The first thing that came to mind as I watched the draconic colossus fly towards me was: shit. Literally and figuratively, I felt the air grow ever thicker as the beast drew closer. Its presence was that imposing with how it violated all manner of biological processes imaginable.

I was beginning to think that the plan would fail. That I had somehow doomed both myself and billions of innocents by dreaming up some unstoppable monstrosity.

I was being pessimistic, and I knew it. Being suddenly thrust into a life or death situation against an enemy of a dream was like I was in a fantasy. Or maybe it would be a horrible nightmare?

“Okay, you can do this…” I whispered to myself. This was my plan, and I couldn’t back down no matter what. Think reasonable thoughts... “Yeah, I already paid this month’s rent the city getting destroyed would mean I wasted that.”

With a renewed resolve of some sort, I turned back to the encroaching horror. Below me, I felt the seats shift ever so slightly. I took my walkie talkie into my hand.

“Kali, please tell me you’re cloaking the giant dragon flying straight towards the stadium.” I said, half actually caring and half trying to get my mind off of how big it was.

My speakers buzzed Kali’s excited yelling was heard from the other end. “Yeah, It’s inside my Cube! No spawn of this Reality should be able to see it. Also, I’m underneath it right now! I’m being really sneaky!”

I frowned and squint into the distance. Floating underneath the behemoth was a small dot, Kali. She was barely even visible from this distance.

“Hey, why can’t I attack it now?” Kali asked suddenly.

“Kali, please don’t do that.” I sighed. “If you happen to enrage it somewhere other than here, it might go berserk in a place we cannot control.”

“Fine.” I got the impression that she was pouting, but I couldn’t see it from here. It was a small mercy that I knew she would at least follow along with the plan. Though, I had to promise extra explosions later.

Waiting for some horrible battle to erupt at any moment was torture. My legs shook in apprehension, desperately trying to stave off the fear that facing against a moving mountain of muscle and scale naturally produced.

With Kali back to doing whatever she was doing to conceal the monster, I was back to my thoughts. My traitorous thoughts that bounced between trepidation and worry. It was just the nail in the coffin that I had no idea how to use my Reality again for how I created Snapper.

Sure, I had tried, but something just wasn’t clicking like when I somehow created Snapper. Saddened about the fact that I couldn't create an army to retaliate, I tried to focus back on what I had to do.

Or what little I had to do. All I had planned was clear the stadium, and then run for my life. Kali’s range should be able to cover most of the stadium itself, too. I just needed to run backup.

The stands began to shift underneath me again. Looking down, I could see that they were beginning to sway with the wind much more than standing structures should. The disgruntled people who had left were also taking note of this, and understandably began to run.

With the evacuation in progress, I had thought that maybe the dragon in the distance wouldn’t attack anymore as the food source was gone. I didn’t have to worry about that.

I did have to worry about the fact that it looked like it was heading straight for me. In fact, I don’t think it deviated from its path. A path that lined up with me perfectly.

A sinking feeling settled in the bottom of my stomach. I hurriedly ran to one side of the seats, and, as I feared, the dragon’s path minutely changed towards me. My heart joined my stomach in doing unhealthy flips.

“Hey, the Sinner is moving weirdly! Should I attack it now?” Kali asked innocently, not even aware of the turmoil that was my mind.

“Um, I think it’s going after me…” I responded slowly, unsure that I even wanted to comprehend several tons of flesh charging in my direction.

Kali’s response was one that was all expected, and, in equal parts, terrifying. “Oh no…” Her voice was uncharacteristically unsteady. I think that terrified me more than her next words. “I think… I think it’s trying to kill you to consume your Reality faster!”

“I’m…” I paused to swallow a lump in my throat. “Going to assume that’s bad.”

“Yeah it’s bad! There’s a reason why they’re called Sinners, and if something does something that they’re not supposed to, bad things happen!” Kali hurriedly explained. I had no idea what she meant by bad things, but I wasn’t in the mood to even ask. If Kali was worried I needed to be expecting an apocalypse.

“Right… uh, new plan.” I said, turning and jogging down the steps. “You attack it before it kills me and does those bad things.”

“Okay!”

Many things happened at once as soon as I ducked into the interiors of the stadium. A loud roar shook the building before a mechanical screech echoed out to challenge it. The stadium trembled, and I felt the collision of something large and fast smashing into one side. Trails of dust dribbled down with the shocking impact.

Then I collided with someone and tumbled to the floor while they barely registered the impact.

