1 - Hunt Reminiscence

His weapon was terribly front-heavy to the point of awkwardness, for just below its spearhead it had a blunderbuss, the trigger placed halfway down the haft - it was this was what lent it the name Boarkiller. As he readied his spear and fought through his fear to look for an opening, he took note of the deformed manacles on the beast’s legs, errant chainlinks still hanging from them. It had a brass ring embedded in its flank, a trail of dried blue blood running down from it. Victor recalled wondering if the duke had been bleeding this thing, albeit only for a moment, as in the next, the beast broke past the Captain’s guard, knocking him to the ground, threatening to rip his throat out, only slowed by the great mass of cold-iron currently prying its jaws open.

Panic gripped his heart, but Victor kept control of himself… More or less. Pointing the spear, he pulled its trigger and felt it push back against him, rather than attempting to rip itself from his grip as Boarkillers usually did. He had wisely loaded his Boarkiller not with shot and regular powder, but with a kind of powder that would create a burst of blinding, stinging smoke, alongside a great deal of fire - fire that Victor could capture and make use of to fuel his magic.

Resting the shaft of his weapon in the pit of his elbow, Victor desperately drew a series of simplistic fire glyphs with the burning tip of the spear, winding threads of errant Ignis around the spearpoint like a spider’s web. At the same time he feverishly formed earth magic sigils with his free hand, desperately drawing upon the strength of earth to strengthen his muscles for just a few moments, the familiar splitting headache of spiritual exertion making itself known. As he felt a surge of surety flow up through his legs, the young man summoned up every bit of strength in his body to heft his spear with both hands and throw it at the beast, its tip becoming enwreathed in smoldering, billowing white-black flame as it flew through the air.

As good a throw as it was, and despite the fact the spear stuck into the beast’s side and knocked it off the Captain, it sprung up a moment later and lunged blindly in Victor’s general direction, the Captain leaping to his feet and barking orders at the other hunters. In its blinded lunge the creature spewed and sputtered flame without rhyme or reason, as if it were coughing, the other hunters finally snapping back to their senses, firing their boarkillers from a short distance rather than charge it and fire them point-blank as intended. Even so, despite the False Drake’s scales and tough flesh, being shot with four blunderbusses at once still shook it and did some - albeit surface-level - damage, opening up just wide enough a window for Victor to… Turn and run.

He told himself he had to create space to do anything since there was no way in hell he could subdue that thing with his bare hands, martial arts or not, and thus his only hope at usefulness was magic. The Captain came after the beast from behind, only to be completely outpaced when it broke into a sprint, running after the young man and catching him across the back, the teeth of its top jaw cutting through his gambeson and scoring his back as its maw snapped shut behind him, ripping flesh out of his back as the beast abruptly moved backwards and to the side.

One moment he was running, and the next, he had fallen over heels-first, tripped by an errant root. He rolled over himself, sliding across the freeze-rotten leaves that covered the ground until he smashed arm-first into a tree. All the noise and confusion couldn’t drown out the sharp report of the gunshot that had made his ears ring immediately after the drake was knocked away from him - it had not been the whooshing, dull thump of a sparklock, but the sort of CRACK only produced by a special, cartridge-using sort of firearm - had the duke’s elite hunters arrived?

When at last he got his bearings and regained some measure of clear sight, the young man saw a cloud of milky-white smoke enveloping the drake as it confusedly snapped at nothing in particular, thrashing about for a few moments in confusion. An high-pitched screech could be heard as a bright-white beam cut from somewhere off to the right, carving strange, glowing glyph circles on three trees in the vicinity. A moment later, as Victor checked that his shoulder wasn’t dislocated, three more gunshots rang out, three glass stakes each in turn striking a circle and causing it to go out, bouncing off somehow at exactly the right angle to impale one of the drake’s legs, leaving only its left foreleg free.

For a moment, he wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating in pain - a scene straight from one of his pulps now unfolded before him, as the beast spewed flame onto itself and melted one stake while freeing itself of another by brute strength, while the third froze its right hing leg solid to the ground. Victor heard what, at first, he thought to be a Tankman, the inhuman speed of those steel armors causing an unmistakable noise, but… It was a woman. A flesh-and-blood, damn near half-naked woman with giant brass-coloured boots and, well, giant everything else. She went ripping through the forest at a speed to put  motorized vehicles to shame, six red braids tipped with glinting metal whipping behind her, her left arm encased in metal, in her right some short bladed weapon that Victor didn’t get a good look at. The moment she came within a stone’s throw of the False Drake it was already lunging at her, having anticipated her approach, only for the woman to leap diagonally sideways right past the drake with such force she left a small crater. She struck a nearby tree and bounced off it right onto the drake’s back, yet again so forcefully she cracked its trunk down the middle.