A/N Hey guys.

The older readers may have noticed that this is not the original chapter.

That is because Venomheart the Dreamer has informed me that it was too close to the original story, Trust is Earned.

Without further ado, I present to you the new chapter.

This is Berk. Twelve days north of hopeless.

Solidly on the meridian of misery. The food here is tough and tasteless, the Vikings that live in the village... even more so.

It's been around for seven generations, unwanted animal problems notwithstanding.

The only problem is the pests. Some places have mosquitoes or mice. We have dragons.

The oversized reptiles like to drop in for a surprise nighttime visit every week or so and announce themselves with much commotion.

We Vikings don't like that. Don't tell anyone but we like our beauty sleep.

So we decided to stop them in the only way that we Vikings know how. We kill them.

My name is Hiccup. Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third.

It's a great name, one designed to scare off the trolls, who oddly enough have the nerve to only steal left socks.

I'm the heir. You wouldn't expect that but I'm the heir to the tribe. A bitter one, thanks to how underappreciated I am, but the rather skinny heir nonetheless.

Because of this I am effectively an outcast among the tribe, although my mentor in the forge – Gobber – is like a second father to me (because my first is too busy running the tribe and fighting dragons to keep me in check).

I've always wanted to prove myself by killing a dragon all on my own, thing is, I'm not very hands on at killing stuff, so I rely on my incredible brain to make things to do it for me.

Terrible Terrors are the easiest on their own, but in my personal experience generally not worth going after. These things are tiny, about the size of a cat but swifter and more agile. On their own they aren't really a threat, but they have a tendency to stick together in packs of twenty or so. Their fire, like some other dragons, is uncanny and will burn for a long time if it finds a place to stick.

Terrible Terrors are easy. Piddling, for most people other than myself.

I hear Stoick killed one as a baby.

Gronckles are the slowest of the lot, of course, look like toads and generally have the build of a boulder.

A Deadly Nadder would get me a date. These two legged lizards have shiny scales that are deceptively sharp, and are dangerous from both the front and back. It has the hottest fire we know of and burns through everything in sight, while its tail is covered in poisonous spikes that it can fire at will. A shield is essential when fighting them.

The shields are often unusable after the fact.

Hideous Zipplebacks are exotic. Two heads, twice the status.

Only the best go after the Monstrous Nightmares, who have the nasty habit of setting themselves on fire.

But what I really want is the Night Fury. No one knows how many there are or, even what they look like, since we manly Vikings are usually too busy cowering from the incoming blast to be bothered about that kind of thing.

So I went after it and shot it down.

Yes, I, the weediest Viking in all Vikingdom managed to shoot down a Night Fury. How, I hear you ask? I used my brain and invented a bola launcher to shoot bolas farther than anyone I know, even my father.

Once I hit it the Night Fury went down on Raven Point.

Not bad for only a few ropes and balls of rock, huh?

But then I found trouble. Or rather, as often happens, trouble found me, this time in the beastly form of a Nightmare - they drool a lot, who rudely interrupted me by smashing my invention.

And he blew fire at me. Rude!

I led him on a merry chase until I found something to hide behind.

Which only led to another reason why nobody likes me in the village.

Anything that can go wrong around me will go wrong.

In the east they have a name for that. Murphy's law. Here, they call it Hiccup's law, and it never fails. I was hiding behind a pillar that held up the fire towers - giant bowls of fire in the sky. I really have to say that they help the aesthetic. The Nightmare's fire burned through it and it fell, bowl, pillar and all as I scrambled for safety, the brazier snapping off when it hit the ground and rolling through the village as if it were a giant sized top, crashing through houses before it rolled through the docks, missing the ships before it plunged into the sea.

You'd think that would be the end of it.

Oh, and it freed a few of the Nadders in the net who were trying to steal our sheep.

Naturally Stoick wasn't giving me the best of looks.

Trying to convince the villagers that I had in fact hit the Night Fury and was not suffering from what they viewed as my constant delusions was an exercise in futility. Would they listen? Noooooo. Did they care? Noooooo. But I knew that I had hit it!

Which leads me to where I am now, looking up from my improvised sketchbook map, where the most interesting thing was an uninteresting lump of dirt with nothing interesting in it except for a worm.

And I hate worms.

Slimy things.

Another site down, three thousand more to go. I scribbled an x where I thought the spot was, broke the lead of the pencil and scribbled over the rest.

"Oh, the Gods hate me."

"Some people lose their mug or their knife. Now I just had to go off and lose an entire dragon!" I swiped at a branch. It whipped back and hit me in the face, as branches are wont to do.

I glared at the bough, then noticed something about the tree. Something had wrecked it with great force. It looked as if it had been hit by Stoick's hammer. A rend, jagged with splinters showed where a falling object (hopefully a dragon) had hit, snapped the trunk almost in half and left a broken stump standing. The debris scattered around it was almost the size of my arm.

This could only end well.

There! A large trench, gouged into the ground from the tip of the roots forward, almost resembling a rut. Crumbly bits of dirt had been sprayed away from the path and onto neighboring rocks. It looked like some Jotün had used a giant snowshovel to clear away the grass.

Cautiously optimistic, I walked along the trench and crawled up the lip at the other end. As I peeked over the top I gasped and quickly pulled my head back. After a heart thumping moment where it felt like my organs were going to jump out of my mouth, nothing happened.

There it was. A Night Fury. The Night Fury.

A/N.

Phew. So now that's done with.

Cheers. B. A, over and out.