Dropping out of the sky gave me quite a lot of time, relatively speaking, to watch the massive dragon brush aside stonework and pour its flaming breath into the ruins, melting what was left into glowing puddles.

I had dropped my Focus, choosing instead to concentrate on my Path, as that would help to cut down my journey back to the cold, unforgiving ground, and hopefully prevent me from accumulating enough momentum that my friends could help. In normal gravity – which my new home was roughly equivalent to – things accelerate while falling at about ten meters – or about thirty-two feet – per second, per second until reaching terminal velocity, which is a result of things like mass, area... wind resistance. Now, normally when falling from the sky, you would attempt to spread out horizontally, in order to be resisted by as much air as possible, but if I did that then I was probably not going to land anywhere where my friends could try and catch me, which meant... straight down, or at least as straight as I could manage.

For every real-time second that I fell, I was covering about four-second's worth of ground at full power, meaning one-hundred and twenty-eight feet in the first and two-hundred and fifty-six in the second and three-hundred and eighty-four in the third. It took just under eight seconds to reach the ground, and while I did not know this at the time – my mind was everywhere but on doing maths in my head as I desperately hoped not to splatter on the ground like overripe fruit- I was actually only just approaching terminal velocity, falling at an actual rate of about one-hundred and eighty miles per hour by the time I landed.

At the last second before I hit, I closed my eyes in preparation for a hard impact, but found myself enveloped in the abrasive yet soft embrace of sand as it caught me and bled off some of my momentum.

Now, I did not know this then, but I would have been fine, even without the catch. A normal human, just falling down, can - in the absence of strange angles – easily fall ten feet without injury, and as a Path stage cultivator with Path stage toughness, that was about five-hundred for me. Ten times fifty. But fall damage is not really about distance, but speed – accumulated energy. A person can only fall so fast through atmosphere, at least in normal gravity, and that speed was simply not enough to injure me – it was the equivalent of walking quickly into a wall. I had not even really needed to use my Path, as terminal velocity posed no danger to me; its use just had me land a few seconds sooner. But you don’t think about these things when you have only had magic for less than a year, and are used to simple things like human frailty. All I had known was that the ground was coming at me, and I wanted to do everything I could not to end myself. The fact that I had broken my leg falling from a significantly lower height had not helped, though thinking back on that, it was possible that I had landed oddly – the wall was on a wet, grassy plane, after all.

Either way, I was quickly placed safely on the ground as the sand rushed back towards Riffa, before vanishing into storage. Later I would kick myself for the waste of Praxis, but at the time I was just glad to be alive, as misplaced as that feeling may have been.

Shaking off the surge of adrenaline I was being hit with after my fall – and shaking slightly from the lack of use – I spun to face my friends - and Faen - and spoke quickly, my words almost stumbling over each other.

“It’s-a-dragon, it’s-a-huge-ass-dragon-breathing-red-fire.”

“With profound confusion, I have never heard of an Ass Dragon; some perversion of donkey and dragon? Are they common where you are from, Hunter?”

I stared at the risi for a long moment, trying to understand what she had said; the sight of the massive winged-lizard and the fall had shaken me enough that I did not realise my use of the idiom right away.

“Oh. No! Just a dragon, I’m pretty sure! Just me being me! Do we fight it, do we run? WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THE DRAGON?!”

“Are you sure it’s a dragon... Hunter? Dragons are not common creatures.”

“Toria is right, Hunter. Could it have been something else? Have you even seen a dragon before?”

“Of course I’ve seen a damn dragon, Dee, we flew here inside one. I also met another dragon, but she was a different kind. The point is, giant, scaly, winged and breathing fire.”

“It seems we will have to delay the civilian transfer; if there is a dragon in the city, we have to mobilize the Guard. It is a bigger threat than any of the sects, and certainly more than the general populace.”

“But it’s coming this way, we can’t leave the people here, it’ll... just walk over them. Or melt them.”

The guard looked pensive, rubbing at his jaw with one hand as he looked in the direction of the persistent crashes.

“If we stop the dragon, then the people will be safe.”

“With cautious interjection, are you certain a dragon will be so easy to stop?”

“Blasted Void! Fine. We need to evacuate the civilians; I’ll need the help of... whoever brought them here, if there are more than a few I will not be able to carry them all.”

“With decisive confirmation, my brother and I carried them, we can assist you in taking them back.”

“What do we do? Wait for the guard?”

I asked the question with mixed feelings; on the one hand, I kind of wanted to fight the dragon, but on the other hand, I definitely did not want to die.

“It would be best if you can distract it, see if you can halt its progress as much as possible until we are able to bring the others - and the Marshall – to fight. Can you do that?”

