Chapter 1. Meeting in another world. Part 1.

  On a planet unknown to us—perhaps in our own galaxy, or another, or even a parallel universe—lay three great continents, home to the most powerful states of this alien world. The native peoples called them the Three Great Civilized Lands. But far to the east, a region that for the cartographers of the Three Great Civilized Lands was nothing more than a blank spot on the edge of the world marked with the laconic title "The Barbaric Lands," was a different story. To its inhabitants, this region was better known as the Great East, a realm of sea monsters and unpredictable currents. Here was a continent known in antiquity as Rodenius—a massive island-continent whose total area, occupying approximately 3.22 million square kilometers, was roughly half the size of Australia, yet too large to be considered merely an island. This made it a continent in its own right, too distant and insignificant to trouble the minds of imperial strategists. But for those who lived on this mass of rock and fertile soil, Rodonius was everything—a world for three nations standing on the brink of a war that would determine their fate.

  The Principality of Qua-Toyne was the living heart of the continent, its verdant treasure trove. Occupying just 0.568 million square kilometers in the northeast, it was an endless chessboard of fields, crisscrossed by deep, flowing rivers. The air here was thick, saturated with the aromas of damp earth, blooming meadows, and fresh bread. But this paradise was deceptive. Generations spent defending this abundance from envious neighbors had forged not a softness in the people of Qua-Toyne, but a stubborn pragmatism. They valued peace not out of weakness, but because they knew the true price of blood spilled upon their bountiful land. The principality's society was a unique tapestry woven from the threads of different peoples. Human farmers worked the fields alongside beastfolk merchants, whose caravans formed the backbone of the economy. Elven forest wardens, bound by ancient oaths, protected the age-old forests, while Dwarven engineers maintained the complex irrigation systems that had turned the principality into the breadbasket of Rodenius. Here, equality was not just a beautiful word, but the foundation of survival and prosperity. And it was for this very reason that the doctrine of their western neighbor was not just an ideological threat to them, but a harbinger of the utter annihilation of their world.

  To the southeast, covering a slightly larger but far harsher territory of 0.681 million square kilometers, lay the Kingdom of Quila. Its landscapes were majestic and unforgiving: endless deserts carved by deep, wind-scoured canyons where water was more precious than gold. Life here was a constant struggle, and it had instilled in the people of Quila an unyielding will and grim resilience. The kingdom's survival rested on two pillars: the perseverance of its people and a stable supply of grain from Qua-Toyne. As in the principality, demihumans made up a third of the population, but here integration was not a matter of philosophy, but of harsh necessity. Dwarves were the best miners in the barren mountains, and beastfolk were the most adept at surviving on the desert frontiers. However, this unity was fragile. In the mining towns, human workers grumbled about the dominance of the Dwarven guilds, while in the army, the beastfolk were often assigned to the most dangerous posts. This internal tension was a festering wound, one into which spies from their powerful neighbor constantly tried to rub salt.

  That neighbor was the Kingdom of Louria, the iron fist of the continent, whose domains stretched over 1.97 million square kilometers and covered nearly two-thirds of all of Rodonius in the west. It was a nation built on the ideology of human supremacy—cold, rational, and merciless. There was no open, chaotic discrimination here; instead, there was an established state system of segregation and propaganda that depicted demihumans as irrational animals, a genetic corruption, and a threat to the very existence of the human race. King Haark Louria the Thirty-Fourth, an ambitious and ruthless strategist, saw the unification of Rodenius not merely as a conquest, but as a sacred mission to purify the continent. For him, the complete extermination of demihumans was a logical and necessary step on the path to creating a great human empire. The forges of his capital, Jin-Hark, never cooled, day or night, and its shipyards worked nonstop, launching ever more warships. The price of this militarization was steep—exorbitant taxes and universal military conscription—but the populace, intoxicated by imperial ambitions and convinced of their right to rule the entire continent, tolerated it for now.

