Chapter 53: Did I do that?
We cut our teeth on a pack of conjurers when our path led to Fort Amol. The various atronachs they summoned made the fight interesting, but the true standout was how well Brienne had come along in her combat training. She'd been with us less than a week and had transformed from a novice to a journeyman fighter. Her talent was truly incredible, able to learn from watching and understand from simple instruction. Seeing her managing her footwork and level changes after so little time as a warrior made me feel almost envious, and Jack and I had freaky fight IQ's.
That evening Aela rallied the Circle for a raid on the nearby Lost Knife Hideout. The place was full of members of the Silver Hand, fanatical werewolf hunters who knew the truth of the senior Companions. They returned before dawn with a fragment of Wuuthrad, Ysgramor's legendary shattered axe. I raided the cave for all the silver weapons and other valuables after breakfast, not one to allow a pile of valuable loot slip through my now perfect fingers.
Aela shuddered when she caught me tapping my claws on a silver greatsword.
Chill girl, I am imagining the money, not putting you mangy dogs down.
With Fort Amol cleared, we diverted from the path to Ivarstead, and headed southeast to Darkwater Crossing. As each day passed, the signs of dragons increased. Dragons, not a dragon. I knew there were three corpses at the Bonestrewn crest and this region was completely littered with dragon burial mounds.
With Alduin resurrecting his followers, even at a sedate pace, the number of dragons grew and grew.
The presence of the dragons put the modest mining town on edge, compounding with the recent uptick in miner's lung. They were happy to host us while I melted down our loot and cast a number of valuable silver ingots which both paid for our stay, our resupply, and netted me a tidy sum of septims.
On the evening of our third night at the Darkwater Crossing, Jack and I slipped away to activate the nearby Atronach Stone. For people like us, with almost no magical potential, the Atronach stone was all benefit. Upon activating the stone, our Magicka pools expanded six times over, and we gained the ability to absorb half of all incoming magic at the cost of our magicka pools restoring at only half speed.
Losing the benefits of the Warrior Stone didn't matter to us any longer as after three months with some of the greatest warriors in Nirn, we had expanded our skills as low tech warriors to great heights. At this point the extra twenty percent to our learning speed no longer outweighed the benefits the other Standing Stones could bring us.
Upon our return to the Crossing the sound of great wings beating overhead clued us into the inbound attack from a dragon. We got our bows strung in time to witness another green scaled beast breath a gout of fire from its mouth as it passed over the thatched roofs of the settlement. It regretted illuminating itself when a pair of javelins penetrated its side even deeper than my Skyforge Steel bow had managed.
Neither had landed in a way that impacted its wing joint, but the pain caused it to lose control and crash into a house.
"Deus Volt, bitch!" I shouted as I ran to the house at top speed and engaged the big bastard with The Mule.
The sonofabitch bit me!
Rather than allow me to rain down blows on it, the dragon locked its jaws around me and put down a painful squeeze. In honor of Kratos, I put a hand on each jaw and pushed out from my body, extending my arms until I heard a satisfying snap as the dragon's jaw dislocated and its pitiful wails of pain.
Animal lover that I am, I couldn't leave it in such a poor condition.
After a bit of messy knife work I held the dragon's severed head up as the gathered onlookers cheered. The light show that went off once Brienne approached got the appropriate Ooos and Aaas.
The party really started after all the fires were put out and we began carving up the beast to feast on. Dragons are just particularly juicy turkeys that breathe fire or ice or other Thu'um mischief. Their meat, when roasted, made for incredibly satisfying eating unlike my last flying enemies. The collectors truly were the lowest of the low.
I wonder if Javik would have been tastier.
Needless to say, our stay at the crossing extended as I now needed to process the dragon along with the leftovers from our previous kill to outfit the rest of the Companions. The young Dragonborn got a shirt and hoes made of the finer green scales of the beast to be worn under a more traditional set of nordic scaled horned armor made from the beast's wing leather and a few of the local sheep.
With her golden hooded cloak tucked into the ramskin and thick warriors girdle, she looked quite the riot of colors. The other members of the crew who wore light armor were similarly outfitted, while the heavies all got the dragon bone upgrade layered over their preferred gear.
