Chapter 5 - The Lair

Chapter 5

Salran Mountains, Starnor Imperial Border Territories

Outskirts of the fields of Kaisersgrenze

"Alright. Far enough, you think?" Said Airah as she sat down in the clearing.

"Should be." Said Stellyra as her avatar paced back and forth, before stopping and turning to face the dragon in human form. "Which brings me to wonder, do you need to strip?"

Airah winced. If she needed to take off her clothes or put them back on after every switch it would be a massive pain in the ass.

"I don't see why I wouldn't."

"I mean, the transformation is magical. Maybe it stores your clothes somewhere else or something. If nothing else, it's worth a try. Just wear a small piece of clothing, and let's try it."

Airah nodded, and quickly stripped down, only keeping her panties. Then she focused, and flexed the mental muscle that allowed her to switch to her dragon form.

The usual flash of light happened, and she was a dragon once more. She looked around, and there was no sign of obliterated underwear, so she focused again, and looked down as she returned to her human form.

The panties were still there, untouched.

"Yes! Alright, that's good." She immediately started dressing back up. Oddly enough the air didn't feel cool on her naked skin, although she guessed that as a fire breathing lizzard she probably wouldn't have to worry about cold overmuch. "So, do you think we should head for the mountains?"

"It's the obvious choice. Caverns, good vantage point, and more importantly a pain in the ass to get to for anyone else."

"Right. Besides, you heard the baroness, this is a border town, and I'm ready to bet the official border with that 'Republic' is the mountain chain. If we piss off one or the other, maybe they won't make a move, fearing for retaliation from the other party."

"That cuts both ways you know. One might refrain from helping us out out of fear of angering the other."

Airah shrugged.

"Fair enough. Still, it's only a temporary base for now."

"Right."

"Alright." Airah got up, fully clothed, and turned back into a dragon. "Let's try to takeoff."

She ignore Stellyra as the AI materialized a bag of popcorn, and launched herself up.

A few minutes later, and she flew lazily through the air, wincing slightly each time she moved her right wing. So, five failed attempts wasn't bad. It was significantly better than last time in fact! And there had been less overall damage.

Still hadn't prevented Stellyra from rolling around in laughter as Airah made a mess of the clearing and surrounding trees, but still, progress!

"Alright, let's try to find ourselves a cave. Preferably dry. And uninhabited."

"Eh, even if something already occupies it, I'm pretty sure being a fire breathing lizzard the size of a battle tank qualifies as part of the 'apex predator of apex predators, run the fuck away' category."

"Probably, but that doesn't mean that animals are smart enough to realize that." After all it took a while on newly colonized worlds to realize that humans might be tasty, but eating one was a good way to end up on the wrong end of a plasma gun. Or just straight up bombardment. The bureau of colonization had little patience for alien lifeforms that didn't know their place, and sometimes it was flat out simpler to sterilize everything from high orbit and terraform it rather than try to work with the local abomination of a biosphere.

"Well, if push comes to shove, you can cook them pretty handily. Too bad you can't just fus-ro-dah them off of the mountain!"

Airah chuckled. Millenia later, and remakes and references to skyrim kept being made, although she doubt many had ever played the original. Although to be fair it would require some specialized equipment, given how old the program was.

"Too bad indeed. But hey, there might be some options. I doubt the fire is a biological process, so we might be able to adjust what I breath out."

"Ooooh, like poison gas, or acid?"

Airah opened her mouth, and closed it. It was easy to forget sometimes that however human like Stellyra was, she was still an AI. Yes, her core thought patterns were human, but she was set apart in a way nothing else could be, and in many ways was effectively a functional psycopath. People she didn't know weren't quite...real to her.

There were more than the official reasons as to why the Galactic Empire only allowed the human part of the bonded pair to command its warships. Even the Empress, despite being an AI hivemind herself, or perhaps because of it, was very aware of the failings of her kind.

"I was more thinking lightning."

"Zap?"

"Yes, zap. That way I might even be able to taze people."

Stellyra chuckled.

"Given what your fire breath does to people, I doubt it. But hey, it might be possible! If nothing else, trying to dial back the intensity would be a good thing to test for, and good training. Not all situations call for a torrent of flesh incinerating fire after all."

Airah chuckled.

"No, only fireball can solve every situation."

They laughed together at the old Dungeons and Dragons joke, before Stellyra gestured at the mountains on their right.

"Look, there! That looks like a cave opening!"

Airah looked to the side slightly to get it out of the edge of her vision, and nodded.

"Agreed. Alright, let's try this carefully..."

In the end, the landing was...acceptable. It wasn't exactly graceful, and involved a lot of stumbling and swearing, but it wasn't a crash. Once again, progress!

"So, how does it look?" Said Airah as she poked her nose into the cavern. Technically the AI wouldn't have access to more information than she did, but without having a body to run, and being able to experience time faster, she could handle at lot more data than she did, and spot things Airah wouldn't. She wasn't perfect or omniscient, like when Airah had spotted the road before her during their previous flight, but it allowed her a usually far greater degree of precision and perception than Airah was capable of.

