The entire mountain shook, the ground cracked, and the trees fell as their roots ripped off from the now pulsating ground. All of the monsters in the area fled the forest, and the city nearby was faced with a titanic stampede of the terrified hordes.

The guards paled, the wizards couldn’t believe their eye, and citizen were absolutely appalled as they heard the dragon’s mad and enraged roars booming across the sky, followed by earthquakes and explosions. For all they knew, just one man was fighting this horror, and that alone was unbelievable.

But their fear was only made worse when a second human roar muffled all other sounds. As the horde of monsters reached the city walls, a barefooted barbarian jumped from the battlements and landed right in the middle of the hungry maws.

All of the monsters froze in place, and Nina glared directly into the face of a titanic tiger with a grin, and the monster backed away. He could sense the madness in her eyes, the brutal violence, and the unhinged bloodshed.

The tiger monster was proud, and he immediately opened his maw to roar, but Nina was faster. Her beautiful face twisted into a smile, and then her mouth opened wide with a roar that sounded more like the cry of a titanic beast than a mere woman.

Her arm flew forward into the tiger’s maw, grabbed him by the uvula, and ripped it off in the blink of an eye. Before the tiger could do anything, she grabbed the upper jaw with one hand and pushed the lower one with her foot to the ground, ripping and shattering it off with ease. Her arm, the one she ripped the uvula with, moved quickly after; her fingers pierced the soft flesh inside the tiger’s throat, reached the spine, and clenched on it with a grip powerful enough to twist steel like dough.

It all happened in the blink of an eye. The tiger was brutally torn apart, and Nina ripped the spine out and used it like a whip to brutalize the other monsters. It was a scene so bloody that even seasoned soldiers puked their guts out, and the horrifying monsters saw Nina as the true nightmarish horror. It didn’t matter how powerful they were; if she caught one of them, they were violently torn inside out and splattered all over the place.

But what made Nina even more terrifying was that she didn’t discriminate. Anything that dared approach her was torn to pieces and killed. Some soldiers disobeyed orders and rushed in to help her, only to end up violently killed by the same violent behaviour the monsters faced.

Merlin had already warned them. Nina was a violent barbarian who had only recently joined the party, and she could not think to save her life even in natural circumstances. So while raging, being in a berserk mode, she can only see herself surrounded by enemies.

Speaking of Merlin, she stood at the peak of the highest watch tower, pointed her staff down, and aimed at the monsters with her spell. While Nina can easily survive this stampede and kill monsters all day long, the soldiers and the city walls won’t hold up. She had to thin the monsters’ ranks with AOE spells and make them easier to take down with arrows from afar.

As she worked, she could easily see Amber leading a battalion of mages that she had dragged out of the city’s armed guards, and was now circling around the monsters to attack from behind. With Merlin on one side, Amber and the warmages on the other, and Nina rampaging in the middle, this stampede shouldn’t be a problem to handle.

The city’s lord watched from his castle with a terrified face. He had never seen such a party of adventurers before. They were unhinged, powerful, and uncontrollable, yet strangely effective.

The Wizard Merlin was talented and skilled with magic, probably had the same level of knowledge as his archwizard, but was much younger and still had room to grow. He had never seen a wizard cast so many spells and in such a short time she had to be blessed by the goddess of magic herself.

The Barbarian Nina was a true monster, and one that he was fine to never see or meet in his life. She looked stunningly beautiful, if she wasn’t covered in blood, torn organs, and filth. Did he just see her rip the testicles of a monster and throw them at another, before strangling a titanic snake with her arms and stomping a demonified Ogre flat to the ground? She was scarier than the stampede and the dragon combined.

Amber, on the other hand, looked like the most reasonable and responsible one of them. She led the warmages with pure skill, guided them through the deadly battlefield, and dealt massive damage to the monsters without losing a single life. If he is ever to need this party’s help, he had better talk with her rather than any of the other three.

But the last one, the most baffling of them all, was Alcott himself. Until now, he couldn’t see him at all, but the shockwaves of the battle with the dragons were still loudly felt through the sky and earth. Out there, somewhere deep beneath the mountain, that man, Alcott, was fighting the dragon all on his own.

Alcott, the man who seduced nuns, had his way with the archwizard’s daughter and her maid, and made a fool of the guards, the jail, and the laws of this city; he was now clashing with an entire dragon. Was he really that powerful? No wonder the bars couldn’t keep him locked, and the will of the gods couldn’t protect the chastity of the nuns.

How would this fight unfold? The city’s lord had no idea, and he had to wait until Alcott showed up like everyone else.

