117 Meeting A Dragon (1/2)
Ygaynth was under the impression that it was sailing through an empty, and safe tunnel. The dragon lazily flew, occasionally flapping its wings to maintain its height and speed. Its incredible senses detected no other non-plant or non-fungal life in the tunnel. It was wrong, but it had no way of knowing that just yet.
This state of affairs allowed the beast to have unconscious confidence and security of mind. The gargantuan beast's mind was not as lazy as its body.
”A god has been discovered...” The beast thought, its mind not able to be as lazy as its body. The dragon was not a scholarly type. It was instead more of a lazy and apocalyptic destroyer that favored violence over deep thought. An archetypical black dragon.
”What do gods do?” The beast wondered, trying to remember facts about gods. Sadly, for it at least, the dragon was not as intelligent as the dragons that Althos had met. And worse than that, the beast was notoriously foul-tempered.
”Gods... create?” The creature eventually recalled. It wasn't certain that it was remembering that correctly, but its intuition led it to believe that it was.
The tunnel the serpentine dragon found itself in was a gigantic, artificially widened, and nearly lifeless cavern. It was dozens of meters tall and almost equally as wide. The dragon easily had the room to fly in the cavern and could even turn in the massive space without much difficulty.
The dragon felt safe, foolishly so, in the tunnel. After all, it was responsible for the tunnel's current state. This place was as much part of its lair as the enormous cavern where it stored its wealth. It never envisioned that an attack on its person might come from in here.
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This enormous tunnel was basically the most perfect place in which I could meet a powerful creature. It was a straight tunnel that extended forward in one direction for dozens of kilometers, and the earth that made it up was something I could easily control.
It took a minute or so after I first heard the dragon and began to be able to glimpse it in the distance before I could finally really see it. The dragon was a much larger lifeform than I imagined it being.
From snout to tail the beast must have approached three dozen meters in length. And from the bottom of its feet to the tips of its wing the creature was roughly fifteen meters tall. Its scales were the color of a moonless night, an almost hungry void. The creature possessed wings that were meters tall and wide. They leisurely flapped and gave the creature bursts of speed and height it needed to move towards its destination.
The creature sailed through the air at an incredible speed, and if I had been a mortal I probably would have been scared. Heck, if I had been my old self I probably would have been scared too. But now, as a powerful god and newborn elemental lord, I felt no fear. I felt only an eerie calmness.
I wasn't sure how I could tell, but the massive thing had what I suspected was a look of relaxation and curiosity on its reptilian face. I chuckled and wondered if it'd feel so relaxed in a few moments.
For a moment I mulled over what I knew about this creature. It wasn't all that much if I was being honest.
The dragon was, in essence, a mythical being to at least two distinct civilizations: the dark elves and the reptilefolk. The reptilefolk revered and were terrified of the beast, a fear that was only surpassed by their newfound and bloodily earned fear of me. The dark-elves hated and also had a grudging respect for the serpentine destroyer.
The dragon was effectively a force of nature in this region. It had created an entryway into the world below Puerto Rico, shortly after establishing itself as the lord of this place's reptilefolks. It had clashed against the dark elves at least once in the ancient past, and based on Drow's reaction to it, some dark elves appeared to have thought that the all too real monster was a myth.
The creature was also a monster that demanded the sacrifice of living creatures whenever it awoke. Its reptilian servants, or at least those who had once served it, had willingly obeyed these brutal commands. In their defense, this was partially out of coercion as the reptilefolks had once failed to collect sacrifices and in turn been forced to watch their own kin be devoured by the dragon. They had learned the steep price that accompanied failure.
It was this last bit of knowledge that led me to approach the dragon from a position of strength. If I were to put an end to the dragon's millennia-long reign of terror I would need to be proud and to approach it with my powers on display. The dragon was a devouring destroyer, a terrifying and ancient source of despair. I needed to show my strength with every move I made.
That was why I made an on the fly choice. The choice to subtly alter my initial strategy. After all, if I wanted to be strong why shouldn't I start off by restricting my foe? Fortunately, I had a number of powers that were perfect for this moment.
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The dragon had senses that were incomparable to those of other mortals. It could see flawlessly even as it flew and even in the absolute darkness of the tunnel. Its eyes relaxedly scanned the tunnel in front of it. It suspected that it wouldn't see anything, and was an arrogant beast, but it scanned its surroundings nonetheless.