Kyle was getting tired of all this jogging. His supposed fantasy adventure had turned into a long series of jogging here and there. For once, he really let go. He entered a full on sprint, but one that wouldn’t go over the passive recharge of the reactor.

  His scanners had triangulated his path to the tallest mountain in the distance. 80 miles, give or take. Wonderful, Kyle thought. A 40 minute sprint.

  Kyle tore across the massive and flat plains that seemed to make up most of the surrounding region. Every now and then, a small hill would rise, or a copse of trees would block his path. Huge sections of the fields were covered in amber waves of grain.

  Small farming communes and lone farmhouses abounded. It was all rather tranquil, or would have been if not for the 10 foot tall power armored Demigod moving at nearly twice the speed of a car on the freeway.

  He tried to avoid the fields as much as possible, but every now and then, he had to go through one-the surrounding paths went too far out of the way. Every now and then, the furious or panicked swearing of a farmer would follow from the distance, but Kyle really couldn’t bring himself to care.

  Nearly an hour of sprinting later, he stopped in an instant at the foot of the lightly forested mountains.

  Kyle pulled out one of his personal favorite tools-the High Fidelity Ground Penetrating Radar. The HFGPR could examine the surroundings for nearly a mile in every direction using a mixture of gravidar and radar.

  Placing the small, can-shaped item on the ground, the tripod legs deployed quickly-and with a small beep, it deployed its scan. It networked directly to his HUD-and showed nothing that looked like a dragon's den. Kyle picked the item back up and put it in its container under his arm. He proceeded to sprint up the cliff face for another mile and repeat the process.

  He was constantly under attack by the denizens of the range-cow sized winged beasts resembling two legged dragons, huge snakes that tried to camouflage with the rocks and failed against his sensors, and even a huge collection of rocks that actually caught him off guard due to its magical nature.

  The rocks had formed into a vaguely humanoid shape, and had started throwing other rocks at him. A single railgun shot to its center of mass put an end to that.

  Covering both entire mountains took nearly three hours. When his HFGPR finally detected a huge cavern deep beneath the metamorphic rock of the mediocre mountain range, Kyle was almost ready to give up and become a mercenary.

  As he suspected, the caves he had coincidentally mapped also led to the huge cavern. Sprinting for a minute over to the nearest cave entrance, he positively blew through the caves, pulping both the occasional megafauna and rock formation in the cramped passages.

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  On his way, he found and killed a monstrous ant. It was about the size of a goat, and red in color.

  And then he found another.

  And then a large group of them.

  At the point where he’d just pulped a group of nearly 30, he started to get worried that he was biting off more than he could chew. If a monster ant nest occupied the caves, he might have had to find another route.

  Eventually, he started encountering less and less ants-but they slowly became more and more prepared for him. Absolutely caked in bug guts and ichor, he wasn’t having it.

  He simply ran through line after line of ants, their lamb sized bodies crumpling before his armor.

  Right before he arrived at the suspected dragon cave, a smaller cavern opened up before him.

  Inside, huge elephant sized ants with mandibles the size of claymores and ranks of heavily armored horse sized ants chittered at his arrival.

  I don’t have time for this nonsense.

  Kyle decided to use one of the 4 grenades he had right there. They were all antimatter bombs-something he obviously had no way of making.

  Unclipping the small cube, about half the size of a pineapple, he turned off all 8 safety switches and threw the primed cube into the writhing mass of ants.

  He promptly hauled ass the other direction-a full on 160 kilometer an hour dash. Once he had moved nearly 400 meters back up the cave, he turned around-and was promptly propelled until he hit the wall.

  Antimatter was no joke. It was arguably the league's most powerful weapon, used in everything from missiles to mines.

  Even a mere grain could devastate an entire destroyer or a formation of infantry in a second. A grenade, especially in a cave system, was an apocalyptic expulsion of energy. When Kyle finally got up, he slowly walked over to the cavern, railgun raised and charged.

  He needn’t have bothered. There wasn’t even a trace of the formidable army of ants left-only a molten and significantly expanded cavern.

  Kyle navigated through the now blackened caves to find a new entrance. Waves of superheated air, tremors from the explosion, and the blast itself had radically altered the entire cave system layout-antimatter was an incredibly potent weapon.

  After a brief episode of sprinting around and stomping on the occasional stunned or wounded ant, he found the best entrance to the suspected dragon’s cavern.

  The tunnel terminated in a wall of black stone-different from the yellowish greys of the rest of the rock.

  Kyle took out a breaching charge. While he could technically do it, it was very inefficient to produce complex chemical compounds like explosives in the Nanofactory.

  Tapping Bariyon to wake him up, Kyle asked about the dragon. “What should I expect?” Bariyon considered it. “Go for the eyes-not even enchanted ballistae can pierce the scale armor of the beasts. From what I saw of your weapon earlier, a single shot to the head should more than subdue it. After which, you should be able to kill it.”

  Kyle lodged the small, tubular explosive in a crevasse in the wall and fell back again. There were no complicated electronics or remote detonators, those would have taken hours of the Nanofactory’s time. Instead, he pulled out his revolver, and simply shot the tube.

  A muffled thump-muted by his adaptive auditory sensors-echoed into the cavern beyond. The wall fell inward. With his railgun humming with power in his hands, he stepped into the cavern.