A glorious sight, a defeated dragon.
But the reality is quite different and a complicated corpse to deal with, with team members exhausted and a few injured the post-battle image is not a glorious or pretty scene.
I can't do anything with the body but try to catch the blood that's splattering on the floor which is still valuable, but I have nowhere to keep it apart from three small bottles that I then carry on my belt to collect some. precious liquid that I bump into, but these three little bottles can pick up a very small amount of blood that is splattering on the floor.
Near the corpse the team begins to assemble.
"Are you two, okay? Did anyone get burned or with injured organs?"
"I had a bit of skin burn; the dragon doesn't like to see ice in front of him. His kick was not simple, he condensed his flames in the palm of his claw and they exploded after hitting me, other than that I have my arm broken and several ribs cracked."
"I'm doing a lot better than he is, I've had some cracked bones all over my body. I used a layer of extra earth on my back in addition to the normal armor to protect myself from the pack and I dropped my shield which was on fire, if I hadn't done that, I would have had several broken bones and burns all over my body."
I don't know which of the two is more lucky or unlucky, but if you're going to judge by the results Gloria defended herself in a much more effective way but analyzing her well and her speech is a little slow.
I think the package left her disoriented, it was a very violent blow I hope she doesn't even have a head injury; these injuries are very complicated to treat without a priest and the longer it takes to treat the worse they are to be healed.
"You two better rest for now, Skadi will help you guys take off your helmets and armor parts to tend to your wounds while the rest of us take care of other tasks, okay?"
Response I got was Skadi going to help them and Gloria moaning in pain as she tried to respond with a nod. Leaving the wounded aside now that Skadi is tending to them I turn to the big problem we now have to solve.
"Who's going to run out to get the horses? Any volunteers?"
Before anyone answers I see Alice run away like the wind, I think she's decided she's going to get the horses. They're not far away so it only takes a few minutes for her to get back.
"Okay, we're two warriors short so the mages will have to do legwork today. The three of you will dig the dragon's nest to go ahead with the work for Gloria, when she recovers an option, she will use her earth element to scour all that land with my help."
The faces of the three mages weren't even close to joy, Ryas really doesn't like me right now.
"Don't look at me like that, you are strong enough to dig but not strong enough to handle the dragon corpse, to be honest no one has the strength or skill to dismantle this entire dragon. We are going to take some precious materials and wrap the corpse to be pulled by the horses and to do all this it is necessary to have a strength well above yours. To motivate you to think you're digging for treasure, because anything that's going to be buried there is treasure unless the dragon destroyed it or shit on it."
"Now just wait for Alice to come back with the mounts so we can all get the necessary tools."
Zephyr was the only one calm with his mission, the other two mages were very unhappy and when I remembered that the cave could be dirty any motivation to find a treasure brought them just disappeared.
But it puts me in a good mood.
For the next hour we all had a lot of work except the two who were resting, I don't have much hope that Bougi will make a full recovery because while his sister was treating his body, I saw that he had some minor burns.
Even though he is a warrior of the ice element and it mitigates the effects of the fire element he will be weak for a few days and marked up to the purifying treatment that only a life element mage can give. Gloria's situation is much better, she won't be able to be a defensive warrior for the next few days, but using her earth element to dig will soon be possible for her.
She got a good practice on the last mission and as the earth in the nest must be pretty loose because it just got blown up, Gloria shouldn't have that much trouble digging into it without straining her body, it's a shame she doesn't even have all her elemental energy or aura now, but she should be able to dig for quite a while.
With Alice and Hilda's help I started to take care of our biggest problem, the dragon, what to do with it?
I started pulling out carefully so as not to damage anything more than what might already be damaged, although the fight wasn't long it was still a struggle of attrition. Many parts of the little dragon ended up being damaged during the fight and this diminishes its value, you can't compare this battered corpse with a dragon killed by dragon hunters.
They know exactly where to focus their damage to kill the dragon more efficiently and without damaging its body too much.
I already gave up on the dragon's fur the moment I saw how much it was damaged, I went straight to pluck the little horns that were coming out of the dragon's head, as this part of the dragon's body hadn't matured its horns were quite small and easy to pull off.
After that it was his eyes, tongue and teeth after that we took the claws off his paws and the little spikes that were sticking out of his tail. Apart from all those easy parts we basically finished a lot of our work, it's not like we had really good equipment to store every part of the dragon, we had to focus on what was easy and important.
Extracting the most important part of the dragon's body was quite difficult, with the help of Hilda and Alice I had to open a slit in the dragon's chest to reach its heart which is the most valuable part of its body.
It was really a good exercise to get to his heart, even after dying the dragon's flesh is very tough to cut and we even had to go through his bone to get to his heart. Cutting the bone required Hilda and Alice to attack with their spears embedded with aura and wind several times to be able to cut through the bone.
If their spears weren't good quality, level three weapons they would have lost their blade by hitting the dragon bone so many times, a dragon bone is already so hard and tough after the dragon died that it justifies the exorbitant price. that an armor that has him in its league is so expensive.
There are some heavy armors that are said to be made with a large amount of dragon bone that they are so strong that attacks below the power of a level seven magic beast cannot scratch the armor.
A dragon bone is indeed a legendary material, the bones of a level three hatchling already compare to level four materials, if these bones had matured for a young dragon, they would have the maximum defense a level five material can achieve or maybe even get to the defense of a level six material.
When we got to the heart the first thing, I did was pierce it to get the blood out of it, this blood and named as dragon essence is a type of blood extremely rich in mana and elemental energy because when the dragon dies and the heart stops working the mana and elemental energy that was in him is concentrated in this blood which is the color of a brilliant ruby.
Normal dragon blood is plain, dark red, but dragon essence is a bright, light red, these two bottles I filled are worth more than the rest of the whole dragon's blood. After that we took out his heart and kept in a box specially chosen for that, his heart and the meat more nutritious than the dragon's body.
The only really valuable part we left in the dragon's body was its core, but we couldn't extract it now, we would spend several hours digging into it and possibly damaging it when we had broken the bone that protects it, it would be so much easier and simpler if he had simply been on the dragon's head.
The only thing we can do now is roll him up and tie him to the horses, because we're going to have to drag him all the way back, we spend another hour to pack the dragon well. Two layers of canvas made of tier two materials and ropes of tier three materials, I don't want to give the dragon's body a chance to be easily stolen or that it leaves a trail of blood as we travel.
Two hours of digging the mages should have done the job well, I hope I'm lucky and find something valuable in the dragon's nest.