The Dragons were still stronger than the rest of us. I could go toe-to-toe with their weaker members, but I couldn’t stand up to Chris, and any Dragon was far stronger and tougher than the majority of our two-and-three ability fighters. Given that, you might not have thought that getting their weak soldiers to turn on them would be that pivotal, but you’d be wrong.

With our forces combined, we outnumbered the Dragons more than four-to-one, and our new allies weren’t shy about burying the Dragons under bodies. Even for someone as strong as Chris, it was hard to swing a weapon with the weight of a whole person clinging to each arm.

My neighbors had been fighting to protect the Shop, our source of food and clean water.

These people? They’d had their loved ones taken from them and threatened. They’d been forced to risk their own lives to keep their daughters and sons and elderly parents safe. Even now, they were deeply worried for the safety of their absent family members. Turning on the Dragons meant risking everything, so I could see why they had been hesitant to believe us… but once they’d committed to their betrayal, they held nothing back.

The light blue Dragon, already on the ground and weakened, was the first to die, a knife stabbed into her mouth as she opened it to cough. Several people tripped and tackled another Dragon, bringing him to the ground at my feet. That Dragon had managed to bring his hands up to cover his face, but the weight of the people atop him was too much to shake off. While a few held him down, a woman stabbed a steak knife into him again and again. Each stab was difficult, requiring her to lean all her weight on the knife to force it in between his scales, and when she wrenched it free, the wounds quickly closed. I could see her face in the moonlight, a grim mixture of terror and anger, as she tried to overcome her victim’s Healing Touch.

I couldn’t even see Chris in the mob that surrounded him. Baseball bats rose and fell as people shouted angrily.

“You psychopath!”

“You had this coming! You had this coming!”

“Never again, you freak!”

It was, frankly, horrifying. I had an impulse to stop it, if only so I didn’t have to watch it any longer, but it seemed… disrespectful. I had only the barest inkling what these people had been through.

Plus, I had no idea how to stop them, and no real alternatives to offer. It wasn't like we had a jail we could lock the Dragons up in, even if they'd surrendered. Which... they hadn't. The ugly truth was that the only real alternative we had to this slow execution-by-mob was to perhaps kill the Dragons more quickly by lending a hand ourselves.

I was hesitant to interfere with the victims' version of justice. Instead, I took a step back, glancing around the backyard to be sure that everything was under control. I saw a Dragon wrestle himself free, but he made no move to attack. Instead, he fled as fast as he could, vaulting over the fence. The Dragons on the roof leapt down to follow him, managing to dodge the few startled grabs people made for them. That made three escapees, at least, probably four; all the Dragons I’d seen had been wearing clothing of some kind, making it likely that the Camouflage user was still out there somewhere.

But most of the Dragons were here. It was still difficult to make out details with so many people nearby, but a life disappearing was still obvious. The woman near me had either landed a lucky blow or overcome the Dragon’s ability to outheal her stabs, because his life faded away, though she didn’t stop attacking.

“He’s dead,” I said.

She didn’t seem to hear me.

I put a hand on her shoulder. “He’s dead. I can’t feel him on my Life Sense.”

She paused, not immediately responding to my words. Her eyes trailed over the evidence of her most recent attacks, still visible. Not healing. Tentatively, one of the men holding the Dragon down let go, and the Dragon’s arm rolled limply from his grasp. Another leaned over, holding his cheek next to the Dragon’s mouth.

“She’s right!” he called. “He’s not breathing.”

The woman dropped the knife, bringing both hands up to her face, and I could hear her sob. One of the men nearby wrapped his arm around her shoulders and I stepped back, leaving them to process their emotional moment together.

I wasn’t thrilled Dragons had escaped, but at least we had Chris. From what we could tell, he’d been the driving force behind the Dragons’ reign of terror. Without his leadership, I had hope that whatever remnants were left would take a different route. If not, at least they would be greatly weakened by his absence.

I wished we could have taken prisoners, rather than this... ugliness. This was ending our chances to get information from the Dragons directly, if we needed it. It wasn’t clear that we did - maybe taking down this group would end the threat they presented - but talking to one of them could let us know for sure.

On top of that, this was just… uncivilized.

A bad precedent.

I wanted to live in someplace with the rule of law, where people were tried before peers and punished accordingly. That might not be feasible anymore, though. How did you make a jail cell to hold someone like Chris securely? Maybe he could be buried up to his neck in stone or something, but that was hardly a humane option.

No. Chris needed to die. I wasn’t in a hurry to put his blood on my hands, specifically, especially since it might make me the focus of the furious people assaulting him... but if it was necessary, I would kill him.

Chris was ridiculously strong and tough. Two people gripped each leg and arm, and by now five more held onto his tail while people with knives hacked away at its base, trying to separate it from his body. Even with all that, Chris’s monstrous strength still let him move, but his burdens left him slow and clumsy. He’d lost his weapon, and instead flexed his claws and tried to twist so the people hampering him would impale themselves on the sharp spines that protruded from his back.

For a while, I wasn’t sure if they’d be able to take him down at all. I stood poised, ready to intervene if he seemed likely to kill anyone or escape.

But then, Chris stumbled. Someone had managed to trip him, and he was borne to the ground under the weight of bodies. Several people held him pinned tight. Another held a knife to the side of his head, ready for a burly man to swing a sledgehammer down surely and precisely on the knife’s hilt, the force overcoming the weak spot in his Armored Skin.

I felt Chris’s Life Force fade.

As his tail went limp and his muscles stopped twitching, his killers looked around for other Dragons, but saw none. Even if the escaped Dragons returned, for tonight, the problems they presented were over. One man began to laugh, and another to cry.

The realization hit me hard.

It was over.

I mean, not over-over. It wasn’t like life had gone back to normal. Even if we had conquered this danger, even if the Dragons who had fled didn’t come back to cause more trouble, they were unlikely to be unique. This battle we’d ineptly fought probably wasn’t our last, and the corpses on the ground around me made it clear that there would still be plenty of problems to deal with in the aftermath.

But it was still a deep relief to find myself alive.

I hadn’t been sure that survival was a given. I had put my trust in the colonel and my neighbors and made what felt like a suicidal charge.

My hands were shaking. I sunk down for a minute, putting my weight on my sword, resting its tip in the grass.

This was the first time I’d fought other people on purpose. The first time I’d swung my sword at another with an intent not to threaten or scare, but to cause harm. To kill, maybe.

I didn’t feel as conflicted as I might have. The Shop was a lifeline for hundreds, maybe thousands. We couldn’t let it be destroyed. Even capture would have been a death sentence, if it was taken by a group like the Dragons. They could have jacked up the prices enough that no one else could truly afford to eat, if they were willing to let others use it at all. The Dragons had shown themselves to be selfish and willing to kill.

Not to mention, of course, that they had been the ones to attack us.

No. I was in the right here, as far as there was a right.

But it was still dark, knowing what it felt like to have my sword sink into another human being. It really wasn’t that different from slicing into a bladetail or a ram.

I would have been happier not knowing that.

Message: Ms. Tamara wishes to know if your attack was successful. The Dragons on the roof ran to the back of the house and have not returned. We are all waiting and people are quite concerned.

I jumped at Colin’s words, their crisp and unadorned clarity actually standing out for once in the muddy morass of my mind.

I took a deep breath, and clenched my hands to try to soothe their trembling. The battle might be over, but there was still a lot left to do.