“So, I thought you said there wasn’t a bomb?” I heard a tough voice above me from my slight daze. It almost sounded just like Cole’s.

“I had no idea that there would be an explosion!” Screamed back someone who talked just like Courtney.

As my daze slowly receded I found that the two didn’t just sound like my best friend, but they were my best friends. No wait, better question: why were they here?

“What are you doing here, Courtney?” I asked as I looked behind me, wondering if some type of dragon would come crashing through the ceiling.

The brunette looked to me with a hand stuck to her hip. “I’m here getting your ass out of whatever situation you’re in. If I knew you were going to actually go with a bomb threat then I would have knocked you out and dragged you away before.” She paused, looking around for something. “By the way, where is that weird robot you brought?”

“Robot?” I echoed.

“Dude, you got a robot without me?!” Cole had his priorities straight.

I frowned as my attention turned to him. He was dressed down in tight fitting, green pants that went down to his knees with built in padding. A skintight, white undershirt was obscured by a loose, greenish-white jersey with our school name on the back, and the number twenty two emboldened in thick, white script. He looked like he had come from the middle of the locker rooms.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

Cole smiled, bumping a fist onto my shoulder. “I saw you running up the nosebleeds when everyone was trying to get out.” He forked a thumb over to Courtney as he continued, “Saw good ol’ Court running this way when one of the stands started to wobble, and thought something was going on. Now, I’m here, wondering when you got a robot without me.”

“Yes, and as great as you two’s bromance is, can we get back to the matter at hand.” Courtney cut in, stepping between us and poking me hard in the chest. “I know I promised you to get people out of the stadium, but I-”

“Wait that was you?!” Cole interrupted.

“Cole, shut up for a second; I’m trying to understand why our friend has turned to terrorism.” Courtney groused, and the big guy looked at me weird. “Now explain, Cade.”

“I mean, uh…” I looked around, wondering how I could even begin explain this. “Could I start from the beginning?”

Courtney crossed her arms, clearly not amused, but nodded her head impatiently. One of her sneakers was tapping incessantly on the concrete floor. I had to hold in a laugh as Cole tried to look the same only to end up looking like he was pouting as if her were a lost puppy.

“So, uh, I was biking home yesterday as usual, you know.” I mimed riding a bicycle. “Then all of a sudden this huge explosion happened, and-”

I couldn’t finish as the ceiling above us was ripped apart by saber-like nails that bore through the rebar and concrete like wet paper mache. Courtney screamed, I screamed, Cole grabbed the both of us and was already making a beeline down the next corner. He didn’t look the least bit uncomfortable carrying the both of us.

“Was it anything like that?!” Cole yelled over a deafening roar that almost made my ears bleed.

“Shut up, Cole! Keep running!” Courtney answered for me.

Both she and I were slung over the football player’s shoulders like living sacks of potatoes. I was given the view of rough, red scales parting before a massive eye that peered into the broken hallway. Its reptilian slits locked onto my form, and I screamed again.

However, my scream wasn’t in fear or surprise, it was in absolute agony as I felt like something was trying to claw its way from my chest. Burning lances of pain sent my body in spasms of uncontrollable shivers. Cole almost dropped my body as a particularly nasty twinge in my nerves nearly jolted my torso out of his fireman’s carry.

“Cade!” Courtney yelled in worry.

“Shit, was that another bomb?!” Cole cursed as he turned another corner.

Then something slammed into the terror of scales with a cry of molten metal and squealing machinery. The beast roared in pain as it was torn away from tearing us to bits, and took some more structure with its disappearance. I think everyone felt it in their bones as it collided with the ground, sending tremors throughout the area.

The pain within me trailed off with the dragon’s leave, and I was finally able to form something that wasn’t a scream or moan of pain. In the lull of aftershock, I realized that the dragon was trying to find me by tugging on my Reality that it had. I had no idea that it didn’t even know what I looked like, but it certainly did now.

Fear slithered down my throat.

“Cade, hey buddy, you okay?” Cole’s voice held me from freaking out. “How many bombs do your friends have?”

I blinked at them, wondering how they had missed the literal dragon that had just beared down on them. Then it hit me. Kali’s cloaking was still concealing the dragon, and they thought this was still a bomb attack. “Guys that wasn’t a bomb. I don’t… think I can explain it now, but you both need to get out of here like right now.”

