ACL: 41. Dragon Tales was a great show.

Chapter 41: Dragon Tales was a great show.

Brockton Bay, NH, USA
Friday, February 11, 2011
Type: Dragon

Turning into a salamence was a unique experience, but I didn’t have the chance to savor it. My body gained several tons as dense, whipcord muscles replaced my fragile human ones. A tail sprouted behind me, sinuous and nearly eight feet long by itself. The light faded to reveal aquamarine scales and wings the color of freshly dried blood.

My hand, already on Lung’s throat, had looked diminutive compared to the giant brute. Even as I rushed him down, I felt my hand morph into a dragon’s claws. Gleaming white daggers dug into Lung’s throat, spearing him through with all the delicateness of a fork going through a meatball.

I roared my dominance to the world. I stood at about six feet at the shoulder or so, but I was more long than I was tall. My wingbeats sent even Armsmaster tumbling back, the weight of his power armor nothing before the might of a salamence. The sheer power of my new form was almost overwhelming.

Yes, Victini was so much stronger, but she was also here, present and ready to help me use her power safely. Of my more basic pokemon, only the tyranitar and metagross truly compared, but they had been different.

With tyranitar, I hadn’t been in the middle of a fight like this. I’d had Amy by my side, someone I was absolutely unwilling to harm. The surging vitality of a tyranitar had been redirected into cracking jokes and eating a tree. And as for the metagross, it was naturally cold and detached, far too analytical to exert such heady emotional pressure.

That wasn’t the case here. Pressure built up within me like a volcano, a fire being stoked by anticipation for the battle to come. I needed to make a point. I had no reason to hold back. So, I didn’t. Lung was huge now, probably nearing eight or nine feet tall. He was as large as I’d ever seen him, and he was still visibly growing.

That was good. The bigger he was, the more clearly I could drive my point home.

‘You’re letting the dragon thing go to your head again,’ Victini warned. Her voice was a distant but bright light to keep me on track. ‘We’re going to have to talk about this, Blake.’

‘I know. Even I can tell that I’m being more aggressive than usual. But for now…’

‘Kick his ass!’ she cheered. I could practically hear her whooping like Mark did whenever he watched basketball. Maybe a love of battle was intrinsic to all pokemon, after all.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I grinned toothily.

With one, mighty wingbeat, I launched us both into the sky. Lung was still skewered on my right paw. As much as his power tried to regenerate the wound, there wasn’t much he could do about it when my claws refused to vacate the puncture holes.

It was exhilarating. Maybe this was how an osprey felt when it snatched up a fish from the sea. This was the meaning of life, to soar across the sky, capture worthy prey, and fight glorious battles.

I felt a small pang of dissatisfaction at that. This not-dragon was… He was fine, I supposed, but only because there was no worthier opponents to find.

Still, that brief spark of discontent was drowned out by pure, undiluted joy in short order. My instincts were roaring in my brain, telling me that this was the fulfillment of a long-held dream.

And, it was.

Every bagon was born with a craving for the sky. This passionate longing was so all-consuming that young bagon often threw themselves off the cliffs of Meteor Falls in a desperate attempt to fly.

They couldn’t, of course. Arceus did not bless them with wings. But he did give them very hard heads. It was a general truism that when a bagon met a boulder, the victor was invariably the bagon.

I remembered wandering through Meteor Falls once and coming upon a sign that read, “Beware of falling bagon.” As it turned out, that wasn’t a joke. Base jumping bagon were a very real hazard.

We didn’t know much about the salamence line back then. Titania, being the gentle, kind soul that she was, caught a falling bagon, thinking she’d saved it a lot of pain. She then lifted it in her psychic grip and floated it back to its nest.

We thought that was the end of it, except, not five minutes later, the bagon apparently tried to commit suicide… again… and again…

And so did its nestmates. 

It took us a moment to realize that bagon were not in fact suicidally clumsy. They were throwing themselves off on purpose. For some bizarre reason, the first bagon had bragged to its buddies that it’d experienced real flight. 

A small horde of bagon threw themselves at Titania for the rest of our stay in Meteor Falls. They followed us so insistently that the local salamence thought we were kidnapping their young, which itself caused a minor ecological incident until my family and I beat the adults senseless.

