Roughly two months had passed since we first pulled together the people for the dragon expedition, and in that time I’d learned something very important.

If you gave a group of already questionable men access to explosives, steam engines, molten steel and a shared desire to kill something wildly beyond their weight class, they would somehow become even more questionable.

For the last two months, that had basically been my life.

Every single day had been spent working until my body felt like it was made of stone and my head buzzed with measurements, tolerances, shell dimensions and steam pressure calculations.

We’d barely stopped long enough to sleep before throwing ourselves right back into it the next morning, because once the idea was in motion there really wasn’t any room left to slow down.

A dragon wasn’t the sort of thing you prepared for halfway.

Either everything would either work when the time came, or all of us would end up dead in some distant stretch of the Wild Lands after getting roasted alive for our trouble.

And now, finally, after two months of slaving away, we actually had something to show for it.

Two steam cars stood in front of me, both far sturdier than the old experimental one Finn and I had cobbled together ages ago back when we were still in that little shack in the woods.

They were still crude compared to anything I’d eventually want to build, but for what we needed right now, they were good.

More than good, honestly. The frames had been reinforced, the boiler systems had been cleaned up and improved, and most importantly, we’d finally been able to use rubber properly.

That alone had made a huge difference.

The wheels were no longer just miserable rigid things that made every bit of rough ground feel like it was trying to murder the driver.

The rubber didn’t make the ride comfortable exactly, but it made it survivable, and more importantly it helped with traction and shock absorption in a way the older design never could.

We’d also used it anywhere steam liked to escape from places it had no business escaping from, sealing pipe joints and pressure weak points so the whole system wasted less energy hissing itself half to death.

It was one of those improvements that didn’t look dramatic from the outside, but in practice it changed everything.

The cars had real pulling power now.

Not enough for me to trust them in any kind of prolonged chase, and certainly not enough for what I’d one day consider a proper vehicle, but enough to carry what we needed them to carry.

And right now, that was all I cared about.

I stood with my arms folded and looked over the nearest one again, my eyes trailing along the steel frame and up to the cannon mounted on top of it.

The cars themselves had no armour whatsoever, which was very deliberate.

I’d thought about it, obviously, but in the end there was no point.

If we tried to wrap the entire thing in steel plating, the weight would ruin its mobility, and the steam engine already wasn’t exactly winning any races as it was.

They were slow.

And while it wasn’t too slow it was still slow enough that trying to rely on high-speed manoeuvring against a dragon would be suicidal.

And honestly, armour would have been a trap anyway.

If the dragon’s breath hit one of these things while we were all tucked inside some heavily plated shell, we wouldn’t be protected.

We’d just be cooked alive in a steel oven.

So no armour.

That meant the steam cars had one job and one job only: move the cannons into position, give us a stable firing platform, and get us the hell out if we somehow still had the option to retreat after the first shot.

That was it.

They weren’t cavalry.

They weren’t battle tanks. They were oversized, steam-powered gun carriages with delusions of grandeur.

Useful oversized steam-powered gun carriages, but still.

Which also meant there was no world in which we fought this dragon head-on in open terrain and expected to win.

No, if we wanted this to work, it had to be an ambush. A proper one.

We’d need to lure the dragon into a position where it couldn’t simply fly over us, circle around, or roast the whole squad from a distance while we fumbled around trying to turn the cannons fast enough to keep up.

The cannon mounts were good, but not that good.

The aiming system worked by manually cranking two separate wheels for vertical and horizontal adjustment, which made precise aiming possible, but not quickly.

If the dragon had too much room to move, we’d never keep the thing lined up well enough to land the kind of shot we needed.

So the terrain had to work for us.

A narrow valley.

A rocky pass.

A cave mouth.

Somewhere confined enough that the dragon’s movement would be restricted and the cannon’s limitations wouldn’t matter nearly as much.

Somewhere where we could funnel it into a kill zone, force it to face us from the front, and then hammer it with the shells before it had the chance to understand what was happening.