I turned my attention inwards to my Core as it vibrated away, passively converting Experience into Praxis; the rate was not quick without me actively focusing, but it was not bad, given recent events. The rate at which it thrummed did however tell me that my little trip had sapped a chunk of my reserves. I could fight at normal output for a little while, but if I had to go all-out, I was going to dry myself out pretty quickly. Not that that was anything new by that point.

Turning, I looked at Toria and Darina, knowing that it was probably going to be just the three of us; Loneth was a Foundation level, I thought, but one entirely focused on building, and as such, probably not much help in a pitched battle against a giant dragon.

“I can fight; my fire-based Focus gives me some resistance to fire, though I cannot speak to the nature of this dragon’s flame.”

“I’ll fight too; I can regenerate through pretty much anything. It’ll make my Master proud when I tell her I defeated a dragon” the apprentice healer looked at me with a barely supressed smile, lips twitching, “mostly single handed”

“Good. You should go then, while we begin to move them. Here, take these.” the guard held his hand out and three bulb-like bottles appeared, each filled with a clear liquid which nonetheless seemed to glow faintly.

“They’ll restore a portion of Experience; they should help if the fight goes on too long. Don’t use them if you don’t have to, they’re incredibly expens-”

Not waiting for the main to finish, I grabbed one of the bottles and uncorking it before pouring the contents down my throat, barely tasting the slight liquorice flavour.

“-ive. What did I just say?”

“Hunter’s abilities are pretty hard on his reserves, I bet he’s below half strength at the moment.”

I just nodded as Darina spoke, focusing on the stream of Experience coursing into my Core; it was not the consciousness robbing ball of energy that Walker had shoved into my chest, or even the Core-completing Thousand Year Pineapple; it had none of the extremes of sensation I had come to associate with such things, but rather it was a cool, almost clinical feeling as the stuff effervesced into mist and was absorbed, my Core spinning it into Praxis and sending it in circuits around my energy system. Blocking out the outer world, knowing that while I would eventually absorb the entire thing, I did not actually have time for that, I concentrated on refinement, adding in my fall and the dragon, the woman with the blades, as much as I could as I felt my Core speed up and then slow as, within minutes, I was back to full.

Opening my eyes, I looked around to see everyone looking at me with annoyance, and I remembered that we were actually in a rush.

“Uh, sorry about that. Really needed it... so, you said they were expensive? How expensive, exactly, and where can I buy literally all of them?”

“We can discuss that, after we evacuate the civilians, drive off the dragon and save the city.”

The Guard’s voice was dry with a touch of rebuke, and I nodded sheepishly, though I did note that the other two bottles had vanished. it was almost certain the coming fight was going to drain me again, and if it did – when it did – I could, provided the others did not need them, use the things to refill my energy and re-forge the rest of my energy system. For a moment, I thought about how lucky it was that the dragon had shown up when it had, as otherwise I might never have known about the bottles, but I shook that thought away quickly; I wanted no part of the responsibility of bringing a dragon down on the city’s collective heads.

“Right you are. Let’s go... fight a dragon. I guess.”

We all wished each other good luck, and as Riffa hurried inside - Faen looking tiny beside her - Toria, Darina and I dashed off down the street.

We were not yet using our abilities to travel; knowing what we would be facing meant that saving as much of our abilities as possible was paramount. Even so, it only took minutes until the crashes became thunderous, the ground shaking hard as more dust filled the air and chips of broken stone fell around us.

I could feel a great heat surging and fading, and even through the remaining buildings between us I knew it was the dragon’s flames, hot enough to melt stone and almost certainly enough to turn me to ash if it hit me. But still, I had a job to do, and I had to try.

Under my breath, I spoke Xiournal’s name and looked at the quest she’d given me only a few days before, to save as many civilian lives as possible. Shaking my head in dismissal, I considered once more that I may have really be screwed on my employment contract.

Finally, after a few more moments of running, we came around one last corner and saw the thing itself, its brassy scales reflecting the light of the sun, as well as that given off by the bright, glowing stone and its own fire. Its head was the size of very large cart, with eyes the colour of blood and multiple rows of teeth that looks like a cross between a shark’s triangular ones and the needle-sharp kind you found on puppies.

The city around it was rubble, even more so than it had been earlier, pulverized almost flat as the massive beat stomped this way and then that, demolishing buildings and reducing what was left to dust and thick, hot fluids.

Every few seconds, a person would catapult out from the edges, impacting the dragon with seemingly no effect, before dropping down and being casually crushed by the dragon’s mammoth, clawed feet.

“I guess there are other people still alive in the city...”

“Though not for long if we do not interfere.”

Darina gestured at the many spots of red scattered around the thing, and in its path.

“I’m going to try to get on its head and zap it. Fingers crossed?”

“I don’t know what that means... Hunter, but good luc-”

Toria was interrupted then, a voice deeper than almost any I had heard filling the cleared space and making my chest vibrate.

“Yes... good luck with that... little cultivator...”

The dragon had apparently heard me.