(Oct 15)

The Grinch is, at the very weakest, an A ranked but it may even be S ranked…

If so… The Grinch could be as strong and as dangerous… as a dragon…

Until now, I had subconsciously assumed that dragons were the biggest threat to me, but I was wrong. Dragons are powerful, but there are other formidable creatures as well that rival even dragons.

Dragons just happen to be the most relevant to me, but now that I realize the threat of The Grinch as well, being prepared for only dragons won’t do. There are other threats besides dragons, like The Grinch or… a war.

“And that’s basically our situation right now. Honestly, we are in quite a dire situation, we don’t have enough resources to devote into this investigation when there’s the threat of a war with dragons at hand. But if we don’t deal with The Grinch quickly, the deaths will continue, the public will get more and more anxious, and who knows what’ll happen next.”

William gave a brief explanation.

He let out a puff of smoke from his cigarette through a big sigh.

“Anyways, you should… head home Anthony. There’s not much to do right now besides gathering evidence and… cleaning up. I’ll contact you when I need your help. Oh, by the way, if you can, go to training tomorrow. I have some things I wanna talk to you about involving your dragon powers.”

William had briefly mentioned something about my dragon powers and going to training tomorrow, but I was tired and didn’t think much of it.

I also didn’t want my wife to stick around here for any longer, so I just quickly went home with her after picking up Gabi from school.

I’m exhausted so I’m going to sleep after writing this.

(Oct 16)

The soldiers were nervous.

By now, almost everyone in the city had heard about the 5 murder victims yesterday.

The news and rumors had spread like wildfire.

Basically everyone in my training group was gossiping and talking about it.

“Have you heard? There were 5 murders… in a single day!”

“Yea… not only that, but they were also all within close proximity as well!”

“Damn, what the hell are the higher ups doing? Letting a murderer like The Grinch run free…”

“I hear they’re doing an investigation, though it’s pretty useless.”

“As if, I bet they’re afraid of The Grinch! I hear The Grinch might even be an S ranked!”

“Are you stupid? Why would an S rank go around killing people for no reason?”

These were the basic kinds of conversations running around, some of them were accurate but some of the rumors were completely made up and false.

I ignored most of them because I knew more about the situation than most of the other soldiers and just focused on the training we did.

Yesterday, William had told me to come to training because he had something to talk to me about regarding my dragon powers, but we didn’t meet until later in the afternoon.

When I got to my training group, Alisha made another speech on The Grinch and how we should train harder, but honestly it was boring and I zoned out.

Next, we did some training where we wore a heavy backpack and made us run through thick forests. We also had to learn to load canons and to use bows as well… as if they were training us for war or something…

Then came lunch time, and this was when Cornelia came to pick me up.

“Hey Anthony… sorry about last time...”

Cornelia also briefly apologized like William had, about the training I did before (involving the hot sauce).

She quickly changed the subject though.

“So like, William says he wants to talk to you.”

Now that I think about it, why didn’t William come meet me himself, but instead send Cornelia to come pick me up? Hm…

Anyways, Cornelia “dropped” me off at William’s office (honestly, we just silently ran alongside to William office, so I have no clue why Cornelia accompanied me and I could’ve just ran there myself) and then she left.

When I entered his office, I was once again greeted by William, who was still working on his massive egg capsule thingy that I had been seeing for a while now… seriously, what the hell is that thing?

“Take a seat, gimme a second… just gotta finish fixing up this one thing…”

After a couple seconds, William stood up from where he was working and dusted off his lab coat.

He took off his lab coat and then plopped onto a chair across from me.

“So the last time you were here, we tested and experimented with your dragon powers…”

William pulled out a pile of documents from his desk and dropped them onto the table.

“I’ve been analyzing the tests you did, and I have some results I want to share with you. Well, it’s more ‘theories’ that I came up with that I want to discuss with you.”

“Theories?”

William nodded and continued talking.

“Listen closely because this might be a little confusing.”

After hearing William say that, I took a piece of paper and pencil from his desk prepared to write down what William says.

“I told you to listen carefully, but I didn’t think you’d take notes… this isn’t a school lesson… well if you want to, go ahead, I guess.”

William cleared his throated and began telling me what he found and his theories on my dragon powers.

“During the testes we did before, there were many unanswered questions, like the fact that you can summon and unsummon your dragon parts whereas normal dragons cannot. But we also learnt several things as well, like the fact you can summon multiple dragon claws and you’re not limited to just two.

However, the more dragon claws you summon, the weaker each individual claw becomes, which makes sense as you are splitting your dragon essence into multiple pieces. This also applies to other dragon parts like your dragon tail as well.

After several days of thinking, I realized that you were creating the dragon body parts using your dragon essence. It’s not growing out of you; it’s being materialized in a physical form through your dragon essence. It’s technically not part of your body, but it’s a part of your dragon essence and magic.”

William had warned me that this was going to be a bit confusing before he started explaining this, and he was right. I was really confused.

“So… what does that mean? I create my dragon claws and parts using my dragon essence? Wasn’t that already obvious?”

“Well, that’s true, but it’s slightly different from what we had thought. The main point here is that it’s not growing out of your body, but it is materialized into reality using your magic.

For example, when you summon your tail. The tail doesn’t grow out of your body, it gets summoned instead. If the tail was a part of your body, it would rip a hole in your pants, which it doesn’t. Instead, it creates a dragon tail on your pant through your dragon essence.”

Whoa.

That’s true.

Whenever I summon a dragon tail, it doesn’t rip my pants.

Thus, concluding that the tail doesn’t grow from my body but is created through my magic.

William raised his hand and gathered his magic into his hand.

As he did, the air around his hand started to freeze up and formed a floating ice spear.

“This is an ice spear that I created using my magic. It’s a spell. And my theory is that your dragon body, is just a spell as well. It’s not an ability, but a spell instead.”

A spell, not an ability?

“Ok. So what’s the difference?”

When I asked that, William started to manipulate his ice spear, causing it to fly around in the air.

“There are several differences. You can do things that wouldn’t be possible if it were growing out of your body. A simple example is that you would be summon your dragon body parts, even when it’s not attached to you. You would be able to create dragon claws in the air and shoot them like projectiles!”

This opens a whole new world of possibilities, and it is also what gave me ideas for a bunch of new abilities.

One of those abilities being…. Dragon missiles.