Beautiful.

Simply beautiful.

Vainqueur had never seen such an exquisite city. Everything, from the pavement to the walls, was made of gold. The builders had even painstakingly recreated an entire park, replacing the flowers, trees, and grass with superior golden duplicates.

“Look at these,” Allison said, pointing at gold statues standing all over the streets. While most represented lizardkin and other reptiles, they also included a great variety of species, such as manlings, elves, beastkin, and orcs; each statue having a wildly different clothing style, although all shared a look of unbridled desire on their faces. Truly the ancient civilization that built this place was a model of minion inclusiveness.

They even had a gold statue of the great wyrm Grandrake, greedily rubbing his belly with a maddened look on his face, in the central plaza. What a refined, dragon-friendly city! Vainqueur could spend an eternity there.

He would. “Minion!”

“Yes, Your Majesty?” His Doer of the Thing answered.

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“After the goldslayer is vanquished, we will move the capital of my great empire, and my hoard, to El Dorado,” Vainqueur decided. “I finally found a place worthy of me.”

“There is something wrong here,” Untasty Allison said, growing more and more agitated. The lich’s nearby presence must have put her on edge. “I do not sense any plants inside the city’s walls.”

“When everything is made of gold, there is no need for green,” Vainqueur replied with pride, but it didn’t improve the dryad’s mood. But not even her whining nor Malfy crying out of joy every time he looked at Manling Victor could spoil the dragon’s mood.

“It is so clean,” Felix the cat commented. “But where are the minions cleaning it up?”

Indeed, El Dorado was incredibly silent. Vainqueur couldn’t hear any bird or local minion for the life of him, and he had excellent ears.

Not that he cared. Indeed, the more time the dragon spent walking on these roads of golden bricks, sensing the metal’s warmth on his scales, the more he felt at home. Vainqueur was not entirely fond of the Thaoten-like architectural style of the buildings, but he would get used to it.

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With this city added to his hoard, he would win his bet with Icefang easily!

A look at a lead pyramid returned him to reality, and reminded him of the threat the city faced. “Sweet Chocolatine,” Vainqueur said. “Do the thing.”

“Do the thing? With whom?”

“The smelling thing.”

“Oh, right.” The werewolf sniffed the air, her excellent sense of smell put to the dragon’s use. She quickly caught a scent and guided them through a wide street, eventually leading the group towards a plaza, right at the steps of a flat-top pyramid.

And there…

They found him.

That fleshless, floating incarnation of pure evil. A monstrous abomination of golden bones and jeweled teeth, whose very appearance mocked a hoard's beauty. Silver-stained robes covered most of its unnatural body, which flew through the sacrifice of orphaned baby gems. Like a serial killer, he had poisoned five gold statues of manling warriors with the curse of lead, and prepared to murder a sixth with his bare hands.

“Furibon!” Vainqueur shouted.

“Vainqueur?” The lich recoiled in fear of dragon justice, cowardly using the surviving statue as a hoard shield. “VAINQUEUR!”

“FURIBON!” Vainqueur shouted louder. “I have crossed the ocean, conquered countries, defeated giants, so I could finally track you down!”

“... and you had nothing better to do?” the lich asked with contempt.

“What could be more important than destroying you, despoiler of the gold?! After you turned the moon to lead?!”

The lich remained silent for a long moment, as he absorbed the words. “That may be the stupidest thing I have ever heard you wyvern say,” Furibon rasped.

And like that, the lich added reptilian racism to his long list of negative qualities. “So you deny transforming the planet moon into a lead hellhole?”

“Happyhole, Your Majesty,” Malfy corrected. “The politically correct term is happyhole.”

“Oh, I see where this is going,” the lich let out a sound sounding like sarcasm, which made sense when faced with suicide by wyrm. “I turn a dragon’s hoard to lead once, once, and it is all people remember me for. Wonderful.”

“You turned a dragon’s hoard to lead?” Felix asked, hanging from Sweet Chocolatine’s arms. “That was stupid, even for a pile of dog food.”

“... it seemed like a good idea at the time,” Furibon said, reveling in his odious historical negationism. “Why am I defending my choices to a cat? Truly I have hit rock bottom today. I feel my intelligence score decreasing just by talking to you.”

“Hey, Furi!” Having partly recovered from his dwarf addiction, Manling Victor waved a free hand at the enemy. Vainqueur wanted to scold him, but instead focused entirely on the lich; he needed to save the gold statue hostage, no matter what.

The lich pointedly ignored the chief of staff, before noticing something out of the ordinary. “Dalton, why are you only wearing boxers and a scythe? No, on second thought, I do not want to know.”

“Get away from the gold statue, you monster!” Vainqueur ordered. “She is innocent!”

The lich let out a deep bellowing sound, which Vainqueur took for a sigh. “I was genuine when I said I never wanted to see you lizard again, and every word you say only reminds me of why. Can we not coexist by ignoring one another?”

“So long as you threaten all that is golden in the world, I shall never rest!” the dragon emperor roared, the ground shaking from the strength of his belief. “I saw the lead pyramid, Furibon! Once your [Transmute Gold to Lead] was a weapon against dragonkind, but now it has become a twisted, perverse addiction!”

“This is different! I am trying to save everyone from this self-replicating gold! If I do not transform El Dorado to lead, the New World is doomed!”

All of Vainqueur’s fears came at the forefront of his mind, as he realized just how deep the lich was willing to sink into depravity. Worse, his minion seemed corrupted by his foul, twisted words. “What do you mean?” Manling Victor asked, his mind overtaken by the villain’s insanity.

His heart torn at the thought, the dragon decided to sacrifice the gold statue hostage for the sake of the greater wealth. With a fearsome roar, Vainqueur opened his mouth and unleashed a mighty fireball at his nemesis before he could drive Manling Victor insane.

“[Za Warudo]!”

Time seemed to freeze for a brief instant, and a split second later, Vainqueur’s fireball only melted gold. The lich had teleported out of the path, coating his body in a stone-like substance and magical protections.

[Curse of Greed] activated.

You can now turn matter to gold on touch.

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