It was fine. That was just how dragons worked and they calmed down eventually. Titania made me swear never to acquire a salamence of my own, something I’d been considering after a spar with Drake earlier in the year.

On an unrelated note, Titania could add “expert baby juggler” to her long list of talents.

The pressure of the wind on my scales brought me back to Earth-Bet. From so far up, the city looked like it was the size of a Cheerio. An instinctive, delirious joy filled me as I rose higher. It was a pure and vindictive joy, the kind that came with the taste of victory.

The Salamence was the dragon that best embodied the idea of ambition. Each and every one held a fervent wish as a bagon, and that wish was so intense that Arceus himself granted them a genetic mutation as they evolved.

Lung was every negative stereotype about dragons: lazy, apathetic, and cruel, filled with undeserved arrogance. He was content to be the frog in the well, not because he did not know the vastness of the world outside, but because he was terrified of anything greater. I could think of no better dragon to drive my point home than as the dragon whose very existence was proof-positive of the power of dreams.

I pierced the clouds and roared with glee as the water droplets stung my face. A human would probably have had their flesh sand-blasted off their bones.

Lung grew slowly now, or maybe that was my perception of him. He was so big that a bit of extra mass didn’t seem as striking as before. Regardless, his wings were visibly developing into more than spikes of bone, gaining articulation and the hint of a membrane.

He thrashed in my grip like a fish out of water and roared his defiance at me. A breath of fire washed over me as he tried to wrench himself off my claws. He almost succeeded, but an application of Dragon Claw extended my reach.

Raw dragonfire melted his body like hot wax and allowed me to carve down from his throat into his chest cavity, giving me a firmer grip. It also seared his wounds shut, the aura-enhanced flames doing more to inhibit him than any mundane variant ever could.

Well, as much as I loved flying, I did need to land eventually. If nothing else, he was getting too fat. He’d eventually put on enough biomass to make flying uncomfortable for me, especially when those wings finally grew in.

A part of me thought about dipping him down into the ocean, replaying Hookwolf’s defeat, but I decided against it. Unlike Hookwolf, Lung could fly. And given what happened in Kyushu, he clearly wouldn’t be weighed down by the water on its own.

So, I decided the trainyard would be the next best thing. It was big, empty, and no one would mind if I blew it up a little. It’d been months since I last visited the place. It was, in fact, the very first place I visited, back when I needed pocket money. Hopefully, even the Merchants weren’t dumb enough to stick around with a warning like this.

I dipped down into a spiraling dive, my faux-dragon opponent clutched in my claws. I broke the cloud cover and marveled as Brockton Bay drew near. My eyes, better than any falcon’s, locked on to the trainyard below.

Then, I finally let go. Lung roared as he tried to right himself. His wings, now nearly grown, flailed helplessly. The wings of a fledgling were not meant for such air pressures. They snapped like twigs and healed and snapped and healed again. Given a few more seconds, they’d gain the strength to support him properly.

He wouldn’t get those seconds.

Our speeds were equal, but few pokemon could claim to be as graceful as a salamence in the sky. Draconic energy shrouded my entire body and boiled the water vapor in the air around me. Haunting blue flames condensed into an armor-like shroud. The joys of flight and battle became one.

I flared my wings, contorting myself in a horizontal twist that brought my tail down like a mace onto his chest. A thunderous crack resounded, scattering the clouds as my tail made a mockery of the sound barrier. The noise alone scattered the nearby clouds.

Scales shattered like glass. Flesh and bone all but evaporated with the heat and force of my impact. Already spiraling, Lung could do nothing as he was nearly carved in two from my strike. And, once again, he was sent rocketing off from a Dragon Tail.

My aim was true. I spiked him like a volleyball into the middle of the trainyard. He landed like a missile, kicking up a massive plume of dust and debris into the air.

I fell after him with a gleeful roar. Blood pumped in my ears as draconic battlelust fully took hold.

Focus Energy. Double Edge.