  The fragile alliance between Qua-Toyne and Quila, whose combined lands were smaller than Louria's, was born not of friendship, but of shared fear. Behind the diplomatic pleasantries lay deep-seated mistrust: in Qua-Toyne, they feared Quila would betray them in exchange for the forgiveness of its grain debts; in Quila, they worried the principality would sacrifice them to buy more time. And while the politicians exchanged assurances of eternal friendship, a shadow war was already being waged on the borders. Lourian agents fomented riots in the mining towns of Quila, Qua-Toynian scouts attempted to steal the blueprints for new Lourian siege engines, and Elven pathfinders silently eliminated Lourian sentries in the borderland forests. The continent held its breath, waiting for the first spark to inevitably ignite an all-consuming flame.

  Central Calendar Year 1639, Month 1, Day 24. 8:00 AM / Calendar of the New World Arrival, Year 0000, May, Day 10. 8:00 AM.

  The morning sky over the eastern frontiers of the Principality of Qua-Toyne was veiled by a thin, almost transparent sheet of cirrus clouds at an altitude of over six thousand meters. They acted as a giant light filter, softening the harshness of the sun's rays and transforming the world into a boundless, piercingly blue void. Within this aerial domain, gliding silently at a patrol altitude of three thousand meters, was a creature that embodied both power and primal grace. Its coal-black scales, composed of thousands of tightly interlocking plates, seemed to swallow the light, while its long, muscular tail, tipped with a sharp, bony blade, served as both rudder and weapon, slicing through the thin air with a barely perceptible whisper. A person from our world, upon seeing it, might have had many names for it, but the closest to the truth would have been "wyvern"—a name familiar to every strategist on Rodenius.

  On its back, settled into a deep leather saddle secured by a system of straps, sat a rider. His light armor of tempered steel and tanned leather was devoid of crests and embellishments—pure function, perfected over generations of dragon knights. This was Maarpatima, a corporal in the 6th Air Reconnaissance Squadron. His gaze, sharp and honed by years of patrol, methodically scanned the horizon. He glanced at the simple but reliable instruments mounted on his saddle horn: a mana-compass, whose enchanted needle always pointed toward the nearest source of terrestrial mana—his base—and a barometric mana-altimeter, a complex instrument crafted by dwarven artificers and filled with pressure-sensitive wind-crystals, which continuously translated the density of the thinning air into precise altitude measurements on its glowing brass dial. His unit's mission was monotonous yet vitally important: to guard the eastern frontiers. On paper, these were deserted stretches of sea. In reality, they represented the most likely flank for a surprise attack by the Kingdom of Louria, whose king was growing ever more aggressive. Lourian strategists were fond of flanking maneuvers, and a strike from an unexpected direction, from across the sea, was entirely in their style.

  Maarpatima and his faithful partner, Skaar, operated as a single mechanism. The rider could feel the slightest tension in the muscles beneath him, and the wyvern anticipated his commands from the barest shift of his weight. Below them stretched the endless, steel-gray "Sea of No Return," as the locals called it, which for centuries had lured adventurers to the east. None of them had ever come back. Seafarers blamed it on the edge of the world, where the ocean plunged into an abyss; the knights, however, knew of more prosaic reasons—anomalies that drove compasses mad, and gigantic sea creatures drawn to the vibrations of ships' hulls.

  Suddenly, something disrupted the flawless emptiness of the sky. His trained eye caught a tiny dark speck to the northeast. It did not twinkle like a distant star, nor did it move erratically like a krakka, a local bird resembling a blue-hued albatross. It held a steady, stable course. Maarpatima's heart skipped a beat, then began to pound steadier and faster—a professional's response to the unforeseen.

  "An ally?" was his first thought. But he knew the patrol schedules by heart. In this sector, at this altitude, there should have been no one. The superpowers of the Three Great Civilized Lands possessed "Dragon-Carriers"—colossal wooden ships capable of carrying up to a dozen wyverns on their decks—but out here, in the backwater of the world, such technological might was the stuff of myths.

  The object grew larger, taking shape, and a warrior's instinct, honed in dozens of training sorties, screamed of danger. Skaar, beneath him, let out a restless hiss, sensing the rider's alarm.

