POV ???:
A figure wearing a plain grey mantle with a hood hiding her face stood between two old-looking stone houses in the middle of the dark valley. Pieces of old wooden trash littered the stone-paved ground covered in layers of old mud. Heavy rain was falling around, drumming on the roofs of surrounding buildings and wetting long brown hairs falling from under the figure’s hood.
The figure kept walking in circles, constantly looking around and radiating an oppressive aura causing all of the rats in the valley to shiver in a corner.
Suddenly steps came from the distance, quickly closing on with the sound of water splashing. The figure immediately tensed, looking in the direction of the steps. Her hand immediately moved towards a shiny metallic wand hanging from her waist, her slim fingers tightly gripping it.
Soon another figure covered in a brown mantle, his muscular stature bulging from under the cloak, appeared from behind a corner. The man in brown stopped and raised his arm up, waving it in some sort of gesture.
The person in grey immediately relaxed, releasing the grip on her wand.
In the meantime, the newly arrived man in brown walked closer to her, speaking in a hushed rough voice, “I have done my part… Should we continue? There is still a time to abandon this plan and wait.”
The figure in grey remained quiet for a few moments before speaking in a gentle feminine voice, “We need to act now, send someone trustworthy with a message for that wyrm…”
“Are you sure about this? What if the wyrm refuses to support our plan or turns on us? It can’t work without their help.”
“They will help. Their relationship with my father is already very hostile.”
“In that case, I shall begin.” the man smiled under his hood, revealing his bald and scarred head for a split second.
POV Vesuvius:
The dragon was gliding through the air, observing the herd that looked from his height like a colony of ants, exiting from the passage between tall mountain peaks and entering the weird landscape filled with stone pillars and wall-like mountains. The heavy rain was falling down, covering the horizon with a thick veil.
‘Finally, we should be finally out of the territory of the cursed monsters. I should go first to ensure that wyverns will not attack them.’
Vesuvius flapped his massive wings covered in fiery veins, blasting through the heavy rain, raindrops around him turning into steam. He flew above the green mountain grass and crystal clear mountain lakes, leaving his minions far behind him. His speed quickly rose, with the wind loudly howling around him.
After a while, he slowly landed on one of the stone pillars littering the weird landscape and growled with fiery droplets of magma flying out of his mouth. The pillar was high, easily reaching eight floors, overlooking a clean mountain lake under it.
His thoughts went for a while towards the wind helping him during his flight, ‘I should probably empower my wind attribute during metamorphosis too… I can farm storm elementals, and instead of just using their cores on the lightning element, I will split it between lightning and wind. I am a dragon. I spent lots of my time in the air, so I should rule over it.’
The dragon opened his massive mouth, with orange light flickering in it. Then an earth-shattering dragon growl spread through the surroundings, echoing between cliffs, carrying simple magically encoded meaning, “Wyverns assemble and come here!”
Soon the sound of flapping came from all directions, and flocks of wyverns filled the sky, flapping their big wings. Vesuvius quickly counted them. There were around forty of them. Most of them were smaller with grey scales, while a few of them were bigger with black scales.
All of them quickly flocked around the dragon, circling around him in the air, forming a ring of wyverns. Their wings kept flapping in tandem, creating lots of noise, and their shiny scales reflected sunlight passing between the rain clouds.
‘This is more than I expected… now comes the hard part.’
Vesuvius intensely focused, carefully imagining a figure of his minions wearing black mantles and dragon-shaped masks. Then he opened his mouth, and a loud growl echoed through the hill once again, causing ripples on the surface of the nearby lake. Vesuvius watched as his mana dropped by a large chunk, and magical energy rippled through the air carrying information containing the image that he imagined with a message, “Do not attack unless attacked first.”
‘I can only hope that they can understand such complex instructions… but they are a little bit smarter than dogs, and one can teach a dog lots of tricks even without speaking its language.’
All of the wyverns immediately opened their mouth, showing their sharp teeth as they growled back in response, their growls carrying confirmation.
New images formed in the dragon’s mind. One showed a black and white cow, while the second showed a sheep covered in fluffy white wool.
“Graaah!” the dragon opened his mouth and growled, magical energy spreading around, bound to the sound and carrying the imagined images together with a new command, “Protect from predators. Feed on them but keep their numbers above one hundred.”.
Vesuvius felt his mana drop once again, this time by an even large margin taking away more than twenty percent of his total mana.
The wyverns remained quiet while flying in circles around the dragon, making him nervous, ‘Can they count? Scientists back on the earth did experiments with dogs, proving that they could count… but one hundred is a relatively large number, but wyverns are at least as smart as smartest dogs, probably even a little bit more.’
Soon all of the wyverns unleashed a cacophony of growls, once again confirming the order.
The dragon breathed out in relief. Then his mouth opened in a weird grin before growling again, “Breed more.”
All of the wyverns growled in response, much faster than usual, their loud growls causing the grass to move and the lake to ripple.
‘Why does this feel like programming toy robots… Maybe I should do some experiments later to find out the exact limit of how complex instruction they can understand.’
Then his reptilian eyes with a slightly golden tint focused on the flock of wyverns circling in the air above him.
Dozens of scaled beasts kept circling around and flapping their wings merged with front limbs, all of their reptilian eyes focused on the dragon covered in smoke standing on the massive stone pillar, but there weren’t any dracodactyls.
His face immediately malformed in a frown, ‘Damn, where are my two dracodactyls?’
‘Wait for a second… I ordered wyverns to assemble, not dracodactyls… Damn it! Such a silly mistake, and it doubled my work!’