The gleaming gray wyvern opened its mouth in a decidedly snake-like manner. The next moment a wall of noise exploded outwards, causing visible ripples to travel away from its open maw.

 

A millisecond later Lucifer heard the deafening roar of the beast. The noise was so great that it blew Lucifer's black hair backwards.

 

It sounded like a mixture between the high pitched screeching of a bird of prey, and the low bassy umble of an alligator. 

 

Lucifer felt foreign mana attempt to infiltrate her body, to little success as the colorless foreign mana was struggling to penetrate her skin. A miniscule amount entered through Lucifer's eyes and a significantly larger part through her ears. In the end, the amount was inconsequential.

 

The interesting part wasn't the attack itself, but the strange colorless mana itself. It did nothing by itself, seemingly only trying to enter her body. But it felt suspiciously like a watered down version of Aindaeth’s presence.

 

Lucifer watched as the Wyvern hovered in the air. Its large wings caused massive winds with every beat.

 

By the look in the wyverns eyes, Lucifer would guess that her continued defiance was causing the beast to grow angry.

 

“Hmm maybe angry isn't the right word.” she mumbled to herself.

 

While it hovered in place, a sudden look of concentration appeared on the wyverns face, which was immediately replaced by derision.

 

Its long crocodile-like tail began to shimmer in a metallic gray. The spined along the top of the beast's tail grew broader, until they merged together into a single sharp edge, which immediately began to shimmer with mana.

 

The wyvern beat its wings once, accelerating towards Lucifer, before tensing its muscles and executing a maneuver Lucifer would have thought impossible. She'd seen pigeons or smaller birds do it, but she'd never thought it possible for the wyvern to do a front flip.

 

With the momentum from its rotation, the tail came downwards with massive force and speed, bringing with it a feeling of familiarity.

 

Lucifer brought her sword in a well practiced high guard parrying the forceful strike with fluid movements. The tail whipped past her right side and carved a multiple meter deep furrow into the ground as the wyvern returned to its upright position.

 

Lucifer stared into the wyvern's eyes, which widened in surprise. Lucifer opened a soul-sight eye on her temple, which swiveled to look at the wyvern. Once she saw its soul, she knew what the feeling of familiarity was about.

 

While not as complex as the souls of other beings, the wyverns soul was well on its way to claiming sentience. Its soul gave the feeling of open skies and sharp metal. And strangely, self improvement.

 

Lucifer had seen that color many times, yet this mixture was only ever felt in swordsmen.

 

This wyvern was trying to become a swordsman.

 

“Would sword-wyvern work? Feels kinda iffy to say.”

 

While it felt like a slightly smarter animal right now, it would undoubtedly approach and likely achieve personhood sometime soon. The infrastructure to support full sentience was already present, all it needed was time and experiences.

 

Seeing Lucifer distracted gave the wyvern the impression that right now would be the best time to launch another strike. It flapped its wings once to gain some height, before letting itself drop. Once it had some downward momentum, it once again arrested its fall, using the downward force to extend its tail into a lightning fast thrust. 

 

Using the backside of her blade, Lucifer redirected the thrust to the side, before stepping forward and slashing at the spot where the wyvern's tail met its hips. Despite the beast's massive gleaming scales, the tip of her sword cut through them as if they weren't present. Lucifer consciously held back, cutting only through the scales and leaving the underlying musculature intact. 

 

The pain was seemingly enough to get the beast to abandon its immediate aggression, as it flapped its wings once to gain some distance.

 

Lucifer watched as the wyvern hovered in the air, its long sinuous neck arching downward, its face inspecting the fresh wound it had received.

 

The wyvern wasn't fleeing. If it was due to anger or a drive to improve itself, but it hadn't taken the opportunity to leave. Now, it didnt know that Lucifer could fly, likely better than the wyvern itself, but it hadn't even attempted to.

 

“Can't believe I'm doing this shit again.” Lucifer mumbled.

 

With a slight flex of her will, Lucifer forced her physical form to change to her need. Her teeth grew pointy, her throat widened and grew deeper into her chest and her tongue elongated and split at the tip.

 

Opening her mouth wider than should be physically possible, she let out a hiss to test out her changed vocal box.

 

“Shaaaaaaaahhhhh”

 

The wyvern froze the moment the threatening hiss left her lips, causing it to plummet to the ground. It caught itself with the folded up tip of its wings the moment it impacted the ground. The several ton heavy animal caused the ground to shake for a moment, before it lowered its head in submission.