Under the mountain, the cave system had already collapsed long ago, and new caves were being blasted open by the violent dragon rampaging there, trying to catch Alcott. That titanic monster moved at near or sometimes even above the speed of sound under the ground, causing massive shockwaves and tremors, and among all of that destruction and violence, Alcott slipped from one crack to another, masterfully dodging all of the attacks.

From his magical pouch, Alcott pulled a long chain that he used to swing from the walls of the collapsing caverns while dodging the dragon’s claws. He then stored the sword and pulled a pair of hooks, which he used to grab onto the dragon’s arm and use the attack’s speed to catapult himself out of the range of a deadly breath.

The most important thing when fighting a dragon is to figure out and understand the beast’s heartbeat and breathing. The reason was simple: dragons are massive creatures, and their bodies use a lot of energy. Based on the heart rate and breathing rate, Alcott could predict the power of the coming attacks, and then by calculating that with the dragon’s anatomy, the open space around them, and the possible attacks, he was able to somewhat accurately predict the dragon’s moves in advance. For example, in a tight space and with low breathing and heart rate, the dragon was probably not planning to unleash a breath or a tail swing.

But as Alcott expected, a fight underground was difficult, not because of the environment hindering Alcott himself, but because it hindered the dragon. Alcott needed the dragon to use a big move, to waste a lot of energy, and get his blood pumping so the poison would affect him as fast as possible.

Alcott needed to drag the fight aboveground and get the dragon to use his wings and fly. In dragons’ anatomy, the wings are the most energy-hungry part, and flapping them at max speed consumes more than 50% of the dragon’s total allowed energy.

With that in mind, he started to slowly bait the dragon to the surface, pretending that he didn’t want it. At this moment, the dragon also wanted to go outside and gain the advantage of flight. Alcott knew that, and pretended that his main goal was to fight the dragon underground, where it couldn’t fly.

The dragon took the bait and slowly made its way to the surface, almost laughing at Alcott for failing to keep it underground.

The mountainside shattered, and the dragon’s deafening roar boomed across the sky. All the monsters froze, and the people of the city stared at the sky with gaping mouths. They saw the dragon burst into the sky in a fit of rage, traveling at such speed that it shattered the sound barrier twice and sent debris raining upon the city and the surrounding forest.

When the dragon finally flapped his massive wings, his heart rate shot through the roof, and he sounded like a bomb going off. The monster was flapping his wings at over six hundred flaps a second to move at such speed, and that was enough to shatter all of the windows in the city, tear the eardrums of the people off, and even crack some of the walls.

This was what everyone feared, a dragon going mental, rampaging with pure malice to violently murder someone. Whatever Alcott did, it almost gave the dragon a brain aneurism. Seeing the raging dragon, even some clerics believed that the gods themselves couldn’t hope to stop such a creature.

But this was Alcott’s chance. The dragon was using most of its energy to fuel its wings, so its other limbs were now much slower. Alcott, who was holding onto the dragon’s collar bone, now pulled a sword doused in Poppy’s concoction.

One swift stab to the heart, the blade slipped beneath the scales with surgical precision, and stabbed the artery right above the heart, delivering the poison and instantly spreading it across the dragon’s whole body. The balance of the poisons in the dragon’s blood fell apart like a collapsing tower, and in the moment its body was stunned trying to recover, Alcott moved to finish the fight.

[Action Surge][Adrenaline Rush]

Alcott twisted his wrist, and the blade moved down, slashing the dragon’s heart open, and then, he turned it up and swung it at the draconic fundamentum, slashing it as well. It all happened so fast that the dragon almost didn’t realise he was stabbed, and he sure wasn’t able to react, thanks to the poison.

Then, in the blink of an eye, his sword flashed, pulled out of the dragon’s flesh, and danced through the air toward its neck, cleaving it in a single blinding move. Then, from that same position, he turned the sword and ran it down the dragon’s open back, cutting the spine cleanly in half from the neck to the base of the tail.

The dragon didn’t even roar, its wings violently flapped and then stopped, its body tumbled down, and it crashed right at the city’s meadows. Alcott took a single step away from the corpse, and all of the monsters stampeding toward the city turned around and fled as fast as they could.

As he walked, the monsters cleared, and he made his way peacefully to the city’s gate, where the soldiers immediately opened it up for him. At first, some people were sceptical of him, but those same people now didn’t even dare get a single step close to him.

The diced dragon corpse outside spoke for him, this man, Alcott Demorian, was someone that the mere common people couldn’t hope to reach. Alcott cracked his neck with a smile, "Now, I wonder what they’ll serve at the lord’s feast."

Arad looked at Alcott in the bar with a smile, "And what happened to Poppy?"

"She was terrified. I bet she never expected I could kill the dragon just like that. From that day, I often visited her when I needed a potion or a concoction mixed up." He smiled, "She is a skilled alchemist."