117 Meeting A Dragon

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.

The creature could see, hear, and smell everything for entire kilometers ahead of it. Its senses were alert and when Althos made his first move the thing noticed. Sadly for the dragon, the god's first move wasn't to manipulate the earth. Had the god gone after the earth first the dragon might have been able to do something about it. No, Althos targeted the dragon first.

Althos was a god of a fair number of domains and subdomains. One of them was the subdomain of the air. And with that came a particularly devastating power: the power to allow creatures to fly, and in this case the more important power: he could take away another creature's ability to fly.

The way this power manifested wasn't particularly violently. Althos hadn't come here to fight after all, though he suspected that a fight might be inevitable. So when he took away the dragon's power of flight he did so gently, and the dragon began to slowly descend to rather than violently crash into the surface of the tunnel.

A few moments after the god had struck, striking with gentleness and subtlety, the black dragon found itself on the floor of the tunnel. It had quickly noticed that it was falling and had tried to stay aloft but found that its wings simply wouldn't obey it.

The beast reacted to this clearly unnatural attack with confusion, and curiosity, and descended to the ground nonviolently. That said, this uncharacteristic patience was also partially owed to the fact that the dragon didn't know who or what was responsible for its loss of control over its wings. It knew, even in its sleepy state, that without a target to vent its frustrations on it wouldn't be able to meaningfully address this anger. So it saved it up.

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I had targeted Ygaynth with my first technique. The first blow I struck was to deny the creature the power to fly. It was easy and involved me utilizing a power I had used before but never to bind a creature to the ground. Once I had targeted the gargantuan dragon with that power I figuratively sat back and watched it descend to the ground, unable to fly anymore.

Once the creature was on the ground for a few moments and had time to react I struck again. The earth at the beast's feet almost instantly dissolved, becoming a quicksand-like substance that began to pull it down. I chuckled as the dragon reacted to this, twisting its long neck and staring down at its feet.

Once more I watched the creature's face slyly shift, this time contorting in annoyance and surprise. The dragon began to struggle against the quicksand-like substance that pulled it down, and I began to move. I teleported myself from where I stood, to right in front of the dragon.

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Teleportation was a strange power for me. It granted me an almost unthinkable amount of freedom in movement. And whenever I used it my surroundings immediately changed. I was lucky that I had a far faster reaction speed than mortals did, as this allowed me to maximally utilize my abilities and come out of teleportation swinging.

I went from a place nearly two-dozen kilometers away from the dragon, to standing right in front of it. The beast had incredibly speedy reactions as well, something I learned when the beast tried to lash out at me almost the instant I appeared.

The beast reacted far faster than I had anticipated it being able too and did so by twisting its snake-like head and trying to bite me. I audibly laughed as I watched the thing's head lash out at me and close in on me. That said, its gigantic fangs were unable to reach me. When the thing was done biting at me, its jaw was snapped shut just centimeters away from my nose.

The monster's breath washed over me as its nostrils exhaled earthy smelling vapor. After lashing out at me the dragon was still. Its gigantic head was more than twice the size of my entire body. I was calm and gently placed hand on one of the thing's teeth.

The tooth I placed my hand on was tall, almost the length of my entire body. It was also a sharp, jagged fang. I chuckled and activated a power I had never used before but had access to almost my entire life. "Status change". I was surprised when I heard the system, in its automated voice, speak to me after activating this power.

[Alert: You are targeting a hostile creature with 'Status change'. Would you like to change the creature's status towards you, to a neutral state?] The automated version of the system asked me. I did the mental version of a nod and watched as the dragon began to emit a faint, silvery light. I was surprised when I heard the beast suck in a deep breath, and then begin to speak.

"This magic... Small one... Are you responsible for this?" The dragon asked, speaking a language that surprised me. It spoke the same language as the humans who lived in Comillas but with a strange and primal accent.

"I can't... bring myself to attack you. But I can still feel my hostility towards you. Deep, deep inside. That said, I can respect someone whose magic is strong enough to stop me from attacking. Even if it is just temporary." The dragon whispered, its voice ancient. I could have sworn I heard a bit of anger in its voice, but it was difficult for even me to be certain.

"Who are you? What is your name, little one?" The dragon asked, curiosity audibly seeping into its voice. I smiled and ascended into the air. I floated upward until I was face to face with the reptilian, almost catlike, scarlet eyes of the dragon.

"Ygaynth... This meeting has been a long-time coming. My name is Althos. And I am a god. You and I really should converse before we do anything else." I said to the gigantic beast, a confident smirk on my face. My remark surprised the dragon, and its eyes widened in bittersweet shock.

"So you... are the god who healed the world?" The dragon asked me, speaking curiously. It was fair for the thing to be skeptical. Instead of replying audibly, I smiled and activated one of my personal favorite abilities. All around me and around Ygaynth's head, a brilliant aura of silver light exploded into existence, bathing the two of us in iridescent light.