Dragons were supposed to be a majestic and graceful species.

Everyone knew that that they were apex predators at the top of the food chain. The typical dragon could easily live for trillions of years, and their scales were harder than the remnant cores of burnt stars. It was pretty much impossible to eat a sky dragon, and it went without saying that the Ryūjin (竜人) had no natural predators.

Ume's mother always told her to hold her head up high.

Nothing in the entire universe should faze her.

Dragons were more elegant than celestial swans. When a dragon leapt into the skies, they ought to be swift and graceful like a dolphin in the water. A dragon's song should be more alluring than a siren's voice, and their snaking dance through the skies ought to be mesmerizing and hypnotic like a beautiful tapestry of art.

Tripping over one's claws or getting tangled up in a knot was absolutely not allowed. In fact, it was a ridiculous notion. Who ever heard of a cat clumsy enough to trip and fall on its back? This was completely preposterous. A cat always landed gracefully on their feet. Similarly speaking, sky dragons were always stylish when swimming through the sky.

Always!

...Except at this precise moment, Ume came tumbling out of inter-dimensional slip space like a large ball of spaghetti.

It was an extremely unflattering look, and Ume wasn't exactly sure how she managed to get her long snake-like tail knotted around her neck five times over. The position was extremely uncomfortable, and in fact she was slightly stuck. Her left front claws were tangled up with her back legs in this weird contorted position, and she spun like a destabilized smoking rocket ship in desperate mayday.

She crashed into the ground like a meteor, sending a large explosion of dust and debris into the air. Although it didn't hurt at all, the impact left a massive crater in the bedrock several kilometers wide. She had probably been traveling somewhere around twenty kilometers per second, which was typical for a falling asteroid, but at least her dragon scales were pretty sturdy.

...Hopefully, no one saw that.

Dragons were not supposed to be fall out of the sky like a dead brick. >__<

If her mom ever heard about her spectacularly ungraceful landing, Ume would probably be grounded in that depressing cave for another five centuries...

+ + +

After lying dazed in a crater for a few minutes, Ume eventually flailed a bit and started trying to untangle herself. To preserve our poor protagonist's pride, we shall refrain from mentioning exactly how many hours it took for her to accomplish this gargantuan feat. Ume was nearly half a kilometer in length, so it was clearly a logistical nightmare. It basically the equivalent of Rapunzel trying to unwind a messy knot in her absurdly long hair.

Anyways.

Eventually... Ume finished cleaning herself up.

The moon might have risen and fallen a few times during that span of time, but dragons had a notoriously distorted sense of time. From Ume's perspective, she really hadn't taken that long at all. Back at home, her father had spent fifteen years taking a bath in a pool of lava, and dragons were well known to sleep for hundreds of years. It didn't feel right to sleep for any shorter periods of time — since it would be like climbing into bed and then climbing out ten seconds later — which would obviously make any dragon very very grumpy.

Incidentally, Ume hadn't yet gone to sleep a single time ever since she hatched from her egg.

Ume floated out of the massive crater that she had formed and slowly peeked around.

Her first impression of this place was that it resembled an asteroid field, except this clearly wasn't outer space. The skies were blue and there were puffy clouds above her head. Thousands of rocks were floating in the air around her, ranging from a several kilometers in length to small truck-sized boulders. Some of the rocks had grass and stuff growing on them, so they resembled tiny floating islands, except a lot of them were completely barren. Many of the rocks collided with each other periodically, coalescing into larger clumps and fracturing again on a regular basis. Due to Ume's collision a few days ago, this area was particularly turbulent with countless pieces of floating rubble.

As she drifted and weaved beneath some of the larger rocks, Ume realized that she was close to the edge of this "asteroid field". Many of the islands in this peripheral area were smaller than the ones that drifted towards the core, and Ume could vaguely see plenty of bigger islands on the distant horizon.

Perhaps she could investigate those larger sky islands later.

The young eastern dragon flew in a wide arc and examined a couple of giant levitating rocks that had so many holes that they looked Swiss cheese. They really did resemble space asteroids, and these rock formations were peculiar. They were not limestone, and off the top of her head, Ume could not think of any other mineral that left giant holes likes Swiss cheese in a planetary atmosphere. Based on a number of books that she read back in her cave, wind and rain would typically wear away any odd formations over time, and asteroids only had holes in space because there was no atmosphere to erode the numerous craters.

Intrigued yet perplexed, Ume drifted back to her original crash site and sat back down in her crater.

She pondered a little about what she was going to do.

The 53-year-old dragon was certainly excited, and even a bunch of floating rocks was extremely interesting to her! However, she was technically running away from her fiancé, and she had no idea how long it would take for him to track her down. If Zetsubou traced her path through inter-dimensional slip space, this cluster of rocks was probably the first place he would stumble upon.

Ume probably needed to leave this place pretty soon...

There was an itchy feeling on Ume's back.

She craned her head around, and she found a tiny slime nibbling on her scales.

"Oh my god it's so cute!!!"

Ume had read about slimes in her books, but she was surprised by how small they were in person. From her perspective, slimes were the relative size of an ant, but then again humans were the authors of many of her favorite books, and humans were already tiny. Perhaps she needed to adjust her expectations about this place. Everything in this world seemed to be much smaller than the megafauna she was familiar with back at home.

This particular slime was trying to eat her, which Ume found absolutely adorable.

Many species of slimes had digestive juices that could dissolve nearly anything, provided they were given enough time. That said, it would probably take several quadrillion years for this slime to dissolve a single one of her scales, so it wasn't like she was particularly worried about her health.

Actually, Ume was more afraid that she would squish the slime by accident... @-@

Perhaps slimes were the ones responsible for chewing all the giant holes on these levitating rocks.

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