I used those moves almost on instinct. Impulses that were not mine, as if born of memories coded into my newfound genes, flooded my mind. Once upon a time, I too had leapt from the highest cliffs as a bagon. I too had braved the horizon to feel the wind on my face.

If Lung landed like a missile, my followup attack could be called a small tactical nuke. The middle of the trainyard, a mess of rails that had once carried freight cars all across New England, turned into an apocalyptic wasteland in an instant. Those same rails that had been built to stand the test of time ruptured and flailed, tearing and lashing about like whips as my descent cratered the earth.

I thought that’d be it. Even most pokemon wouldn’t be able to continue fighting after a strike like that. It was a showstopper, about as impressive as most decent tournaments could expect for a conclusion. Yet, to my amazement, that didn’t end the fight. The faux-dragon was still conscious.

He glared up at me as he waited for his body to mend itself. A wordless roar left his four-branched maw, no doubt swearing to inflict unending agony upon me.

Lung was easily fourteen feet tall now and was finally in my weight class. His regeneration had improved with his growth in size. He wasn’t whole, not even he healed that fast, but I could see his nearly torn halves work to reattach themselves.

I was happy to fix that. I became a whirlwind of flame and claws. Dragon Claw and Crunch ripped into him faster than he could heal even as my scales all but ignored the flames washing over me. He thrashed desperately, trying anything at all to regain any sort of momentum in this fight.

Until finally, his claws managed to close on the base of my wing. He grunted with exertion as he threw me away. Stumbling, he rose on one knee, the side of him that was still mostly attached, and used his tail to balance himself. Behind him, I saw his wings finally grow to an appropriate size to bear his weight.

I laughed like a madman, for the dragon in me had found a dance partner in the sky. With a mighty leap, I took to the air, higher and higher, my challenge obvious.

The trainyard had been my choice of battleground, but that was before he had wings. The sky was the only arena that befit a true dragon.

To his credit, Lung accepted my invitation. Or maybe Lung the man was gone, subsumed by whatever really controlled powers in parahumans. I couldn’t rightly say he was in control anymore.

Was this why he feared a true challenge? Did he fear losing himself to his power? Or did he fear the rage he wielded like a blunt weapon?

I doubted that was the whole story; the greed and petty arrogance I’d felt earlier were not wrong, but perhaps a part of him did fear such a thing. I felt a pang of sympathy for him, to be blessed with such immense power, yet shackled to someone, something else. It was a pitiful existence.

I brushed aside this spark of pity. Fat lot of good it’d do now. No, Lung had made his choice and I’d made mine. His brand of lazy dominance, the apathetic cruelty and greed, such things had no place in my city.

And so, we began our aerial dance in earnest. 

I quickly found that my dance partner was lacking. Evidently, he'd never bothered exploring this aspect of his power. Oh, he had power aplenty. He made the air quiver with heat shimmers. Each wingbeat was like the sound of a huge sail flapping. 

But that was all he had. He was no true flyer. He possessed neither the blinding speed of a swellow nor the raw might of a fellow salamence. Nor could he make up for his shortcomings with his breadth of experience as a wily honchkrow might.

I rose higher. He gave chase.

I dipped into a cloud. He lost me until I carved out his spine to announce myself.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two figures in white hover nearby. Lady Photon and Laserdream. The heroes must have sent them ahead to keep an eye on us.

They remained distant, only close enough to keep an eye on us. That was good. I was a dragon now and dragons hated having our battles interrupted. 

Lung tried to spike me into the earth as I’d done to him. I guarded with a well-timed Protect, parrying his tail aside even as a Dragon Claw ripped his arm from his shoulder. That didn’t deter him from trying to bite through my neck.

As big as he’d gotten, almost twenty feet now, his brute strength rivaled my own. His fangs closed around the base of my neck and I sustained the first injury of the day. My dragon blood boiled as I howled in pain.

He thrashed and twisted, rolling with my neck in his jaws. It was supposed to be a tearing motion, like an alligator’s death roll, but his four-branched maw made that difficult. So instead, it ended up more like a series of saw blades ripping inaccurately around my neck.

The smell of my blood filled the air as I retaliated by ripping his other arm clean off. His growth might have no upper limit, but it struggled to overcome the scouring effects of dragonfire.

