Billy took stock of his condition, the first time he’d been able to stand to view the mirror since he’d been brought back to his den to be healed. The dragon in the house-sized mirror sported a wicked scar along the left side of his face, where his jaw had been reattached. On his shoulder was a patch of oddly shaped scales, where the shrapnel from the RPG had been dug out. All in all, it made him look absolutely ferocious.

“Damnit!” Billy shouted, turning away from the mirror and destroying it with a swing of his tail. Ferocious was not what Billy wanted. Billy wanted Perfect. What better symbol of a living god than the beautiful form of an adult red dragon? Now, though, he looked as though he had suffered wounds.

Wounds were nothing more than tangible symbols that someone else had laid hands upon you. They said someone else out there was in the same ballpark. That you could have equals. Then it spawned the niggling thought. Maybe Tyranus wasn’t a god.

It was an easy fix. An easy fix, but an annoying one. In order to reshape his flesh as it had been before the toy soldier had assaulted him in his capital, Billy would have to consume most of the energy in his Yuenan, which would take an extra fifty years to refill. And that meant his next Molt would be put on hold. It was like someone was jostling his arm when he was trying to build a castle out of cards. It was infuriating. Wait fifty years, and who knew how many more things would show up and jostle his arm? He’d already been delayed twice in the last two hundred years alone. It was maddening.

Billy wanted to hurt something. He paced his cave, digging his claws into the stone like soft cheese, resisting the urge to hurt his own incompetent minions. One of the lessons Professor Clement had tried to teach Billy had been to value his toys. When he broke them, they were gone forever.

Billy glanced at the S4M unit that stood stuffed in the corner of the den, the VAMPR hung above it. A trophy, no good for venting. Besides, you didn’t win that fight.

Billy roared and leapt on the taxidermied man, tearing it to tiny little pieces. The demon had hardly even been a backup plan. Billy had subdued him, then intended to give him the last blow on the toy soldier in private so the immortal pain in the ass could be out of his scales. When Billy had lost consciousness, the demon had broken free and finished its mission, allowing it to return to its home plane, inadvertently saving Billy in the process.

He’d gotten lucky. The dimensional lock on his body, that he used to prevent wizard cabals from summoning him into a collapsing cave or a dragon-shaped iron maiden, had worked. The VAMPR worked on technology based on the spatial distortion of summoning and banishing magic, which meant, when the VAMPR tried to summon a chunk of his flesh out of his body, it was unable to. That stupid monkey had him dead to rights, Twice.

Billy briefly considered bringing the S4M unit back to life so that he’d have something to torture. No, that would be stupid. Billy could think of a million ways that could turn out poorly, and why would he want to spend so much power from his Yuenan just to bring a headache back into the world. Perhaps he could find someone else who looked similar and torture them.

Perhaps he could make it a sacred position. A holy squeezy toy for Billy to vent his frustrations. It would have to be someone quite sturdy and well versed in healing magic. That sounded like a fine idea. Billy spat out shreds of dark skin and stuffing, and shards of one of the mannaquin’s glass eyes before lumbering to his bed and collapsing on the soft gold. There Billy lay, stewing.

“My lord Tyranus?” Thomas called. Billy turned his head and engulfed Thomas in a wave of fire, leaving nothing of his butler but a smudge on the stone floor.

Shit.

Now the floor was covered in black scorch marks.

Billy huffed a blast of fiery irritation and lowered his head back down. Might as well start reforming his flesh as soon as possible. Better to have his divinity unquestioned than rush the Molt. Billy closed his eyes and entered the trance state, using highly disciplined magic to slough off his wounded flesh and replace it with conjured dragonflesh created from pure energy. Healing always left scars, ergo this wasn’t healing, it was the most difficult discipline applied in the most difficult way: genesis.

Two days later Billy stood and fixed the mirror with a wave of his clawed hand.

Not bad. Billy had fixed the things that needed fixing, and even done a little cosmetic work. A more noble brow and snout, the ferocity subtly softened in favor of more intelligent, worshipable features. It only followed that if Billy was going to spend the time and effort to modify himself, that he take full advantage of it.

You look like a girl.

Billy resolved to change his appearance back as soon as possible. No amount of boost in human zealotry was worth forsaking his appearance.

“My lord Tyranus,” Billy heard a human call from the servant’s entrance. He glanced over. It wasn’t like humans would be able to see his shame immediately. The woman dropped to her knees at the sight of her god, tears springing to her eyes.