That was the theory, anyway.

Whether reality would have the decency to cooperate with that theory was another matter entirely.

My gaze shifted upward to the cannon mounted on top of the steam car, and I felt my eye twitch slightly just from looking at it.

God, I hated that thing.

No, that wasn’t fair.

I loved the cannon.

It was brilliant and was elegant in a brutal sort of way, and every time it fired properly I felt a little burst of satisfaction somewhere in my chest because it worked.

It really worked. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

What I hated was everything it had taken to get to that point.

Testing the cannon had been one of the most miserable experiences of my life, and considering the fact that my life included getting my leg sliced off by a B-rank mage, that was saying something.

The cannon itself had taken enough effort already, but the shells were what nearly got us all killed repeatedly.

Every single part of that design had needed testing: shell integrity, propellant force, barrel tolerance, fuse timing, penetration behaviour, whether the ceramic cap would shatter correctly, whether the copper would deform the way I wanted on impact, whether the shell would remain stable enough in flight not to veer off and kill one of us by accident.

Spoiler: several of those tests had gone very badly.

After the first week, every member of the dragon-killing squad had flatly refused to touch the cannon. I couldn’t even blame them.

By that point, we’d had shells rupture early, shells fail to fire, shells impact incorrectly, one cannon recoil hard enough to nearly throw Rowan off the platform, and one truly spectacular incident where a shell had detonated in a way that sent a chunk of shattered metal screaming past Garrick’s head so close that it took a lock of hair with it.

That was around the point everyone collectively decided that if I wanted further testing done, I could be the one standing near the damn thing.

So I’d been forced to rotate people in one at a time after that, cycling through the other five men whenever I needed another loader or someone to help with measurements.

It became a sort of miserable ritual.

One week in, one week out, then hand the responsibility to the next poor bastard once the current one had lost all willingness to cooperate.

Luckily, by the time I’d run through all of them, the design was finished.

And once it was finished, it was beautiful.

The shells finally behaved the way I wanted.

The cannons held.

The steam cars could carry them.

The recoil systems weren’t perfect, but they were manageable, and with enough practice we’d gotten to the point where each cannon only needed two people minimum to operate properly.

One person loaded, the other aimed and fired.

It would be more efficient with a third person assisting, especially in an actual fight where speed and coordination mattered, but the minimum crew requirement being two meant we had flexibility, and flexibility mattered.

I exhaled slowly and rubbed the back of my neck.

After the construction phase, I’d spent another good stretch of time dragging the squad through test rides and live firing practice.

Watching grown men try not to panic while riding a steam-powered wagon across uneven ground had been amusing the first few times.

After that it mostly just became another problem to solve.

We’d had to work out how the cars handled on slopes, how much space the cannon needed to traverse, what sort of ground made aiming impossible, how long reloading took under pressure, how far the blast and smoke impaired visibility after each shot, and whether anyone besides me could be trusted not to do something catastrophically stupid during the process.

The answer to that last one was, unfortunately, "sometimes."

I was still staring at the cannon and thinking about the number of times it had almost killed us when a small giggle sounded behind me.

I turned around.

Silvia was riding Potato.

The sight was so absurdly normal compared to everything else we’d been doing lately that it took me a second to process it.

She was sitting atop the horse with the complete confidence of someone who had no concept of how dangerous falling off could be, one hand gripping the reins poorly while the other patted the side of Potato’s neck as if she were praising him for some great feat.

Potato, for his part, looked deeply resigned to his fate.

I honestly hadn’t thought about that horse in ages.

Back when Finn and I had first started making steel in the shack, before the factories and trains and industrial district and everything else spiralled out of control, Potato had been one of our main methods of transportation.

He’d hauled steel, tools, supplies, but as things scaled up and carts turned into rail systems and rail systems turned into proper industrial transport, Potato had sort of... drifted into the background.

Not neglected, exactly.

Just no longer central.

