The gorge they picked this time was narrower than the quarry mouth we’d lost the primary bunker in, barely forty meters across at the pinch point, with walls steep enough that nothing short of wings could climb out of it in a hurry.
That was the idea, anyway.
Sivrel called it a “controlled repeat.” I called it betting our remaining ordnance on the theory that a dragon smart enough to read our last three traps wasn’t smart enough to notice we’d built this one to look almost exactly like the one that killed half our harpoon crews six hours earlier.
“Almost,” Sivrel kept saying, like the word did any of the actual work.
“It sees the same bait, the same formation, the same firing angles it broke last time. What it doesn’t see is that we moved the kill line eleven degrees left and rebuilt the north nest with green timber instead of the seasoned stuff. It’ll dodge the way it always dodges. Except this time the dodge puts its wing exactly where we want it.”
I was on Winch 2, feeding slack to a harpoon head as thick as my forearm, and I did not love being told that our entire plan depended on an animal doing something predictable out of spite.
Predictable was a word people used right up until it wasn’t.
“And if it’s learned to not dodge the same way twice?”
“Then we’re feeding the quarry another platform,” Sivrel said, without much drama in his voice, which somehow made it worse.
He had a strip of cloth wound tight around his neck, the same neck that had nearly snapped in half copying the beast’s last violent twist.
He wasn’t going to be doing that particular trick again.
Not without dying from it.
So this time his job was simpler on paper: watch the dragon’s wingbeat, count the rhythm, and the instant it broke pattern to avoid the harpoon line, mirror the motion small enough that his own body wouldn’t tear itself apart doing it.
“Small enough” was doing a lot of load-bearing work in that sentence too.
The bait went up on schedule, three goats on a raised platform bleating with the kind of enthusiasm that suggested they had no idea what they were auditioning for.
I kept my hands on the winch brake and watched the sky past the gorge rim, waiting for that particular quiet that meant something big had stopped flapping and started gliding.
It came from the northeast, lower than last time, wings set at an angle that ate less air and more distance, like it had already worked out that a straight approach got its face full of iron.
Somewhere behind me, a spotter called the range in a flat, professional voice that didn’t match the way her hands were shaking on the binoculars.
Sivrel stood at the edge of the platform with his arms loose at his sides, eyes locked on the shape growing larger against the pale sky, and started counting under his breath.
Not for us.
For himself.
“Three. Two—”
The dragon broke left, the same clean roll it had used to gut the primary bunker, wings tucking half-shut for half a second before flaring wide to catch the turn.
Sivrel rolled with it, his own shoulder dropping, arm swinging out in a mirror of the beast’s wing, small and controlled, the kind of gesture that looked almost gentle from where I stood.
It cost him something.
I saw it in the way his knees buckled a fraction on the landing side of the motion, a wince he swallowed rather than voiced.
But it worked.
The dragon’s evasive roll, instead of carrying its wing clear of our firing line, dragged it directly across the eleven degrees of correction Sivrel had bet on.
“Fire,” someone shouted, and I let the brake go.
Four harpoons left the gorge walls inside two seconds of each other, trailing cable as thick as rope, and at least three of them found meat.
The dragon’s shriek was less a roar and more a tearing sound, something raw and mechanical, like a hull plate giving way.
Its left wing folded wrong, membrane splitting along a harpoon shaft that had gone clean through the leading edge, and for a moment the whole animal seemed to hang in the air, undecided about which direction gravity wanted it to fall. Read the latest chapters at NovelPing.
Then the recoil hit our platform.
I’d fired winches before.
I hadn’t fired four at once into a target that weighed several tons and had just violently changed its flight vector mid-strike.
The kickback came up through the cable, into the winch housing, into the timber frame we were all standing on, and the whole structure gave a groan I felt in my teeth before the north corner simply wasn’t there anymore.
The platform didn’t collapse so much as it decided to become several smaller, faster-moving pieces of platform.
I had maybe half a second to register that the footing under my boots had turned into open air, and that there were at least two other hunters somewhere in my peripheral vision doing the same undignified impression of falling that I was about to do, before I made the call that mattered more than any of it.
I triggered Programming.
Objective, best I could frame it in the half-thought I had time for: secure the crew, hold the tether, but only as long as the footing holds.
Don’t die proving a point about heroics.
That last part wasn’t strictly necessary to include.
I included it anyway.
Old habits.
Everything went dark the way it always did, that abrupt and total absence, no drifting into it, just a light switching off mid-sentence.
I came back to the smell of dust and hot metal, flat on my back on a ledge that hadn’t existed as far as I remembered, my shoulder screaming in a way that suggested it had done real work while I wasn’t around to consent to it.
My hand found the report tucked into the same mental space it always occupied, waiting for me to read it.
Handover, Kharvoss gorge collapse.
Structural failure confirmed at 0.6 seconds post-recoil.
Full platform loss inevitable; partial crew loss avoidable only through selective anchoring.
Evaluated three grip points: exposed rebar spur, load-bearing support post, secondary harpoon cable already under tension.
