To spend time with one another was a rare treat for Dragons, or at least, that's what Aqua told me. Well, it was a treat for us, for most other dragons that only met each other to do battle, establish hierarchies, kill each other and sometimes take one another as a mating slave, well, it was certainly no treat, more of a threat really.

  But well, unlike other dragons, we could solve our problems by talking, or by playing a game, or by talking it out while I'm losing at just about every game I could think of, including whatever the hell I had wound up making when I was working on trying to recreate a trading card game that I clearly was not as good at as I thought I was.

  "I think I like this game..."

  Have I created a crackboard crack addict?

  Shit, have I created Cardboard Crack in this world? I might've made a terrible mistake. The worst mistake. I must ponder and reflect on what I've done for the rest of my days.

  Or at least until I forget that this is my fault. "I like it too," I said.

  We had spend a lot of time working on this, the initial project had changed a lot from when I started recreating it based entirely on some other game I had played, I didn't really remember all the rules perfectly so some of this I've been basically making up on the go, with Aqua's input helping me think things through a little further.

  It's nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of, especially someone who is a lot more thoughtful than I am and doesn't, apparently, just decide to go with whatever the first thing that comes to their mind is.

  "I think this date has been very satisfactory," she said, nodding. "So we should move on to the next step, we should-"

  And then suddenly everything exploded.

  Or, rather, our little snow refuge was blasted by what I can only assume is someone's really bad case of halitosis, as the roaring noise of something breathing really, really hard hit my ears, the vibrations strong enough to shatter all the ice and causing the entire refuge collapse on top of us.

  Before I could even say anything, Aqua transformed into her full size form once more and in the motion of doing so, she blasted all the snow away, pushing me also as she did that, I had to catch myself and attempt to land on all four limbs instead of rolling like a dumb lizard. I rolled like a majestic lizard as I failed to catch myself.

  Turning to where the attack come from, I-

  "Is that a goddamn turtle?"

  It was a goddamn turtle.

  It was a turtle that had several of the mountains that I had seen before on its back. It was a turtle the size of a small island, with a shell so astonishingly immense that I confused it with mountains.

  It was so big even Aqua looked small next to it, and Aqua's huge!

  "What the hell is a turtle this big doing this far north? What's it even eat?! Everything here's frozen!" I huffed.

  "Do I look like I know that?!" Aqua responded. "It's a Giant Island Turtle!"

  Once again, I curse this woeful automatic translation bullshit because that sounds so mundane and boring that it's actually turning me off of the whole thing. "But why is it HERE?"

  "It must've walked obviously!"

  "Walked?! Here?! Wouldn't we have felt its steps?" I asked "With a body that big I would've expected to hear its breathing or its heart or even the blood going through its body!"

  We actually might have heard that and just ignored it, there were strong winds and nature noises all the time after all, especially for us who had such strong senses.

  Its scales were gray, it had a beak that formed into a hook about the size of my head, sixteen legs along its elongated, oval-shaped body, a tail with spikes so large they had snowy tips and no eyes... no, it did have eyes, it had thousands of eyes, strewn about all over its body, none of them was large.

  I was slowly realizing, it had no weak points anywhere, at least, not ones easily exploited. I could guess that its 'head' didn't contain a brain, and even the underside of its body was covered in the scales that seemed to cover all of its body.

  This must be some sort of world ending final boss type threat, or maybe a Bonus Boss, the kind that awakens after the plucky protagonist reaches the end of his story and has very few opponents to measure themselves against.

  "Do we need to actually fight this thing? This seems like it's just going to be very defensively strong and just eat our attacks," there might not be a concept of having high hp and defenses in real life, but it was a giant turtle with a strong shell, there was no way it would be anything but super tough?

  "This thing interrupted our date. It WILL die," Aqua hissed, as she swam up through the air dodging another blast of air that was basically the Turtle just burping really loudly, which I had to dodge as well because as it turns out sound doesn't come out in neat beams but in ever expanding waves.

  And let me tell you, you do NOT want to feel the sensation of sound waves stronger than any you've ever heard before ripping through your intestines, just having the edge of the soundwaves catch my tail as I flew away was enough to vibrate through my entire body.

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  Everything around and below us, the vast expanse of snowy white serenity, was turned into a chaotic mess of fissures, vaporized snow and raining ice.

  I took flight and went high, high above, though it was staggering to see just how truly huge the turtle actually was. Its moves were lumbering and so slow it was almost like it was caught moving in slow motion while the world around it was moving normally, but of course, with its absolutely immense size, even taking a single step caused earthquakes, shattered the land and caused avalanches in all the mountains around us.

  No doubt repercussions of even just this much of a battle would be felt across the world.

  Which means we should probably not take too long and not allow this thing to even really move. We had to end it quickly, before it managed to stand fully upright, because if we knocked it down it would probably cause world destroying disasters, earthquakes, volcanos, might even cause dogs and cats to live together.

  Aqua blasted the turtle's head with pressure, causing its scales to shatter and digging a well on its head that soon became a white, black, blue and red geyser, as four different kinds of fluids, what looked like fat, some sort of ichor, blood and... some weird blue goo, it exploded out of the turtle's newly made wound.

  Probably a weird effect from being hit with such a physics breaking attack as a directed blast of environmental pressure.