“Cade, you need to shut up now.” Courtney said, tapping Cole on the arm that held her. “You can set us down now, Cole. Thank you for that, by the way.”

“No prob’.” Cole smiled.

“No, you guys don’t get it.” I sighed, running a hand through my hair. How do I go about sending my friends away while also telling them I plan on fighting a literal ton of impossible biology? “Those are not bombs, and Courtney, that thing you saw earlier wasn’t a robot. It was a living thing that I created.” She looked at me, not even believing a word. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but I need you guys to leave. It’s too dangerous and… wait,” I turned towards the hole that was behind us. “Kali, you can take the cloaking off the dragon now that we’re in the stadium!”

The diminutive bender of reality didn’t really respond to my words, but there was a slight shift in the air. Suddenly the roars in the background became louder, the air was thick with heat and smog and both my friend’s faces were rapidly paling.

“That sounds like a dragon.” Cole was the first to speak.

Courtney slapped him on the back of the head. “Of course it’s not a dragon, you idiot. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for something to make that sound.” She walked over to the opening, and I reached out to pull her back just as a gout of hot flame scorched the ground, curling up from below.

“Holy shit! It really was a dragon!” Cole ran over to us, peered over the edge and gaped. His mouth hung open by the sight that was once a regular football stadium.

I joined him, too. There was a great many things that I had expected from this fight, and while I had planned to destroy the stadium, what was before me was a different matter entirely.

The once turf and green plastic grass fields were now a stark imitation of hell. The ground was upturned to the point that soil and stone were all that remained between scorched cinders and cackling flame. Our stadium once had two sets of high stands that stretched up into the confines of the sky, but now we had been trimmed down to merely a small portion of seats.

Concrete and rebar splayed out in equal disarray in the wrecked stadium. Large pieces that looked like they had been shorn off were lodged in the walls on some places, tearing up more seating from their probable trajectories. I found a rather distinct shell of molded metal that looked like it was still cooling from being forced into a shape that metal didn’t want to bend into.

There was also an imprint on it that didn’t bode well for my chances of survival: an indentation of well defined scales. Kali’s missile of metal couldn’t even pierce through its outer carapace.

However, I don’t think my friends were paying much attention to that detail. I wouldn’t blame them either when most to the stadium wasn’t actually destroyed. Instead, it had been repurposed into a series of floating clamps made from tons of glowing rebar and crumbling concrete. Lightning danced along the outer fringes of each clamp, pulsing with unnatural energy that crackled in insane harmony. There were two long pipes, larger than a school bus, made from more metal and stone that blasted out shrapnel of glass and red hot rebar with pressurized air.

Red, impenetrable scales covered the beast that the clamps sought to contain and the pipes dared to fire upon. Its body was more serpentine than I originally anticipated, fittingly matching as each of its five pairs of trunk-like legs carried it in coiling maneuvers to dodge the dangerous pieces of its assaulter’s attacks. The once majestic wings that let it break the laws of gravity were now mangled and broken in several places, spurting steaming, crimson liquid into the fires that surrounded it. If anything, that only made the fires thrive.

The beast had been cheated of its ability to fly, but that did not mean that it was any weaker. It took to the ground like it was water, showing that its ocean wasn’t only just the air. Five tails cracked and broke the sound barriers in violent bouts of supersonic speed, slamming into projectiles or sending its own salvo on ammunition to its offender. Its scales shrugged off anything that wasn’t shot from the two pipes, and even then, those times were seldom.

A head like an arrow rose, some of its eyes were gone, replaced by gory openings full of stained glass and bloodied steel. However, it still had five eyes with which it could see, and a mouth that opened to sharp points of jagged porcelain.

Then it roared with flame. Burning red light shone from beneath the scales on its chest, traveling from where its lungs would be and flowing till it reached its open maw. Out came screaming hellfire of white and dark red, torrents of almost liquid flame gored through the concrete of the stadium with ease before crashing into some invisible barrier that spread out the flames into the rest of the field. Tongues of flickering fire reached our locked feet as we stared below.

I saw Kali, surrounded by her machinations of science and bullshit, no longer laughing or jovially playing with the beast like she had when we first met. No, her face was set into a stern frown of concentration that bordered on a new personality. She was far away, but I could see exhaustion begin to set in for her.

She had gotten lucky with taking out the dragon’s flight and some of its eyes. The only problem was that those were all of its wounds. Nothing more and nothing less. It was learning her patterns, and it was healing.

