It was a beautiful day today, the sun was bright, the temperature was neither too hot nor too cold, the atmosphere was soft and gentle, a perfect day to go out and enjoy one's life.
"Ah-" ignoring the last call of distress, Dramentia crushed a man within one of his palms, consuming and resuming his search.
Rather than flying and unleashing a stream of flames, he made use of his unique body, travelling from one high point to the other, swirling like a humongous, and nightmarish serpent in between mountains.
Extending heads on every sides, he had encountered many more flesh and blood since his greatest feast, had he devoured all of his kin already? The dragon kind may be powerful, but they weren't especially numerous.
He could only sate himself using the caterpillars, grazing and crushing everything in his path, unearthing the caterpillars hiding underground, no matter how small or pathetic they may be, a dragon needed to eat.
Still, even when faced with the possibility of having reduced the draconic population to zero, the melting dragon couldn't stop laughing and laughing.
Suddenly, all of his heads turned to the same direction, with the high vantage point, he could easily spot the place the sweet scent was coming from.
A city deserted of all life, except for a single female caterpillar, who was waving the single scale of a since long diseased dragon.
Dramentia had had no problem digging bones out, even if lacking most of the usual nourishment, they were still unrivaled compared to the blandness of everything that wasn't draconic in nature.
Swiping one of his thousand claws, he left most of the city and its surroundings bare of anything as he casually made his way toward his next meal.
"Human?" he called out to her unsure, he hadn't bothered to memorise all of the species of those upright-walking folks, his amused voice booming both physically and mentally, at this point, most would end up just like Bob and Billy upon hearing him saying anything, he didn't even need to adress them directly or be anywhere near them for their heads to pop like rotten pumpkins.
Dramentia suddenly reformed back into a much less deformed appearance, returning to his more traditional dragon look, except for the fact that the ancestral and primeval dragon wouldn't be able to look him in the eyes even if stacked on top of each other.
Still, seeing that this human had been converted to a pile of blood or having a bloody seizure, he lowered his head to her level to get a better look, even if she didn't any different than any other of the caterpillars to him.
Raising an eyebrow he didn't have, simply moving his goo-flesh to imitate the movement, he offered her his palm so that she would hand over the scale, the last few times he had tried, the ones that were capable of surviving hearing and seeing him crumbled.
He twisted his head around a few times as he saw how unfazed she was by all of this.
"Bu-?" as he had a sudden revelation, a powerful gust of wind tore his face to little pieces, also serving to push the caterpillar away from him.
Dramentia wouldn't know but this wasn't just any human, but the heroine of Castelos, it didn't make much of a difference, heroes, peasants, nobles or royalty, he had eaten plenty of each and not noticed a difference.
In the end, there were caterpillars as well as flesh and blood, dragons and everything else, there were only two castes to him.
'...'
Until now.
"What is your name?! Who are you?" he asked, suddenly all riled up as he jumped in place like an excited dog, except that there was nothing cute about it, nothing adorable about earthquakes and collapsing mountains
Taken aback by the way this living disaster was acting all of a sudden, Foslauz first prepared another wind blast before entertaining his question.
"The Pyrite Heroine, Foslauz" she answered, weirded out by how happy he appeared, all smiles and joy, very far from the image she had in mind of this catastrophe in the shape of a dragon.
"What about you?" she asked back, the scale tucked safely with her as she held her swordstaff above her head, ready to unleash a windy hell upon her opponent.
The dragon's head had already reshaped and he hadn't shown any sign of being hurt, he was still laughing his ass off.
"Dramentia, self-named, my mother was too busy to think one herself" he replied simply before immediately heightening the hostilities, his chest bursting open with a cloud of toxic smoke.
The fog was quick to cover Foslauz's vision but nothing she couldn't just blow away, the distressing part was that Dramentia had already managed to disappear in that minuscule span of time.
Reflexively, she conjured a raging tornado behind her back but this wasn't where he had gone, the heroine looked around the deserted city, who was already falling apart, there was nowhere for the humongous beast to hide.
She noticed a house collapsing to her right, rocks still falling in the distance due to Dramentia inadvertently making all of the ones within eyesight break down.
She saw the little vegetation around taking on a ghastly coloration and wither due to the toxic mist he had unleashed.
The sky was a gorgeous blue and perfectly clear.
"Where...?" she wondered, barely a second had passed as she surveyed her surroundings attentively, she looked down to the ground, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, it was covered in cracks but it was to be expected after the cannibal dragon had begun jumping around as if he didn't weight as much as all of the dragons he had ever devoured, without counting the caterpillars.
Exactly as a second passed since he had disappeared, Foslauz suddenly blew herself away to the side, right as the gaping maw of the melting dragon closed in on where she had stood, suddenly breaking through the ground.
"Flying away already butterfly?"