Corenzite's wounds had not yet healed fully since their battle with that Titan. How could they possibly do so in such a short time, considering that the Supreme Leader had come far closer to death than ever before? As such, even three months later he could not muster the strength to fly on his only barely healed wings, and he still suffered from a limp. Making it even worse is that apparently the explosion that ended the fight had permanently damaged one of his more important organs, meaning that he was now incapable of using his Dragonfire without injuring himself. And without Dragonfire, could Corenzite even call himself a Grand Dragon?

Thus, the blue-scaled Dragon had thrown up a wall of bluster in an attempt to keep his rivals away, stating that if any were to intrude upon his territory, he would destroy his enemy's treasure horde, the gravest possible threat it was possible to level against a Grand Dragon. For some time this had worked in preventing raids, but now one of Corenzite's rivals had called his bluff, a red-scaled upstart from the north going by the name of Ophey.

Thus, the blue Grand Dragon trudged their way out of their capital to intercept Ophey, dreading the encounter that was about to occur; fights between Grand Dragons generally went until one party decided to disengage and flee, but if they were incapable of fleeing then battles almost always ended in the deaths of one or more of the Dragons involved. In his present state, Corenzite would find escape nearly impossible, and his lingering disabilities already had him at a massive disadvantage. Indeed, the only reason why Corenzite hadn't tried to slink off and find somewhere to hide is because Regno had a distinct absence of rough terrain or suitably large caves, leaving him with very few options in that category.

Thus, the red dragon bore down on the blue Supreme Leader of Regno, the old king's injuries dooming him just as effectively as if the Titan had made the finishing blow. The resulting battle was short, brutal, and there were no illusions on either side that both parties would survive. Almost instantly, Ophey determined Corenzite's inability to breathe Dragonfire or fly, before taking ruthless advantage of both infirmities by simply blasting Corenzite repeatedly from the air until he eventually keeled over.

In the immediate aftermath, Emperor Ophey dropped Corenzite's severed head on his former palace, proclaiming his dominion over Regno, and that any dissenters would soon face the wrath of a Grand Dragon. He still hadn't finished consolidating his power base when he spotted a mass of steel on the horizon, approaching at speeds faster than even the greatest of Grand Dragons could manage in level flight.

Over the couple months I spent buried on the bottom of the seafloor, the truly vast number of Gremlins I put to the task of figuring out a way to block teleportation made only two notable advances. The first was a general purpose Blink device that I could fit to my Clockworks, allowing them short-range tactical teleportation. That immediately went right in the next model of all my main-series Clockworks; I had a feeling they'd need it.

The second advance of note was something I found myself grudgingly tolerating as a form of teleportation defense, being a floor tile that would redirect nearby inbound teleport attempts to itself, allowing me to guarantee that unwelcome visitors beaming aboard would arrive in extremely undesirable conditions. Admittedly said tile had no form of IFF, meaning it would jam my own teleports as well, but I considered that an acceptable trade-off.

Experiments regarding using a pair of the 'attractor' tiles to telefrag someone into pieces simply resulted in the victim arriving unharmed at whatever tile was closer to their destination. Further, it had been demonstrated in testing that the more mana was put into the teleport, the easier a time it had not getting re-directed; at the levels of mana inherently used in teleporting to an orbital structure, they just flat out would not be effective at keeping a space station secure. Providing the tile with more mana wouldn't have helped, as part of the way they functioned was by pumping all the ambient mana out of the arrival zone.

The other major project I had the Gremlins working on was some way to finally be able to make serious use of Mutants outside my structure without them immediately going into full crush-kill-destroy mode. Almost immediately I had figured that the most reliable option would be to simply de-brain them and integrate a Clockwork's processor core for decision-making, but doing so had been proving surprisingly difficult to get right, with the peripheral nervous system simply refusing to synch up properly. Gradually, over the course of the project more and more components of the final Cyborg had been made Clockwork, until eventually the end product reminded me of a Terminator more than anything else; a cosmetic tissue layer concealing a robotic endoskeleton.

This conveniently let me fit my newest creations with a lot of the gadgetry I would normally only be able to cram in a Clockwork, including the new Blink device, some concealed automatic weapons, and a toggleable radiation source that would both regenerate the mutant's squishy parts, and allow for easy elimination of most assassination targets.

With much cosmetic surgery courtesy of my Gremlins, and a quick burst of radiation to make the Mutant tissue regenerate the surgical scars, I was ready to send my infiltrators into the world.

With my infiltrators on their way, I finally turned my attention to what I would be building for my next Chassis. This time, I wouldn't be wasting effort on excessively complex humanoid mechanisms; instead I would be building for raw, brutal combat effectiveness, focusing on firepower and mobility. Thus, the hull profile I ultimately selected would best be described as a flying battleship; I had briefly considered cosplaying as a Bolo, but in the predicament I found myself in, I needed all-angle weapons coverage and enough mobility to stay well out of melee range with the stupidly powerful dragons I'd be going up against.

The most notable property of the hull, aside from being almost as excessively durable as my last humanoid chassis, was that I'd used some additional Mana to reduce its effective mass, leaving it neutrally buoyant in air at around 2 kilometers altitude. This low effective mass combined nicely with the horrendously overpowered engines I had mounted to the ship for both forwards thrust and turning, meaning that if absolutely necessary, I could get 100 gees of acceleration. Of course, this would have been immediately fatal to any unfortunate Gremlins who happened to be aboard, necessitating water-filled suspension tanks with breathing gear, which could protect biologicals from utterly absurd gee forces.

Weaponry was also upgraded to a degree that some would consider rather excessive. First, I had a main battery of twenty four Pulsed Proton Cannons, with each bolt delivering a terajoule of energy to the target and each gun firing once per second. For a secondary broadside, I had several kinetic weapons that conjured projectiles moving at 50 km/s; I called them Relative Conjuration guns. Then there were the 32 missile tubes I was mounting, firing missiles equipped with Nuclear Shaped Charges, which I considered a secondary weapon system for no reason other than collateral damage. Point Defense meanwhile was handled by dozens of smaller Relative Conjuration Guns. I didn't bother with any melee weapons; if this chassis wound up in close combat I had severely messed up.

Some other miscellaneous systems that bore mentioning included an escape pod, an experimental defensive force field, and an emergency mana storage system that worked using a cubic meter block of the same compressed mana material as composed those Beads that Seth had given me some time ago. I really hoped I didn't need any of them, but better to have and not need than need and not have.

As I underwent my final launch preparations, the twenty thousand or so Gremlins who had been working on my latest round of engineering projects climbed into their suspension tanks, ready for the extreme accelerations I would be pulling in my fight against the draconic dictator oppressing the people of Regno. The chats I'd had with the Aether Titan had been quite informative in that regard, and it was quite clear to me now that Grand Dragons as a species were simply too dangerous and megalomaniacal to be allowed to live.

Thus, when my sensors informed me that the Grand Dragon over Regno's capital was red rather than blue, my resolve regarding my course of action didn't falter for a millisecond. Instead, I simply ordered my fire control computer to give me a firing solution for every single weapon my chassis was equipped with, while also adjusting the criteria slightly to herd the Dragon away from the city they were currently flying over.