The once broken wings were beginning to right themselves, and I saw bubbles of liquid forming in its empty sockets, pooling eye jelly that began to turn into usable vision. It was regenerating and Kali was not.

She wasn’t injured, or I couldn’t see if she was. The thing that was holding her back was that her tactics hadn’t evolved from ‘shooting till it dies’, and it was showing. This was no longer an enemy that she could just overpower with her insane creations that defied laws of physics.

It was no longer a battle, but an inevitable loss that was slowly coming to fruition.

“Damn, who is that girl?” Cole murmured from beside me, taking my mind off of the growing desperation of the situation.

“I’m guessing that’s Kali.” Courtney shot her own conjecture and looked at me, traces of skepticism were long gone in the presence of this fight. “Now, I think I understand a little of what’s going on.” She finished while pursing her lips.

“Wait, you do?” I asked.

“Of course, this is obviously too real to be faked anyways. Also, you said you created that weird metal thing, and also said it was your ‘pet’.” Courtney said, gesturing over to the dragon as it rampaged. “You also said that you needed to kill your first pet; which I’m guessing is that… thing. I’m sorry, but you said you created them, right?”

My jaw hung open. She put all that together so easily. “Um, yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know how creating life works or what not, but can’t you just un-create it?” Cole butt in.

“Obviously, he can’t somehow.” Courtney reasoned, and easily stole back the limelight. “I have no idea what to make of anything else, but we need to find a way to kill that or else we’re all going to die. That thing doesn't look like the type to take prisoners. And I don’t know about you guys, but I certainly dislike being instantly flambeed.”

Cole pointed out to Kali. “That girl looks like she has it covered, though. I mean, look at all that! She’s badass!”

“I think I agree with Courtney, Cole.” I said slowly, gesturing to Kali once again. “Kali is showing signs of exhaustion, and if she falls we have no chance of fighting a raging beast like that. I need to go and help her somehow.”

“Uh, don’t you mean ‘we’?” Cole frowned.

“I’m sorry, but I agree with Cole on this one.” Courtney followed before I could say anything. “You obviously can’t get close to that thing, err, dragon without being crippled somehow. That’s why you suddenly yelled out, right?” I was scowling as I nodded. I hated when she brought out perfectly reasonable facts. “Besides, you’d be better off creating more fodder to stall that thing… I mean, dragon whatever.”

“About that…” I laughed nervously.

Courtney sighed, placing her face into her palm. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“What?” Cole was understandable confused. “What’s going on?”

“This idiot,” Courtney growled. “Has no idea what he’s doing. It makes sense for how everything got so out of hand that he had no idea how to work his little acts to defy nature.”

“It’s not my fault!” I defended. “I had no idea that I was dreaming up monsters until yesterday!”

“Dude, not cool.” Cole chided. “But honestly, what kind of messed up dragon were you even dreaming of to come up with that?”

“Wait, dreaming?” Courtney interrupted, and I saw the dawning of an idea come over her. Her arms crossed while her foot began to tap against the floor. “If you’ve somehow been imagining them into creation, then you should know all their strengths and their weaknesses, right?”

I blinked as that thought made sense to me. “Oh yeah…”

“No, more like damn right! What do you mean ‘oh yeah’? Now quickly spill, what are we dealing with?” Courtney ordered.

“Shouldn’t we be going and helping the controlling-debris-of-doom girl?” Cole asked.

“We’d just be nuisances right now, at best. If we figure out the weak points, we can go and tell her.” Courtney explained then motioned to me. “Come on, Cade, we’re running on a clock here.”

I nodded, pulling up my memory from when the image first came into my head was rather easy. “Uh, so I remember it having impenetrable scales, or whatever I thought would be the strongest. And uh, I’m fairly sure I made its blood really, really thick so it works like cornstarch and water when you hit it.”

“So you…” Courtney made a sound that wasn’t quite a scream, but not quite a yell as she pressed her fingers to her temples. “You made its blood into a non-newtonian fluid… I just can’t. How is it even alive?!”

“I think you’re thinking too dark there, Court.” Cole said with a playful grin. “At least the scales aren’t diamonds.”

“Uh…” I broke into a sweat.

“They’re not, right? Cade, tell me we’re not going against a living being that is coated in thick diamond!” Cole frantically shook me around.

“We’re not going up against a living being that’s coated in a thick layer of diamond.” I repeated.

Courtney slapped the back of my head. “Surely, this dragon would have some kind weakness, Cade. You wouldn’t think up an unbeatable being of killing, would you?”

