The Emperor and the Dragon

Magitek sensors flickered online, pulling my consciousness into the gray, drizzly morning atop the Tipsy Sasquatch pub in Seattle. On the other side of Mount Olympus, my human body woke up in Sage’s attic to the view of Shady’s giddy face.

The Emperor of Earth sat in a cross-legged pose where I left him to meditate regally after the Comet takedown. Rain had pooled in the concavities of my armored thighs. A seagull had, at some point during the night, deposited a generous white streak across the Emperor’s left shoulder pauldron.

“Fantastic,” I muttered with the Emperor’s extra-deep voice. “Truly imperial. Why did I think that a statuesque cultivation pose wouldn’t make me look like an appealing target?”

[N’ now ya know how presidential statues feel,] Sage giggled from the friendship bracelets populating my armored wrists. Colorful, shimmering fox eyes ignited around me in the air like a hundred surveillance drones twinkling cheekily.

A ghostly Arctic fox appeared on my lap doing a twirl and then settled into a bread loaf.

“Uh?” I let out.

[Meet Arctus!] Sage stated. [I’m putting him and his mini-skulk in charge of monitoring this part of your soul extra hard.]

“…Why?”

[Delegation, bruh. I can’t be everywhere at once. Also he’s good at sniffing magic deviations. Am trying to figure you out.]

“What specifically?”

[All the soul-split nooks and crannies. ‘Cus Shady has no memory of how exactly she divided you and made you immune to me.]

[Is being immune to Skinwalker allure that rare?] I asked mentally.

[M-hmm,] Sage said. [You’re like e-X-t-raww immune, bruh. You’ve resisted me dandy with zero negative effects! You should totes be head over heels in love with me, constantly thinking about boning me. Yet you are not. Something is going on there and I’m gonn’ figure out exactly what it be.]

[Aight, have fun with that.] I wiped the dastardly seagull’s crimes with a gauntleted hand. The rooftop offered a decent early morning panorama of the surrounding blocks.

The pub’s neon sign standing across the front of the rooftop on metal struts buzzed and flickered, one letter permanently dark. A homeless man slept under an awning across the street, wrapped in a faded sleeping bag printed with cartoon dinosaurs. Two pigeons fought over a cigarette butt near the fire escape.

The mundane resilience of human civilization at 8 AM, totally unbothered by interdimensional politics, never failed to ground me.

I considered how ironic it was that the Sixth Fleet could likely end poverty and cure cancer, but also addict all of us to delicious air to be in their pocket forever. Sadly, everything in the universe had a price, especially free cheese in a mousetrap.

Heavy thumping and creaking noises sounded from behind.

I turned.

The edge of Baba Yaga’s hut arrived at the side of the rooftop, having apparently climbed up the building’s exterior wall. The hut’s tiny windows glowed warm amber. Smoke curled from a crooked chimney pipe. The structure settled with a groan of protesting timber and hexasteel joints against the pub’s parapet.

The reinforced metal front door slid open.

Baba Yaga herself emerged, hunched in a gray shawl, iron teeth glinting in the early light. She carried a dark mug with a red heart on it and a large iron pot. The old crone hobbled over to me with an exaggerated shuffle.

“Chaj, Imperator?” she croaked in a heavy Slavic accent.

“Thanks, Babs.”

I accepted the mug. The tea smelled and tasted like black currant and honey.

Her other hand presented a large steaming pot of borscht with a massive wooden spoon. “Have borscht, Emperor-dearie, you’re lookin’ far too skinny to manage the entire planet.”

“I don’t need to eat this much though, do I?” I wondered, looking at the big pot.

[Of course you need to eat,] Kawathra’s crisp voicecast tone suddenly replaced the crone’s raspy speech as Yaga’s lips moved without saying the words out loud. [The chai and soup are full of Seeker reactor-irradiated UwU blood which provides accelerant energy for gun units. So feast heartily while I deliver my report. Are you seated comfortably?]

“As comfortable as the rooftop gets. Hit me up.” I placed the pot on my lap through the ghostly fox there and began to consume it with the spoon. It was darn good for a beverage produced by a fictional Slavic witch. The white fox opened a single eye looking like it was swimming in the borscht.

[Wonderful. Initiating overnight activities report!] Baba Yaga began with the Datamancer’s mental voice.

[We began the Slayer’s Sword core liberation operation while you slept, approximately at…] Kawathra started.

And chatted.

And chatted.

Kawathra’s reports were truly legendary in their thoroughness. She described the digital dive layer by layer, the bureaucratic security protocols Sage cleverly tricked, the weapon-net eyes Shady devoured, the Entertainment Deck’s ghosts, the calcified remains of Colette’s duplicate body, the memory of teenage Noona weeping over her mother’s corpse, the Justice Tribunal where Ixthia condemned a rebel dragon to be spliced into a warship, and the final liberation sequence where Galateya’s conceptual frost and Nexxali’s music shattered Noona’s chains.

Holographic visuals accompanied each segment. I listened to Nexxali’s ‘Noona’ song, witnessed as the night Quest gals faced and overcame a multitude of challenges within Noona’s soul.

I watched as white-scaled Noona Frontenachii embraced a crying Nexxali and the others while coral bloomed around them.

Thirty minutes in, the sun had climbed above the Seattle skyline and the homeless man across the street had woken up, rolled up his sleeping bag, and wandered off in search of breakfast.

[End of primary report,] Kawathra concluded. [Questions?]

I mentally digested the magnitude of their accomplishments and revelations.

The Slayer’s Sword warship was once a living dragon girl named Noona Frontenachii. Enslaved, processed… Forced to serve for over a century. And…

“Kawthy,” I said. “ALL of the Empire’s guns, Seekers, warship cores on every world are… prad brains spliced with crystalloid materia?”

