Amazon Apocalypse Shorts: Ben the Dragon (2/3) (Patreon)

The woman behind the radio show's name was Margaret, and that too was familiar to Ben. Unfortunately, that was as close to her as he'd be getting. It was hard enough for an ordinary citizen of Crownhill to meet with someone important like her.

But Ben wasn't a citizen of Crownhill, he was a drake living on a volcano. He'd asked the woman he'd partnered with and knew Crownhill had strong defenders. He'd be lucky to get within sight of the walls and leave again with his life.

But he wasn't ready to give up. If he couldn't go to Margaret, he just needed to get her to come to him. His first step was to acquire the smarts needed to form a plan, and that meant becoming more than a drake.

He hunted again, but this time with a purpose other than food. He needed to reach level one hundred.

The woman he'd recruited to buy him human food proved to be an unexpected asset in this.

"I can sell the monster bits, if you're not going to eat them. I'll come back with something you can eat instead," she explained.

Ben agreed to the deal, and soon they had a little arrangement. He would hunt and she would sell what he killed. Soon, the two of them were making far more money off his kills than he'd found rummaging around for coin purses off dead people.

The idea of having someone working for him for pay and growing a personal hoard seemed natural to Ben and in alignment with something deep within him. It might not match his current life, but it resonated with his past one.

With that in mind, he expanded his operations as soon as he could and had the woman introduce him to several of her friends. Pretty soon, he had a small organization of human minions scurrying around selling things for him.

Several more months passed like this. The levels hadn't been coming easily for him, and it should have taken him several years of hunting D-Grade creatures and monsters. But he had a lucky break when a horde of strange, pale voidlings descended from the sky. On that day, Ben tore apart foe after foe and was given a deluge of levels that sped up his growth by years.

When it was all over, he felt his big breakthrough upon him as he reached level 100. He sensed the changes within him before they happened, and he retreated to the volcano to bathe himself in lava.

His back itched fiercely, but no matter how he squirmed or writhed he couldn't scratch it easily. That status window he'd seen before flashed through his mind a few times, but each time his blood stirred and made his choices for him.

Bit by bit, he transformed from a torchdrake into something more. The scratchiness on his back eventually gave way to cracking and shedding skin. His scales came loose and he felt agonizing pain before passing out deep beneath the molten lava of the volcano he'd been born in.

When he finally came to his senses, he hauled himself through the magma and broke to the surface. The instant he did so, he felt different.

His body was leaner than before. As a Torchdrake, he'd stalked the earth like a large cat, covered in armor and muscle. His new body was more elegantly shaped and appeared less armored, though the sturdy feeling his scales gave him now was far greater than before.

The biggest change though was what was on his back. Two great curtains hung limply behind him. He could feel them dragging against the ground and wanted to lift them. It took a moment of concentration to find the right thoughts to command the wings to move.

Ben realized this dragon body would be pretty useful in the long run, though eventually he'd craft a human form to rejoin society. He still remembered the Humanoid Transformation Technique Carter promised him and felt vaguely certain he could attempt it now if he took the time to master it.

Ben furrowed draconic brows and realized something far more important had changed within him. His thoughts were clearer than ever before, and the dreams and visions he'd had of his life before dying and being reborn as a dragon were solid and coherent.

He was no longer Ben the Torchdrake with vague dreams of something else. He was Ben, the lawyer and a man resurrected from death!

He checked his status screen again, this time with the mind of a human behind it.

Torchdragon (Level 103)

Cunning: 934

Constitution: 873

Soulstrength: 743

Titles:

Torchdragon Bloodline (Mythic), Forerunner of Earth (Legendary), Integration Survivor (Legendary), Death Defier (Legendary), Death Curse (Unique)

Note: You now possess draconic wings and have gained a natural affinity for flight! Any flight ability will be significantly increased in effectiveness.

That Death Curse would be a problem. He was surprised more things hadn't hunted him when he was a young drake, but perhaps it hadn't appeared until he'd completed his reawakening just now.

Now that he knew what was happening, he realized he'd been wasting far too much time. He must have spent at least a year wandering these lands as a Torchdrake with only half his senses. Margaret must be worried sick. He needed to get to her.

Thankfully he hadn't been entirely stupid. He'd built a small organization of followers to sell his wares and buy him food. But he'd need to do more than that if he wanted to safely get Margaret's attention.

First, he tested his dragon wings. Flying was tricky, especially with no flight magical abilities. Flapping his dragon wings for the first time felt strange. He'd never had wings in either of his lives, so moving was unintuitive. Things improved when he held back his human thoughts and allowed the draconic instincts built into his body to guide him.

With the natural strength of his wings alone, he was like a truck in the skies. He could manage flight, but he'd always be like an eighteen-wheeler on a race car track.

