Chapter 44 Greedy.

The duo watched as Shaeo jumped backwards and then whirled on Kahtesh. Isaac assumed she would go for a quick guaranteed kill via heavy overhead smash like she had tried to do to him at the beginning of the fight. ‘Right!’ Isaac yelled at Kahtesh mentally. Kahtesh understood the intent behind the word and threw his head to his right a split second before the blow came crashing down. Kahtesh’s body exploded from the impact. Bones were blasted across the tunnel. Isaac focused and cut the power that was flowing into Kahtesh in hopes that Shaeo would leave what was left of him alone.

Isaac knew instinctively that Kahtesh’s skull was the only important part. The rest he had grown anyway so as long as the skull remained Kahtesh could be regrown. Kahtesh’s skull was tossed across the ground but managed to avoid being blown to bits by the blow thanks to Isaac’s quick thinking and the dragon’s microsecond reaction time. Shaeo seemed to stare at the skeletal fragments for a moment to make sure that they weren’t going to continue moving before she turned back to engage the other two. She squared off against them. Isaac diverted the slightest amount of incoming mana from the stream that was pouring into Lenna to refill his reserves. At that rate it would take Isaac an hour to refill but he couldn’t risk Lenna not being at a high enough power level to trade blows with the drider.

“Kahtesh?” Lenna asked Isaac quietly.

“Out but not permanently.” Isaac whispered back.

Lenna nodded. “Reserves?”

Isaac could feel his focus slipping slightly. It was incredibly difficult to keep guiding the mana that was going through Lenna’s body. It was like trying to write two different words at the same time with both hands. There was simply too much going on to keep it up and even when it was working he could tell that it wasn’t working nearly as well as it could be. “Low but stable.” He replied.

“How long can you keep this up?” Lenna asked.

Isaac huffed a laugh. “Longer if you stop talking to me.” He replied honestly. “Not long.”

Lenna nodded again then fully focused on Shaeo who had simply been observing them. She was taking the moment to try to figure out how Isaac was boosting Lenna’s power so much. “Why, no attack?” She asked Isaac simply. The amount of power Isaac was using was immense and Shaeo could feel it. She couldn’t understand why it wasn’t being used to try and overwhelm her and was instead only being poured into Lenna where it seemed to have barely any effect. The effect itself was very noticeable but was not nearly as strong as the amount of mana would indicate.

Isaac didn’t answer. Lenna could feel his intense focus and she could also feel some of the mana currents inside of her body randomly start to slow down before abruptly going back to normal. “Shaeo’ahna,” Lenna addressed. “Eventually all mortal beings must die.” She nodded to the drider resolutely. “It is your time.”

Shaeo didn’t move. She simply waited for Lenna’s next move. “Throw it.” Isaac whispered in Lenna’s ear and vanished. He was about to do something that he knew he shouldn’t have been able to do. He was sure that Lenna’s body wouldn’t take it very well either.

Isaac appeared in mid air and swung at Shaeo’s neck from behind. She turned and swung behind her like she could see the future. Isaac barely teleported back to behind Lenna in time to not get bisected. Meanwhile Lenna was getting ready to launch her sword at Shaeo’s chest. Isaac reappeared and wrestled control over the mana that was inside of Lenna back. He forced the mana to move like he was directing a puppet on strings. Lenna’s muscles tore but were quickly healed. She grit her teeth through the pain and launched her sword.

Shaeo turned back to counter Lenna as she felt the power spike from Lenna throwing the weapon. Her own sword was raised expecting the follow-up attack to Isaac’s to also be aimed at her head as the rest of her was heavily armored. Her surprise at the target being her navel caused her to barely be able to get her sword down in time to knock the other sword away. She would have let it hit but she noticed the trailing flames and instantly she knew that it would have ignited her armor while she was wearing it.

Then, Shaeo felt it. She turned and ducked her head away from the sharp pain in her neck. She was fast enough that the sword had barely been able to cut her. The problem was that it had cut her. A thin line, an inch long, was pouring blood from the side of the drider’s neck. For the first time in the entire battle she had taken damage. Her left hand reached up to cover the wound. She needed to seal the wound. Drider silk was awful at keeping liquids out due to how soft it was. It had to be woven incredibly tightly in order to seal out water and she didn’t have any like that with her. She had some back in her lair for just such an occasion. The problem was that in her haste to remove the dragon she positioned the duo in between herself and her nest.

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She was stuck fighting with one hand. That would have been bad enough if the pair had let her catch her breath after the injury. They did not. Isaac appeared in front of her face mid stab. She swung up to remove him and he was gone again. Lenna was frozen in place while the thick death mana burned itself out healing back the injuries she had just sustained. It would take a few seconds as Isaac had fully relinquished control over it. Isaac was pushing himself as hard as he could both mentally and physically. Every teleport took him to somewhere near Shaeo while he made constant swings with only the strength in his arm as he had no ground for leverage. Even with one hand Shaeo was always ready to cut him in half. Neither of them succeeded in hitting the other.

Isaac switched tactics for his last few teleports. He was about to run completely out of mana while still fighting a literal legend. Instead of swinging his sword he started throwing the throwing spikes at her. She missed one and it scraped a line of blood across her cheekbone which only seemed to piss her off even more.

