No one would ever dare call me stupid. To my face at least. Except for Kat, Esme, Moonslight… and a few dozen more people, now that I thought about it. A surprisingly long list. Maybe… nah, they just didn’t appreciate my genius.

  Naturally, when faced with an invisible murder-giant with so many levels that he was a very real threat to me, I did what any sensible dragon would do. I killed the lights, and I bravely ran away. Wrath wasn’t happy about this solution, but he knew I had a plan, so he was biding his time.

  My first course of action was to get some space, vertical space in this instance. My wings flapped, sending me quickly to the ceiling, where I flipped over and dug in my claws before scurrying deeper into the dungeon floor like a spider.

  A stream of golden particles highlighted exactly where I was, so I wasn’t worried about Kenny losing me. Both of the exits from this floor had been sealed and blocked off with tons of stone, so there was only one way for the bastard to go.

  “Can’t hide in the dark, sparkly boy,” Kenny said from below. I caught the occasional faint sound of a footstep as he moved after me.

  “Please don’t call me that,” I muttered. “Besides, I’m obviously aware I glow.”

  “Smarter men than you have tried. Your dossier is pretty clear: mentally subnormal.”

  I was getting very, very tired of people calling me stupid.

  “And you’re just an overgrown freak who likes to scare children with his missing eye. Who was it that took it again? Some bloke from the Adventurers Guild?” I was nearly where I needed to be, and Kenny had to be looking up to follow me, and not at his feet, which were gradually building up a collection of broken spider webs. Soon, the click-clack of tiny feet would start, and my little ones would come to rescue me.

  I paused, clinging to a stalactite. I think they’re the ones that dangle rather than rise up? I clung to a dangly spike of rock and looked back at the ground. “Mortem Fucem!” I snapped, and the magical sentry turret sprang into existence off to one side of where I guessed Kenny was standing.

  “Can’t target what it can't see,” he growled.

  Click-clack. Click-clack. I imagined he was glancing around, suspicious but not afraid of the noise. He was impossibly strong, and he was also impossible to detect unless he spoke or made a noise.

  Except that I had chosen to let our fight take place on the arachnoshroom combat floor. In addition to stocking up on delicious bacon-flavoured monster corpses, the little horrors didn’t need to see or hear in order to find someone. Kenny was standing on the mycelial web they wove across the entire floor, and every time he moved, it was like ringing a dinner bell to the swarm.

  The floor was almost pitch black down below me. The faint glow from the mushrooms next to me on the ceiling, and my own sparkles, didn’t reach down far enough to cast any illumination down there.

  “You’re used to being invisible, aren’t you? Does Dalgliesh prefer it that way?”

  “Doesn’t matter if people can see me or not.”

  Something flashed up at me, moving too fast to track, and my head snapped back. I flexed my jaw and reached around with a tail to stroke my chin. Then I dodged like crazy. Cockroach-When-The-Light-Turns-On had me scurrying left and right as more pebbles slammed into the roof around me. Where they struck the stone, they exploded, leaving modest craters. Where they hit me, it bloody hurt. And he was just flicking bits of rock at me.

  “Do you begin to realise how badly you’ve screwed up? Mr Dalgiesh finds Mr Bulldo’s abilities very useful. Going after him was a bad idea, Bob.”

  “He’s fine. Say, how do you feel about spiders?”

  “I crush bugs, even ones with scales, the hells is that?”

  On the plus side, when it came to quips, we were at least on an equally bad footing. My minions had arrived. The sentry began blasting away at them. It could one-shot the little arachnoshrooms, and unfortunately, it tended to reduce them to pulp and shreds. Nothing left for my larder. But they weren’t the issue.

  Beams of red light flashed out as the big guys arrived. The harsh glow from each attack threw the surroundings into an eerie reveal. A sea of spider-legged mushrooms, all converging on… nothing. The face-lasers from the mother-mushies slammed into something, though, so I opened my bruised jaw and sent a torrent of orange and green fire down at where Kenny had to be.

  It was just a quick blast, just enough to test the waters. If he was immune to the acidic flames I could spout, I had other options, but like any dragon, I usually assumed my breath could deal with whatever pissed me off.

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  It did not. The patch of stone blazed into fire, the delicate strands of the web crisping and turning to ash. Kenny glared up at me, and I grinned down at him. The turret locked on, and the explosion launched him sideways, tumbling through the arachnoshrooms. Chitinous limbs stabbed down as he passed, and more red laser beams cut through the air to burn into him, but the only damage I could see was done to his clothes.

  Then he moved. Way too fast. He blurred around the room, lit up by blasts of red light as he slaughtered his way through the dungeon mobs. He pulled back a fist to punch one of the mother-mushies into paste, then glanced down at his feet. It looked like he was standing on two blobs of candy floss.

  Kenny snarled and reached down to clear them off. His back was to me, he didn’t feel threatened by me at all, and wasn’t even showing me the respect of keeping his solitary eye in my direction. Wrath was spitting feathers in my mind, and I was not particularly amused at his attitude. My claws slipped free of the stone, I rolled over, and my wings snapped out.

