Soon they crested the edge of the cliff, and a sprawling cavern awaited them below, its sheer scale best compared to Arches itself; stalagmites and stalactites the size of buildings framed the vista as though immense teeth. The cavern’s vast sprawl was dominated by the corpse of a tremendous dragon, or at least the uppermost third of it; matte-black scales, each the size of a building and overlaying the next, shrouded the immense creature as a suit of armor, many of them missing like the tiles on a shattered mosaic with purple flesh underneath, and many others still were broken. At the end of its muscular, gilled neck sat a six-horned, four-eyed head. Of its body, only the upper half of a torso and a proportionately tremendous arm were left; its arm was atop its head, covered in cuts with two of its clawed fingers having been severed. Its amber-coloured eyes were open and pristine, but glassy, without the slightest motion. A small lake of purple blood had pooled around the body, and from it unearthly purple-tinged flora grew in abundance, emitting Fog in abundance; the dragon’s fingers floated within it.

The gaping hollow of its torso bore a singular intact, unsettlingly humanlike lung, the other ripped-open and tattered, and no other visible organs; its was filled with pustulous sacks inside which vaguely quadrupedal forms floated, attached to the dragon’s unrotting, unwithering flesh. Several burst-open sacks betrayed their contents: Wolves and dogs, halfway turned to False Drakes. There, in the center of it all, was the dragon’s six-chambered heart, stone-still and dead. From this distance, it looked like the heart was covered in pustules, or perhaps tumors. Though her knowledge of these beasts wasn’t exhaustive by any measure, Red had gone out of her way to learn as much as she could about Dragon Descendants in order to facilitate her goals in Arches. A Dragon Descendant’s number of eyes evidenced its closeness to its ancestors; True Dragons each had four pairs of seeing-eyes in addition to a crystalline extra on their foreheads that served as an amplifying medium for their immense arcane power, with Dragon Descendants losing pairs of eyes the further removed they were from their ancestors. A dragon with three eyes, no matter how titanic, was inherently lesser than a five or seven-eyed cousin, and a dragon possessing only a single eye was an abominable thing barely above an animal in intellect. Such mono-eyed dragons were so far removed from their ancestors that many Pateirian scholars considered them to be no more than arcane beasts trying to mimic Dragon Descendants, derisively labeling them “Sorcerer-Lizards”.

“The Dragon of Arches withered away over time, and when its Fifth Eye closed at last, so too did the growth of new Dragonhearts cease; those growths you see on its heart are…” the duke spoke up again, gesturing vaguely in the dragon’s direction. His hand shook, and with a heavy gulp, he continued: “Unripe ones, so to speak, now never to ripen. In my lifetime, it only produced two, and even these were weaker than their predecessors. Because of this, my grandfather’s mutagenicists had devised a method for imbuing beasts with a sliver of draconic essence, and by performing a full transfusion using the resultant False Drake’s blood, a False Dragon Knight could be created. The method was also incorporated into the rearing of True Dragon Knights in order to reinforce their waning powers, but….

Alberich looked to her with sorrow in his eyes, leading her a ways to the left, onto a walkway that extended along the cave wall and over the Dragon’s head. It was slick with purple blood that still glimmered with iridescent colours, betraying its freshness in the absence of clotting. It was atop this walkway that the reason for the god-beast’s death became clear: Its Fifth Eye was gone, cut out of the socket.

“It must’ve been constantly using its Fifth Eye to keep itself alive…” she thought.

“I knew not what to do, nor who to tell, when I had learned of what had happened…” the duke said, his tone filled with a swirling mixture of disbelief and grief. “But worst of all, I know not who did the deed. It seems one of my own sought to usurp the Dragon’s remaining power for himself, either an ordained Dragon Knight or one of my mutagenicists. I only pray Ser Adalbert wasn’t involved.”

Raising an eyebrow under her mask, Red questioned: “Where is the knight-captain?”

“He took up a search-and-rescue assignment for a group of hunters who hadn’t returned…” the duke trailed off.

Red pushed him: “...From where?”

“A Red Locust Bandit hideout,” he relented. “Ser Adalbert requisitioned two parties of twelve, one for himself and one for Ser Baldwin. He said the location had to be the Red Locusts’ headquarters in the duchy if it was so heavily defended as to capture a group of six beast-slayers of might comparable to Dragon Knights without at least one escaping.”

“Of course it was Adalbert. Who else could it have been? After how badly that homunculus humiliated him, his ego must’ve snapped in half…” Red thought, only just barely managing to stop herself from voicing the thought.

“...While I am most honored that you trust me enough to share these grave news with me and ask my counsel, I have urgent business which, unlike a dead dragon, will not wait,” she said, retracing her steps over the walkway before the duke could try to stop her. ”I shall leave Tian Meng with you if you want for further advice. The lift returns to the surface on its own, yes?”

The duke nodded, and with that, Red left him. Upon reaching the surface, she was nearly instantly greeted by the inconspicuous broker, waiting for her in the central courtyard by the Panopticon. He was watching over two groundskeepers as they fixed the damage her landing had caused.

