Chapter Thirty Eight: Ben the Magnificent

  The king sat in his bedroom and looked at the wall. In all of the drawings and studies, the dragons were small. They only grew about the size of a tree, maybe a house. Small dragons were the size of a monitor lizard, the babies. The fully grown adults normally were shorter than a roof.

  It was easy to kill dragons, that’s why they had been banished, and tamed. It was like any other beast. The dragons were protected from hunters now, kept locked in zoos for entertainment in other areas of the world. The dragons grew fat, fed by humans, locked in cages with unbreakable chains cuffed on each limb. They were lazy.

  This new dragon didn’t appear in any books. It was mentioned in some fictions. The size of the beast was uncanny. Some unique outliers the king had found to the traditional dragon slaying stories were pinned on a separate wall.

  The tale of Ben. A knight who killed a dragon with a catapult. He was a mentally challenged son of a lord, who loved to shoot the catapult. His father, loving his mentally challenged son, decided to make sure he could always practise. The king ordered the serf to stay away from Ben’s boulder field, so he could practise every day.

  The men would bring carriages to retrieve the boulders, until they were cracked. Then they would replace the broken ones with new ones. Ben was practising one day, when a giant dragon landed in the field carrying a yak. It had landed there to feed, not expecting to be hit by a boulder. The dragon started clawing at the belly of the dead yak with it’s claws, and then began to eat. The dragon’s head exploded as Ben, the mentally challenged knight, landed a perfect hit, directly on the beast.

  He was hailed as a hero, and a book was written about him.

  Another strange dragon kill was the serpent of the lake. The king found the short story in a compilation of mysteries. It was written by a traveller who collected stories of cryptids and unnatural creatures.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  An unnamed fisherman was high on a cliff above a lake when a dragon attacked him. It was the size of a horse, and bright green. The fisherman was pulled off the cliff and landed in the water. The dragon dove into the water to eat the fisherman, but he was a very good swimmer, and started heading for the shore. The dragon started to fly up, out of the water but was allegedly eaten by a large snake. The fisherman swam for shore and never returned to the lake again. The snake was apparently ‘massive’ according to the fisherman. That was a dead end. The fisherman’s tale was brief, and did not contain the location of the lake.

  The third, most enticing story to the king.

  The harpoon.

  A whaling ship carrying nordic fishermen in the north seas was sailing at night when a dragon the size of a house attacked. It set the sails on fire. The whalers shot the dragon with a harpoon, and it stabbed straight through the beast. The harpoon was massive. This book contained pictures. The king saw a large man with rippling muscles standing next to a ship. The ship had a harpoon ballista mounted on the front. The king’s mind started turning.

  He wanted to design a crossbow that could shoot a harpoon big enough to kill that dragon.

  He started designing on paper, making crude illustrations of crossbows. Then the king started upscaling the project. The crossbow trigger was replaced by a lever on the ground. The ballista could rotate and tilt up and down. The tower would be reinforced and have a reloading station. The harpoons would be tree trunks, capped with spearheads made of iron.

  The king ordered some of his best builders to begin to build a prototype.

  He looked at his wall. Most knights killed dragons with swords, arrows. Every dragon story in his library had heroes slaying dragons with a team of twenty men. He was outmatched. This was no regular tale of Dragons.

  This was truly a fight against the apocalypse.