"I really did hit it..."

"Sure..."

"He never listens..."

"Well, it runs in the family..."

"And when he does it's always with this disappointed scowl, like somebody skimped on the meat in his sandwich." Hiccup turned on the porch, squared his shoulders (and flicked his mouthpiece back so that his words wouldn't accidentally be broadcast all over town), and deepened his voice to a barely passable imitation of General Stoik. "Who's in charge of the rations? I'm demoting him, he brought me the wrong offspring! I ordered an extra-large boy with beefy arms! Extra guts-and-glory on the side! This here - this is a talking fishbone!"

Gobber chuckled and shook his head. "Now, you're thinking about this all wrong. It's not so much what you look like, it's what's inside that he can't stand."

Hiccup stared at Gobber, his expression asking louder than any words, and that's supposed to make me feel better somehow? "Thank you for summing that up," he finally replied, turning toward the door.

"Look, the point is, stop trying so hard to be something you're not."

Hiccup shrugged dejectedly. "I just want to be one of you guys." He pushed his way through the door.

Gobber sighed and turned around. He was due in the tactics hall.

It took about thirty seconds for Hiccup to get out the back door, unnoticed and without his headset, pad, regulation pistol, or anything else that could constitute as an electronic. All he had on him was a heavy-duty hunting knife and a printed map folded into a notebook.

He was going hunting.

"Either we finish them or they finish us!" General Stoik boomed at his troops. "If we find the nest and destroy it, the dragons will leave; they'll find another home." He banged his fist on the table, right on a blurry spot on a large map. Somewhere within that poorly-charted area was the nest. "We're launching one more search before the ice sets in!"

"Those ships never come back," a faceless man said from among the enlisted.

"We're soldiers - it's an occupational hazard. Now who's with me?"

The reaction was less than enthusiastic. And for good reason. That area was poorly charted, as near as anyone could tell, because the dragons all seemed to generate a kind of force field that neutralized every known area-scanning equipment. Their own dragon-training arena didn't show up very well on radar because of the captive dragons there. The more dragons were in an area, the bigger and denser the force field was as they reinforced each other. And although no one had seen it, the fact that dragons were still coming from this nest for raids no matter how many of them were killed suggested that there were a lot of dragons.

Stoik could have simply drafted himself a unit. However, he maintained the peace within the village after a fashion by letting them at least think that following an order was their idea. He straightened his shoulders and played his trump card.

"All right: those who stay will look after Private Hiccup."

Suddenly he had so many volunteers.

"That's more like it."

Gobber scratched his chin and started to stand. "Well, I guess I'll be packing my undies."

The man's fascination with underwear was always a mystery to Stoik. "No, I need you to stay and train the new privates; see if any of them can be promoted in four weeks." He settled by his friend.

Gobber thudded back down. "Oh, perfect." Then he turned, as though something had just occurred to him. "And while I'm busy, Hiccup can cover the stall. Broken guns in need of repair, explosives to rewire, lots of time to himself, what could possibly go wrong?"

There were so many answers to that question that Stoik didn't know where to start - and that, he quickly saw, was the point. "What am I going to do with him, Gobber?"

"Put him in training with the others."

"Oh, I'm serious."

"So am I."

"He'd be killed before you let the first dragon out of its cage!"

"Oh, you don't know that..."

"Yes, I do..."

"No, you don't..."

"Yes, actually, I do..."

"No, you don't!"

"Listen," Stoik heaved himself to his feet again and started pacing, "You know what he's like. From the time he could crawl he's been...different. He never listens, he has the attention span of a sparrow...I take him fishing and he goes hunting for - for trolls!"

"Trolls exist!" Gobber proclaims, waving his mug - unwittingly revealing yet another oddity about him. "They steal your socks, but only the left ones; what's with that?"

"When I was a boy," Stoik began (ignoring Gobber's muttered, "Oh, here we go,"), "My father told me to bang my head against a rock and I did it! I thought it was crazy, but I didn't question it. And do you know what happened?" ("You got a headache.") "That rock split in two. That was when I knew what a soldier was capable of; even as a boy I knew what I was, what I had to become..." Stoik sat down again and finally voiced what sounded - to him - almost like a defeat. "Hiccup is not that boy."

"You can't stop him, Stoik; you can only prepare him." Gobber shrugged. "I know it seems hopeless, but the truth is, you won't always be around to protect him. He's going to get out there again. In fact, he's probably out there now."