I wish I could tell you that we went in there like badasses and straight-up kicked that flower-wyrm’s ass with our coul powers, but I can’t. Jack and I might have been talented, but for the time being, we were still just kids, and that massive Flower-Wyrm was technically a dragon, albeit, of the stupidest, and weakest, kind. So, what really went down is that we took that Flower-Wyrm down, like a bunch of bees, or ants, can take down a man. Doing enough chip damage that we eventually just overwhelmed the flower-wyrm’s ability to resist.

Jack stood way back. Darting around on bladed-black limbs of shadow, to keep from getting hit by the flower-wyrm’s poisonous flames. Since we were dealing with a dragon, fire was out. Even weak dragons were notorious flame resistant. This was true for poison too. Especially, since the flower-wyrm was out here using corrosive flames. Jack wisely decided to rely on her darkness and ice instead. Firing hail and darkness bolts at the dragon from a distance.

I fought a little closer to the dragon. I danced and jittered about like an ant on a hot plate, while hurling spear, after spear, after spear at the flower-wyrm. I currently had a little under 70 times the strength of an average person. The [Tale of the Hunter] was filled with many strange techniques that allowed weak humans to display monstrous strength, to defeat their even more monstrous foes.

One of those techniques was kinetic-boosting. One could use eldritch power to lay hold on the very concept of movement and motion and increase the momentum of blades and arrows, so that even a pebble could have the impact of a mountain. This was the beginning of the thing known to mortals and immortals as kinetic-manipulation. Not just telekinesis but something even more profound. I was nowhere near good enough to make “pebbles fall like mountains”, but at the very least, I could increase the momentum of the spears I was throwing so they flew with 15 times their speed, and thus landed with 15 times the force.

A regular, trained and strong, man can throw a javelin at around 100 miles. Convert that to metres per second, that’s 44.7 metres per second. Between the skills I’d gained from the [Tale of the Soldier] and my raw strength, I could throw 65 to 72 times harder. So let’s call that 70 times and say, my spears were now flying at 3129 m/s. My heavier spears weighed a little over 12 kg. Force equals Mass times Acceleration, so that was 37,548 Newtons of force. Times that by ten with my kinetic-boosting that became 563,220 Newtons of force.

That wasn’t the greatest amount of force, it was just a little more than the force behind the average carriage crash. However, considering that all that force was being focused down a spear-point, and repeating dozens of times in the span of a few seconds, and hundreds of times in the span of a few minutes. The damage I was doing to the flower-wyrm rapidly added up. Scratched scales, became dented scales, became broken scales, became fallen scales, became flesh wounds.

Jack played her part well and turned the flesh wounds into even more nasty injuries. She rained shadow bolts and ice javelins, like a one-woman artillery line. Yin energy could be devastating, and darkness could snuff out light. Add in the ice javelins that interfered with the flower-wyrms ability to heal itself, and it was only a matter of time until the creature went down.

The flower-wyrm gave up a mournful cry as it succumbed to its injuries. I threw a couple more spears at the beast in case it was playing possum. Then when we were sure that the creature was dead, Jack and I gathered in front of it. Jack tried to give me a high-five, at which point we both discovered that the arm I’d been doing much of the throwing with was kind of dead. It hadn’t fallen off, but I couldn’t use it. The skin on that arm had turned a weird purplish-red, and I could sense that the bones and meat inside were all kind of mess.

“Uh….” said Jack. Looking at my arm in concern.

“Um, it’ll probably be fine. It’s just a flesh wound,” I said. Mentally make a note to quickly get my Constitution up to 100 times the human norm, so that I could make sure that I wasn’t just bullshitting here.

“Er, if you say so...I know you normally get the cores for me, but do you need help cutting this thing open?” said Jack.

I looked at my arm and used my good arm, which honestly wasn’t doing much better to try and give my busted arm a swing. I winced and immediately stopped that as a whole bunch of pain that I had been too hopped up on adrenaline to feel before, told me to knock that nonsense off.

“Yeah...That’d be appreciated,” I said.

Jack generated a third pair of bladed limbs and used her shadow limbs to cut the flower-wyrm open. She fed the beast’s core to her grimoire and groaned as her powers surged. Black veins appeared on her pale skin as her grimoire assimilated the lesser-dragon’s strength. Meanwhile, with Jack having taken what she needed from the beast it was time for me to take what I needed. I fed the flower-wyrm to my system and smiled as my potential skyrocketed upwards.

“Nice...Okay, give me a sec to adjust some stuff in my system, and after we’ve both rested a little bit, we can turn this cave into a proper home,” I said.