Or so he thought. He vaguely remembered some skillbooks with the coins he'd been collecting from dead adventurers. To his delight, one of them was a flight ability, or at least something close enough to one.

Aerial Acrobatics (Rare)

This ability allows the user to spin, tumble, and manipulate their position in the air as easily as if they were on the ground.

After learning the skill, he found flying much more natural. The ability was only rare-rank, so it didn't help him with the actual flying, but he could now launch himself off the ground easily and take to the air in a heartbeat. He could also land in an instant, turn, spin, and move like a bird a tiny fraction of his current size.

While flying, he worked on the first stage of what Carter described as the Humanoid Transformation Technique. He remembered it well enough to get started, and while it would take a tremendous amount of work to completely form a human body, the first stage was something he desperately needed to master.

Communicating with his human followers by scratching on the ground was far too inefficient. If he wanted to build an organization that would get Margaret's attention, he needed to regain his human voice.

So he focused on completing the first stage of the humanoid transformation technique. The whole technique would involve him creating a human body within his soul. Eventually, he'd be able to turn his soul inside out like a sock and present a human body to the world while keeping his dragon body in his soul. Now though, he attempted a much more limited transformation that only involved his vocal cords, or lack thereof as a dragon.

A truly skilled dragon might force their biology to form whatever organs they wanted, but Ben was far from that level of skill, so he would have to rely on preexisting methodology.

The first stage of the Humanoid Transformation Technique was both alien and familiar in design. It felt like half the technique was formed around bestial instinct, and the other half with human intuition. At some point, ancient humanoids and beasts must have worked together to create the technique.

Some concepts the technique introduced were unfamiliar. Ben had no idea what spirit roots were before this, but looking inward he examined his new draconic body and discovered he had them. They looked like these little channels that stretched from his body to his soul.

These strange organs marked a fundamental difference between his current body and his old one, where his spirit lacked such a direct and obvious way to be affected by the physical world. And to affect it in return.

Just focusing his attention on them gave him some influence over them. A dragon without access to the System would have already mastered cycling energy through the body and into these organs to grow their power, but since Ben had been relying on the System for levels he'd largely ignored them. As a result, the organs were largely dormant and needed to be slowly coaxed to life by cycling ambient mana through them.

Thankfully, that process came to him instinctually. It would have been a lot harder if he'd just been a drake still, but as a dragon the strange mystical art of cultivation seemed as natural as breathing.

Eventually, he had accumulated enough power to implement the first stage of the Humanoid Transformation Technique. After several false starts that produced an unintelligible or comically squeaky voice, he eventually wound up with something he was satisfied with. It was lower and rumblier than the human voice he'd had in life, but it would be strange for a dragon to talk like an average lawyer.

He finally met back up with his human minions. He hadn't paid them more than passing interest as a drake, but now that he was a dragon he had a better head for names and faces.

His memories as a drake were almost as blurry as those from when he was a human, but after straining his mind a bit he eventually found the names he was looking for. The woman he'd first encountered was named Rebecca, and the friends she'd brought along were Michael, Tod, Sarah, and Amanda.

Together, the five of them had founded something of a bootleg adventuring team. He would kill things, and they would return to Crownhill with the monster remains to claim the bounty and sell the monster parts as though they'd killed them.

No doubt people were already starting to notice something fishy going on. The five of them were low D-Grades, and yet were somehow taking down a half dozen much higher leveled D-Grades per day. It had probably raised more than a few eyebrows.

Any team that could reliably fight well above their level would be a team of elites, and their levels would rapidly rise to match their abilities. But Rebecca and her friends had hardly gained any levels at all.

It was probably even stranger when their monster hunts came to an abrupt and inexplicable stop while Ben was focused on evolving into a dragon. Fortunately, Ben had already thought of a solution. His goal was to get in touch with Margaret again, and to do that he'd need to be more than the shadowy dragon behind the scenes pulling strings.

He eventually spotted his minions from the air and circled from afar. The five of them were sitting on a rock passing around a few bottles of alcohol and a joint. The wilderness was usually a pretty bad place to hang out and relax like that, but they were close enough to Ben's territory that only low-leveled monsters dared approach.

Ben frowned as he saw his current batch of employees drinking and smoking on the job. He really had been half-assing things as a drake. Even when he and his wife first started his law firm, none of his employees would be doing this on company time.

Ben realized he'd have to be a bit more assertive from now on if he wanted to turn this group of five into a business venture capable enough to impress Margaret.

He landed over the hill, barely hidden from sight. Then he climbed over it and stared his five drunk and high employees down.

"I see you're all gathered here already. Good, it's past time we have a company meeting," Ben said.

Several terrified screams rang through the air. Ben knew very well that meetings were unpopular, but sometimes they were necessary. He waited with patient understanding, but the screaming didn't stop and a few of his minions reached for their weapons.