  I was on him before he was done; his hands were now wrapped in delicate strands as well, which he tried to swipe off on his tattered jacket. His face swung toward me as I sent a blast of fire at him and opened my jaws.

  Having recently killed a much more powerful dragon than myself by detonating his intestines, I was not willing to actually risk eating the bastard. But a damn good chewing wouldn’t hurt.

  In cartoons, there’s often that moment where something is coming to eat a character, like the crocodile in Peter Pan, and the plucky hero manages to wedge a stick or something between their jaws, and it stops the monster from chowing down. Kenny didn’t need one. He was the stick.

  His clothes were smoking ruins. The arachnoshrooms were recovering, the ones that survived at any rate, and they began to move towards our odd still life. My jaws strained; I could feel his hands around my canines as he fought my bite pressure.

  “I’m not on the menu,” he growled, but I could hear the strain in his voice.

  “Noth your thcall!” I tried to snap, in more ways than one. My menu, my choice, and he was very much on the menu once he was dead.

  A spike of pain shot up my nerves. I spat the man out and reached up with a claw to check what he’d done. “My toof!”

  Kenny dropped the four inches of fang he’d managed to snap off and rubbed his hands together. He strode towards me, far too confident. More laser attacks hit us; dungeon mobs weren’t picky about their targets.

  “Time to die, dragon.”

  “Eat shit.” I lunged forward, using Stoat-Baits-The-Cuckoo. My neck stretched out, and his fist flashed out to intercept me, but I twisted to the side and swatted him with the horns that lined the back of my head. Wrath was not happy; in fact, he was rather angry and was filling my mind with smoke. But I still had a plan.

  A portal opened ahead of Kenny before he could right himself. He tumbled through at the same moment I set the other end up near the ceiling, facing toward the ground. He fell through, an angry snarl echoing down at me. Then I moved the first portal to directly below him. He vanished. He reappeared and then vanished again.

  “You–fucking–bastard.” He could just about get one word out between being re-portalled back to the ceiling.

  The archnoshrooms were still taking potshots at him, and a few of them were trying to burn my wings off. I flapped up to the ceiling and latched on nearby, watching as the thug fell perpetually.

  “It–won’t–last–long–enough. And–when–I–get–out–of–this–”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m dead. I don’t know, though, the charge on those portal gems will last for a while. But maybe not long enough. You still need to drink, right? And it’s going to get pretty unpleasant when you need the bog.”

  “The–Bog?”

  “The loo, the lav, the toilette. You’re gonna be whizzing round with your pee for a while. But it won’t last forever, I’m sure. You’ll die of thirst. Righto. I’ll leave you to it, I guess. Got to go deal with your boss.” I turned and walked towards the stairs, leaving him ranting and snarling behind me.

  Cyrus was gone. I wasn’t sure if he’d escaped during the fight, or Kenny had killed him, forcing him to use up his extra life from the incredibly expensive potion I’d used to ensure he wasn’t actually at risk. The iron staircase was cold under my claws as I rested my forepaws on the first step.

  “See you in a bit, Kenny.” I shifted back to my human form as a portal opened ahead of me. I stepped out into my old lair. A number of automated mana-cannons pivoted towards me before winding down as they detected the ring on my finger. I walked over to the edge and stared down at the wintry landscape below me.

  This was going to cause trouble. I was going to destroy the nest of vampires under the city, but first I needed to deal with the Glaswegian psycho. And that meant dealing with his minions.

  My skin turned to armoured scales, a handful of which were cracked and ached painfully. My tooth… Were dragons like sharks? Did our teeth grow back, or did I need to have a word with Mordechai about some kind of magical replacement?

  I stepped out into the sky and beat my wings, angel feathers rippling in the wind. I didn’t head towards town for a spot of light dental surgery; I strived for altitude.

  The ground became a distant blur. Fields and forests blended into a green blob, dotted with the occasional grey speck of a town, the blue squiggle of a river. It really hit home how insignificant we all were.

  Mere humans, puny mammals that they were, could only be considered as irrelevant to the wider world. The horizon was lost in clouds, and had taken the kind of curve that suggested that… yep, the air was getting very thin.

  My gigantic lungs struggled to provide enough oxygen to my burning flight muscles. This was an entirely new experience for me, and I understood why flying creatures tend to stick reasonably close to the ground. The sky above had gone from a pale blue to a very dark one, almost black, in fact. Were those stars, or my natural sparkles?

  I didn’t want to push it any further. I moved the top half of the pair of portals that had Kenny locked in an endless holding pattern and aimed it up and away. He was tough as hell, but he was already moving at what I hoped would literally be terminal velocity, especially when he had plummeted for miles to splash down in an ocean, or simply to splash against a rock. Whatever happened, there was going to be a splash involved.

  Only half of his body spun away toward the void.

  Human (Parathug) level 273 slain.

  Gold coins earned!

  Twenty-one gold added to the Hoard.

  Well, that was disappointing. Greed continued to cry in my mind. Now for Bulldo.