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Under a hail of rockets and small arms fire, the beast roared and breathed flame into the sky.

Its battered, jet-black scales betrayed decades... no, centuries... of preying on the weak, and reaping the consequences of constant conflict. Eyes of molten gold pierced hatefully at the ragtag bunch of survivors, daring them to mount a resistance which could halt its siege. And then an expertly aimed shoulder-fired rocket struck the beast square in the snout, exploding with a fireball of yellow and orange, and raining smoky debris down on the city.

Roaring in agony, the dragon crash-landed in a government building; its head and neck severely mangled by the blast.

These weapons had not existed a millenium ago. This must be a mistake. All of these people must die so that I might have what I desire. The wounded beast, coherent even as it was sensing defeat, was irrationally proud and supremely disgusted that he'd been brought down. The black creature clawed at anything within reach, bellowing fire and smoke until its lungs burst. Thick, black blood spattered the walls around the mythical creature; a building which was once beautiful, yet now brought to ruin.

Another rocket found its way to the beast's head, exploding with a deafening roar inside the collapsed building, and causing even more debris to rain down on those surrounding. The beast lay still. As the citizens cautiously approached the mythical being, they realized in awe that it was even larger than it appeared in the sky. At least twenty meters long, with thick, tarnished black scales covered the recently deceased dragon from destroyed snout to razor-sharp tail, and a wingspan which had to be at least fifteen meters wide.

The dark head was enormous, and though the beady yellow eye on one side had been torn to shreds by the blasts, the other lay open, glazing over visibly. One could almost still sense the spite coming from the ochre orb, and a gung-ho citizen put a point blank range shotgun blast into the remaining eye, which caused it to explode in a shower of viscous alluvium, which covered the man. He smiled triumphantly and raised his shotgun into the air, shouting a victory shout.

Night fell, and this time, some of the citizens of Lansdown were even able to get some sleep.

Night after night. Fighting. Non-stop. No rest for the weary.

So thought one handsome black man, as he helped clean out the remains of the dragon slain the day prior. It had taken two bulldozers the size of houses to move the beast; the monster must have weighed 30,000 kilos. The thick black scales certainly helped. After seven hours of excavation and removal duty, he was ready to sleep. They were all ready for some precious sleep.

But sleep would not come tonight. Or any night.

No sooner had the sun disappeared below the horizon than the alarm was sounded. The shrill, piercing sound had startled him the first time he'd heard it, but after this long of responding to its deafening demands, it was little more than a cantankerous old "friend" that you loved to hate.

Tonight's crisis was no different than hundreds that had gone before it; they burn, we build. It was a sort of mantra that the proud men of Lansdown had adopted for themselves, to make their lives feel like they had more purpose than just defending against a group of beasts that could hardly be defended against.

When they first saw the dragon, they expected the same as usual: it would come swooping in, and rain down fire from above, perhaps doing major damage, perhaps not. But tonight was different. The man sensed a new spirit of vengeance in the dragon as it came down and actually alighted atop the building he was on.

Petrified with fear, the man ran for cover, screaming for backup. But as soon as the others piled out the door onto the roof, the dragon sent them scurrying back into it with an expertly aimed projectile of fire.

Sweating like a pig, the man reached for his rocket launcher which had fallen at his side. He heard the crumbling and shaking as the building crumpled slowly underneath the beast's advance. It was slowly but methodically making its way over to his side of the roof. The flames had stopped raining down around him; the dragon was him. Could it know? Could it know that he had led the charge on its counterpart earlier that day, that he'd been the expert shot that had brought down the dragon with extreme prejudice?



The man felt the foreign thought form itself in his consciousness; not exactly as words, but the thought was unmistakable, and it was not coming from him. The dragon was telepathically communicating with him, and telling him he was about to die. And there was not a damn thing he could do about it.

The dragon reached his position, and he whirled around the corner to fire a rocket as quickly as possible. But the dragon, reading his mind, had anticipated his move, and sent a pre-emptive ball of fire at the exact position where it expected him to come out. And it struck him right in the face and chest.

In agony, he dropped the rocket launcher as he fell to his knees, all of the skin on his upper body a molten mass. Unable to see, unable to hear, he felt monstrous claws dig into him and drag him closer. His bowels involuntarily evacuated themselves as his brain tried to tell his body to crawl away, to escape this nightmarish creature.

From the roof of the adjacent building, horrified onlookers saw a dragon stalk along the support beam structure of a building as the rest of the roof crumbled around it, and wait until the perfectly opportune moment before sending a single flame projectile at a single man hiding there. The man fell, and the huge beast reached out and dragged it closer. They could scarcely make out the human, barely alive, trying to crawl away from the beast's hold. But his efforts were in vain.

The beast raised its head to the night sky and shook itself violently, brandishing its shining scales in the moonlight and the light of the nearby buildings on fire. Then, lowering its head until it was directly above what was left of the man, the dragon roared a fearsome, deafening roar down at the body, which was no longer moving.

A sickening crunch was heard as the beast crushed the man's head with its claws, and took off into the sky. A single man was all it had come to destroy, and that single man had indeed been destroyed. And the entirety of Lansdown now knew the price for taking the life of a dragon.