The sun dawned upon the Town of Arches, its rays filtering down through the eponymous cage of ancient, supermassive ribs that it had been built within, its walls little more than plugs in the gaps between each rib.

A young man dragged himself into the world of the waking, groggily sitting up in his bed as the pains of the previous day’s hunt shot through him, the gash across his back having crusted his bandages to his body like some vile turtle-shell. His eyes drifted towards one of the two windows of his accommodations, this one pointed southward. In the stead of a southern gate there were the remains of the dead titan’s pelvis, and atop a hill in the north-west, a manor stood, its regal walls of stone contrasted by a giant black skull with windows in the eyes and a great door in the mouth. A nice view, all in all, though among the few redeeming qualities of his living space.

This podunk little town in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere was his life raft and his prison at the same time. Heir of a pathetically minor noble family that he was, his parents had pulled what strings their meagre standing in noble circles had allowed, sending him off to play at a martial disciple so that he might dodge the draft, his inheritance an aquamarine necklace, a couple hundred gelt, fundamental glyph circles tattooed onto the palms of his hands with magic-conductive ink that wouldn’t fade, and a Black Marble Tablet that had been commissioned for his brother, as a return gift after the war… But that was before anyone had known the scale and devastation it would all spiral into, before they had received an aetherwave telegram that his brother had been turned into paste by a Grekurian nobleman of high pedigree. Ikesia and her mechanized forces, fuelled by bleeding-edge industry, pitted against the Pateirian Empire’s and Grekurian Statehood’s vast numbers and mighty cultivators. It had been a massacre for both sides, ending with most known cultivators wiped out, Ikesia occupied, and her unifier - the Sage of Fog - gone to the winds. Some said he had sacrificed himself to erect the Blackwall, that aptly-named monument which could not be bypassed by any means, and whose great gates arbitrarily chose who to let in or out.

The world was all fucked, by Victor’s reckoning. The fact that the nobleman who had killed his brother was also known to have been killed by a Tankman nicknamed “Steel Comet” mere days later only eased the pain a little.

Picking up the slate of black stone from the floor by his bed, he clung onto the pinprick thrumming of its interfacing with his soul, using it to wake up fully, blinking bleary-eyed at the time and weather readout hovering in the top-left corner, right above his attribute listing.

NAME VICTOR KHESTUN SEX MALE SPECIES HUMAN (IKESIAN) FORCE D PRECISION D HARDNESS D+ AETHER D+

Still the same-old: Above-average Aether, denoting his affinity for magic in extremely generalized terms, and Hardness, relating to how difficult he was to injure.

Victor groggily scratched the underside of his neck as he made his way to the glorified water closet that passed for his bathroom, little flakes of bone peeling off his skin and clattering to the ground, much to the young man’s groaning annoyance. This was his inheritance; a shitty mutation, born from a flash-in-the-pan spurt of popularity that had allowed one of his ancestors access to the degenerate cultivation arts of the high nobility. Said ancestor had gotten the genial idea to, instead of just getting a nice suit of armor made like any sane person would do, spend the better part of his remaining lifespan hunting down every gods-damned bonewolf in the region, to steal their measly Azoth Stones, grind them down, and make crude pills from them - at least, so the story went. Victor didn’t particularly care for the story or the truth behind it, because this was his truth - his genetic inheritance was a replacement for facial hair that wouldn’t start to look good for years, or if he was unlucky, decades, a marginally easier time hardening his body for martial arts, and an affinity for a niche type of magic.

It was a small mercy that the surface-level bone plates had no nerve endings.

As he brushed his teeth and stinging menthol foam ran down into the burns on the back of his palm, memories of the previous day flashed through his head...

Hours of trekking through the forest, stuffed into a dead man’s gambeson that fit just barely well enough and armed with a boarkiller spear, searching for the duke’s escaped pet; supposedly one of the last surviving dragons in the region.

What the hunting party eventually came upon was, however, a hunched-over, deformed thing, simultaneously bloated and emaciated, dull reddish scales flaking off its skin, its tail severed above the halfway point, its feet mutilated and clawless. The stench of burned meat and spilled viscera filled the air as it ripped at a deer’s carcass. Victor had, at first, thought its wings had been cut off too, but when it raised its head to sniff the air in suspicion, he saw that there were neither stumps nor scars where wings would have grown. Its head shape was wrong, too, the stumps of what had been horns in the wrong places, its eyes not a dragon’s. The eyes of dragons and their descendants were well-known to shine with humanlike intelligence and to possess no visible pupil, but rather a cornerless triangle formation within a homogenously-coloured iris - a trait passed down to those who consumed the blood of dragons, and their children from then on.

This thing was no dragon. It was an animal; an arcane animal, one capable of breathing fire and mercilessly lethal even in its sorry state, but not a dragon. A False Drake, a mutagenicist’s crude imitation of the ancient living weapons that dragons were. One moment it had been sniffing the air, and in the next it had sprung into motion with a quickness entirely unbefitting its haggard state, zipping about and breathing fire, encircling the hunters in a ring of magickal flame before they even knew what was going on. Had it not been for the Captain, they would’ve been wiped out in a moment, and even then, for all his strength, for all the power of that giant cleaver the Captain lugged around, the False Drake still seemed to shrug off its blade, its decayed scales still plenty tough enough to rob the singsong-resonating weapon of most of its cutting power. Victor had seen it cut halfway through a grown boar and sever its spine, but even the one full swing the Captain got on the False Drake was barely enough to make it limp…

Well, limp more than it already had been.

