A Dragon's Curiosity

Little Lia returned and dropped a mangled monster at the feet of the group.

Unico, wielding a short dagger and a throwing knife, picked up the body and inspected the damage.

Satisfied with its condition, he packed it with the rest of their spoils.

Nisha and Lisa squatted down and petted the [Storm Trail Dragon Wolf], which preened under the attention.

The blonde girl picked up her sword and shield and moved to the front of the trio, whereas the elf had a broadsword slung across her back and wielded a short bow, an arrow knocked ready to be let loose.

“To be honest, I still don’t quite understand. How can every citizen be a spy?”

Looking for another enemy, Unico scaled a tree and held the throwing dagger he recovered from the looted body in his palm.

Each of the three warriors present had little trouble dealing with their current targets, it was the number of enemies that brought the attention of the [Royal Academy] and assigned it as an appropriate mission for the warrior excursion.

Spotting another target close by, the handleless blade left his hand as it sailed through the air and elicited a pained cry from the monster on hit.

“It’s a result of culture clashing with the need for outward representation and it’s difficult to understand without knowing the history behind it.

Let me start with some background first.”

The elf was entirely capable of sending an arrow through the gaps in the branches of the forest to finish off the monster injured by her party member.

Yet they were here to gather combat experience and improve their teamwork instead of blindly racking up contribution points by slaying as many monsters as possible in the time allotted for the warrior trip.

Hooking her bow to her belt, Nisha retrieved the longsword instead and prepared to support her two friends in combat.

She liked the heaviness and reach of the weapon, it was really troublesome for the dragon to reach enemies with her smaller frame compared to the physique of a dragon.

The [Imperial Swordplay] mitigated that disadvantage to some degree, but it also expended her time and aura to get up close, use her sword and retreat out of range of bigger monsters afterwards.

With her current greatsword, however, it was easier to bring her great strength to bear and it increased her range by the length of the blade.

The only downside was that Nisha had to anticipate the moves of her opponent and move the sword in advance, it took longer to change stances because of its hefty size.

“A long, long, long time ago, there were three empires on the continent. Bear in mind that there’s not much known about them, most of the history books I found focus on the time period from a bit before Leandar was founded.

Anyway, the two big players were the Golden Expanse, the northern empire, and the Great Southern empire.”

Branches gave way and bushes broke down as another [Mad Stonetooth Boar] broke through the foliage, screeching with pain.

The throwing knife buried in its back drove the irate creature to even higher levels of anger than its name implied, charging straight for the first living creature it spotted.

Lisa was clearly ready and raised her shield with one foot in front and the other dug in the ground behind her, ready to weather the charge.

Nisha paused her narration and slanted her greatsword in an angle to the ground sideways behind the other girl.

With a loud thwack, the bovine slammed headfirst into the small buckler, which lit up with a sheen of aura as the defensive skill applied to it activated.

The blonde girl grunted with exertion as the power of her skill and her own strength contended against the monster, which drained the momentum out of its mad rush.

Seeing that she was about to get pushed back and fall down, Lisa allowed her shield to angle off to the direction of the elf behind her and gave the boar another push to send it stumbling forward.

Disoriented from the blast to the head and in agony from the rebound the shield skill sent back from its own strength, the monster trundled out a final few steps, unable to entirely stop its charge.

Nisha was already ready, trusting her team member to break its assault and set it up for her finishing attack.

Taking a sharp step forward, the greatsword held to the side advanced at the same time and made use of the counterforce to rip a gash in the flank and hindleg of the boar.

It howled in pain and fell to the ground, unable to remain on its feet after one of its legs got nearly severed.

“Whew, that worked great. And did you not say that there were three empires?”

The fight was short, but intense. Without a single member working in tandem to guide the monster, it would have been way harder to take it down if the dragon continued to match her strength to that of her party.

They would without doubt be able to take out the [Mad Stonetooth Boar] regardless, it was an early second rank monster, yet their teamwork expedited the process and sped it up a lot.

Walking over to the struggling bovine, Lisa aimed her sword and ended its life with a clean stab.

“Indeed, thanks to the unique nature of the World Tree, the Elven Court managed to be near the prowess of an empire along with the other two.

But they ultimately remained mostly scattered forests under the control of elves, just that they could reinforce each other over vast distances on short notice.

For most of the story, they remain more or less irrelevant.”

Perhaps it was callous to talk of her own kin as a tangent, yet Nisha never came into contact with the elven kingdom or any remnants of the Elven Court.

“For unknown reasons, the Golden Expanse empire encountered a catastrophe and more or less splintered overnight, reduced to city states around oases and small water sources as the land dried up and the rivers vanished.

I haven’t found anything that indicates the reason, the empire just crumbled to dust.”

Unico slipped from the tree and retrieved his palm sized throwing knives, which conveniently disappeared into his sleeves.

The hidden throwing weapons drew the monster over and inflicted bloody wounds on its back and neck, testament to their sharpness and speed.

It took the youth only a flip of the wrist to dispense them, and the elf doubted that he had shown them his best yet either.

“Without a counterforce and no threat to keep them in line, the Great Southern Empire wished to expand and claim more territory.

Yet before their ambition came to a head, their Guardian Beast encountered a terrifying enemy and fought to the death with it.

Unico can probably weigh in on the truth, the history books mentioned that it was not a clash that ended in a matter of days, but rather moons or turns.