As we fought, my blood boiled more and more. I could feel it, a mounting pressure that was as much spiritual as it was physical. The sky was a salamence’s joy. The battlefield was much the same. There was a part of me that relished this experience, savored each spark of violence.

Even the pain made me feel alive. The struggle was a visceral proof of my existence, but proof nonetheless.

Then it all came to a head. The dragon’s blood in me boiled over. My physical form could no longer hold the everything that I felt in that moment. The rage, the joy, the exhilaration, it all erupted out like a volcano in a torrent of azure dragonfire that dwarfed anything I’d produced until now.

It was unlike any drunkenness or high I’d ever experienced. A human body simply lacked the faculties to facilitate an equivalent. Rather than muddle the senses, a dragon’s rage came with a clarity of purpose. I had one job: Lung had overstayed his welcome and this battle had gone on long enough.

Azure flames condensed around me. It expanded my form, creating a construct of concentrated dragonfire that directly paralleled my movements. Each wingbeat, each swipe of my claws, everything was echoed and magnified in a corona of flame. This was Outrage, the raw, primal manifestation of a dragon’s wrath.

I laid into him with a near-berserk fury. My claws didn’t so much cut as melt through him. Scales thicker than most doors. Flesh like corded iron. Bones thicker than many tree trunks. None of it mattered. The absolute, aura-enhanced heat of dragonfire ignored every defense Lung had to offer. Pieces of him fell to the earth, each as large as a man. It was an unending rain of viscera facilitated by his ever-growing mass and regeneration.

What had once started to look like a fair fight turned once more as I fully tapped into the dragon within. And with one, overcharged Dragon Claw, I completely bisected Lung across his chest and over one wing.

He fell with a roar of agony.

Second verse the same as the first, I grabbed him and accelerated down, ripping into him all the while. Arms. Other wing. The nubs that looked like they’d become a second pair of arms if I gave him enough time.

I ripped them all away until the twenty foot tall dragon-man was a limbless torso. I had enough presence of mind to find a landing spot elsewhere. I chose a clearing outside city limits, one of countless in New Hampshire’s forests. A forest fire was far more manageable than what’d amount to a meteor falling in the middle of the city.

With every last bit of momentum I could coax from Outrage, I crashed down into the clearing. As I fell, dragonfire burned Lung, searing his wounds shut. I’d once heard that Heracles did much the same with the hydra in Greek mythology. 

A last second Protect saved me from taking too much recoil even as I used his torso as a cushion.

When the smoke cleared, Lung was out cold. All the rage and hate I felt from him was gone, replaced by a tranquility that was at odds with all that I knew of the man. Just to be safe, I kept my fire burning, turning every attempt to regenerate into ashes before his power could get started.

Until finally, he began to shrink. If his power was intelligent, I would have claimed that I’d convinced his power that no amount of biomass would let it overcome dragonfire. Perhaps that was the case, perhaps not.

Once he’d returned to a mostly human shape, I shifted out of my form and slumped forward in exhaustion. No matter how much dragons loved fighting, I was no dragon. My mind was willing, but human flesh was so very weak.

I remained there just long enough to recover a bit of aura and maybe shoot a Heal Pulse Lung’s way. I didn’t actually want him dead-dead, his current limbless state notwithstanding.

I drew in a deep breath. The smoke had yet to clear but I had to make sure there would be no forest fires from my actions. I took a minute to clear my mind before shifting back. Once I checked the forest over, I could go give Lung to the heroes.

X

Colin Wallis

We waited with bated breaths to hear from Lady Photon and Laserdream. They were able to take down Oni Lee with assistance before being tapped to observe Menagerie and Lung.

As two of the fastest flyers in the city, we’d had no choice but to ask them to tail the two dragons. They were given explicit orders to not engage, for fear of accelerating Lung’s growth. Come what may, Menagerie would have to fight that battle alone.

I scoffed. As if he’d ever balked at the prospect. As sociable as he seemed, he was a lone wolf, through and through.

The endbringer sirens had not been triggered a third time, but only because we’d preempted that on our end. A quiet alert had gone out to nearby cities for flyers, just in case. If Menagerie failed, they’d be deployed to lure Lung elsewhere.

