Battle for Leadership

After nearly a month of recuperation and development, the red dragon's domain was flourishing. Under the direction of Langpu and the hobgoblin, the goblins and ogres had already erected a rudimentary stone fortress within Giant Valley. Its walls stood over five meters high, with watchtowers positioned at elevated points. Langpu, whose wide reading habits made him surprisingly well-read, had named it "Bedrock Fortress." This made the naturally defensible valley even more impregnable. Even if a regular human army marched against it, the red dragon was confident he could turn them away at the gates. "Work faster! Don't slack off!" an ogre over three meters tall roared down from the top of a watchtower. Yet beneath the ogre's massive, rotund bulk, the wooden tower appeared dreadfully fragile. The timber even gave off sharp creaks and groans, as though wailing under the half-ton weight. "Heave-ho!" Ogres shouldered massive logs, laboriously hauling them upward to form the framework of the Bedrock Fortress watchtowers. As distant cousins to giants, ogres possessed extraordinary strength. Aside from being gluttonous and lazy, they made superb heavy laborers. The goblins were already accustomed to building encampments. With over four hundred goblins working alongside the immensely strong ogres, guided by Langpu's formidable 17 Intelligence and directed by the hobgoblin, raising a simple fortress was relatively easy work. Beneath the five-meter-high walls, a gang of goblins swung their pickaxes, toiling to quarry and shape stone. "Hurry it up!" "You hit my foot!" Naturally deceitful and lazy creatures, they would normally have slacked off at every opportunity. But after an enraged ogre overseer mashed a goblin pretending to sleep into meat paste, such behavior ceased entirely. After all, Langpu's "punishments" meant only momentary pain to a thick-skulled ogre, but for a goblin, they meant the end of a lifetime—a fact they understood all too well. "Awoo—" "What's that?" The working goblins looked up one after another, startled by the massive shadows falling across the sky. Several hulking silhouettes flew in from the distance like a heavy dark cloud—a flock of over a dozen wyverns. They had simply sensed the call stirring within their draconic bloodline, arriving in a flock to see whether a being worthy of their allegiance truly dwelt here. The largest among them was over seven meters long, baring fangs and brandishing talons with fierce menace. In size it rivaled Cassius himself, though it was far more slender than the red dragon. Unlike true dragons, which had four limbs and a pair of wings, wyverns possessed only two scaled legs and a pair of leathery wings. A wyvern's tail was muscular and powerful, tipped with its deadliest weapon: a venomous stinger. The wyvern's potent toxin could travel through the bloodstream to sear a victim's heart and blood vessels. This lethal nature led hunters and adventurers to covet its venom, harvesting it for alchemical concoctions and weapon coatings. The wyverns gripped the ground with their forelimbs, drawing their wing membranes tight behind them. They landed, hissing and snarling. They were calling for the master of this place. The nearby goblins panicked, terrified of being devoured or crushed flat by the wyverns, shouting to their companions as they scrambled to flee. They were simply too weak; the slightest movement from such powerful beasts could snuff out their lives. Upon the fortress walls, the ogre mage stood ready, already assembling the spell structure for a Fireball. The chimera in the cliffside cave also grew alert, its three heads wearing distinct expressions. "Master, a flock of wyverns!" *Roar!* The red dragon soared out from Giant's Mouth Cave, letting out a resonant, far-reaching roar before descending before the flock of wyverns. "Bow before me," Cassius commanded in Draconic. The wyverns let out a clamor of hisses, then arched their long necks and lowered their heads in submission. Yet the largest wyvern of the pack, seeing that the red dragon before it was only a juvenile whose size was comparable to its own, chose instead to issue a defiant roar. Clearly, the rare opportunity to become leader had gone straight to its head. A battle for leadership? An ancient tradition among draconic creatures. Two would duel; the victor would become leader of the flock, while the loser was driven away. Yet to a proud, pure-blooded red dragon, such a challenge from a lowly, two-legged pseudo-dragon was nothing short of an absolute humiliation. Had Cassius been a native red dragon, steam would have burst from his head in fury, and he would have torn the beast apart on the spot. "You have made the worst possible choice," Cassius said angrily in Draconic. In truth, his irritation stemmed mostly from his own size—how much longer would he have to wait before he could be like an adult red dragon, who needed only to flex his might for these monsters to drop to their knees in terror? "And what I grant you... is death!" With a sweep of his wings, the red dragon surged high into the sky, glaring down at the wyvern from above. [Based on your strength, you can observe the following information:] [Wyvern] Large dragon, unaligned Armor Class: 13 (natural armor) Speed: 20 ft., fly 80 ft. STR: 19 DEX: 10 CON: 16 INT: 5 WIS: 12 CHA: 6 Skills: Perception +2, Hunting +4 Senses: Darkvision 60 ft., passive Perception 14 Languages: Understands Draconic Actions: Multiattack, Bite, Claws, Stinger Challenge: 6 (2,300 XP) Description: "At times, travelers in the wilderness look up to see the broad wings of a wyvern carrying prey through the sky. These distant cousins of true dragons hunt through dense forests and cavern complexes. Cruel predators, their arrival in flocks often sends ripples of panic through the civilized frontier." On the ground, the wyvern curved its long neck slightly, raising its savage head to let out a defiant hiss. The raspy sound resembled that of a serpent. *Hiss—* Immediately after, the massive wyvern pushed off with its forelimbs and launched into the air. Its powerful tail lashed midair, the sharp stinger at the tip glinting with a chilly gleam. "Fire Breath!" Yet before it could fully leave the ground, a searing cone of flames erupted from the red dragon's jaws, hurtling straight toward the wyvern's body. The wyvern scrambled to adjust itself midair, tilting its wings and attempting to grip the ground with its forelimbs to escape the attack, but it was still caught by the blazing torrent of breath. The scales across most of its chest were scorched black, and the flesh beneath was torn and blistered by the searing heat, leaving it in a battered state. *Awoo—!* The wyvern let out a pained shriek, but it quickly propped itself up with its forelimbs and wobbled into the air once more. It did not have much time. The red dragon's next breath was already coming; deep within Cassius's throat, an orange-yellow glow smoldered like an erupting volcano. *Boom—* With another roar of air consumed by fire, a second torrent of crimson flame rained down from above, sweeping along the wyvern's flight path. The blazing heat warped the surrounding air, throwing the wyvern into absolute terror. It could do nothing but flap its wings in frantic desperation, dodging and weaving through the sky without the slightest means to retaliate.