I was sheepishly rubbing the back of my head for a second as I realized that I hadn’t thought of a weakness before Mrs. Moore brought my attention back to history class. Then I realized that I had thought up one weakness. “...history…” I mumbled.

“What?” Courtney blinked. “I’m sorry I think I just heard you say ‘history’.”

“Specifically, American history…” I answered.

“Dude, that’s a lame weakness.” Cole shook his head.

“In my defense, Mrs. Moore really made everything boring!”

“It doesn’t matter.” Courtney sighed, one hand pinching the bridge of her nose. “We have it’s weakness, and all we have to have is for that girl to recite some facts. Can you tell her?”

“Kali, yell facts of American History at it!” I yelled over the explosions and fire, unsure that my words would actually reach her. I was both pleasantly surprised when she nodded, but absolutely terrified when she waved a hand in our direction.

All three of us were dragged up into the air, and flown over to her fast enough for my ears to pop. My vision blurred as the wind rushed in front of us. When I finally got ahead of myself I found that all three of us were floating behind Kali, a large block of concrete halted a gout of flame that had carelessly traveled in our direction.

Oddly, enough the beast halted the fire before the fire could slag through our defense. Instead, it roared a vibrato of wrathful indignation before shooting towards Kali with renewed fervor. I felt my head shake from watching the huge behemoth break the sound barrier with its own body.

“You all chant your ‘History’. I’ll protect you three.” Kali said, sending a few floating cinder blocks and bolts of condensed lightning at the malevolent monstrosity.

Cole was screaming while trying to scramble out of the air. I knew he was afraid of heights, but I didn’t know he was this terrified. In fact, I was almost chuckling at the scene of the large teen yelling in a very high pitched tone.

Courtney was too busy being disorientated by the sudden transition to help now, and I was sure she would marvel at her lack of appeal to gravity before trying to help. That meant it was up to me till Cole got over his fear and Courtney realized that our situation was dire.

I wet my lips before saying the first thing that come to mind. “Uh, Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety two.”

The dragon squealed as a piece of supersonic shrapnel bored through its scales and flesh with supernatural ease, blood spilled in amounts similar to swimming pools. It continued to thrash about as if some stake had been driven down its spine and then acid was filled into the hole. I continued to say random facts that came to my mind, and the beast screamed in phantasmal pain.

At one point, Courtney had joined with me, giving much more detailed accounts of the Gettysburg Address and the socio-economic reforms of the late eighteen hundreds. They were as painful to me to listen to as the dragon’s diamond scales shattered like plywood, sparking off in shards of glimmering red. Its blood sloshed with unnatural viscosity as more and more wounds piled up on its massive body.

Bullets of reformed stadium, molded steel and razor sharp glass spilled out of the cannons that Kali kept forming around her. Their mechanisms chirped and complained with explosive results as each shot compromised whatever processes she had going on in there. However, for each disposable, oversized rifle she made, five more would snake out from the nearby structures. She was a gatling gun that had decided to remove the idea that being a gatling gun meant it had to be a singular machine.

Death rained, dragons screamed and I was weaponizing history. It was an odd day.

When all seemed to be going great, everything naturally went to shit. Kali’s unending rain of various surrounding was dwindling as there wasn’t as much reusable material around. She had said she couldn’t use organic material, and that if the bullets were lodged into her opponent, she had no way of retrieving them.

The dragon before us was bleeding through many holes that were now healing at a rate that was significantly slower than before. It proved that we were getting through its insane healing factor, but we were slowly becoming aware that we might not have the firepower to actually finish off this monster.

Understanding seemed to pass through the four of us, and Kali did something with the air. Suddenly it became thicker, almost as if it had become molasses. Then the surroundings filled with living lightning.

Nets of shocking plasma coiled into being as they discharged towards the struggling beast. Coils of electricity burned into the dragon's flesh, caurterizing every brutal wound that they slashed into it. It continued onwards even when the air became thinner. I realized slowly that Kali was having trouble breathing as well. She was somehow transmuting the surrounding gasses into plasma.

It was a last ditch maneuver that was becoming more and more dangerous to continue.

She dropped before we did. Her face was an interesting shade of blue as she continued to asphyxiate on the low oxygen, and lower us to the ground with all the care that our squishy bodies deserved. When we all touched the floor I saw that her legs shouldn’t bend that way.

“Kali…” I rasped through breathless lips. “Stop… Please.”