His weapon was terribly front-heavy to the point of awkwardness, for just below its spearhead it had a blunderbuss, the trigger placed halfway down the haft - it was this that lent it the name Boarkiller. As he readied his spear and fought through his fear to look for an opening, he took note of the deformed manacles on the beast’s legs, errant chainlinks still hanging from them. It had a brass ring embedded in its flank, a trail of dried blue blood running down from it. Victor recalled wondering if the duke had been bleeding this thing, albeit only for a moment, as in the next, the beast broke past the Captain’s guard, knocking him to the ground, threatening to rip his throat out, only slowed by the great mass of cold-iron currently prying its jaws open.

Panic gripped his heart, but Victor kept control of himself… More or less. Pointing the spear, he pulled its trigger and felt it push back against him, rather than attempting to rip itself from his grip as Boarkillers usually did. He had wisely loaded his Boarkiller not with shot and regular powder, but with a kind of powder that would create a burst of blinding, stinging smoke, alongside a great deal of fire - fire that Victor could capture and make use of to fuel his magic.

Resting the shaft of his weapon in the pit of his elbow, Victor desperately drew a series of simplistic fire glyphs with the burning tip of the spear, winding threads of errant Ignis around the spearpoint like a spider’s web. At the same time he feverishly formed earth magic sigils with his free hand, desperately drawing upon the strength of earth to strengthen his muscles for just a few moments, the familiar splitting headache of spiritual exertion making itself known. As he felt a surge of surety flow up through his legs, the young man summoned up every bit of strength in his body to heft his spear with both hands and throw it at the beast, its tip becoming enwreathed in smoldering, billowing white-black flame as it flew through the air.

As good a throw as it was, and despite the fact the spear stuck into the beast’s side and knocked it off the Captain, it sprung up a moment later and lunged blindly in Victor’s general direction, the Captain leaping to his feet and barking orders at the other hunters. In its blinded lunge the creature spewed and sputtered flame without rhyme or reason, as if it were coughing, the other hunters finally snapping back to their senses, firing their boarkillers from a short distance rather than charge it and fire them point-blank as intended. Even so, despite the False Drake’s scales and tough flesh, being shot with four blunderbusses at once still shook it and did some - albeit surface-level - damage, opening up just wide enough a window for Victor to… Turn and run.

He told himself he had to create space to do anything since there was no way in hell he could subdue that thing with his bare hands, martial arts or not, and thus his only hope at usefulness was magic. The Captain came after the beast from behind, only to be completely outpaced when it broke into a sprint, running after the young man and catching him across the back, the teeth of its top jaw cutting through his gambeson and scoring his back as its maw snapped shut behind him, ripping flesh out of his back as the beast abruptly moved backwards and to the side.

One moment he was running, and the next, he had fallen over heels-first, tripped by an errant root. He rolled over himself, sliding across the freeze-rotten leaves that covered the ground until he smashed arm-first into a tree. All the noise and confusion couldn’t drown out the sharp report of the gunshot that had made his ears ring immediately after the drake was knocked away from him - it had not been the whooshing, dull thump of a sparklock, but the sort of CRACK only produced by a special, cartridge-using sort of firearm - had the duke’s elite hunters arrived?

When at last he got his bearings and regained some measure of clear sight, the young man saw a cloud of milky-white smoke enveloping the drake as it confusedly snapped at nothing in particular, thrashing about for a few moments in confusion. An high-pitched screech could be heard as a bright-white beam cut from somewhere off to the right, carving strange, glowing glyph circles on three trees in the vicinity. A moment later, as Victor checked that his shoulder wasn’t dislocated, three more gunshots rang out, three glass stakes each in turn striking a circle and causing it to go out, bouncing off somehow at exactly the right angle to impale one of the drake’s legs, leaving only its left foreleg free.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating in pain - a scene straight from one of his pulps now unfolded before him, as the beast spewed flame onto itself and melted one stake while freeing itself of another by brute strength, while the third froze its right hind leg solid to the ground. Victor heard what, at first, he thought to be a Tankman, the inhuman speed of those steel armors causing an unmistakable noise, but… It was a woman. A flesh-and-blood, damn near half-naked woman with giant brass-coloured boots and, well, giant everything else. She went ripping through the forest at a speed to put motorized vehicles to shame, six red braids tipped with glinting metal whipping behind her, her left arm encased in metal, in her right some short bladed weapon that Victor didn’t get a good look at. The moment she came within a stone’s throw of the False Drake it was already lunging at her, having anticipated her approach, only for the woman to leap diagonally sideways right past the drake with such force she left a small crater. She struck a nearby tree and bounced off it right onto the drake’s back, so forcefully she cracked its trunk down the middle.