artemis being around was great. we had enough people trying to cram into our tiny cottage, too many settlers, and literal mountains worth of trees that we decided to move into a bigger plot.

    given how mobile most of us were - excluding raccoon and titania, who were a bit on the slower side - we rebuilt our home over the ruin of our old one, finding countless treasures that had been buried and collapsed. the material wasn’t as nice, the place wasn’t nearly as luxurious, and raccoon was too old and established in her job to make her haul all the water up, but we once again had our home.

    auri’s hall of mirrors had shattered into a million pieces, but she was one to roll with the punches. she picked them up, had us build her a new, huge nest room, coated the walls in sticky tar then carefully, a dozen pieces at a time, rebuilt a mosaic out of the million broken pieces of mirror.

    “brrrp!” she fluffed herself up as she looked in the mirrors, first one side, then the other.

    “i’ll admit, i had my doubts, but you were totally right. this effect looks amazing.” i said. it was like a sliver of a hundred thousand little fires flickering through the crack in a wall. “you took something broken, and made it even more beautiful than it was before.”

    “brrrpt!!!” auri fluttered over to my shoulder and nuzzled my cheek.

    “i was thinking, we should install the bath right above, so you can heat it up. it should only leak a little.” i joked, yanking auri’s chain a bit. she looked so outraged by the suggestion i couldn’t help but laugh.

    “brrpt.” she pouted. i had to agree.

    “artemis is a bad influence on me.”

    all of us were on the porch, watching the sunrise. it was turning the ocean into a thousand sparkling gems, and titania had made a lovely tea for all of us. it was a beautiful moment. me, iona, auri, artemis, nina, raccoon, and titania. seven lovely ladies, nearly all of my family in one spot. amber was somewhere, and i knew she was safe thanks to her lucky coin, and fenrir was snoozing in his cave, the big lug wanting his 18 hours of beauty sleep.

    the valley stretched out in front of us, and we could also see the patchwork of farms. it was sunrise, most everyone had already been up for hours, working their ass off. the sunrise marked breakfast, and many of the [farmers] were heading home after turning out the cows, sheep, and dinosaurs to graze in the fields, while others finished their morning vegetable harvest for the freshest fruits. i could spot both the nixes and surveyor from here. a light turned off in skye’s office as the natural light let her see enough to no longer spend mana on that enchantment.

    as usual, we got no warning before calamity struck. a dragon roared overhead as it dove down, the sound shaking us so badly it threatened to spill my tea. i managed to keep it all in, but i was giving the overgrown lizard the side-eye. the scales were a burnished white, and it was on the smaller, younger side. definitely a dragon though - four powerful legs, two leathery wings, scales that could turn an arrow, claws that could rip through a house, and teeth that could bite people in half.

    figured it was as good of a time as any to level up [identify].

    [kangrim, the alabaster reaver - 817]

    he landed, seized a pair of cows, blasted black flames into the air, then took off again. welp, that could’ve been worse.

    raccoon, artemis and nina all jumped to their feet while i sipped on my tea.

    “damn.” i said as two of them babbled, rocks starting to hover around artemis. “that’s really unfortunate for the nixes.” they’d be fine though. two cows? orthus town was lucky enough to be considered wealthy, and the family could absorb the loss without a blink. maybe we’d bake them a pie and joke about getting a [dragon livestock provider] class.

    what were we going to do, fight a dragon? kill - no way. placate - it had been placated, hopefully it’d keep moving on and we’d be done with it. drive off - i hoped we didn’t have to, but we could probably make the area less tempting than others. tolerate - the logistics probably didn’t work out, but if the dragon decided to set-

    “my territory!” fenrir roared out as he shot out of his cave, hellbent on fighting off the intruder.

    oh fuck.

    shit went down very, very quickly. i mentally shifted gears entirely. i split my mind into as many parts as i could, each one managing something different.

    the first, greatest priority of mine was to flip my healing back on for everyone. i’d mostly been relying on [domain of the healer] to ‘wean’ people off permanent healing. it would lead to things like kids thinking they were invincible, that they could jump off the top of trees and nothing bad would happen. it led to broad stagnation. it led to - it didn’t matter right now.

    focus.

    a calamity had befallen us, and it was going to take every inch of skill i had, every single stat point, to get out of this merely bruised and unhappy. the dragon’s black flames reminded me strongly of lun’kat’s flames defying all logic. lule burning to death in my arms, under my aegis, and needing to hack off my arm was seared into my memory. i was going to do everything that i could to prevent deaths.

    the second was flipping iona’s armor out of storage and onto her body, along with dropping her weapons in front of her. she’d be able to grab them before they fell. my wife was summoning her bow and arrows, bending her knees and making sure we were all ready to fly off to help fenrir.

    the third was activating my extremely rare stat-boosting runes. i rarely found a need to significantly increase my physical prowess, but today was the day. i’d built them as a percentage boost, the effect just as strong as the day i engraved them.

    my mind flipped through spells and plans, the situation at hand looking uglier by the second, forget the aftermath. we did have a significant level advantage, and our class quality was top-notch. but we were against a dragon.

    auri was already blazing off to reinforce fenrir, who hadn’t made it there yet. the white dragon was just starting to lift his head, recognizing the challenge issued.

    artemis was shouting at nina and raccoon.

