Surviving as a Broken Hero

We rose up through the lights into the darkness and the elevator platform smoothly slotted itself into its platform in the tower.

If there was one thing, it was that the ascent had taken longer than the others—I’d guess by account of us rising through the hollow tower.

It seemed to be a massive waste of space to not even have more floors to me, but the interior of the place was already huge in every aspect—we hadn’t even seen the rest of the castle.

We were greeted by the dragon’s nest, the sky, and strewn debris.

I could clearly imagine the magnificent private study that the tower’s room might have once been

The big, square-like room would have had a desk firmly in the middle of one side, facing outward toward the huge mosaic window we had seen from the outside.

Instead of the mosaic blocking sight, instead there looked to be an enchantment over the entirety of the mosaic, allowing a nearly unobstructed view of the courtyard and the city beyond.

There would have been a fine carpet covering the entirety of the floor, warmth supplied by a steady enchantment that heated metal rods in the corners of the room.

Bookshelves of all sorts would have lined the walls, housing all sorts of private documents pertaining to the city, the lord, and whatever other manner the city lord had to keep away from prying eyes.

The lord’s chair, sturdily constructed and made of the softest leathers and the finest silks. An idle thought passed through my mind of where the lord might entertain guests, but I didn’t have the time to entertain such thoughts.

Finally, one corner would have been dedicated to relaxing, intricate glowing enchantments that I could only guess the meaning of assisting the lord with who-knows-what while he relaxed on the cushy sofa and sipped tea from a fine cup resting on the small table in front of the curving sofa.

The room would have had configurable enchanted lightstones along the ceiling that could change colors and luminosity to fit whatever mood the lord wanted to set.

I imagined it would have been an extremely relaxing place of comfort for the lord to retreat to in his daily work.

However, what greeted us wasn’t very relaxing or comfortable in the slightest.

Instead, only the remnants of all of that were left behind.

The lord’s desk was half-incinerated, a crumbling pile of burnt wood and ash, and the chair behind it was in much a similar state, the leather cracked and torn.

As for what must have once been the plush carpet over the room, only bits and pieces of it remained, the rest thoroughly burnt into a fine ash that seemed to coat every surface of the room.

The bookshelves were scattered and falling over, some burnt, some decaying, and the books and documents themselves were in all manner of disrepair, from being just piles of damp mush to looking as good as if they were new.

The relaxation corner with the sofa and intricate enchantments instead sparked with intermittent magic, the complex sigils that composed the enchantments scratched and faded here and there.

We were lit by the sun coming in from a gaping hole in one side of the ceiling, just to the left side of where we had come up, facing the lord’s desk in the center of the room.

That was almost assuredly where the dragon would enter and leave.

Finally, there was the dragon’s nest.

Skulls and bones littered the ground around it, and the massive nest took up almost the entire back third of the tower.

I wasn’t sure what constituted comfort for a dragon, but I wouldn’t have imagined it to be a pile of bones, melted armor and swords, piles of ancient coins, and a thin layer of wrecked books.

Cliche or not, it was almost exactly what I would have imagined a dragon’s hoard to look like.

‘Huh…’

“Here.”

Koise lightly tossed some powder from his item bag over us.

“What’s this?” I asked, rubbing at the powder with my fingers as it seemed to cling to me and vanish.

“It’ll hide our scents, but we need to find a place to hide ourselves.”

Hiding in the dark corners of the room would probably be useless.

If almost everything else I had known about dragons was false, I was at least sure that they had good low-light vision.

While I glanced over the room, thinking about the best place to lay in wait for an ambush, I practiced trying to use heat sense to keep my own body heat close to my body like some sort of invisible jacket.

I had felt it kind of working before, so I wanted to make sure I hadn’t been imagining it. After all, that ability was what I was holding as my trump card for the dragon’s breath, and I didn’t want to bet everything on an ability that I wasn’t even sure would work.