The biggest advantage came from the whole crew using dragon bone bows. Our ranged DPS went through the roof and would hopefully hold up against the upper tier dragons.
With our business at the crossing concluded, we ventured north through the volcanic hot springs to the Bonestrewn Crest. Somehow we managed the approach without spooking the sleeping Frost Dragon, allowing everyone to take aim and lose a volley of death at the lazy beast. Both its wing joints were penetrated, though not as deeply as the green dragon had due to the Frost Dragon's natural increase in toughness. A number of lesser arrows had landed in its neck and chest, but Aela's had struck it in the eye, blinding the beast's left field of view.
In response to the sudden wake up, the beast bellowed out a stream of icy air that caused a localized white out, preventing us from targeting it again as it charged through the cold blast.
I managed to whack it with a hammer strike before it bulled me over. Damn thing stepped on me as it passed, but I hacked the tip of its tail off before it got away.
The fight after that was a blur of teamwork as the crippled dragon went down in white blaze of glory. Athis and Ria came away from the battle with the worst of the injuries as the nords all were able to resist the magical cold and Jack and I absorbed it. We chose to make our way up to Windhelm to stock up on potions to better resist ice and fire attacks at the legendary White Vial alchemist shop.
After the battle against the white scaled Frost Dragon, the brief attack by one of the lesser brown scaled dragons barely got our blood pumping, but at least added another dead dragon to my Loot Sled.
Despite the dead dragons and the presence of the Companions, I was turned away at the gates of the ancient city, as Argonians were not allowed inside the city walls after the sun sets begins to set. In solidarity, the Companions and I made our way down to the docks where the local argonian population lived and worked. The conditions here were better than those further to the north, where the dunmer slums existed.
Unlike in the game where the dunmer refugees had taken up a segregated corner of the city, here they were forced to live outside the stone walls in a hastily constructed ghetto. They had over time made the place far more homie, but the stark contrast between the conditions of the nords and the other races in Windhelm set the Dragonborn off something fierce. She and Athis set out to the Grey Quarter that evening and had it out with various drunks who stumbled through the ghetto throwing bottles and shouting slurs throughout the night.
Jack and I didn't join them as the local argonians sensed the kinship with us and invited us to a big ol' Hist Sap group trip. Mistakes were made.
The wife and I exist in a state of quantum fuckery as we possess the DNA and Power of three distinct individuals while only expressing the advantageous and subconsciously desired traits of any of the constituent beings. It's why Jack and I became more physically imposing after eating Jabba, but did not change beyond our basic krogan and human forms, and why I gained a more hybridized argonian-krogan form while Jack remained largely unchanged.
You see, that quantum fuckery should make us sterile to anyone we encounter… unless we encounter a race of people who are constantly in flux controlled by a hallucinogenic sap that has connected their species evolutionarily to a species of godtrees that shape them into their ideal forms.
When we all woke from the trip I was surrounded by buffed up argonian girls leaking my seed from their every orifice.
Jack and I left the docks that morning having chosen to not speak to anyone about me fathering a new super race.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
JManM
JManM I believe this is the first chapter I have ever writen with only a single line of dialogue, but I hope "Deus Vult, bitch!" was enough to tide everyone over.
Grunt can breed with argonians after a group Hist session, but not with Jack as they aren't argonian enough to have the hist reshape them into compatiable forms. Grunt on the other hand has fathered a new race of super lizards that will one day conquer Skyrim and establish an new Argonian Empire that worships thier ascended Godking Allfather.
I doubt anyone was thinking of this possiblity, I certainly wasn't until I reread about the argonian relationship to the Hist and how those trees basically shape the argonians like clay. While they couldn't outright turn the argonians into beings like Grunt, they could shape the females into receptive wombs capable of barring children with his ridiculous powers.
They won't have screen time, but will be lurking like a huge shadow over the fate of Nirn.
Had to get today's chapter out early as the boy's and I are going to the fight tonight. I was honestly stunned that Usyk vs Joshua didn't get more media coverage. I found out about it the day of the fight and caught it via youtube. It was an excellent fight, far better than Wilder Fury 3 is likely to be, but who knows. Maybe Wilder was able to improve his game enough that his big right hand can come into play this time.