"Pretty good so far. No animal tracks, detritus, or anything to announce it as inhabited. And it looks pretty dry."

"Good. Alright, let's check it out."

"At least try to make a torch-wait, you can see in the dark?"

Airah blinked, and refocused at the inside of the cavern, and realized that indeed she had some form of night vision. Which she hadn't noticed until now because she was so used to her eyes having been genetically engineered to see basically every electromagnetic wavelength known to man. Perks of being a national hero was that your 'civilian body' was always at the cutting edge of Imperial bioscience, although she had turned down some of the more combat focused mods. Yes, she was quite sure it was safe and wouldn't alter her day to day life, but no she didn't need combat drug sacks in her brain or an implanted pulse rifle in her right arm.

"Yeah. Apparently so. That's handy."

"Very much so. Won't have to just breath fire everywhere, or carry some burning wood."

"Yep. Alright, let's go spelunking!"

*****

In the end, the cavern delving was supremely anti climactic. There were no dangerous creatures, mysterious ruins, or demonic temples, as you'd find in adventure novels. Just an empty cave.

Airah lost no time in settling in once the area was confirmed to be safe, which was more or less just turning back into a human, and rummaging inside of her bag of holding. It seemed like the items inside of it were resting on a solid surface, although made out of what material she had no idea. She'd resisted the urge to stick her head inside to see better what kind of place it was, and instead grabbed the book case, and opened it to start digging through.

She settled in, and began reading. She might not have been a true scholar, but she had been studying ancient earth history. Besides, her journals were quite clear that she'd always been quite the bookworm. And Stellyra was a comforting presence, calmly reading with her. It was almost being with a sibling really.

Which was why she never saw the wolf coming.

*****

Airah barely had the time to process Stellyra's shout of warning before 40 kilos of rabid canine slammed into her.

The wolf's jaws locked around her throat, and closed in...and the wolf looked extremely confused as no warm blood filled its mouth.

Airah? Airah was just pissed off.

She grabbed the wolf's head, and forced its jaws apart, before brutally twisting its head, causing its neck to snap with a sickening crack.

Airah whirled around as Stellyra began feeding her information. It was at a level more primal than words, the level of interaction necessary for an AI to allow their human to command one of the Galactic Empire's capital ships.

Half a dozen other wolves were inside the cavern, all of them slowly backing off, their teeth bared, clearly taken by surprised by the death of their packmate.

They looked...Odd. Airah wasn't an expert in wolf physiology, but she was fairly sure their silhouette looked wrong in some way.

Then another one of the wolves charged, and the pack followed.

Airah swatted the first wolf into the cavern wall, but the rest just dogpiled her, and she lost patience.

She turned back into a dragon as the wolves attempted to kill her, and only managed to trash her clothes. The wolves yelped in surprise, and she shook herself, sending them flying in all directions.

The wolves rallied, and the biggest one, clearly the alpha of the pack, looked at her full form...and promptly ran away, its tail between its leg, closely followed by the rest of the pack. Those that could still move anyway.

Airah opened her mouth, and prepared to unleash hell, before Stellyra appeared in front of her, her arms extended.

"Wait! The books!"

Airah looked down at the scattered crate of high flammable books, and nodded. She watched the wolves run away like the stars themselves were on their tails, and transitioned back into her human body.

She looked down at her clothes in disgust. They were tough enough that they weren't completely fucked, but they definitely weren't new or clean anymore.

"Alright." She turned towards the remaining wolves. The first one was very much dead, but a couple remained, the one she had smacked against the wall, and the other who had gotten thrown off after her transformation.

The surviving wolves looked at her, their eyes wide with panic, as they tried to pitifully scramble away from her, and she calmly opened her bag of holding, pulling out the sword.

Time to get some practice.

*****

"Well, at least we know the wildlife thinks of humans as prey. Or at least is hostile to them." Said Stellyra as Airah dragged the last corpse out of the cavern.

She tossed the body out one handed, letting it roll down the slope, and clapped her hands together.

"Yeah. Which is odd. Very few predators fucked with humanity, even before we developed bows or firearms."

"Indeed, humans don't make good prey." She chuckled. "Something the conclave realized all to late."

"Yeah. Well, I'm not going to shed any tears over those." She nodded at the corpses down the slope. "Or the conclave."

"Neither will I. Still, it teaches us that you probably should sleep in your dragon form. I don't think they'd dare attack you then."

"Let sleeping dragons lie eh?"

"Something like that, yeah."

"Alright. Well..." Airah sighed. "I think my mood to read books has been a bit shattered. Let's go over the last pieces of that briefing package."

"The ones about great dragons?"

"Sure. There was something about souls in there?"

"Soul crystals I think."

"Alright, let's see it."