  "It isn't flapping its wings…" Maarpatima whispered, and a cold, sticky dread seeped under his armor. The creature flew in a perfectly straight line, with an unnatural stability that ignored the air currents. He quickly pressed his gloved palm to the manacomm amulet on his gorget. A slender crystal within glowed with a warm light, establishing a connection to the base.

  "Base, this is Patrol-6. I have an unidentified aerial object, sector Gamma-7. Closing for visual identification. Current coordinates…" His voice was even, polished by hundreds of reports.

  He applied gentle pressure with his knee to Skaar's flank, and the wyvern, dutifully banking a wing, began a smooth turn. As they closed the distance, the details became clearer, and a chilling realization pierced through him: this was not a living creature. Not a wyvern. Not a griffin. Not a dragon. It had been created. Forged. A man-made monster of metal and some incomprehensible power. It had a vast, elongated body of pristine white, making it almost merge with the clouds. Instead of living, beating wings, it had four perfectly straight, motionless limbs. On the ends of these metallic wings, blindingly white lights flashed rhythmically, like the heartbeat of some unknown god.

  Maarpatima clenched his teeth. His orders required him to identify the object at all costs. He commanded Skaar to give it everything he had. The mighty muscles of the wyvern tensed, the beat of its wings growing faster and more powerful. The oncoming air slammed into his face with the force of a storm, forcing him to squint. His wyvern's maximum cruising speed was 230 km/h, and in a short burst, he could push it to 240. That was the absolute limit for a living creature in this region. But the distance to the object… it wasn't shrinking. On its two motionless wings, whirlwinds of metal blades spun at a vision-blurring speed. The sound that emanated from them was not a cry or a roar, but a low, deep, vibrating hum that was felt more with the whole body than with the ears. On its wings and tail were painted five-pointed stars of a deep crimson red, the likes of which Maarpatima had never seen on any flag or crest of the known nations.

  "Kh… what in the hells is this demon?!" Desperation and fury mingled in his cry, lost in the roar of the wind. His partner Skaar let out a distressed, panicked squawk, sensing the futility of the chase.

  He activated the manacomm again, his voice now cracking with strain.

  "HQ! This is Patrol-6! The object is impossible to identify! The speed difference is colossal! I repeat, pursuit is impossible! The object is on a course for Port Maihark, deeper into the continent! It's getting away from me, there's nothing I can do!"

  He watched as the man-made monster rapidly dwindled, turning back into a speck before melting into the haze on the horizon. Maarpatima, breathing heavily, turned the exhausted Skaar around, whose heart was pounding like a war drum. A cold terror reigned in the corporal's soul. It wasn't because he had encountered something fast. It was because he, a professional military scout, had just witnessed a violation of a fundamental law of their world. In their skies, the skies of Rodonius, something had just appeared for which their best warriors, their pride and their main strength, were nothing more than slow-moving birds, not even worth chasing. This was not just a scout. It was a herald of a new, incomprehensible, and terrifying age. And it was flying straight into the heart of his homeland.

  Meanwhile, Aboard the Tu-142M3, Side Number 77-Red.

  Airspace Over the Unknown Continent.

  08:05.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  At that very moment, within the drone of four turboprop engines, the Tu-142M3 long-range anti-submarine aircraft continued its journey at an altitude of three thousand meters. Inside the pressurized fuselage, in the combat control compartment, the atmosphere was one of monotonous, focused work. The air was stale, smelling of ozone from the active electronics and the faint aroma of yesterday's coffee. The dim light from numerous instrument panels and screens cast itself upon the weary faces of the crew. This was the second day of their extended patrol over the boundless ocean of a new, alien world. The second day of searching for land, for landmarks, for any sign of civilization at all.

  "Commander, the Korshun Radar System has a contact. Bearing zero-four-five," the voice of the radar complex operator, Lieutenant Sizov, came through the headsets, steady and impassive. A tiny, barely perceptible dot appeared on his old but repeatedly modernized screen. "Range is forty kilometers, initially on a crossing vector, Commander," the lieutenant quickly updated, reading the changing data. "However, the target has just initiated a sharp banking turn upon establishing line of sight. It is currently pulling into our wake, desperately trying to lock onto a parallel pursuit trajectory."