If you want to support me and my family, you can do so at
ko - fi . com / jmanm
Chapter 54: Kynesgrove
"I never thought I would ever be able to gain the respect my grandfather had before he fled Morrowind." An old dunmer armorer wept as he looked on his newly upgraded workshop, "You have more than earned my loyalty Dragonborn, and the Companions too."
The old dunmer was the grandson of the master armorer of House Hlaalu, but his ancestral skills had been scorned in Skyrim and his grandfather, father, and himself had all made due crafting farming tools and horseshoes while desperately trying to keep their cultural craft alive.
We had chosen to help the man build a proper set up in return for helping me better utilize the dragon bones using dunmer methods. During the week we spent in Windhelm the man and I learnt the secrets of dragon bonemold armor, enabling me to forge sets of truly transcendent equipment. The strength of dragon bone, the coverage of full plate, I may have mixed in two expert alteration robes taken from the Fort Amol Conjurers for Jack and myself as a part of my dastardly plan to become nearly immune to magical damage.
It really was quite dastardly, using a pair of enchanted rings and amulets we'd picked up over our travels, several skill books, and Jar-Shak's apprentice level study of the subject we would quickly delve into the Alteration branch of magic with the intention of maximizing our skill in the subject as fast as possible to connect with the Magic Resistance and Atronach Stars.
It was admittedly slow going as keeping stoneflesh up during spars was all our magicka could take, but it was coming along. We'd be journeymen by the time we reach High Hrothgar and would get their even quicker as we intended to go through Kynesgrove on the way south and get some tutelage from Dravynea the Stoneweaver.
Our last night in Windhelm saw the dockside argonians hold a feast for us, not in return for the one we held for them with our dragon meat, but to celebrate the fact that I'd successfully impregnated all the unmarried argonian women in the area.
The people of this world really know how to creep me out.
I kept expecting some kind of Red Wedding turnaround for defiling everyone's sisters and daughters, but just like in Whiterun they kept piling on the praise and gifts. At least with the human women I wasn't leaving them full of bastard children, but that just seemed to make everyone here even happier.
Strong seed, they kept saying.
The cult vibes made me more than happy to hit the road again.
Two days out from Windhelm we approached the small mining town of Kynesgrove, this place built around the mining of malachite, a much more valuable and rare substance than the corundum ore of Darkwater Crossing. All was going well until the dragon nation attacked. Alduin flew over with a pair of his bronze skinned home bois and they began their reign of fire on the town while the big black bastard went on to rez his pal, Sahloknir.
Leaving the sled behind we ran the final stretch between us and town.
"Jack and I will take one!" I shouted over the medley of screams and the roar of the fires, "All of you take the other!"
Jack flung a warp sphere at one of the Elder Dragons and I started sending arrows down range wishing I had one of my old machine guns. We weren't heroes, we weren't here battling these things because saving the people of Kynesgrove meant something to us, but the sounds of them roasting alive as everything they knew burned down around them did serve as motivation to not hold back.
The Elder Dragon was tougher, more mobile, and harder hitting than any we'd faced prior. It took three shots for me to connect and even then it was a grazing shot. The beast was aware and agile, and knew he could tank Jack's biotic attacks. After the second warp sphere landed without significant damage, Jack joined me in shooting as the beast played keep away and unleashed streams of raging fire on the people of the town.
Eventually the pressure was too much and a shaft hit him where the shoulder meets the chest, causing him to lose that slick evasiveness and take two more shafts before plowing into a burning home.
We launched more javelins into the wreckage and the dragon burst from the side of the building before clawing at the earth like an enraged Tigrex. The bastard actually used his horns to deflect a pair of javelins before Jack and I were forced to engage him in melee combat.
Jack timed a biotic charge to land just as I plowed into the big bastard with my shield raised and the collision put all three of us on our asses. I got up first and swung a hammer blow to his head and the Elder Dragon threw an overhand wing strike and comboed it into a swift tail strike that launched me into the wreckage of someone's home, a home that was promptly set even more on fire. Jack hit him with another charge as he tried to roast me, knocking much of the stream off target and into more flammable wood houses.
