Falsely Accused, I Started Plundering Monster Traits

That dragon couldn’t really be the Anchor... could it?

A sense of despair crept over Lin Yan. The kind normally reserved for watching your phone slip out of your hand mid-shit and drop straight into the toilet.

There had been gunfire from the streets when it appeared, then the deeper, much heavier rhythm of a heavy machine gun opening up somewhere in the fog. Grenade rounds had gone off too, several explosions close enough together that he had felt them through the ground.

Their fire had hit the dragon. He was sure of that.

What he hadn’t seen was how much damage any of it had done.

The fog had hidden most of the fight, and the dragon had been too far away for him to make out individual wounds. It had roared, turned on the people shooting at it, and answered with enough fire to turn the street below into an oven. Maybe they had hurt it. Maybe they had done more than that.

It certainly hadn’t looked close to dying.

Lin Yan’s own heavy machine gun could hurt things that ordinary rifles struggled with, but there was a difference between putting holes in something and killing a creature that large. Even if every round got through the scales, how much ammunition would it take before the damage actually mattered?

He had no idea.

Which meant he needed bigger weapons, or at least people who knew what heavier equipment had made it into the zone.

The emergency units outside the original perimeter were his best bet. Reeves’s team hadn’t been the only force deployed around Fairmont. There had been other response units, heavier support, equipment Lin Yan had never bothered asking about because at the time there had been no reason to.

If any of them had been dragged into the Convergence with their gear, finding them had just become a priority.

Then another possibility occurred to him.

Lin Yan looked across the convenience store at the older knight.

The Black Dragon had been hunting these people for days. The Church knew what it was, knew what it could do, and had sacrificed an entire decoy force just to keep it away from the girl sitting a few feet away.

"Does your Church have anything that can kill the Black Dragon?"

The older knight regarded him for a moment. "Why do you ask?"

"Because—"

"We do."

The Saintess was still eating the chips Marcus had given her. The older knight looked at her, but didn’t contradict her.

"What is it?"

This time the older knight answered. "Something the Church prepared for the Black Dragon."

Not much of an answer, but enough.

"Where is it?"

"At the church."

That explained why they had been so desperate to get there.

"What does the church look like?"

"It’s built of dark stone, with several towers above the main hall," the knight said. "The tallest can be seen from well outside the city."

Something about the description tugged at his memory.

Had he seen something like that before?

Lin Yan thought back to the moment the Convergence began. He had been near Fairmont Regional then, watching the other world bleed into the streets through the pharmacy window. Through the thickening fog, dark stone towers had risen above the hospital where nothing had been before.

The more he thought about it, the better it matched.

"I think I’ve seen it."

The older knight looked at him. Lin Yan pulled out the map from the operation and found Fairmont Regional. "When the city changed, something with towers like that appeared around the hospital."

The knight didn’t understand the last word.

"A place where we treat the sick."

"And you know where it is?"

"I know where it was."

The hospital’s position on the map was clear enough, but the map belonged to Fairmont before the Convergence. Roads had been stretched, broken apart and mixed with streets from another world. The few kilometers between them and Fairmont Regional could now mean almost anything.

Still, a direction was better than nothing.

Lin Yan showed him the hospital’s position relative to where they had entered the area. "We head this way. As long as enough of Fairmont is left, I can keep us moving roughly toward it. If we start getting into places you recognize, you take over."

The older knight agreed.

Lin Yan had been expecting the two groups to split once they finished talking. Now there was no reason to. He needed whatever the Church had brought for the Black Dragon, and they needed someone who could at least point them toward the place where their church might have ended up.

Before they left, Lin Yan realized he still didn’t know the girl’s name.

"What’s your name?"

"Lucia."

"So how did you become a Saintess?"

Lucia thought about it while eating another chip. "I don’t know. People from the Church came for me one day and told me I was one. Then they said I had to go with them, so I did."

"They never told you why?"

She shook her head.

Lin Yan looked at the older knight. "Why her?"

"My lady has told you what she knows."

That was clearly as far as the conversation was going. Lin Yan left it there, and they finished the last of the food before heading back into the fog.

The streets stopped matching the map almost immediately, but the hospital’s general direction still gave them something to work with. Lin Yan recognized enough of Fairmont to keep them moving, even when familiar streets opened into stretches of stone road that had never existed and buildings appeared where entire blocks should have been.

There were rotters along the way, though nothing like the group that had surrounded the knights earlier. Most wandered alone or in twos and threes through the fog, and Lin Yan and the older knight cut down the ones that got in their way without stopping for long.

After another one fell, Lin Yan asked, "You know what’s causing them?"

"The heretics," the knight said. "Wherever they passed, the dead began to rise. We never learned how they did it."

Lin Yan glanced down at the corpse as they moved on.

So there are human enemies too.

Some time later, static suddenly hissed from Lin Yan’s radio. The channel had been dead until now, and his hand went to it immediately.

A voice broke through the noise.

"...to all units. Any surviving personnel receiving this transmission, respond."

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