Kali just smiled my way as a bleeding dragon dragged its wounded body towards us. It growled so low that I felt my everything vibrate; bones, muscles and organs going through interesting tones as the floor trembled with every approaching step.

Courtney coughed violently on the floor nearby. The combination of smoke and little breathable air seemed to have affected her the most. Her eyes watered behind a veil of fear.

Cole was the best out of all of us, but his legs were still trembling from being up in the air for so long. He had gotten his wits about him eventually. He dragged Kali up from the floor, and I realized that she had fainted at some point. His other arm wrapped around Courtney as we both found ourselves in a silent conversation.

We nodded as one. Then we began to shamble on exhausted steps. Moving between blazing hellfire, dancing beside growing bonfires full of smoke and coughing past fogs of black that littered the floor.

Our lungs burned as we moved. We were feeling the pain of continuing, and Cole had tried several times to pass off Kali and Courtney to me. I just took Courtney, but never let myself take both.

I knew him too well to know that he was trying to make it so that he became a martyr to save us all. There was a desperation that was welling up in me too, but I would never let Cole abandon himself. I yelled at him with my eyes, and our silent struggle continued. He just gave me a grim nod of acknowledgement.

The beast was behind us, charging through the smoke, brushing past the flames and prancing through any obstacle. It was hardly slowed by what we forced our bodies against.

We were saved when a large section of the still standing stadium crashed down on the crawling dragon. Several tons of rebar and concrete slammed its massive body into the ground, pushing it further into a prison of earth.

Both Cole and I stared at the scene with some sort of odd glee. We felt like kids who had been lost and afraid, and then were suddenly found. Tears began to gather in our eyes as we felt that the nighmare was over.

The glee went through a rollercoaster of turmoil as the debris exploded off of the dragon with a flurry of action. We had expected the monster to come up and eat us for even believing that it was stopped. Then we saw that we were saved not by random chance, but by the opportunistic predator that I had released earlier.

Snapper, in all its dull metallic glory, had grown to an impressive length from its little eating frenzy. It easily coiled around the massive beast many times over with chitin of chrome and millions of needle-like legs that found purchase on the many holes that littered the monster’s body. The scissors that had been its jaws were now shears that could bore into the dragon’s flesh like some kind of horrifying, metal millipede that was conjoined with a centipede.

Oddly comforting squeals of breaking iron echoed out in conjunction with the mighty dragon’s screams. Snapper had found a particularly large hole in the side of the dragon, and promptly burrowed further into its unfortunate prey.

The wounded dragon wailed in agony as it clawed, bit and flailed around, trying desperately to remove the parasite that had found it. Snapper’s metallic body wasn’t fit to handle the stress and strain that the dragon was putting on it, and several sections of metal flesh was shorn off the new and improved metal monstrosity. However, for every foot of so that was removed, Snapper just grew faster.

Eventually, Snapper got small enough to fit in any hole on the dragon that it wanted. The little horror gored through the dragon’s body, creating a network of pathways through the living beast’s body. Blood flowed freely as its regeneration was beginning to fail it.

I had to stop myself from gagging at the ease at which my creation was murdering what amounted to its big brother, and I promised myself to properly train Snapper whenever I had free time. I did not want that horror to be unleashed without at least knowing some table manners.

The dragon was slowing down. Its thrashing was falling to small twitches as more and more lethal wounds stacked up against its rather unfair healing factor. Stumbling on torn and mashed feet, it plodded towards me, all of its eyes were locked on me as it moved.

For some reason I felt rather horrible as Snapper popped out of a newly made hole, and skitter over to me to rub against my leg like a loving dog, wiping gore and thick blood onto my pants. The dragon collapsed right in front of me, its breathing slowing to a crawl.

I looked at it, finding its slit pupils to be rather intoxicating. There were tears welling up in its eyes, and I felt my heart break. I watched as it opened its mouth and out rolled a small marble that looked like it contained a red star. Something pulsed inside me as I stared at it.

I knew it was mine. It was my Sphere. My Reality. There were no signs of any damage on it at all.

However, I didn’t reach for it, I moved towards the dragon instead. One tired arm and exhausted body leaned against the warm body of my dragon. I knew what it wanted.

It whined, for some reason it seemed happy. The sound was almost as if it was crooning, telling me something that I couldn’t hope to understand. I never wanted anything more. Then it stopped breathing.

And I couldn’t help but feel this victory was depressingly hollow.