    “get the rangers! search and rescue, harrying!” she ordered.

    iona was fully ready, i was as prepared as i was going to be, fenrir was about to hit. iona and i were on the same wavelength, and we blasted off in unison, artemis trailing half a second behind us on shoes of stone. iona’s weapons came with her, buzzing behind her like ducklings as she telekinetically pulled them along.

    “but-” raccoon tried to protest.

    “now!” artemis ordered over her shoulder.

    there was a time and a place to argue, and i wanted to argue that artemis didn’t belong in this fight, that her level wasn’t high enough and her quality not there. i knew exactly how effective that would be, and a fight with a motherfucking dragon was not the time or place.

    i elected to slow down a bit and pace iona, figuring the two of us hitting at roughly the same time was better than a slow trickle of reinforcements. auri worried me a bit with how she was flying ahead. there was so much knowledge lacking around dragons. like, who was the true master of flames?

    iona was talking so fast i could just barely understand her.

    “pyronox, ocean, verdant. flames look nasty, try not to get hit. water jets. ability to manipulate himself, think sigrun! growing skills, unknown.”

    sigrun was the valkyrie leader iona had grown up under. she could self-dose with verdant to boost her baseline, which made her stronger and deadlier. i supposed it made sense that tricks would eventually overlap. and a growth skill would have additional effects depending on what, exactly, was being grown. i thought of sentinel nature, who grew bark and sharp thorns over his body to act as armor in one type of growth, and my recent adventure to the school made me think of the witch in white, who grew flowers with all sorts of spores. that could go anywhere, really.

    i got into range to hit kangrim with my radiance, but i wanted fenrir to hit first. dozens upon dozens of rocks whizzed by us like angry bees as artemis judged she was in range and opened fire.

    we managed all that in the moments before an enraged fenrir [lightning flapped] the remaining distance, then hit the dragon with ten thousand tons of force. he didn’t have any foreclaws, but his hind legs sank deep into the dragon’s back while his jaws closed around the dragon''s nape. the two started to tumble to the ground, heading straight for a farm. they twisted and turned in a sinuous mess.

    unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. report sightings.

    “fuck!” iona swore, tossing her bow and arrows aside, moved her glaive in front of her, and grabbed on.

    iona and i both veered off. thanks to a quirk of the system, we could fly down far faster than fenrir and the dragon could fall down, and iona and i were both thinking the same thing - save the people inside.

    jets of water exploded out of the dragon, carving deep grooves into fenrir. they immediately closed back up under my healing, but one jet cut deeply enough to briefly sever a muscle in fenrir’s neck, loosening his jaws and letting the dragon’s head slip loose. kangrim twisted his head around, snarling tooth-to-tooth at fenrir, nevermind the wyvern being half again as large as the dragon.

    with my new angle and the minor separation between the still-falling draconids, i saw my chance. i blasted a fully-powered, hold-nothing-back [rays of the first dawn] directly at the dragon’s eye. a feral scream confirmed i’d blinded the dragon, but my hopes of quickly ending the fight rapidly vanished.

    [strength: 169,320 (effectively: 1,354,560)]

    [dexterity: 193,576 (effectively: 2,061,197)]

    [vitality: 754,624 (effectively: 11,791,000)]

    [speed: 741,856 (effectively: 14,601,952)]

    [mana: 2,086,008]

    [mana regeneration: 7,589,760 (+ 24,287,232)]

    [magic power: 3,162,167 (+ 230,205,758)]

    [magic control: 3,161,024 (+ 230,122,547)]

    [class 1: [the elaine- celestial: lv 1456]]

    [celestial spirit: 1456]

    [domain of the healer: 1456]

    [a drop of eternity in a sea of starlight: 608]

    [luminary mind: 1456]

    [universal cure: 1456]

    [clad in twilight: 565]

    [the mantle of dusk and dawn: 910]

    [elaine eternal: 1456]

    [class 2: [seraph of the dawn - radiance: lv 1024+]]

    [radiance mastery: 1024]

    [a light shining in the darkness: 941]

    [the rays of the first dawn: 1024]

    [radiant angel''s spear of obliteration: 500]

    [celestial dew: 1024]

    [sunrise halo: 1024]

    [wings of the seraphim: 1024]

    [six wings, six million feathers: 1024]

    [class 3: [sage of tomes - spatial: lv 1024]]

    [spatial authority: 1024]

    [scripture savant: 1024]

    [teleportation: 1024]

    [the library of infinite wonder: 1024]

    [tower of knowledge: 666]

    [reality, writ as you will: 1024]

    [astral archives: 1024]

    [endless pursuit of knowledge: 1024]

    general skills

    [long-range identify: 666]

    [everywoman: 614]

    [companion bond between elaine and auri: 1456]

    [the world around me: 650]

    [oath of elaine to lyra: 1456]

    [sentinel''s superiority: 1456]

    [persistent casting: 1456]

    [tender gardening; industrial farming: 900]