At one point, dragons were the apex of the intelligent species. They were never great in number, but they brook no argument, and took what they wanted with their great physical might. We were fortunate to be considered beneath their notice. It is only with time and our greater knowledge that we now rule, and the dragons that are left are shown to be what they always were: backward, primitive, comparatively stupid creatures.

  – Prof. Lily Woodthew, Mythozoologist

  Sallus was already strapping in, shaking her head and laughing. “You certainly know how to throw down the gauntlet! I like it!”

  “If they survive, I want them terrified of my might. If they are not, then I do not want to give any chance that the heroes know I am coming.” Apex growled that through the speaker, at the same time feeling an odd and brief tug at his body’s presence. “Did you do something?”

  “That makes sense, and don’t worry. All I did was increase the inertial compensation so I won’t get crushed. We should have enough power to protect this room.” The elf glanced at the camera. “You move fast, even with this you’ll probably make me ill again.”

  The dragon growled, “I won’t be slowing down for you.”

  Sallus grinned, “I’d be angry if you did.” Her smile faded. “You need to watch for what they fire at you. You’ll need to get in close, but you have an advantage. They’ll be expecting missiles or energy weapons, so they have things to counter those, like energy shields or MCM. Your claws and tail ignore both.”

  Apex grunted, but was already turning his attention away from the elf. He wasn’t sure why she’d chosen this specific area, but he got the idea. He just needed to take this thing down fast, because he hadn’t gotten the impression that the crew would listen to the warning.

  Their problem, not his. He’d warned them.

  His vision had seemed fuzzy at first, but with a thought, he could sharpen it or even enhance distant objects. Apex could see his target as he accelerated forward, keeping his thrusters well under their maximum. His bluster and bravado had been important to get the idea across, but he was well aware that he was unfamiliar with the capabilities of these machines. He didn’t want to give them a good idea of what he could do, should one escape.

  Loud beeps interrupted his thoughts, as Apexillos saw four tiny projectiles detach and speed toward him at a frightening velocity. They were small, but so were arrows – and with the right enchantments, arrows could hurt his old body. These must be some kind of ship-arrows, and must be the missiles Sallus had spoken of.

  “Ah, that could be a problem.” The elf’s voice cut into the squealing alarm as the missiles sped toward the draconic ship. “Those are MADAR-guided. They use pulses of mana to track the target once they’re locked on. Very hard to avoid without countermeasures, and we didn’t have any installed yet.”

  “Hm.” Apex was already adjusting his flight path when Sallus informed him. It still felt alien to change his vector without banking, but his body responded easily. It was not entirely fluid – he felt a faint shudder along his side, and an odd twinge in one wing. Something like pain flashed through his mind.

  This body is old… but it is mine, now, he thought.

  Just as Sallus had warned him, the missiles – each moving in a twisting pattern to avoid easy tracking – altered their path to follow him. He felt them as they streaked through the starlit sky, closing the distance rapidly. He felt how they were tracking him, the faint tickles and pinpricks of magic wandering over his body, repeatedly pinging off his scarred and pitted metal ‘scales’ that covered his new form.

  “Ah… so that is how they do it. You Lesser Folk have gotten clever, haven’t you?” He murmured that in lazy admission, his thoughts already racing in ways to counter this.

  “A backhanded compliment if I ever heard one. You don’t sound concerned.” Sallus, for all she tried to sound impressed, didn’t show any change in her voice. Apexillos mentally noted that she’d not been surprised.

  Was this entire exercise a test?

  Apex shoved that away for later. He knew how the missiles worked now, but that did not make them less dangerous. Tapping deep into his frame, he felt the dwindling supply of power – that dribble of quintessence in the tanks – and drew upon it. A raw, painful ache throbbed through his body as ancient circuits flared to life, used in a way they were never meant to be used.

  “Your people rely too much on ritual and memorization,” he grumbled to her as he tied off the improvised spell. The pings of invisible power met his spell and bounced back at odd angles and speeds, a simple and small adjustment that sent the quartet of deadly projectiles spiraling away from one another, one exploding prematurely. None flew anywhere close to Apex.

  “Be careful doing that,” Sallus warned. “Your mana circuits aren’t built for that sort of thing. I’m trying to record what you’re doing so I can figure out how to upgrade them. Then you’ll be able to use magic more properly.”

  The dragon heard, but did not respond. Now that the missiles had been baffled, he expected the patrol ship to answer with some other kind of weapon. He angled his wings so the boosters could fire, causing him to dive below the plane of the opposing ship’s center. They already weren’t face-on – Apex had come in above the plane of the patrol craft’s trajectory – but it helped to think of it that way just so he had a point of reference.

  His instinct had been correct. A flash of a mana cannon bolted over his head, and the corvette started to roll, attempting to keep more of its weapons trained on the dragon that jinked about and swerved unnaturally for a spacecraft.

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  In spite of his rapid evasive maneuvers, another blaze of pain hit the base of his wing. Alerts scrolled across his vision, and the left booster went offline. He didn’t have time to assess the damage right that moment, continuing the dive and roll, until he passed along the ‘underbelly’ of the corvette, with only a lone small mana cannon peppering his armored hide. It was clearly meant as some sort of anti-personnel weapon or something, as it simply couldn’t penetrate his armor.

  Apex had come in fast, and now suffered a simple problem: he couldn’t slow down. The patrol craft was bigger than he’d expected, since Sallus had claimed he was much larger, but he realized it was long, slender, and almost flat. It was the length of his body without head or tail, but much slimmer, making it considerably less massive than his own frame. All this came to his mind as he whipped past the underbelly, threatening to overshoot the craft and end up right back in the firing arc of its weapons.