  Major Alexey Vorontsov, the aircraft commander, looked up from his navigation chart. His eyes, accustomed to multi-hour flights, tirelessly scanned the instruments.

  "Speed, altitude, nature of the target?"

  "Well, that's the thing, Commander…" a note of bewilderment entered the lieutenant's voice for the first time. "The speed is unstable, fluctuating around two hundred and forty kilometers per hour. The Radar Cross-Section (RCS) is almost nil, like a flock of large birds, but the signal is too stable for that. Altitude is three thousand meters, on the same flight level as us."

  Vorontsov frowned. Unstable speed, low radar cross-section…

  "Navigator, visual confirmation," he ordered.

  Captain Ignatyev, the navigator, glued himself to the eyepiece of the powerful "Neptun" optoelectronic system. For several seconds, he silently twisted the focus knobs, and then he froze, his breath catching.

  "Commander… I… I don't know what this is."

  Taking the navigator's place, Vorontsov stared into the eyepiece. The image, stabilized by gyroscopes, was crystal clear. Against the backdrop of the clouds, a creature was flying, beating huge, leathery wings with heavy, powerful strokes. It was an enormous, coal-black reptile with a long, serpentine neck. And on its back, in a saddle, sat… a person. In armor.

  Vorontsov silently pulled back from the eyepiece, his expression for a moment becoming an unreadable mask. A heavy silence descended on the compartment, broken only by the hum of the engines and the beeping of equipment. The crew, sensing that something was wrong, fell still, their gazes fixed on their commander.

  "Son of a bitch…" the navigator breathed, wiping a sudden sheen of sweat from his forehead. "Is this… are they filming a movie or something?"

  "See for yourself," Vorontsov said in a low voice.

  The co-pilot, Captain Belov, took his place at the eyepiece. He watched for a second, then recoiled as if he had seen a ghost.

  "It can't be…"

  Whispers rippled through the compartment.

  "What is it?"

  "They're saying it's a dragon…"

  "What do you mean, a dragon? We've all gone flight-crazy…"

  "All stations, silence on the comms!" Vorontsov's voice cut through the rising murmur like the crack of a whip. The steel in his tone instantly brought everyone back to reality. "Sizov, classify the target as an 'unidentified biological aircraft with a pilot of humanoid type.' Begin recording with all surveillance systems. Everyone, remain calm. We will not show aggression. Maintain present course."

  The rendezvous point drew closer. The creature was now visible to the naked eye through the side portholes. It was flying gracefully and powerfully on a parallel course, desperately trying to close the distance. Its wings beat the air with a steady rhythm. The gleam of its black scales was visible even from several hundred meters away.

  "Commander, he's trying to catch up to us," Belov reported, his voice more level now, though his eyes still held a look of shock.

  Vorontsov allowed himself a wry smile, more to reassure his crew than out of any real amusement. Their Tu-142M3 was flying at an economical cruising speed of 550 km/h. For this creature, whose flight was a miracle of biology and not aerodynamics, they were unreachable. He could see the muscles straining in the creature's wings as it desperately tried to push itself harder.

  "A powerful beast," Vorontsov said quietly, watching it. "But you can't cheat physics. The air resistance at this speed is too much for a biological airframe. I can only imagine what he's reporting to his superiors right now…"

  He watched with cold, clinical fascination as the biological wonder—a beast composed of sheer, unbridled muscle and primitive instinct—physically exhausted itself against the merciless supremacy of jet-era aeronautics. For the heavy Tu-142M3, five hundred and fifty kilometers per hour was a slow, unhurried economical cruising pace; for the living beast, even a fraction of that was an impossible terminal velocity that threatened to tear its leathery wings apart. Predictably, the disparity in energy was absolute. Vorontsov observed the enormous winged creature desperately straining, only to immediately plummet backwards into the violent turbulence of their heavy contrails, shrinking rapidly into a helpless dark dot on the horizon. The Soviet-built leviathan had brutally outpaced it in seconds without the flight engineer so much as touching the throttle levels. Two conflicting feelings warred within the Major: the overwhelming astonishment of a man confronting the impossible, and the ice-cold calm of a soldier assessing a new, incomprehensible threat. This was no mere pterosaur. This was something that shouldn't exist. And it was being controlled by someone.