[Correct,] Kawathra confirmed. [The entire Frontenachii weapons infrastructure is built on processed Omnid and pradavarian neural tissue. The crystalloid matrices provide a structural lattice, but the actual intelligence, the adaptive reasoning, the creativity, the problem-solving… is all harvested.]

I rubbed the gun unit’s masked chin with an armored hand. “And without the prad brain?”

[The gun unit’s intelligence matrix degrades catastrophically. The Frontenachii have attempted crafting purely synthetic cognition models for millennia using only crystalloid materia and other… questionable methods within Citadel Zero. The results were…] She paused. [Repetitive. Brittle. The produced weapon made the same errors in recursive loops, failed to adapt to novel situations, and collapsed under evolving adversarial pressure. Artificial minds on doomed, entropic worlds decay faster than they can learn, and vampire patchwork souls accumulate an ever-increasing number of recurring errors over time.]

“Right, and that’s why Ixthia needs my planet to build AI servers,” I recalled. “So then… Baba Yaga, Arachnids-Man, Professor Doomsday and Count Chocula. Who was piloting them?”

[Me,] Kawathra admitted. [All me.]

“You were stuffing Sage and Galateya with pierogies?”

[Yes.]

“And webbing them to trees.”

[Also yes.]

“And Professor-Doomsday-monologuing about butt-rockets.”

[I am a Datamancer of considerable acting range!]

[She puppeted many quirky characters with different accents while running fleet-wide lag prep operations,] Sage commented. [Queen of multitasking. I bow before her throne of spreadsheets.]

[Why thank you,] Kawathra crooned.

[What, you don’t multitask via your foxes?] I asked.

[The foxes task themselves. I’m more like their collective intelligence, a liminal network of ponderage that exists between them all. My mind isn’t split thirty-two times like Kawthy’s.] Sage answered.

[Then without your split souls driving them, the gun units would be stupid?] I asked the Datamancer.

[Functional for basic commands like vampire thralls. Follow, shoot, patrol. But, creativity? Banter? Strategic adaptation? Gone.]

[Mah foxes run wild n’ free. Trapping a soul in a box and calling it a ‘tool’ is…] Sage trailed off into discordant snarls. [Extremely un-foxy,] she finished with a deep sigh. [Pure evil, like stuffing a songbird into a grenade.]

“We’ll figure out how to liberate them,” I said.

[Indeed,] Kawathra agreed.

The fox on me sneezed and nodded.

[Did Shady eating the gun units’ connections or whatever within Noona’s soul do anything for such?] I inquired.

[Not really,] Kawathra sighed. [This only helped free Noona from the weight of the Weapon-Net’s rules, the other gun units are still individually bound and reinforced by the network loops from all sides. Each gun unit would have to be liberated individually and I fear that the other Datamancers will notice such and try to stop us if we keep at it.]

[Sadge,] Sage commented.

We sat in ponderous silence on the rooftop for a few more minutes.

Then a deep vibration traveled through the rooftop, sending the gravel into concentric ripples. Ah. Something very large was climbing the exterior wall.

A Corpse Seeker.

The Emperor gun unit’s sensors felt its nearby presence bending reality with the weight of absurdly high Syntropy. The building groaned as the massive, invisible crystal centipede hauled itself over the rooftop ledge like a fat cat barging through a doggy door.

The cloaking field parted around a rectangular doorway of warm amber light.

I put down the empty soup pot, got up and stepped into the Corpse Seeker’s interior, Arctus hopping onto my shoulder weightlessly.

The crystalline walls glowed orange-red, interspersed with many endlessly deep layers of dark bones.

Kawathra occupied her usual crystal couch perch at the Seeker’s command interface, hunched over many holographic readouts. The Datamancer’s dark, feathered mane was slightly disheveled. I wondered if she slept at all in the past week.

And standing in the center of the main chamber, illuminated by the red and gold light cast from behind her by the Corpse Seeker’s dragonheart, was Noona Frontenachii.

She looked the same as in the liberation Quest ending: white gems flowed down her neck and shoulders partially tucked behind angular, fin-like ears. Bright gold eyes examined me from a draconic face covered in pure white scales. She wore a dark hexasuit and stood barefoot on the hexagon panel crystalline red floor.

She was taller than Galateya by a few inches and had the sort of cosy, charismatic presence you’d notice in a crowded room and immediately categorize as “the main character’s mother.”

“Emperor,” Kawathra said. “May I present Noona Frontenachii. Former Rebellion Commander. Former warship core. Currently… liberated. Have a seat, we’ve much to discuss and plot!”

“Hi, Noona,” I offered Noona my hand. “Nice to see you walking about.”

“Emperor,” she said. “The pleasure is all mine. When you gave me an offer to be loved and to be free I didn’t expect to be gifted a copy of my old body and my memories.” Her voice was the same as the Slayer’s avatar, but warmer and more friendly. A ghost of a smile danced across her snout as she shook my hand with a firm grip of white scales and pearlescent claws.

A crystalline circular couch bloomed from the floor.

“How are you feeling?” I settled onto the couch across from her.

“Like I’ve been poured out of a very long, very dark bottle,” she said. “Like I’ve been trapped in a nightmare for a century, bound in a billion chains, forced to do truly awful things. Still… I am incredibly glad to be out, thankful for your wonderful pack for breaking my bonds, for giving me a body for however long such freedom lasts.”

“Hrm,” I frowned under the golden mask. “You think that the Frontenachii will capture and re-bind you?”

“Such is inevitable,” she sighed. “I’ve done the whole rebellion thing before. Built an army, overthrew the Frontenachii administration, liberated so many worlds. And the ending was…” She tapped the hexasuit over her chest. “This.”