 

Drawing on the connection to Aindaeth, Lucifer pulled as much knowledge about the draconic language into her soul as the connection allowed. With the language came snippets of information and impressions of hierarchy that were important to the nuance of the language. There was a significant difference between the ability to converse with a fully grown dragon and an almost sentient wyvern. 

 

“Child. Young. Hatchling. Inexperienced.”

 

As the throaty rumbling of the draconic language emanated from her throat, Lucifer observed the wyverns' soul. The words “Hatchling” and “Inexperienced” caused a reaction, likely due to some fragmented knowledge of the draconic language the wyvern had inherited. I didn't understand exactly, but by a strange quirk of the draconic language, one didn't actually need to understand the language properly to communicate at least somewhat.

 

Putting more of her soul behind the words, Lucifer repeated those that worked.

 

“Hatchling. Inexperienced. Sword. Weak”

 

Both of the new words caused a reaction that Lucifer was not prepared for. Disappointment flooded the wyverns soul as it understood. It was too weak and inexperienced. 

 

As this moment was likely the first time any being had communicated with it, it naturally felt strong emotions right now. Also the fact that Lucifer spoke in almost fluent Draconic and the language inherently suppressed those of weaker bloodlines.

 

With a sigh, Lucifer raised her sword again, moving into a well practiced but loose high guard.

 

“Sword. Weak. Learn. Fight.”

 

The wyvern's eyes opened in surprise and it immediately sprung to its feet. Or more like two back legs and its folded up pair of wings.

 

It took an appraising look at lucifer and the way she held herself, before whirling around and slashing in a complete circle. Lucifer redirected the strike upwards, which caused the wyvern to lose its footing. It managed to right itself just in time, going into another stab, this time using its tail like a scorpion. Lucifer moved a step to the right and let the thrust bury itself into the ground.

 

With deliberately slow movements, Lucifer ran the tip of her blade along the base of its tail again, to show the wyvern what it did wrong.

 

“Slow. Predictable”

 

Predictable did not elicit a reaction, so she said the word again, while echoing the impression of anticipated movements with her soul. A strange ripple went across the wyverns soul for a moment, before it moved again.

 

Slash after slash and thrust after thrust, the wyvern threw its tail around. The mana enhanced edge caused a strange whistling sound whenever it parted the air.

 

For such a large creature, the wyvern was surprisingly flexible and quick. But the unorthodox body plan translated to an equally unorthodox swordsmanship style.

 

Lucifer parried and dodged the wyverns' attack, only ever counterattacking as a demonstration. 

 

The longer she played with the wyvern, the more she understood the style of swordsmanship the beast had developed for itself.

 

With every movement the beast threw around several hundred kilos of metal enhanced tail, cutting through trees and leaving deep furrows in the ground. 

 

Despite the massive power the swings had, both due to the wyvern's considerable mass and the incredible sharpness of its tail, Lucifer had little to no problem with deflecting the attacks. The tail's incredible length made it easy to use tiny bits of leverage to deflect. The wyvern's tail also wasn't a sword in the true sense. It did not have a spot where one would grab on and hold, instead it was attached to the wyvern through its spine and the surrounding musculature.

 

The wyvern jumped into a powerful backflip, creating a lightning fast upward slash as its tail followed. Lucifer took a step to the side, dodging the tail. And started to press the attack.

 

The wyvern was forced on the defensive as Lucifer attacked from different angles. The fire of ambition in her soul flared as she finally began to understand the sword of the wyvern.

 

Her movements had been tight, controlled and fluid. But now they started to grow more ferocious. 

 

She changed her grip, letting her right hand slip all the way down the handle of her sword, until she had as much reach as possible. Her swings turned into wide sweeps that clashed with the wyvern's tail in reverberating metallic noises.

 

The wyvern responded in kind, its massive tail clashing with Lucifer's sword, the impacts causing the soil to be blasted away.

 

Lucifer began to grin, the fire in her soul stoked to new heights. Loosening her control a bit, Lucifer's body grew, gaining another 50 centimeters in height. Her shoulders broadened and her limbs elongated as new muscles started to bulge along her arms.

 

“FASTER!” she demanded of the wyvern.

 

Now with a body more suited to this kind of swordsmanship, they continued their fight. Lucifer started to focus less and less on deflection, instead matching the wyverns style with wide powerful swings.

 

She no longer used her kinetic energy, instead focussing solely on the feeling that was slowly building between the two of them.

 

With every clash of their blades, the deep reverberating sound of vibrating metal grew louder.

 

Lucifer began to lose herself in the feeling, the rhythm of clashing metal. Unconsciously she loosened the control of her body a bit more, growing centimeter by centimeter with every hundred swings.

