The Girl Who Hacked The Magic System

PoV: ???

The Dark Bottomless Abyss. That's the name of this dimension, where every being that can't fly is doomed to be forever falling.

There aren't many beings native to this place, though. Most of the beings that live here came from other worlds.

Why would anyone in their sane mind come to a place like this?

Well, they wouldn't. Not someone in a sane state of mind would dare to even take a small peek into this place.

And that by itself says lots about the kind of creatures that decided to make this place their home.

Take, for example, this little boy.

He is a dragon. A very old one, having witnessed the rise and fall of countless civilizations throughout the cosmos.

Yeah, 'little boy' was ironic. So please, leave it at that and focus on the boy himself. I mean, dragon. Dragon. Don't kill me, please.

So, the dragon.

He once dreamed of building a civilization himself, so he scoured the cosmos in search of a suitable planet, and when he found it, he set himself to terraform it.

He invited his friends, and together they wove the arias and coagulated energy into elements and created a world. And in there they started playing gods with their toys, I mean, dragonkin civilizations.

When other races, descendants of mammals from some god-ridden place, didn't care. As long as the little apes played by the rules, it was all good.

And of course apes wouldn't acknowledge the rules, much less would they abide by them.

The truth is, when the newcomers started causing problems, he had already lost interest in that toy called 'civilization.' So, naturally, he went to find another thing to pass time and get some mild amusement at least.

He broke a couple of other people's toys in the way, and some people got really mad at him, but he couldn't care less. Breaking toys wasn't enough to fend off his boredom.

In the end, his cosmic pilgrimage brought him to this abyss. A place where the strong come to become stronger, or die trying. Or so he heard.

Die trying. Wouldn't that be nice?

But the universe wouldn't be that kind to him. He is an eternal dragon, after all. He can't simply die. He has to be killed.

And so, after more than a thousand years killing random people in this place, he is bored to death all over again.

Until that little ape came.

It's a female ape, from a race called 'hooman' or something. He never cared for ape names, after all.

No, not Nurtawalladi Za Nadin Zeru'ibni Eres. He would never lower himself to learning the name an ape would call itself.

To his surprise, the ape challenged him, calling for his whole name. It was a formal challenge, spoken in good Draconic. A challenge for a formal duel.

That changed everything. From that moment on, the thing in front of him wasn't a simple ape anymore. She became his challenger. The human goddess Juno.

A dragon will never forget the name of a challenger, after all.

:::

In that darkest of places, where there is only falling and time itself loses meaning, nobody knows for how long this battle has taken place.

The residents of the plane treat it like a weather anomaly. It exists. It's doing its thing in there. Just don't come close to it, and you're good.

Nobody cares. How the fight is going, who is going to win, and who is going to lose. None of it is of any matter for anyone in this place.

As long as the involved parties don't cause a mess in other people's backyards, it's all good. Nobody will look at you twice.

So the years pass. The human concept of tyranny and the draconic concept of rulership keep fighting.

The dragon has the upper hand but never seems to deal the finishing blow. There's always some sort of seed that allows fascism to grow again.

So the human always comes back. Over and over and over and over again.

As two eternal beings for whom time is of no importance at all.

:::

It was in the middle of an exchange of blows that the human felt herself being weakened. As if some vigor had been robbed of her.

It wasn't an effect of the dragon's ability or anything. Just herself becoming weaker, for some reason.

In the instant she felt the change within her, the wavering hesitation almost cost her her life.

Still, the gash in her face and chest was ugly. And she knew that she didn't have a chance in the condition she found herself in at that very moment.

So she turned on her heels and fled without looking back.

The sheer disrespect of her attitude left the dragon outraged. How dare a challenger simply flee like that? It was a shameful display. One that couldn't be left unaccounted for.

The dragon's roars made even the strongest of denizens of this plane of existence tremble and retreat in fear.

"Goddess Juno of the humans. I will hunt you to the ends of the universe. I will find you, and I will kill you. You are going to pay the price for challenging a dragon and then disrespecting the sacred challenge."

:::

Juno didn't hear his roars nor his declaration, as she hadn't fled in any spatial direction. She simply shifted planes.

She had unified all her consciousness into one in hopes of having a chance against Nurta, the king of dragons. And yet, she fell short.

And now she was hurrying, hopping dimensions to get back to her planet.

Something happened while she was absent. The decrease in her strength was sudden and sharp, so there was something wrong with her followers.

She wasn't receiving enough power.

In her mind, only two things could justify that decrease.

The first possibility was that the Church had done a huge fumble that backfired spectacularly. Maybe even with infighting within the Church itself.

The other was that some god from another world invaded her own. This was against the rules all gods were contracted to, but at the same time it wasn't unheard of.

What she really didn't expect to see, when she finally arrived, was the birth of a new native goddess and a war between human nations.