That was when Ben remembered he was a dragon. Maybe the screaming wasn't just because he was calling a meeting.

"Weapons down. Now," Ben ordered.

The humans instinctively dropped their weapons.

"Now that we can talk like civilized people, let's begin the meeting. Rebecca! Put the cell phone away. This is important. Amanda, drop the joint, and Michael, put away the alcohol. From now on, there will be no drinking during working hours. Tod, button up your shirt and stop leering at Sarah. I don't care what you do in your off hours, but while you're working for me you'll keep things professional."

Ben's minions seemed even more scared as the dragon looming over them spoke each of their names. Ben's boss voice was well honed through years of running a law firm, so he knew the right no-nonsense way to take control of a situation like this. Pretty soon they were obeying his orders without even knowing what was happening.

"Alright, as I was saying, welcome to our first meeting. I understand the five of you have been operating as an adventuring team. You can continue to do so, but I plan to scale operations and that will require bringing on more teams. From what I've gathered, the usual structure for these sorts of entities is a guild, so that's what we'll become. From now on, the five of you will tell everyone you are members of the Rising Dragons Guild."

There were very terrified and bobbing heads all around. Ben was pleased to note that despite their inebriated state he had a very attentive audience. Usually he had to keep meetings under half an hour to avoid having people's eyes glaze over. There really were some benefits to his non-human form.

During the meeting, Ben told his minions of the next stage of his plan, which boiled down to making a lot of money and recruiting new talent.

Eventually, Rebecca and the others realized he was the same drake they'd been following around trading treats for monster meat. Ben had overheard them nervously whispering to one another, thinking Ben might catch on that he'd been cheated before.

Ben let them stew in that nervousness. They really had pulled one over on him. In terms of value, a dead high D-Grade monster was worth a lot more than some protein bars and other human snacks. As the middlemen in their relationship, they'd harvested the bulk of the profits.

But while Ben was a dragon, he was also a free market capitalist, and he could appreciate that things were worth whatever someone was willing to pay for them. In his case, that meant snacks for dead D-Grades.

While practicing flying, he paid special attention to any areas that would be important to any draconic industrialist. Though Ben had been a lawyer in his past life, his father had been a skilled jeweler with keen interest in gemstones and metal deposits, so he knew what value looked like even when it was still in the ground.

Currently, the volcano he was born on was his greatest asset, and it was time to make use of it. Ben was pretty sure he didn't hold legal claim to the volcano, but he'd certainly remained unchallenged so far. Once he had the money he'd have his guild buy the property, but for now he could just scare away anyone getting too nosy about where his guild's gold and gemstones were coming from.

The next few days saw him switching between hunting monsters and digging for gold, both of which he did with the tireless energy he'd used to build his company in his past life.

From what he could gather from his current instincts, dragons were usually lazy creatures who spent most of the day napping, so a dragon willing to work overtime was already a terrifying force of nature. Adding in his management skills and a mining, smithing, and adventuring guild formed around him before the end of the week.

He discovered a bit late that gold was no longer as valuable as he remembered. Crownhill apparently had some very valuable off-world exports, which meant gold was flooding into the city faster than it could leave to buy raw goods and services. But it still held some worth, so Ben mined it anyway. He refined it with his breath, and eventually hired a few smiths on staff to climb the value-added chain.

Working for a dragon was unusual for them. As a giant fire-breathing lizard, Ben found he could be much more intimidating in one-on-one meetings.

Winning over his employees wasn't completely impossible, though. Though it was slow at first, he proved his capabilities as a leader. The Rising Dragons Guild rapidly grew in reputation as a mercantile-focused guild with expanding influence across many domains.

He pushed his employees as hard as he pushed himself. Handing out time off or bonuses was always Margaret's role, so without her he was probably working people harder than he really should. But he was gaining levels rapidly, and as a dragon he was already pretty damn powerful. In the end, he held his fledgling guild together through sheer force of draconic will.

All in all, things were finally starting to come together.

<Note>

Carter doesn't realize he's released a far more terrifying form of dragon than the usual village-burning kind. Draconic Robber Barons!

They're probably the type of extremely rare foe only people from Crownhill are prepared to face. Any other world would be helpless before their predatory lending practices.

If it seems like there's less physical threats and more internal structural threats to Crownhill, that's by design. Carter will be A-Grade, so it wouldn't make much sense for him to be constantly battling A-Grades while he's home. But there are other types of problems that can still annoy him.

Anyway, I guess this is going to be a three part one. If this were part of a book I'd probably trim the introspection from this middle chapter, but since it isn't I'll keep it. It will wrap up in the next chapter though.

Also, I'm still anxiously waiting for the cover art on book 6. After I finish this, I'll probably do a few book 7 chapters if I'm up for them. Book 6 is still very much on my mind though, and will be until I hit that publish button.