“Watch over the duke while I’m gone, I suspect he may need guidance,” she said to him. “Is it ready?”

Meng simply nodded, prompting her to smile under her mask.

“Very good.”

Construct Seven, the Dragonfly, the name didn’t truly matter.

She’d stashed it away in an abandoned manor at the edge of town, along with her other works; a construct of blackstone, it was the most complete manifestation of Red’s proficiency in wielding this “blessing” of hers. The Dungeon Core’s essence allowed her to give form to the formless, to seemingly create things from nothing, but the effort to make something real was an order of magnitude above making temporary constructs.

Red had toiled without relent to grasp this power, knowing that it was in direct defiance of the Emperor’s will, that it was courting death, but what was the point of her otherwise? To have all this power, and not use it.

“Your actions were what forced me onto this path, my liege; the Walking Way of the Living Monument. I may as well walk it,” she thought as she strode through the deserted halls.

Red had learned how to create and shape blackstone, how to make it move, filling in for what she couldn’t make herself with parts procured through her contacts in the Land of Lingering Smoke.

The Dragonfly was the result; an elongated blackstone construct atop six spindly, insectoid legs, possessed of four articulated “wings” made up of triangular panels. Her intention with it had been to create a vehicle to let her ride the leylines the same way mythical cultivators did with their flying swords, and though it did work for this purpose, the Dragonfly could only hover under its own power, and in operation resembled a motorbike more than anything else.

She opened a Fog Vortex in the palm of her own hand; a deceptively useful aspect of what she had become was the possession of her own personal Fog Storage, albeit limited in capacity. From the vortex she retrieved a fist-sized sphere of iridescent crystal, which she slotted into a depression in the Dragonfly’s “head”. A Subcore; this crystalline orb was wrought from tremendously compressed Pneuma and Azoth, the primordial mercury of life, of which the False Drake population was a plentiful source. The Azoth Stones of those beasts were worthless for anything to do with cultivation, laden with impurity, and so distilling them down to blank, pure Azothic Mercury was a perfect use. It was an amplifying medium and an extension of Red’s will at the same time; a means by which she could fuel her constructs without exerting herself or even being there, she could even see through it if the need arose. She’d only been able to make this single one, but it sufficed.

The machine came alive, its wings tilting back and forth for a moment before its legs retracted and it floated into the air about a meter off the floor, emitting a slight crystalline ringing. From the Subcore sprung forth a windshield of translucent arcane matter and Red impelled the Dragonfly out through one of the mansion’s shattered windows, catching the updraft of a leyline before descending down to ground level once she reached the fateful forest road, the tall grass that covered much of it having clearly been trampled only recently.

Mere minutes of riding down this path, and already Red saw what she’d hoped for: Two huge motorbikes, and driving the larger of the two was…

Her.

The party rode down the road which they’d previously circumvented, the two rescued captives holding on for dear life, fear plainly evident in their faces; meanwhile, Victor was obviously doing all in his power to make it seem like he wasn’t absolutely terrified of falling off the screaming steel beast from whose exhausts spewed fire and lightning. Things were going altogether smoothly so far; a bit too smoothly, by Zel’s reckoning. As if in answer to her expectation of a hitch, an unfamiliar, black-red shape came into view as they rounded a bend.

A blackstone dragonfly hovering a good meter off the ground, its wings reaping what tall grass hadn’t been smushed down to the ground as it bolted in their direction. Atop it was a horned, masked figure cloaked in red, its visage unmistakable.

“Is that Red?!” Zef questioned from behind, shouting over the engine’s howl.

“Has to be! Probably involved with the traffickers!” Zel shouted back.

She slowed down and brought her machine to a halt, with Jorfr following her lead.

“If it comes down to violence, just grab the captives and take them to safety. By the time you come back it should be over,” she said to Zefaris, who nodded without a flicker of worry in her eyes. The captives stuck with the norseman at the back as Zelsys - and Zelsys alone - walked out ahead to meet the Lady in Red, who had also brought her bizarre essentech vehicle to a halt. Zel and everyone she trusted knew who it was, under that mask; she’d been briefed on the Rigport Incident, on how Red had somehow been reborn into the role of a “moderate” imperial agent that balanced out the extremism of the Occupationists. She didn’t trust that act one bit.

“Lady Karmesin, is it? What is a noblewoman such as yourself doing on a back road at such a late hour?” Zel questioned coyly. She didn’t expect Red to fall for it; the recognition in her eyes and tone of voice were all too obvious, but deception wasn’t the point of this song-and-dance.

The Lady in Red tilted her head to the side. A curtain of black hair fell out of her hood. “There are matters of state to which only I can attend. Furthermore, I could ask you the same question: What is the Prime Slayer of a separatist city-state doing on a back road at such a late hour, and with two missing youths in tow?” came Karmesin’s voice in reply, distorted and amplified by her mask.

“We are merely following up on the same investigation that brought us to this duchy in the first place: The location of the Red Locust Bandits’ so-called Meat Market. You wouldn’t happen to be heading to that self-same Meat Market, would you? Surely, the duke’s trusted advisor wouldn’t be involved with slave-driving, parasite-using traffickers.”