Sure enough, I did feel a rising warmth over my body, proving that the waves of heat I sensed twisting around my body weren’t just my imagination.

As for if it could do something similar with a dragon’s fire? I had my guesses that it worked better against more obvious sources of heat, but I couldn’t be sure until I actually tried it.

We each chose a different space to lay in wait.

That way, if the dragon detected or found one of us out, it wouldn’t immediately compromise the others.

Lein hid beneath the crumbling remnants of the desk that was against the mosaic window on the opposite side of the room from the nest.

Koise, rather than picking a particular place to hide, positioned himself against one of the sofas in the relaxation corner of the room before slowly fading from sight. It appeared that he had some sort of camouflage ability.

As for myself, I navigated my way through the dragon’s nest, having spotted a pile of melted armor against the wall of the nest that was farthest from Lein.

I did my best to ignore and not disturb any of the bits and baubles, books, and pieces of coin lying on the ground. The stench of iron was strong in the nest, which I hoped would mask my scent even more.

The curved lump of metal was heavier than it looked, and I was just able to weasel my way under it, my stomach pressing against the hard floor while something jabbed lightly at my side.

With the metal pressing on me from above, it was like a firm hug. I couldn’t see anything, as I had covered myself completely, but echo sight would work well enough for that.

And so we waited, each of us in position to launch our ambush when the dragon attacked.

Koise would fire his arrow first, and we would hope for the instant kill.

But if that failed, we would have to either fight or die.

There was no running from a dragon, not within its own castle.

I glanced over at my quest windows again as we waited.

[[Bring the Relic to the dragon and fulfill your quest!]]

{{Solve the mystery of the City on the Edge.}}

Interestingly enough, neither quest had changed since I had first seen them after the collapse of the dungeon. No prompts had appeared when we had formed our plan or when we had infiltrated the castle.

The wait was longer than we had anticipated.

I wondered what sort of speech the dragon had to have been giving for it to last for what seemed like hours.

Then again, when waiting for something, time always seemed to pass slower.

For all I knew, I was under that pile of melted armor for only minutes instead of the hours that it seemed like, sharp pieces of metal poking my side no matter how hard I tried to minutely position myself.

It was one of those deep discomforts similar to a long plane or car ride that sets in only after you stay in one position for a long time.

Then, as I was once again trying to twist my body to one side to stop a piece of metal from digging into my flesh, I heard it…

The heavy beat of wings was approaching the tower, signaling the dragon’s return.

I held my breath so as to not make a single sound, keeping as still as possible, completely forgetting about my previous discomforts.

Thankfully, due to my high Endurance, I could hold my breath for quite some time.

Even being as focused on echo sense as I was, I felt more than sensed when the dragon flew through the gaping hole in the roof into the tower itself, flapping its wings briefly before it thudded into its nest with the sounds of clanking metal.

My echo sight showed me the ash that was kicked up from the beating of its wings, as well as the pages and bits of books that went flying throughout the room.

The tower shook with its landing. The dragon must have quite literally weighed tons, with the size to match.

‘And Koise said that this is its weakest form?’

I had a hard time believing that.

Not only that, but its aura was absolutely suffocating, seeming to press down on me with a heavy weight, as if it had even increased the gravity around it.

For all I knew, the aura did exactly that.

The dragon shuffled around, turning in circles like a dog before thudding onto its stomach and letting out a long sigh.

From the sigh, I could imagine someone who had just come home after a long shift at work and flopped onto their couch to rest.

Luckily, it didn’t seem that such an image was far from the mark, as the dragon stilled afterward and its breathing evened out.

There was no way to tell if it was actually asleep, and Koise seemed to want to wait it out a bit for it to fully relax.

Then, while I was wondering when the ambush would start—though I couldn’t sense that far—my heightened hearing just caught the muffled Hrmp of someone trying to suppress a sneeze in the direction of the desk Lein had hidden under.

The dragon suddenly tensed, and its eyes shot open.