Final Boss

She began once more, her fingers pounding against metal as she shaped it just right.

The boss... she thought she’d be getting the best of the deal when she contracted with a dragon. Sure a couple of hard to do things here and there, a few mystical doodads made for the simple fact that her master wanted pretty trinkets, show pieces and the like, and the rest of time she’d spend passionately banging away at whatever project caught her fancy at the time. Ya know, the easy life.

Unfortunately what she found out instead was that Boss Andracca was a tyrant, and a slave driver, sure he gave her all the power she could possibly have wanted in a dungeon, a position of prestige which allowed her to basically order most of the dungeon around as she pleased, and a boat load of starmetal. She was pretty sure that so long as she kept on finding more metal and whatever else she could to finance the various projects which he expected of her she would be allowed to more or less do whatever the hell she pleased...

But she was working her bloody hands off the whole day, and half the time it was supervising, not the fun stuff like this in front of her. And this last request, oh dark gods below... this last request bordered on ridiculous... He wanted to flatten out a portion of the fangs enough for grass landers to find it livable. Really it would take almost a month’s work just to get the opening area done, the assigned Elemental spawner content so far to spit out Earth aligned creatures, and that snake girl Andracca had tossed her direction a dam slight better at pure area of effect earth magic than she was herself. Between her and the hired help from the Aerie, she couldn’t help but think that she’d gotten off easier with the project which he’d proposed than it could have been.

It didn’t hurt of course that she would from time to time go find the boss himself whenever he was doing something close by and drag him into a linked session of smoothing out the earth in the needed areas to make the proper kind of flat land needed. But then they still needed to keep it in an area which would be defensible, a small valley no more than a three kilometers in width and hidden from view by the mountains around it, would serve, the normal amount of extra care need in stone carving projects lessened by the fact that there was no ceiling to come down upon their heads as they moved the earth, reshaping it as they pleased. Most of the grunt work she never even had to touch, just the finishing touches which would allow her to lay a proper layer of soil down.

Given a few vitamancers, and some occupation, the space would make a great little Isolated sub-court all of its own. Too bad it was a headache to have gotten started. She figured it had something to do with Andracca’s lady friend, Talitha’s old boss. But she figured that if they just kept it to a grassy hidden here nestled between the mountains, then they could probably keep some of those jungle and grasslands types which they’d had to give up the last time the boss had stepped out.

Essentially the bloody dragon wanted a back lawn.

The young oni grumbled beneath her breath as she continued to work on the metal at hand, her de-stressing project for when Lial wasn’t about. She’d grown surprisingly attached to that idiot blob of easygoing protoplasm, and it hadn’t at all changed since he’d figured out how to make himself the size of a room. And Ril was pretty cute too for a slime kid, like an over eager Warg-puppy.

The oni girl smiled a little, it was strange really, she’d never been attached to anyone before, particularly not anyone who wasn’t already family or in some way attached to her work. Well... there was the reason that she’d changed her name, but she figured that it was a child’s game there, no need to bring it into adulthood. Who’d have thought it would have been a hungry room that would have caught her fancy?

She sighed.

Even as she reflected on the fact that she was starting to have feelings for a blob of goo, her fingers worked diligently, each one to the task of letting a steel hard nail drive into heated metal, allowing her a precision in carving the runes which she desired far beyond any other tools she’d ever used before her latest evolution. The satisfactory feeling of putting fist to heated metal and having it bend and mold to her whims was profoundly relaxing, especially after the ordeals which Andracca had put her into managing.

Idly she patted her belly between a pause, wondering if this time the progeny would be true. After spending time with Ril and Lial together, she’d rather warmed up to the idea of actually having trueborn children with the idiot slime. Maybe she’d stake a claim if one came out of that white-mage. That is if her boss didn’t take one first. Still rolling that gamble was the monster way. By the fleshwarper she’d keep ‘letting’ the fool plant his progeny in her. Since growing to her tier three form, the idea of Motherhood had suddenly become even more appealing than it already had been.

Silently she spoke a prayer to the mother of secrets, empowering the runes which had formed at her literal fingertips as she’d worked completely without paying attention to what she had been doing.