Tracking the Hoard Thieves [Job:Breaking and Exiting] (Akeya Kuusai/Solo)

Job Description:

Akeya wasn't completely sure whether she had accepted this job because it felt like a simple one, or because of some strange instinctive attraction to the details of the job. Either way, she had felt somewhat odd ever since dragon scales had begun to form on her body, and having something like this to take her mind off of it sounded like a good idea.

The half dragon was flying above the town of Hargeon, heading for the docks while using her sharp eyes to study the streets below. Somewhere at least one group of thugs should be visible while carrying very big bags, spilling jewels left and right in their hurry to get away to their escape ship. What had driven them to try and steal from such a large company in broad daylight she couldn't phantom: had they fallen on such hard times that they preferred facing such large risks of failure over doing nothing? Well, no matter: it wasn't her job to try and figure out the reasoning of these thieves. She just had to catch them, and the job wasn't complicated enough that she would have to try and understand their mindset to catch them.

Of course, the same couldn't be said for her own thoughts. Ever since she and some of the other members of Blue Pegasus had prevent that Harper from getting his hands on that ancient vault of artefacts she had been feeling somewhat awkward. In the end she had managed to not fall prey to the desire to treat the vault of artefacts as an actual hoard, primarily because she never actually got close to it -her teammates had taken care of that- and because she was too busy focusing on the treasure hunters in their way.

However the thought of a hoard had stuck in her mind, something which shouldn't have happened. Was she becoming more like a dragon at a faster pace than she had expected? The dark blue scales that now adorned a fair amount of her body seemed to agree with that theory. Those also made Akeya feel somewhat odd: not enough that it actually disrupted her daily life, but before this point the only scales she had were on parts of her body that she didn't have before the dragonfication had started. To put it more precisely: her wings, tail, and the fins that replaced her human ears came with scales, so she didn't know what they felt or looked like without them. But now parts of her body which had been covered in an olive skin now were clad in dark blue scales. It was a strange experience, and honestly a bit worrying for the winged ninja. She had willingly chosen to take the path where she would slowly lose her humanity and become a dragon instead. But to see the body she was born with actual change like that was...not something she had been completely prepared for.

At least she had managed to avoid drawing too much attention to it. Most of the scales had formed on places where she had clothing to obscure them, so at least most people only ever really saw the couple of bigger but less frequent scales on her shoulders and lower arms. She couldn't hide the fact that she was a half dragon: her wings and tail gave that fact away no matter what she tried. And she didn't want to hide it either. It wasn't something she felt shame about. But if they saw that a large part of her body no longer even had human skin they might get even more awkward around her than they already were, and that would be both annoying and make things more complicated.

Still, maybe she should see if some of the more experienced mages had any knowledge they could share that would help her. While she hadn't heard of anybody actually turning into a half dragon there were plenty of mages who had the ability to temporarily change their shape, and maybe there were others who did have experience changing from one creature into another, just not specifically from human to dragon. There was so much knowledge about that it should contain at least something that was of use to her. That, and other Dragon Slayers were also supposed to slowly turn into a dragon, even if their process was a lot slower than Akeya's own. Her Soul Dance technique had already started the change, so when she became a Dragon Slayer she got a whole lot more transformation out of it than apparently even those who had been Dragon Slayers for years could admit to having experienced. She wasn't sure she had even heard of any who had any draconic traits besides the initial fangs and slitted pupils.

So in that aspect she might be experienced something nobody in recent history had experienced, and maybe finding anybody or anything that could tell her more about it would be a fruitless endeavour with little to no success. Taking notes for herself would also help: that way at least she would make the knowledge available for anybody who might experience it after her, and it would make things more orderly, giving her better chances of figuring out patterns or the like. So far her changes had started with the usual, although she also had received sharpened nails and her ears had changed into spiny fins. After that wings had erupted from her back and from her lower back a long tail had uncurled, both like the fins having dark blue scales. Those had taken some getting used to, even if she had already known how to temporarily grant herself those things before they became a permanent feature of her body. And now dark blue scales were beginning to cover the human parts of her body as well, starting with the forearms, lower legs, hands, feet, sides, and back, with some minor expansions on her outer thighs, upper arms, shoulders, and cheeks. While the wings and tails had appeared to be abrupt, they had actually only become permanent after Akeya had already been able to invoke them temporarily: it looked like she was receiving parts of a dragon piece by piece...

Her thoughts were cut short as she saw a group of people below her running like mad towards the docks, clearly in a big hurry as they ran away from the same direction as Akeya had come for. If they weren't the thieves the half dragon had been tracking she would eat her mask. Changing the angle of her wings she swooped into a dive, aiming right for the humans trying to run away with their stolen hoard.

((Obligatory monster dice post.))

The member 'FilFire' has done the following action : Dice Rolls

'Monster Dice' :

Yep, that must be them: carrying large bags, acting like they were in a real panic about something, and heading straight for their best chance at getting away scot free. The chances of these guys not being the bandits Akeya was tasked with apprehending were so low that she pretty much discarded them without a second thought. Well, at least now she could do what she came here to do: get back into shape after having felt like something was off for quite a while. Of course it wasn't exactly nice to consider these bandits as nothing more than a stress relief, but honestly she couldn't care less. She wasn't going to kill them anyway: just roughen them up a bit, which was going to be necessary to catch them anyway. She was pretty sure she couldn't create enough chains from shadows to capture them all without subduing them first, and she wasn't in the mood to try.

Once she was low enough she didn't waste any time giving them a warning, or even by picking a single target: slowing down she breathed deeply, at the same time that the thieves noticed her shadow already gathering power inside her lungs. When they stared up at her with widening eyes she also didn't give them any time to response: she flapped her wings powerfully at the same time that she pulled her mask down and breathed out, a torrent of black flames erupting from her mouth and smashing straight into the bandits, who were in a real panic at the sudden unprovoked assault from above. The flapping of her wings helped her not be blown backwards by the force of her own Shadow Dragon's Breath, which was quite honestly instilling more fear into her prey than that it was doing any actual damage, most of the bandits in their panic at least having managed to avoid standing in the centre of the blast. Well, time for the cleaning up.

Diving the rest of the way down Akeya landed in the midst of the bandits on all fours, her wings folding up after having delivered a gust of wind that made all the men around her stumble from the raw force behind the wings buffeting them: a dragon didn't need to be a wind mage to topple people over. After a second of pause Akeya jumped up and spun, her long reptilian tail circling around her and whipping all of the men that were still standing in the face. After that Akeya landed and immediately jumped forwards, grabbing one of the bandits that was still reeling from the stinging pain that was suddenly available plenty in a line across his face. Holding him by the neck she swiftly punched him in the gut, then held him up in the air for the others to see while he was still gagging.

"Give up and come with me, or I will beat you all unconscious and drag you."

The bandits all looked at the man trying to free himself from Akeya's iron grip around his throat, then at the half dragon, then at each other: after several seconds they appeared to reach an unspoken agreement and nodded, meekly standing up at the same time as Akeya let go of her victim. That really was too easy. And did a nice job of distracting her for a while.