Chose the cable.
Reasoning: rebar spur showed corrosion consistent with prior storm damage, unreliable beyond two seconds; support post was already failing in slow shear, would have taken longer to abandon than to hold; cable was ugly, unglamorous, offered no leverage for a dramatic single-handed rescue, but its tension was stable and its anchor point, the dragon itself, was not going anywhere in the next four seconds regardless of what it wanted.
Used it to snag and redirect two falling hunters into the ledge you are currently lying on.
Heavy gear crate and the north winch assembly were not recoverable and were released into the quarry to reduce total falling mass.
You will have shoulder strain consistent with holding approximately three hundred kilograms of moving weight through a single tether point for the duration of the fall.
I am sorry.
There was no version of this where nothing hurt.
I lay there a second longer than I needed to, staring at a strip of gray sky, thinking that “I am sorry” was doing a strange amount of work for a report that otherwise read like a maintenance log.
Nobody had built that into whatever subroutine was running back there, as far as I understood it, which meant it had built it into itself.
Somewhere below and to the left, a hunter I didn’t recognize was throwing up quietly into a crack in the rock, alive, which felt like the correct outcome even if his morning was clearly ruined.
Beyond him, another lay curled around a bruised arm, cursing in a steady, businesslike way that told me he’d checked his own bones already and found them intact enough to be annoyed rather than screaming.
Two saved.
The gear crate and the winch, gone into the quarry below, along with whatever credit value they’d represented on someone’s ledger.
I decided not to think too hard about that part yet.
The dragon, meanwhile, was not doing well.
Its ruined wing hung at an angle wings weren’t meant to hang at, and instead of the graceful, contemptuous climb back to the peaks that every previous encounter had ended with, it was losing altitude in a series of ugly, uncontrolled drops, correcting late each time, sliding sideways through the air like something that had forgotten how physics worked.
It wasn’t heading for the high ridgeline anymore.
It was heading down, toward the terraced roofs stacked along the lower slope of the quarry town, where I happened to know, because someone had mentioned it in the briefing I’d half listened to before this whole disaster started, several hundred off-duty hunters and their families were currently housed.
That was the moment the sky above the gorge blinked out into the familiar dead calm of a broadcast pause, every loose piece of falling debris frozen mid-tumble, dust motes suspended like they’d been told to hold that pose for a photograph.
Vassago’s voice arrived a half-beat later, cheerful in the specific way that meant somebody’s tragedy had just become somebody else’s quarterly earnings.
“Well, folks, if you were tuning in hoping for another majestic aerial retreat, I have some devastating news: our dragon’s flying days are officially over. No more soaring. No more scenic circling. Just gravity, doing what gravity does best.” A pause, the kind engineered for laughter that wasn’t coming from anyone actually standing in the gorge.
“Now, some of you are worried about what happens when several tons of injured apex predator meets a residential district. And to that I say: worried is a strong word. Concerned, invested, on the edge of your seat, sure. Speaking of which, this segment’s structural collapse is brought to you by Ferrovane Bracing Solutions, because when your platform fails you, at least your sponsor didn’t.”
The falling debris resumed its fall five seconds later, exactly as promised, and I hauled myself off the ledge with a shoulder that informed me, in no uncertain terms, that it had opinions about being used as an anchor point.
There wasn’t time to process any of that properly, because that was when the reward notification finally caught up with me, sitting patient and unbothered in the corner of my vision the way these things always did, indifferent to the fact that a mangled dragon was currently falling toward a neighborhood full of people.
Reward Crate Unlocked: “Royal Chicken, Fractures Included.”
I didn’t have the energy to appreciate the joke properly.
I opened it anyway, mostly because my hands needed something to do that wasn’t shaking.
Ability Acquired: Dead Grip.
Applies absolute, unbreakable adherence between your hand and whatever surface it contacts at the moment of activation, for a duration of four seconds.
Effect ends automatically after four seconds regardless of circumstance.
Following deactivation, the joint or limb used enters a mandatory one-minute recovery window during which grip strength, fine motor control, and pain tolerance in that limb are severely reduced.
Cannot be reactivated during recovery.
Recommended for emergency anchoring only.
Four seconds of not letting go, followed by a full minute of a hand that couldn’t hold a cup of water.
Whoever designed these crates had a sense of humor about exactly how much rope to give a person before yanking it back.
I filed it away, because there wasn’t time to test it, because thirty meters below the gorge lip the alarms had already started, a low rising wail rolling out across the terraces, the kind of sound that everybody knows.
On my telemetry bracelet, a new marker blinked into existence over the quarry town’s residential grid, red and insistent, tracking a falling mass that was, by every measure that mattered, no longer under anyone’s control.
Sivrel was already moving past me toward the rope line down, favoring the leg that had taken the worst of the platform’s collapse, shouting something to the rest of the crew about barracks and evacuation routes of which I only caught half over the alarm.
Whatever satisfaction there was supposed to be in grounding the thing, in proving Sivrel’s mirror trick had worked exactly as designed, evaporated the second I realized where it was actually going to land.