  The water the turtle itself had blasted into the air was gathered into a singular sphere, a sea's worth of water gathered into a sphere about the size of my fist, and then blasted into that same hole that Aqua had just made, before expanding all of a sudden.

  No matter how physically tough the turtle was, water cannot be compressed, Aqua of course was not subjected to such limitations, being the Ruler of all things Wet and Fishy, but the turtle's flesh, bone and other inside bits did not manage to contain the ocean it had just been flooded with at all, and exploded into a shower of multicolored gore.

  As I suspected, there were very few organs in the turtle's head, almost all of it seemed to just be meat and bone, which painted much of the landscape red, making the already destroyed place look even worse.

  It's almost enough to make me feel bad about the destruction of such a naturally serene, beautiful and peaceful environment.

  But I didn't have time to worry about that because the turtle, without a fucking head, could apparently still roar, and because it no longer had a head its roar came out garbled, weaker and omnidirectional from the stump where its head used to be.

  I expect big things to be strong and hard to kill, it really only makes sense, but I reserve the right to be annoyed that things don't die when you blast their heads apart. That is a sacred convention, you put the brain in the head, you destroy the head, and the thing stops living! That's how living things work!

  My ears were ringing, I'm pretty sure some of my internal organs were liquefied and I've got it on good authority that up is down, left is right and everything smells of the sea.

  Shaking my head and recovering from the sensation of confusion left upon me by the disgustingly potent screeching roar from the turtle, I looked down to see Aqua, much closer to the source of the roar, had collapsed to the ground, blood was coming out of her eyesockets and ears, no doubt the result of the attack.

  The turtle started to rumble and the ground quaked as it started to lift itself up. I could see the signs of boiling right where its stump was, and then it blasted what appeared to be a gigantic torrent of blue goo out of its mouth, but of course, having no head, it blasted the blue goo all over the place.

  It was like someone put their thumb at the tip of a hose, some of it came out as mist, sprayed so thinly that it did nothing, but most of it came out as a tidal wave of what, to my eyes, looked like cool mint toothpaste, part of it had an oily texture, there were glops of partially melted fat, chunks of bone and rivers of blood running alongside the ridiculously overwhelming goo wave.

  That said, despite the nature of the attack being disrupted, it still managed to sweep Aqua, forcing me to fly down and grab her, raising her with me as I dodged around the rain of thick, heavy and freezing cold goop.

  I even had to tuck my wings in and do a cool spinning move, that would've been a nice trick to pull if there was anyone to watch me do it, but unfortunately Aqua still had no eyes or functioning ears, probably was still conked out from the omnidirectional roar even, she wasn't very responsive even when I chucked her far away.

  I turned back to the turtle, which was working on narrowing the spray of blue goop and other assorted bits of its own body, and it was succeeding, as it aimed its attack at me. I revised my initial assesment, it had hundreds of thousands of eyes all over its body, in every one of its legs, and in many places around its shell.

  It could probably see everything.

  "You think you're tough and strong just because you're tough, you think you're mighty because you managed to catch Aqua by surprise," I growled at the faceless turtle, as I flapped my wings and with a burst of speed, dodged around and through the ever narrowing cone of attack from its spraying goo.

  It didn't answer.

  As expected.

  It has no mouth, but it can still scream, because it stops its attack only to follow it up with another roar, not quite omnidirectional this time, instead, blasted mostly in my direction.

  But you see, sound moves far slower than I do, and I now know how your attacks work, you stupid brainless turtle!

  The sound waves are exactly that, sound waves, it doesn't actually have the ability to manipulate the fundamental forces of reality the way we do, its attack is purely done through physical means, and what that means is that my authority trumps its brute force, letting loose my power, I catch hold of the very air itself and arrest it in place.

  The sound waves need a means to carry, in this case the air, and once I made the air refuse to do so by my will and power, the sound waves simply... stopped.

  Oh man how I do love making the laws that govern the universe my bitch.

  It seemed about to start spraying goo again, turning its body to face me a little more, with its slow and lumbering movements, but all that achieved was just exposing the already immense weak point that was the open, bleeding wound where its neck used to be.

  Thus, I decided to forgo the elements and, this time, I went all in on empowering my Breath Weapon with only the pure intent to turn the Turtle into a giant corpse, throwing my head back, opening my mouth and letting a flash of white light out for only a brief moment, splitting the sky and revealing the stars beyond the atmosphere, turning my mouth on the Turtle, and letting loose.

  Everything went white, and then, only the hollowed out shell of the turtle remained as it crashed to the ground.

  Though it had only raised itself off the ground by at most the length of one of my claws, the impact of its legs losing strength and it crashing to the ground was enough that I legitimately feared, for a moment, that we might've destroyed the world by just killing something that big.

  Thus, I looked upon the disaster zone we had created, and...

  Well shit that was one messy fight. Holy balls the place is ruined.

  I hummed. "Should we fix this?" I pondered to myself. "Can we fix this even?"

  There was so much blue goo and chunks of turtle. Plus, the giant corpse itself.

  It'd... probably be fine?

  Maybe?

  This was so far away from anywhere humans could get to, so far past the point where they would be totally unable to endure until they invented infinitely better means to resist the elements than what they could use currently, surely, SURELY, the mess we left here would long since have been covered up by the snow?

  I wonder if Aqua's recovered by now.