This was the trouble with independents. Even when they thought they were doing the right thing, they took away the agency of heroes. Right now, the Protectorate was stuck with nothing to do but wait. Our hands were tied; even if we wanted to help, we couldn’t. We had no choice but to trust that Menagerie could handle Lung.

I felt helpless and frustrated. It felt as though any progress I made was meaningless because some teen lucked out with an absurd power. A part of me wanted him to fail, if only so I could get the chance to use the tranquilizer I’d been developing.

I lambasted myself for thinking that way. This wasn’t what was expected of me as a hero.

Still, I checked for the sixth time that I had the tranquilizer ready. The head of my halberd peeled back to reveal a reinforced, hypodermic needle. It wouldn’t pierce Lung’s scales, but perhaps an eye or his gums would do.

The chemical itself was a prototype. I’d yet to fully iron out the kinks and there was a chance that Lung’s body heat would denature the active chemicals, but I had to try. If Menagerie failed and Lung returned, I had the best shot at taking the dragon down. If doing so required my death, then so be it.

“Four sustained third degree burns. One is in critical condition. All are suspected to belong to the Merchants,” I spoke into my mic.

Rather than wait while twiddling my thumbs, I’d decided to make myself useful and took over the PRT operations at the trainyard. It was the most likely place for them to return to.

To his credit, Menagerie had chosen his battlefield well. There were few people in the trainyard. Any injuries could easily be healed with Panacea’s help. He’d even incidentally incapacitated a Case-53 tinker who called himself Trainwreck.

“Armsmaster, do you copy?” I heard.

“I do, console. What’s the issue?”

“Menagerie is returning.”

Despite myself, I felt a wave of relief at that. Lung had been well over twenty feet tall by Lady Photon’s last report, nearly as tall as he’d been in Kyushu.

It was a chilling thought. A single person had rivaled an endbringer by Lung’s approximation. Menagerie had coaxed Lung to such an overwhelming state, and he’d won.

“Any word from Lady Photon?”

“Uh, yes, sir. She’s currently… scolding him,” the agent on console replied with sheepish disbelief. “Something about being irresponsible and reckless and… Yeesh, poor kid.”

“That sounds like them,” I scoffed. All that power, and he’d allow himself to be chewed out. In a way, it spoke well of him. 

Sure enough, they soon appeared over the horizon. Lady Photon hovered near the blue dragon, the salamence. I could hear her lips moving, no doubt continuing her lecture.

Despite being the fastest flyer in the city save the changer himself, her daughter rode on his back like a dragon-riding princess straight out of a fantasy novel. It was, admittedly, an understandable action.

I dismissed such childish thoughts and moved to greet them. I didn’t know how a dragon could look sheepish, but Menagerie managed. It was a strangely endearing sight, made all the stranger by the limbless, unconscious man in his claws.

Lung needed to be treated. The trainyard needed to be cleaned up. The forest had to be inspected to make sure he hadn’t started a forest fire. And, of course, many phone calls had to be made explaining this mess.

This… This was going to be a long night.

Author’s Note

“No one cares about the trainyard.” Sure, Blake. Trainwreck minds. Poor guy’s homeless now. Blake is a monster.

I feel like it’s very on-brand for a pokemon to immediately turn into a chastised child. On some level, Blake knows he got carried away, but it’s hard to resist his instincts, especially when he’s in combat.

Welp, that’s it. Oni Lee and Lung are both gone. Brockton Bay’s criminal scene belongs to… Skidmark! All hail the king!

Animal Fact: The hooded pitohui is a member of the oriole family, a type of songbird. It has black wings and head, with reddish-brown or orange feathers on its torso.

It is one of a handful of bird species that are known for being poisonous. It’s thought that the hooded pitohui does not synthesize poison on its own, but stores it from its diet.

Its skin and feathers contain batrachotoxin (BTX), a type of neurotoxin. It works by permanently opening sodium ion channels in the victim’s nervous system, causing paralysis. At severe enough doses, it can also cause cardiac arrest. Other animals that carry this poison include poison dart frogs and melyrid beetles.