That changed the moment Silvia arrived.

At some point during these last two months, Silvia and Potato had apparently decided they were friends, and now they were almost constantly together whenever she wasn’t attached to either me or Finn.

I still wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened.

Maybe because Potato was patient and warm and didn’t mind her climbing all over him.

Maybe because Silvia liked anything that could carry her around and didn’t complain when she tugged on its ears.

Or because both of them had the same vague energy of "not especially bright, but generally harmless if supervised."

Whatever the reason, the friendship had stuck.

Silvia grinned when she noticed I was looking at her, then leaned down over Potato’s neck and hugged him dramatically.

"Potato is really fast," she declared.

Potato was not fast.

Potato was, at best, committed.

I stared at her for a second before glancing at the horse, who gave me a look that somehow managed to be exhausted despite the fact that he was a horse and therefore should not have been capable of emotional expression that specific.

"I see he’s suffering in silence," I said.

Silvia gasped and sat up straighter. "He’s happy."

Potato flicked an ear.

"That was not a convincing defence."

She huffed and patted his neck again. "He likes me."

"He definitely does," I admitted. "I’m just not sure he likes you enough to survive whatever game you’re making him play today."

Silvia immediately looked offended. "Potato is really strong."

That, at least was somewhat true.

She slid off his back a second later with far more agility than I expected, landing lightly before jogging over to me while Potato wandered a few steps to the side and began chewing on absolutely nothing in particular.

Silvia came to a stop in front of me and tilted her head up, white ears twitching.

"Are we going to kill the dragon soon?" she asked.

Straight to the point, then.

I looked back toward the steam cars and the cannons resting on them.

Beyond those were stacks of equipment, shell crates, spare parts and all the other evidence of two straight months of sleep deprivation and bad decisions.

Although we had to give up on the automatic rifles as we where completly unable to produce a bullet caliber that was capable to even scratching the steel we used in our tests as a substitute for dragon scale.

The workshop yard still looked like a small army had tried to industrialize itself and gotten distracted halfway through by artillery.

"We’re close," I said at last.

We were close enough now that I could almost feel the expedition beginning to shift from theory into reality.

Silvia followed my gaze to the cannons, then back to me. "Will it be hard?"

"Probably," I said.

"Will it be scary?"

"Almost definitely."

She considered that for a second, then nodded as if I’d merely confirmed the weather.

"I’ll still help."

That made me smile despite myself.

I reached out and patted her head, right between the ears. She immediately leaned into it, because of course she did.

"I know you will."

And that was the part that still felt strange, even now.

Two months ago Silvia had been a half-starved runaway slave hissing at me from an alley and biting my arm hard enough to draw blood.

Now she was here in the Aldric territory, feeding Potato apples, chewing on Finn’s trousers when she got bored, following me around the industrial district and acting like joining a dragon-hunting expedition was the most natural thing in the world.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure whether that said more about her or about the kind of people I apparently kept collecting around me.

Probably both.

I gave her one last pat and then looked past her toward the workshop, where I could already hear raised voices in the distance.

Judging by the tone, someone had either dropped something expensive or Finn had discovered yet another way for our schedule to become my problem.

Most likely both.

I let out a slow breath and straightened.

Two months of preparation.

Two steam cars.

Two cannons.

A squad of lunatics willing to follow me into the Wild Lands to try and ambush a dragon.

And if all of that somehow wasn’t enough, we still had one final thing left to do before any of us could actually leave.

We needed a real plan.

Not just weapons or vehicles.

Not just the vague agreement that yes, killing the dragon would be nice if we could manage it.

No, we needed to sit everyone down and turn all of this into something concrete—routes, supplies, scouting order, crew assignments, fallback points, how exactly we intended to lure a dragon into a place where two steam-powered cannons could blow a hole through its chest before it incinerated us all.

Which meant the fun part was over.

Now I had to organise people.

In other words, the truly dangerous phase of the operation had finally begun.