During the fight the dragon had broken off the shafts in the sides of his chest, but I noticed one thick shaft still sticking out of his chest a good bit. Rushing back into the fray I ducked under his claw swipe tail strike combo leaving me right where I wanted to be. With a roar I hammered down the nail that stuck out.
The wet quality of its ragged breathing clued me in on the pictured lunge, reducing the beast's shouting capacity and making it harder to recover it's spent energy on its attacks. We spent a few minutes evading and punishing the increasingly slow attacks of the Elder Dragon before I buried my axe blade in its neck just behind the skull, killing it instantly.
Jack and I breathed heavy, truly pushed for the first time since coming to this world. Bethesda definitely didn't animate this guy.
We didn't get a chance to catch our breath as the rest of the Companions had yet to slay their dragon. Drawing our bows, we got the drop on the beast and put a pair of javelins in its neck. We waited out its death throws and Vilkas rammed his sword through its eye for good measure. The beast lit up and Brienne had devoured another soul, but following the trail of light led to the girl kneeling over the scorched form of Ria, the newest member of the Companions before we joined.
"Get up girl!" I shouted as I lifted her with one hand, "You have to drain the other one before Alduin brings him back!"
"But, Ria!" she cried.
"Now!" I bellowed, "She will still be dead when you get back!"
I put the struggling girl over my shoulder and walked her back to our kill. I would have felt glad to permanently slay the beast if not for the arrival of the black destroyer himself and a bright orange dragon with a wide ridged neck and tail that landed to our side.
I placed the struggling Dragonborn down and got my shield ready to defend her from the bigger threat, but Sahloknir posed a huge threat as well even if his birdlike beak and bulging frog eyes made him look dopey. Revered Dragons were not to be tangled with lightly.
Alduin spoke to Brienne in the language of the Dov before realizing that she did not understand him.
"You do not even know our tongue, do you? Such arrogance, to dare take for yourself the name of Dovah. Sahloknir, krii daar joorre." With that said Alduin took off into the night, leaving us to his minion to slay.
"I am Sahloknir! Hear my Voice and despair!" the dragon spoke before launching a Drain Vitality Shout that I leapt with all my strength to get us out of the way of. The shout tried to correct course, but my dodge was timed too well and thus we just barely managed to evade the lethal shout.
It took everything I had to keep us away from the Revered Dragon's calamitous Thu'um. The Elder Dragons dealt massive damage to the town, and Sahloknir seemed able to match their output combined. His torrents of flames reduced homes to ashes as he pursued us and it didn't stop until a javelin bounced off his head and another stuck into his chest far shallower than ever previously seen. The rest of the Companions began to kite the dragon with their bows, the big beast far slower to rotate than the Elder Dragons but just as fast in a straight line with all his added mass turning him into a wrecking ball destroying all in his path.
We were slowly wearing him down when Torvar tripped over a beam hidden in some ash. Time seemed to slow down as Sahloknir barreled down on the Companion and snatched him up in his jaws even as more arrows riddled his form. The slovenly nord pulled a knife off his chest plate with his unpinned arm and rammed the blade in the dragon's eye before the maw slammed shut and Torvar fell to pieces, part falling to the burning ground, the rest falling down the dragon's throat.
Farkas and Vilkas broke away from the plan and rushed the Revered Dragon, evading his clumsy wing strike and ramming their blades into his chest to the hilts, taking the beast down with their ferocity.
"So this is my end, eh Dovahkiin." the beast gasped, "My voice has been silent for so long…"
Many of the Companions collapsed in exhaustion, covered in burns, and grateful to have survived. Looking out over the destruction, I knew that this time we wouldn't be celebrating our victory.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS
JManM
JManM
Got home from the fights and chose to finish the chapter I was working on before going to bed.
The championship bout was the best fight I have seen all year. Wilder showed up the best he has ever been and came up short getting knocked out in the tenth round. The man took a huge beating and showed that he had the heart of a true champion.
His record may be heaviliy padded, but the man has spent 29 rounds in the ring with the greatest heavyweight fighter currently competing. I think the Wilder who showed up tonight could defeat everyone else in the division except Fury and possibly Usyk.
Weekly Power Status
200+ Power
Ranking 
2 Power
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