  "Center, this is Albatross-One," he spoke into the microphone, switching to the secure communications channel with the flagship, the Amphibious Assault Ship Priboy. "Confirming entry into the reconnaissance quadrant. Reporting an unscheduled contact. Prepare to receive telemetry and video data. I repeat, prepare yourselves… what you are about to see is not a malfunction or interference."

  The crew listened silently to their commander. They all understood: their routine reconnaissance mission had just become a historic event. The report they would send in a few minutes would forever change the command's understanding of the world they had fallen into.

  Principality of Qua-Toyne. Immediate Aerial Command Center, Base of the 6th Dragon Rider Squadron. 08:02.

  In the dimly lit operations room, which smelled of ozone from the active mana-amplifiers and old parchment, a young elf named Kalmia was bent over the communications console. Her long, sensitive ears, capable of detecting the slightest fluctuations in mana-currents, were tense. The mana-receiver, a complex device of polished crystals and copper runes, was hissing with static—a common occurrence when communicating over long distances. But suddenly, the hissing was replaced by a clear, yet alarmed signal. The receiver crystal vibrated, and a mechanical voice, devoid of all emotion yet carrying the distinct panic of a living man, filled the room.

  "…object is in the airspace, one hundred and thirty kilometers northeast of the base. I repeat, pursuit is impossible! The object… it's massive, and… it's not flapping its wings. Its speed… gods, its speed is far greater than ours!" The voice on the manacom belonged to Corporal Maarpatima, one of their best scouts. The bewilderment in his tone was more telling than any formal report.

  Kalmia froze for a fraction of a second, her fingers hovering over the transmitter runes. She knew Maarpatima's voice. Calm, confident, even in the face of a storm. She had never heard him sound like this.

  "Patrol-6, clarify the object's allegiance!" her own voice broadcast, as steady and clear as regulations demanded, but her heart began to beat faster. The constant threat from the Kingdom of Louria had conditioned them to treat every unidentified contact as a potential attack.

  The reply came almost instantly, choppy and desperate:

  "Allegiance… unknown! The markings are not ours, not Lourian… they don't look like anything I know!"

  "Is there any possibility it is a high dragon or other rare magical creature?" The question was standard procedure, but Kalmia already knew the answer.

  "Negative! It's not a high dragon, not a wyvern, I don't even know if it's alive! It's… it's made of metal! Requesting immediate backup!"

  The final words were lost in a crackle of static. Kalmia shot up from her station. She raced through the echoing corridors of the base, her boots clattering on the stone floor. She burst into the commander's office without even knocking.

  The base commander, an elderly elf-veteran with a face etched with the scars of old battles, raised a weary gaze to her.

  "An unidentified object, you say?" he asked after she, breathless, had relayed the essence of the report. His voice was calm, but a shadow of alarm flickered in his eyes.

  "Yes, Commander. Maarpatima from the sixth squadron reports… the object is moving at an extreme velocity, is made of metal, and is not flapping its wings."

  The commander went still, his fingers tightening on the hilt of a sword hanging on the wall.

  "Not flapping its wings… made of metal…" He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "That's impossible… unless…"

  He recalled vague, fragmented intelligence reports from the Second Civilized Zone. Tales from merchants who had been to Mu, of "flying ships" forged from metal and fire, rather than from flesh and magic. He had always dismissed them as tall tales. Until now.

  "The object is maintaining a direct, unwavering vector straight for Maihark, Commander!" Kalmia reported, cold dread beginning to seep through her disciplined voice. "Analyzing Maarpatima’s distance parameters of one hundred and thirty kilometers and factoring in this terrifying velocity anomaly... by the Gods, it will tear through our outer air defenses and reach the city center in roughly twelve to fourteen minutes! We have no time!.