Personally, it’s hard to imagine a battle on the scale that large, how can they even last more than a few days? But it’s generally accepted as a real event.”

Sending a pulse through their contract, Nisha called for her familiar.

While it was hard to communicate through it, a simple mental pulse was easy enough and the wolf simply appeared similar to a spectre as it approached the group without a trace.

Lisa clearly looked tempted to cuddle the big furry beast again, the thin coat of fur mimicking scales provided great protection despite its astonishing softness.

Dodging the outstretched hand with a small burst of wind aura, Little Lia arrived next to the fallen body and waited for the elf to load it on her back.

As a fourth rank beast, [Mad Stonetooth Boars] were so far below the dragon wolf that she alone was more than enough to exterminate them all instead of the warriors from the academy.

The bovines mainly troubled local villages because of their huge numbers, so they hired adventurers through the Guild to thin the herd until it moved on.

Eventually, they would either return to the Wilderness or get exterminated, the huge numbers allowed some of the early second rank monsters to persist until they finished their passage through the kingdom.

Unfortunately, they ran into another horde of monsters around this place, and both groups remained locked in a fight close to a human village, making it a prime target for the Warrior Excursion.

The extraction of materials and byproducts was left to the specialists back at the academy, so the familiar quickly set off with the carcass, she was in charge of guarding their spoils of war.

Concentrated wind aura lingered in the footsteps of the dragon wolf, one of the two innate abilities she awakened at the new rank.

Any foe that tried to follow the beast would be greeted with a deluge of wind blades if they disturbed the paw prints before the aura dissipated on its own.

With a strong beast guarding their gains and the teachers constantly surveying the location, there was no chance that any other groups had designs on their merit points.

“The battle started a spark of internal unrest, largely dividing the population in different camps.

With the void of power in the region, many smaller forces took the chance to expand and the Terus tribe unified other families in the region and established the Terus kingdom.

During the tumultuous times, the Elven Court recalled most of the forces it had inside forests that were located in the kingdoms and empires related to humans and many historians speculate that the elven force also fell into discord during this period, but it’s hard to verify that as no records ever got leaked because of the World Tree.”

It was hard to imagine that the current massive Terus Empire started as a single family clan in the past, but the elf and her companions only silently deliberated over the humble beginnings of the behemoth for a moment before more movement in the distance drew their attention.

Rather than the senseless rampaging from the bovine monsters, the sound was more subdued and shrill, letting them guess at the nature of their next encounter.

“As all of the old powers were beset by problems, the Terus kingdom rapidly improved and incorporated more and more of their neighbours, eventually becoming a new empire.

The battle in the Great Southern empire tore apart their internal structure and most factions perished in the attempt to seize the throne, destroying vast swathes of infrastructure and heritages while they were at it.

Eventually, the last two remaining camps formed the Left and Right kingdoms, and perhaps would have fought to the death if not for an excursion of the southern barbarians who smelled a chance to plunder their cities.

Beset by external enemies, the two kingdoms formed a tenable peace treaty and only engaged in internal strife as long as they were not threatened by external troubles.”

Swapping places with the blonde girl, Nisha took the front spot in their small formation, it was her turn to face the enemy first.

Each encounter added a little combat experience and allowed the youths to practice with their weapons.

Gripping the longsword in reverse, Nisha angled the tip down towards the earth while she placed her feet apart from each other to form a stable base.

Attracted by the earlier commotion, an insectoid monster screeched with rage as it charged at the group.

It did not need the aggravation from a flying knife to attack them, as it inherently attacked everything around it with its bladed front legs until it was small enough to stuff between its mandibles, no matter if it was other monsters, wood, rocks, soil or human adventurers.

A furious [Starved Shredder Hatchling] crawled at the elf, eager to reshape the pesky humanoids in front of it into bite sized pieces.

Compared to most insects, these voracious eaters were considered fairly big, about the same as a wild dog.

The sharp front legs hacked into the grounds as the monster propelled itself at the closest target, the elf, its hindlegs nothing to scoff at either as they rippled with teeming aura.

The mandibles clacked together rapidly as another screech ripped through the air, no doubt aimed at destabilising the dragon - unfortunately, even the most ferocious roar paled in comparison to a dragon howl.

In anticipation of the charge, Nisha had already positioned her greatsword, due to limiting herself to the strength of a late second rank warrior it was not quite as effortless to wield the weapon as the elf made it look like.

Turning to the side, she used herself as an axis and performed an improvised version of [Slash] in the incoming path of the insect monster.

The delay between her preparations and execution meant that a lot of things could go wrong in case of unexpected interference or if the monster was stronger than expected.

She liked the reach and heft of the weapon, but the longsword was too bulky and slow overall for the elf’s liking.

While the [Imperial Swordplay] still worked to some degree, the elven girl also found herself missing the [Taurith Short Sword] and the ease with which it displayed her skills.

But it was also a good thing to learn about things that did not suit her, as it prevented her from spending time on the wrong path.

The war cry from the insect turned into a pained screech as the blade dug into its side from the cut, although not deep enough to be lethal.

Nevertheless, it threw the monster off balance and it crashed to the ground, where a short sword and dagger were already waiting for it and cut off its mobility.

A short struggle later, another body was added to their pile and the group had a short break in the series of fights meant to refine their fighting skills.

“And that leads us to the reason why every citizen of the Left and Right kingdoms is a spy.”