 

Despite the wyvern not growing in tandem, it nonetheless managed to keep up. While the wild swings of its tail had lost not a sliver of power, they slowly grew into something cohesive. It used the movement and inertia of its tail to continuously throw its body around, leaving fewer and fewer openings. 

 

Lucifer finally arrived at a feeling of utter focus. All that was left was her own sword and the incoming blade of the wyvern. The world around her froze as she stretched out her right arm.

 

Something was once again building up in the world around her. She felt like sharp metal and unstoppable force.

 

In her peripheral vision Lucifer saw the wyvern almost mirror her motions. Two steps into a 360 degree turn and Lucifer whirled her sword around more like a baseball bat than a proper sword.

 

The world froze around her for a moment as the sound of vibrating metal echoed around her. The edge of her sword began to gleam with a sheen of mana. Without her conscious volition, Lucifer's still draconic mouth spoke.

 

[Steel Dragon Annihilation: Decapitation]

 

The moment was shattered as Lucifer's sword came into contact with the wyvern that had just executed the same move as her. The sound of tortured metal rang out as their blades crashed into each other. Lucifer's body was larger than it usually was, but even her enlarged form couldn't counteract the several hundred kilos of mass behind the wyverns strike. Had she been fighting like usual she could have just absorbed the kinetic energy, but something strange had overtaken her.

 

Instead Lucifer was launched backwards with tremendous force, skipping across the ground and breaking through trees multiple times, until she landed in something to the noise of a thunderous crash of broken wood and whining horses.

 

Lucifer took a moment to just think. Something strange had come over her. Instead of sharpening her own sword style, she had taught the wyvern the basics. And then? 

 

“What the fuck is happening?” Lucifer grumbled to herself.

 

Then she had thought of a new sword style.

 

“What the fuck! That's not something that just happens!” 

 

With a groan Lucifer extracted herself from the wooden carriage she had impacted. With a heavy pull, she removed her leg from between two planks of wood, causing the carriage to crumble and her pants to rip almost entirely.

 

Now, free from the pile of shattered wood, but noticeably more naked than before, Lucifer beheld her audience.

 

She froze, because standing in a semicircle around her, were dozens of humans, weapons pointed at her. Some were on horses that had been spooked by her unfortunate entrance, while the rest were on the ground.

 

All of them wore heavy armor, some made of leather and bone and some made of normal metal.

 

Interestingly, every one of them carried a two handed weapon that was pointed at Lucifer. They were also incredibly muscular.

 

Now that they had her attention they began to yell in a language she did not understand and by the sounds of their voices, they were yelling orders. Most likely for her to identify herself or something of that nature.

 

Lucifer would have gladly taken a moment to engage with the first humans she'd seen since coming here, if it weren't for the sound of something large approaching at rapid speeds.

 

Her attention moved to the furrow her unfortunate tumble had cut through the forest. A nearly straight line separated the trees, where Lucifer had crashed through everything that was in her way. 

 

And from that gap in the trees, Lucifer saw the wyvern approaching. It flew close to the ground, its wings scything through the trees, most likely due to the metallic shimmer coating them.

 

It broke through the treeline not a moment later, immediately moving into a lightning fast frontflip, slashing its tail downwards.

 

Lucifer, now no longer distracted by the strange happenings, raised her right hand. The moment the wyverns sword-tail came into contact, she rapidly siphoned off every last bit of kinetic energy the beast carried.

 

For a moment it stayed frozen in place, before crumpling to the ground in a heap, its entire momentum gone.

 

The surrounding humans immediately tensed and began yelling amongst themselves, while the wyvern righted itself with what sounded like a disappointed whine.

 

It took a few lumbering steps once it was upright, causing the surrounding humans to flinch. The metallic gray beast lowered its head until it was below Lucifers and then looked into her eyes.

 

“Why does this keep happening?” she mumbled to herself as she saw the wyverns gaze. It looked just like a dog that wanted to continue play time.

 

Engaging the necessary organs to speak proper draconic, Lucifer hissed again.

 

“Leave. Later. Sword. Fight.”

 

The humans flinched at the sound, as it seemingly caused headaches for quite a few of them.

 

The wyvern whined once again, but rose to its full height, before launching itself into the air with a massive beat of its wings.

 

Lucifer observed for a moment, hoping the wyvern wouldn't disrupt her first interaction with a new culture any more than it already had.

 

Once she was sure that it had really flown away, she began to undo the changes to her physical body she had unconsciously made. She shrunk by a good half meter, while her voice box returned to something more suited to human languages. She kept the teeth, because intimidation always helped.

 

With her body in its usual shape, she lowered her gaze, to finally look at her audience and the one suspiciously short man standing before her.