  The commander's face turned to stone. Maihark wasn't just a city—it was the economic heart of the principality. A strike against it would paralyze the nation.

  "Sound the alarm! Scramble the entire sixth squadron! Everyone who's on the ground!" his voice boomed through the office, filled with its old strength. "If that's a scout, the main force could be right behind it. We cannot allow our honor to be trampled into the dirt! We must intercept it!"

  The headquarters instantly became a disturbed hive. Magical sirens began to wail, their piercing sound echoing throughout the base. Dragon riders resting in the barracks leaped to their feet, pulling on their flight armor and saddle harnesses as they ran.

  An order, magically amplified, blared over the public address system:

  "All knights of the sixth squadron! Battle stations! An unidentified object has entered our airspace and is approaching Maihark. Your mission is to intercept and destroy! I repeat, shoot it down on sight!"

  Twelve wyverns, led by their riders, emerged one by one from their cavernous hangars onto the runway. Their roars mixed with the battle cries of the knights. Spreading their mighty wings, they launched themselves from the ground and, forming up into a perfect V-formation, soared to meet the unknown threat.

  They flew to intercept. What had at first appeared as a distant dot grew in size with astonishing speed.

  "Gods… what kind of beast is that?" one of the riders muttered over the open manacom channel, his voice trembling with a mixture of fear and awe.

  "A monster," his wingman replied. "But even monsters can die."

  The object's speed was astounding. Even accounting for their own forward motion on an intercept course, it was closing the distance with an unbelievable, unnatural velocity.

  The squadron captain, a seasoned and cool-headed veteran, assessed the situation in a fraction of a second.

  "Attention! Prepare a concentrated volley of fireballs! Its speed surpasses ours; we won't get a second chance! We attack on the fly-by! Show them what years of training are for!"

  His words restored the riders' confidence. Twelve wyverns opened their maws in unison. Pure mana began to concentrate in their throats, coalescing into vortexes of flame. The air around them crackled with static energy. A single one of these fireballs could burn through the hull of a wooden ship or incinerate a platoon of infantry.

  But just as the magical energy reached critical mass within the throats of the beasts, ready to be unleashed in a devastating salvo, the unknown man-made construct enacted a maneuver born not of physical agility, but of terrifying, brute-force industrial engineering. Undetected by the dragons' primitive senses, the automated tail-warning radar of the giant machine had long since calculated the intercept trajectories of the biological swarm. There was no desperate twisting, no panicked fighter-like banking exposing its vulnerable underbelly.

  Instead, the deafening drone echoing from its motionless wings violently intensified as four immense turboprop engines pushed raw aviation kerosene into their combustors. Shaking the sky with mechanical fury, the colossal 185-ton machine engaged a heavy, mathematically steady ascent. With an incredible, unrelenting climb rate of fifteen meters per second that completely disregarded the exhaustion tearing at biological wings, the flying leviathan dragged itself into the high heavens like an invisible elevator.

  For the wyvern riders, the result was a brutal, instantaneous defeat brought on by atmospheric physics. Attempting to follow the rising metal beast, their loyal mounts smashed directly against their physiological limits—a flight ceiling of four thousand meters. Above that altitude, the freezing, rarefied air starved their biological lungs and denied their wings the density needed for lift. Helpless, gasping for breath, the entire defensive squadron stalled in mid-air. The massive bolts of coalesced flame were aborted, fizzling out into useless sparks in the sub-zero sky, entirely devoid of their target. They were forced to circle in sheer, freezing impotence as they watched the pale white behemoth leisurely and safely punch its way into the stratospheric upper limits, arrogantly ignoring them as it maintained its devastating heading toward the terrified capital.

  The captain, stunned by a maneuver that defied all known laws of flight, activated his manacom to report.

  We cannot reach it. I repeat, it is continuing on its course to Maihark, and it remains beyond our reach."

  There was no longer any confidence in his voice. Only the cold, sober realization that they had just encountered something far beyond their comprehension. And that "something" was flying directly toward a defenseless city.