirit that lived in a sword. It didn’t matter how much of a lone wolf image you tried to project, you’d find yourself tangled up in other people’s lives and problems eventually. A lot of those problems can’t be solved with strength and a sharp edge.

Debt, hunger, discrimination. I couldn’t kill those concepts for other people.

The villagers back there were the same. They had gotten themselves stuck in some messy business. The eyes I saw glaring weren’t ones that came about from a polite disagreement. A jovial attitude wasn’t enough to keep people’s worst nature at bay forever. Kind, tight-knit villages could be just as cutthroat as a huge city; you just never heard about it in the taverns. Things were personal by nature, everyone knows everyone. Everyone has a loyalty and allegiance to each other that supersedes fact and reason.

Stigma claimed I could rise above the throng by using her power – and while that was appealing in one sense, the prospect of having her infesting my body for any longer than she needed to wasn’t something I was eager to experience. Like many things in life I had to wait and see how things would pan out.

For now, I refocused my mind on dragon hunting.