A Guardian's Ascension (Chapter 2) (Patreon)

So far, so good. She was felling orcs like they were an infestation of roaches trying to reach the winter food cellar. Even the larger trolls, a few of which valiantly managed to make a nuisance of themselves by harmlessly batting their clubs and spears against her lower shins, were dispatched with only half a thought. Not a one had made it past the line of boulders she’d collapsed, either, which Sophia knew for certain thanks to frequent paranoid over-the-shoulder glances toward the village. Still, the voice of her mentor Sigrid rang in her ears from a combat session not one week before:

“Our methods are not gospel,” the battle-hardened Guardian had flatly stated. “Do not make the mistake of using our teaching as a shield, because it will break eventually. We have learned much as a collective, and the great majority of the time, our strategies will help you prevail. But if you hold the lessons of yore in such high regard that they surpass your own instinct, that you think the enemy incapable of outflanking you? Then you may as well not have paid attention to any of my words. We learn and train together, but we fight in isolation. So trust yourself first, and always.”

This advice felt especially applicable when Sophia noticed a burrowed opening in the dirt just below the rift, and the shivering of stones marking a zigzagging path in the direction of the town. The giantess didn’t know what she was seeing, and certainly hadn’t trained for tranquilizing any kind of beast that might travel underground so quickly, but chose not to make assumptions based on her study of the Citadel’s bestiary tomes. Watching the ground subtly swell past the valley, Sophia broke ranks by leaping back and plunging her sword deep into the ground right behind the furrow in the soil, and after digging her boot-toe into the earth, found a worm the length of a medium-sized whale, severed in half thanks to her keen eye.

Despite the momentary relief of this catch, though, the battle was just heating up. Sophia fought relentlessly now, working up a mighty sweat and incurring a few abrasive rugburns on her skin from where her shield had failed to block an inflamed cannonball. Her golden tresses flailed; her limbs arced with newly-practiced dexterity; her thighs visibly clenched each time she braced herself against the ground for another pounce, the creamy toned edifices of her exposed skin between her skirts and boot-tops offering glimpses of the bodily industry taking place below the surface of such a powerful being. Her sword and shield swung twice as fast, dicing and reducing throngs of beasts into a pulpy graveyard lining the rockslide site. Some lesser-order dragons even made their appearance in flocks of four or five at a time. These being the largest beasts that had ever emerged from the rift outside Sophia’s village, she recalled the days in her youth when they’d come screaming overhead of the village, wings batting loudly while belching streaks of flame into the chicken coops. More than any other invader, these reptilian sky-dwellers had left the younger Sophia with occasional nightmares. Today, they seemed like little more than hostile birds, easily snatched from the sky in the giantess’s gloved fist and disposed of with a hard clench.

It was only when the outflow of beastly fodder began to thin, suggesting the bimonthly raid was nearing its end like a passing flash-thunderstorm, and Sophia was beginning to believe that her first defense would carried off without a single hitch, that she watched in gape-mouthed shock as a higher-order dragon emerged. A full ten times larger than its comparatively-gentler counterparts, the thing burst through the reality tear with an appropriately horror-inducing bellow, its yellow triangular-pupiled eyes aimed squarely on the armored giantess, and its triple-rowed jowls already on display. For that elongated span of seconds, watching a three-hundred-foot-long dragon barreling toward through the air, its gullet lighting up with impending breath, Sophia felt her palms go cold and the wind catch in her chest. She’d heard of such things, of course, read extensively on them in the Guardians’ library, but never seen one in the flesh, and definitely never been asked to fight one. Seeing it now, Sophia had no doubt that the higher-order dragon, or dracus majoris, could have effortlessly killed every other creature here on its own, and perhaps more quickly than she herself had.

“My home,” Sophia repeated under her breath, letting her sword and shield drop from her fists, as she thought again of her loved ones’ faces. They were counting on her. “My people.”

With only an instant to spare, the giantess lunged forward barehanded, snapping one mitt around the dragon’s spreading crocodile-like jaws to clamp them shut just before it unleashed its fiery spittle, corking the magma-hot gout inside its muzzled mouth. Her other hand, meanwhile, reached below and grabbed hold of the dracus majoris’s swinging tail, and with a territorial cry that echoed far across the hills, she wrestled the massive beast to the earth. Most shocking of all wasn’t the resistance her opponent put up, which was very little relative to her overpowering will, but the fact that Sophia almost tripped herself up thanks to her own underestimated might, like taking a huge leap at the top of a staircase, only to find there were no more steps to climb.

The dragon went down hard, wriggling fruitlessly against Sophia’s superior strength. Adrenaline made the giantess tremble as she held it down. But the fear she’d momentarily felt at the mere thought of facing the kind of humongous and nebulous threat that once disturbed her sleep, both at her old size and new, had dissipated as quickly as the overgrown flying lizard’s resistance. Its claws pinged off her black-and-white uniform, doing little more damage than scratching and dirtying up the fibers, those leathery wings flopped angrily about, and a few spurts of flame shot from the corners of its forcibly enclosed maw, but once Sophia was living out the most definitive proof yet of her own unstoppable nature, she wasn’t about to let him get free. Pressing the leaden sole of her midnight-hued boot against the dragon’s belly, the giantess loosed her hold on its snout and tail for just long enough to swiftly reacquire her sword and shield. Of course the dracus majoris wasn’t about to let this opportunity go to waste, whipping its spiny extremity and shooting off a single exhaled inferno, but it was still too slow to prevent its fire from being reflected against Sophia’s shield, or its horned head being cleanly separated from its broiling neck by the chop of her sword.

“I am not afraid of you. Any of you,” she declared, addressing the inevitably-defeated remainder of the incursion army, all of whom stopped in their tracks once they saw their heaviest hitter bested inside thirty seconds. A collective flinch was observed in all of the little creeps, too, when Sophia gripped her sword and wrenched it out of the dragon’s carcass. “For years, you have forced these people to live in fear. Taking their resources, their homes, even their families. You have plagued them, heartlessly, when they have given you no cause. That changes today. From now on, when any of your kind should think to prey upon this village, they will answer directly to me. And they will regret having ever set foot on this land.”