“My lord, what majesty…”

Maybe he would keep it, after all.

“Maria, what is the reason for your presence here?” Billy asked.

Maria roused herself and spoke. “I’ve come to ask your opinion on the fugitive who attacked me and stole from the Tower’s vault.”

Billy snorted. “Just kill him, Don’t bother me with such trivial things.” Billy looked away and returned to his own thoughts. A few minutes later, Billy noticed Maria still kneeling in the entrance. “What?”

“After Thomas didn’t return from delivering news of him, we tried sending a squad of horsemen after him. They haven’t returned. The man is very dark of skin,”

No…

“About seven feet tall, with a peg leg and an odd accent.”

“What?” Billy asked. Why would he have a peg leg? Maybe it wasn’t the toy soldier. Tyranus glanced over to the shredded taxidermy below the VAMPR. “Did he give a name?”

“He called himself Sam, my lord.” Maria said, bowing her head.

It could be any Sam, there were thousands of Sam’s out there, maybe even a few seven foot tall black ones.

“He signed the logbook in the vault, though, and left a string of indescipherable characters.” Maria said, pulling a sheet of paper out of her robe.

Wordlessly, Billy reached out and snatched the paper from her hand with finely controlled telekinesis. Billy scanned through the names until he landed on the one in question: S4MDS 0003, written in fine, controlled print.

Goddamnit, it’s the toy soldier. Billy bent his powerful mind to deciphering the serial number. The S4M unit’s serial numbers were simply determined by what state they were sold to and in what order. There was no state with the abbreviation DS. The second part, the number, was easy to guess. It was the third S4M to cross paths with him since the fall of man. It also meant that this particular Sam had inherited the memories of the previous ones, enough to call himself the third.

Wait. There were plenty of other S4M units, the serial number only had meaning to Billy, which meant the DS at the end was related to Billy as well. Dragon Slayer. Billy burned the paper in his hand and crushed the ashes. S4M dragon slayer number three out of a possible ten thousand. It was a warning. The Toy soldier was telling him that he would keep coming, again and again, until one of them got lucky.

“Which way did he go?” Billy asked.

“He followed the walls of the city for a time, then turned west.” To the Factory.

Billy smiled at the arrogance of this toy soldier. It hadn’t taken Billy long to figure out that the snapped leyline had been his little friend leaving his underground facility for the first time. The leyline had grown up around him, and like removing a fuse, The toy soldier’s absence had caused that leyline to collapse, with a terrific backlash to the surrounding countryside.

The facility that was pumping these clones out was just Southeast of First Word. In other words, smack dab in the middle of the forest between the two nations. The toy soldier was going for Billy’s elves, but he could go for Sam’s source of immortality, like trading a rook for a queen.

“How long ago did he leave?”

“Over two days, my lord.”

“Tell every available member of the Force of God and regular standing armies to assemble outside the city. I want his triumphant return met with a wall of flame that spans the horizon.”

“As you wish, my lord.” Maria said, bowing and leaving.

In war, you did not blindly chase after your enemy, only reacting to their actions. A journeyman would force the enemy’s hand, trained to do things that constantly put them at a disadvantage. A master would do that while cramming as many meaningful actions into a single move as Dragonfully possible.

Get the elves back, destroy the toy soldier’s immortality, level the forest separating his armies from the elven citadel of First Word, and most importantly, kill that motherless son of a general’s wet dream. And if Mississippi came and took over a few cities and raped and killed their people while he was gone, well; the persecution complex of the christian faiths wasn’t achieved in a day.

***

Maria walked out of the cavern, her heart fluttering. The magnificence she had the honor of laying her hands upon a few weeks ago had become something divine, moving with such power and surety of purpose that she had become weak at the knees.

And his face. Her lord had emerged from the life-threatening battle as if from a crysalis, more beautiful and splendid than before. Maria had no doubts about his divinity now. If that were the case though, why did she not tell him about Sam’s Wellspring? The man that had held the Wellspring device showed such a powerful connection to her lord’s font of power that Tyranus surely must be aware of it. That had to be the case.

Maria nodded to herself, burying her uncertainty beneath the assertion that Sam was simply an unknowing part in her lord’s grand design. In the meantime, she had to put out the word to the officers of both the standing military and the Force of god, every member a recipient of the Blessing of Tyranus. Her lord’s hour was coming, and Sam was playing his part.