  He’d already figured out that some of the weapons couldn’t shoot in certain directions. Apex wanted to avoid taking another hit. This body was falling apart already, if the shudders he’d felt during acceleration and maneuvering were any indication.

  In desperation, he did the only thing he could think of. Heavy metallic claws bit into the hull of the nearby ship as he shot past, anchoring him to the alloyed skin. The eerie silence of the battle was all the more disturbing as his claws tore through the hull, leaving deep furrows and the misting puff of atmosphere escaping. His mind could imagine the horrid screech of metal tearing metal, trying to fill in for a noise that never reached his ears.

  The differing vectors of the two ships suddenly merged as the two collided and became one object, attached by the curved talons that he’d feared might be purely decorative.

  The collision forced both into a spin, a twirling dance with one another as the corvette tried to bring guns to bear on a ship that coiled around it like a serpent, while the dragon wrestled with an unmoving, stiff rectangle. Neither were in their element, each battling an enemy that did not react the way their training and experience dictated.

  A silent roar tore out of Apexillos as heat blossomed in his tail. Warnings flashed in his vision, a textual shouting about tolerances and imminent damage. His tail had curled, slamming into the ship to rattle the occupants, but in doing so it had crossed over one of the engines. Someone inside had been quick enough to ignite the engine and start his tail melting.

  Deep instincts took over, centuries of battles against foes both large and small. No hesitation slowed his neck bending and the steel jaws clamping down on the edge of the corvette, the thinner but more advanced armor of the cruiser buckling as its integrity failed under the wrenching teeth. He held on, his tail whipping away from the source of pain and slamming into the other side. Gasses hissed into his mouth, the patrol ship’s hull now leaking from numerous breaches.

  He felt a faint buzzing through his body as the energy shields – useless against his purely physical attack – flickered and died, another casualty of the crippling damage that the steel dragon had done to the sleek, modern vessel.

  It was already dead in space. Power remained, the reactor still humming, but control systems shut down throughout. That didn’t matter to Apex. It was a foe that had harmed him, and his body reacted to make certain it would never do so again. His rear leg clamped onto the hull just behind the still-burning engine that was sending them in a tumble through space. The claws bit deeply, and with a powerful kick that sent several alerts of ‘actuator overload’ through his vision, Apex kicked.

  The starboard engine tore free of the hull in an abrupt buckling explosion, flaring for several seconds longer before the no-longer-present fuel lines ceased to feed anything to the engine’s chamber. It rocketed off into space, sputtering and dying but already distant, leaving the quintessence-bleeding carcass of the corvette behind.

  “That’s enough, Apex!”

  Sallus cut through the battle rage, slicing into his mind with her voice. A reminder that this was not a sea serpent strangling him, but merely a tool, a device. He had won, and though his body was steel, his soul was still drunk with the thrill of victory.

  It took several seconds before he released his jaws from the ship, leaving only the claws clinging to the mangled corpse of a vehicle. Now that the battle was no longer ongoing, it felt as if he was still, or nearly so. The tapestry of stars barely moved… but the nearest one, the bright blue one, climbed across his vision much faster. He eased his thrusters on to stabilize relative to that closer neighbor, realizing that the much more distant stars were not a useful point of reference now.

  “Well, you certainly are effective,” the elf’s voice broke into his thoughts. “So much for salvaging as much as we can. Hopefully you didn’t breach both fuel tanks. We’re almost empty after that.”

  “Hmm…” Apex rumbled, reluctantly releasing his prey. The angular, sleek corvette was now a torn and mangled piece of space junk, wreckage that even as he watched, threatened to break apart as bulkheads within buckled and gave way under the released pressure of the atmosphere within.

  “It is more difficult than I had thought to take these vessels undamaged.”

  “You’re going to want to work on that, big guy.”

  The dragon grunted at the flippant response, but he could not argue. This was something he sorely needed to control. His battle instincts were honed by centuries of survival, and when he had engaged that ship… echoes of his last, struggling battle had seeped into him, forcing him to fight with more strength than he’d planned.

  His eyes scanned the wreckage, spotting the debris floating about. Corpses, too, tumbled past. One of his attacks had breached the hull near the supposedly secure bridge, and a long rent down the side had spilled further crew into the harsh and unforgiving void of space.

  “I’m going to open up your belly. This is where your main cargo hold is, the one exposed to space,” Sallus said, her voice quieter. Weary. “I will guide you through tearing apart the hull to retrieve the more valuable components. We’ll have to drain the remaining fuel tank. Our quintessence just hit critical.”

  “Mmm…” Apex rumbled back at the elf, flipping through his vision options while tearing open the hull. He felt his stomach open up, split down the middle to ease the massive armor plates to the side, thinner doors swinging open behind them. A comparatively vast storage space lay within, broken only by a few crossbeams to prevent it from being a structural weakness.

  It was far more spacious than he’d thought, but the support struts limited how large an item he could place within. Unsurprising to Apex. He was not a cargo vessel, or at least he did not think so.

  “Why do I have such a large cargo space?” He directed the question inward, instead of musing over it in private.

  “A lot of your components are old, but your reactor and some of your support systems are state of the art. They’re a lot smaller than the tech used to build you originally.” She chuckled quietly. “We gave you some extra fuel tanks and a much larger cargo space. A good thing, it turns out.”

  “Yes,” the dragon replied absently. “And now we have something else to take care of, before I fully disassemble this.”

  “Oh? What’s that?” This time, Sallus sounded mildly surprised.

  Apex reached for one of the few parts of the ship still sealed and containing atmosphere. His claw began to cut away the outer hull, much more delicately than the vicious strikes of battle.

  “A survivor.”