Lenna could finally move again and she pulled out another scroll and threw mana into it. Three small prismatic marbles shot forth and slammed into Shaeo causing her to stagger and take a throwing spike through the tip of her ear. Her armor was starting to come apart from the reality magic that shot through the silk from the Stars of Doom. All of her armor seemed to shutter from the hit and some of the tightly tied knotts came undone.

Isaac was done. He used his last teleport to fall behind Lenna. She took the moment that the stars had bought them to slide in and retrieve her sword. She started trading blows with Shaeo again. Both of them were much weaker as the more Shaeo was moving around the more blood she lost and with her one hand awkwardly on her neck she had lost a bit of dexterity. They were back to an even fight but, except for the lack of mana and tired aura, Lenna was good as new. Isaac took out his waterskin and splashed his face with it. He needed to focus.

He shook his head and took a deep quick breath. ‘Back to your roots Isaac.’ He told himself and moved in to help Lenna. He continued to aim for Shaeo’s knees but he knew that he lacked the power to really do any damage. Damage wasn’t the name of the game for Isaac however. All he needed to do was help keep Lenna’s momentum up. Slowly Shaeo started to slow more and more until finally she jumped back and decided to flee.

Shaeo knew that she wasn’t going to be able to get back to her nest. She also knew that her odds of surviving the neck injury were dropping quickly so she did what any logical fighter would. She tried to retreat. Lenna and Isaac weren’t about to let that happen. The problem was that there wasn’t really anything either of them could do to stop the drider. They both took off running down the tunnel after her. Isaac reopened his connection to Kahtesh and decided to just let the dragon slowly rebuild himself while they gave chase.

Shaeo was fast. Far, far faster than any humanoid mortal. There was one thing that she seemed to forget however. The humanoid form was built for sustained, long distance, medium pace travel. Even worse for Shaeo was that Isaac could feel her at all times. He knew exactly which tunnel she took even without looking for the blood trail. Every time Shaeo thought she had lost them and could take a moment to rest, she heard Lenna’s armor, and knew they were closing in again. This continued for three miles. Until, finally, Shaeo tripped.

The impact was hard. All six hundred and eighty pounds of drider hit the cold stone ground. Her hand slipped off of her injury from the impact and more blood gushed out. It was then, through the fog of low blood pressure that she realized that the wound should have closed by itself after that long. Or at least it would have. A few images went through her memory. Images of Isaac’s sword closing in on her face or neck from his teleporting spree. She realized that his blade was chipped and damaged across most of its length. All of the impacts with her own sword, her legs, and whatever else Isaac had fought with that sword had caused the blade to become a glorified saw.

Isaac had made sure to take as good care of his sword as he could. He would sharpen it after every adventure but that didn’t stop the notches from building up. He was brutal with his sword. The poor steel blade couldn’t hold up with all the stone-like bone and exoskeletons that he slammed it against. By far the most damage it had taken in a single engagement had been with Shaeo’s legs but it was about time for a new one. He had also gotten extremely lucky. When he cut into Shaeo’s neck he had hit with a still mostly sharp part of his blade but when it drug across her, from her trying to get out of its way, one of the flanges, caused by an impact with Shaeo’s leg, had caught and turned the wound jagged.

For any mortal it called for stitches. For Shaeo it called for her death knell. Her inability to seal the wound along with her body not being able to keep up with the extreme endurance of Lenna, while fighting, and Isaac, while chasing her, simply stacked up until it was too much for her to bear. Isaac and Lenna eventually caught up to her. They watched her try to get up half a dozen times before her body simply stopped listening to her.

“We should, have just, lit her, on fire.” Lenna panted.

Isaac swallowed dryly before taking out his water skin and lubricating his vocal cords enough to reply through his own deep breaths. “It, worked out.” He got out.

“Greedy.” Lenna replied.

“Yes.” Isaac agreed.

The reason they hadn’t was the amount of silk that was wrapped around her body and the amount that was strewn across the tunnel that they had been fighting in. Lenna wouldn't even have thrown her flaming sword at Shaeo if she wasn’t sure that the drider would attack the flying weapon causing the flames to get blasted apart by the impact. Between the silk and the dragon bone Shaeo was wearing a small fortune. If the tunnel they had been fighting in was anything to go by then she had stretched out another small fortune along a quarter of a mile of tunnel. One of those strands being lit on fire would have caused the entire thing to go up like a new year's day bonfire complete with excessive use of lamp oil.

The pair just stared at the dead and dying drider before them for a long moment as they caught their breath. “That was an anticlimactic end.” Isaac commented while looking down on their quarry.

“I heard that is normal on the surface.” Lenna replied.

“Oh?” Isaac asked.

Lenna nodded. “It is common practice to wound prey like that.”

“Then they just spend the next half an hour chasing it down until it bleeds out or dies of exhaustion?” Isaac asked skeptically. “That sounds like a massive waste of time.”

Lenna looked at him with a deadpan expression. “That is what your greed just made us do.” She reminded him coldly.

“Fair point.” Isaac agreed. “How do we get the armor off of her?”

Lenna’s look turned withering. “We do not. I will figure it out.”

Isaac turned to meet her gaze. “What’d I do?” He asked with his hands raised defensively.

Lenna relaxed her face when she realized that Isaac actually didn’t know before explaining: “She’s not wearing anything under it.”