TYRAM

Balthazar Nodd was finally starting to look the worse for wear. His beard and hair were still long and flowing but they were frayed and ragged at the edges, their once pristine white now stained with dirt and blood. His body was covered with wounds clenched shut by the power of his Regalia. But when he stood his back was straight, his eyes were focused, and the two fingers Tyram had broken cracked and snapped back into position. He opened and closed his hands a few times to test them out.

“So,” he said. “You found your grit.”

“Had it beaten into me,” Tyram shrugged.

“Fine,” Balthazar cracked his neck. “Guess I'll come and beat it out of you again.”

Tyram called on his auram, more auram than he'd had to work with than ever before, as he and pirate rushed across the field to meet each other.

The Dragon Regalia was, more than anything else, power.

It took his own auram and amplified it, used to to make more and more raw energy he could then channel throughout his body, reinforcing his defense and strengthening his attacks. The sword was meant to build off of that, the subordinate Regalia inside it resonating with the Dragon Regalia to produce an unbelivable amount of energy. Too much energy for Tyram to control when it was condensed into the blade, especially when even he admitted he was an indifferent swordsman at best.

But he didn't need to try. That's what had made him so much stronger when he fought Jalgoz, the half-drawn sword caught up in the bandit's claws. That's why the sword had exploded when he'd reached for it, unconsciously with his auram as well as his hand. He could just as easily pour his auram into the sword without drawing it, create the sympathetic reaction that called forth those incredible reserves of power...and if he wasn't trying to concentrate them into a blade, he could control them. Make them his.

The power flowed off him in waves now. His muscles tightened, his eyes grew sharper. Glowing tattoos of dragons spiraled around his arms and legs as if the creatures were tightening on them like pythons. And if it wasn't for Rimni, it never would have worked. The power would have just torn him to pieces if he'd tried. Because as J'vann had told an unfortunate bandit a few weeks ago Auram is power of the will, and Tyram's will had been weakening.

But I understand now, Tyram thought as he and the pirate charged each other across the ruined village. I get it. No matter what you want to do there'll be a part where it's going to be awful. There'll be something that tears you soul apart, that you don't want to do. The only way to get anything done is accept that. Accept that it gets harder before it gets easier, and push through. Because the other side is where anything worth having is.

They clashed.

The brutal shockwave of their collision put a fresh crack in the dirt and made the unstable buildings closest to them topple. Tyram blocked Balthazar's blow with his left forearm. He hald the fingers of his right hand out like a blade and swung them into the pirate's neck, the same way he had with Jalgoz. Balthazar choked in surprise, but Tyram's hand didn't reach his throat just cut in deep between the nape of his neck and collarbone. The pirate shoved him away and stumbled back, the wound on his neck closing.

Tyram tried to press his advantage but Balthazar caught him in the gut. The knight wheezed as the air was knocked out of him and Balthazar followed up with a chop to the shoulder that drove him to his knees. The knight wrapped his arms around Balthazar's wrist and stood, twisting, throwing the enormous pirate over his shoulder to slam down into the dirt.

But he was up before Tyram managed to wheeze the breath back into his body, and a pair of punches sprawled Tyram out on the ground. Balthazar lifted his foot and brought it crashing down on Tyram. The Knight caught it in both hands but couldn't seem to push the pirate away.

“You found your grit!” the Pirate laughed happily. “You just took more punches from me than anybody but that big werewolf chick has in decades. You can--”

Andry's fist caught him in the side. There was an odd sound, like the banging of a wet gong, and Baltazar was thrown into the ruins of a nearby building. The Lion Knight stopped his charge and reached out a hand to help Tyram up.

“Fann was right,” Andry said, clenching and unclenching his free fist. “That does work!”

“What did you do?” Tyram asked, dusting himself off.

“Not telling you,” Andry grinned. “We might wind up fighting again someday.”

Tyram was going toe to toe with Balthazar Nodd by using his own incredible auram reserves to neutralize the Indomitable Regalia's advantages. Andry didn't have that luxury. But Fann had told him about the sonic pulses he'd used to harm Nodd earlier in the fight, and Andry had tried to duplicate the technique. But while the Bat and Lion Regalias both weaponized sound they did it very differently, and what he'd wound up with was closer to what Fann had been looking for in the first place. A sharp impact of sound that vibrated through the target, doing damage as it went.

More than that, although Andry didn't realize it, he'd come up with an attack unlike any Balthazar Nodd had encountered in his three and a half centuries of life. It was a kind of force he wasn't used to repelling, so unlike nearly any other weapon or power he didn't have a countermeasure in his muscle memory to at least partially shrug it off.

When the pirate picked himself up out of the rubble he was laughing. He wiped blood off his lips, hissing steam rising from his body.

“I haven't had to do this,” he said, “in over a hundred years.”

Balthazar's body began to glow like molten metal, every inch of him gleaming like he'd been thrown into the furnace, so bright they could barely make out the details of his face. A suffocating humid wind flowed from his direction as he advanced on the knights. Just a breeze at first but then harder and harder and hotter and hotter until it really was like the air blasting from a furnace, or the wind flowing away from a raging forest fire.

“What the hell?” Andry said, holding his hands up in front of his face.

“I think it's body heat!” Tyram said, shielding his face. “He did something with is body heat!”

“Watch it!” Andry warned, and they both dodged to the sides as a lethal red laser cut through where they'd been standing moments before. The beams came from the pirate's fingertips, burning red lances that cut and burned through anything they touched. Balthazar advanced on them, the ground burning as he walked. Tyram dodged and weaved around the deadly beams of light to land a punch on the pirate's side.

“AHHHHHH!” Tyram screamed, stumbling back and clutching his fist. The backs of his fingers were hissing with smoke, blackened where they weren't raw and red. Distracted by his wounded hand he almost didn't see a beam in time and it caught his shoulder as he dodged, burning a stripe in his skin. Off balance he was helpless to dodge another set of beams but Andry fired sonic blasts into the pirate's wrists, knocking the lethal hand away long enough for him to pull Tyram back.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

“You okay?” He asked.

“Yeah,” Tyram said, shaking out his wounded hand. “It felt like I was punching molten iron.”

“I don't see a way around that,” Andry said.

“I can get a few hits in now that I know to expect the pain,” Tyram said.

“Yeah okay,” Andry agreed. “But first we have to get close.”

A task which seemed impossible. Balthazar was advancing on them, and the burned ground at his feet and the heat rolling off his body were completely secondary to the slicing rays of heat he waved back and forth in his path. Buildings were sliced in half, set ablaze, or both by their merciless assault.

Then the blasts hit Balthazar's leg.

Aurina rode in on Book's back, cannons blazing, all targeted on the pirate's right shin. The birate glared at her in surprise, directing the beams in her direction, but before he could the repeated blasts had the effect she'd been going for and his leg buckled. His rays went wide, cutting through rooftops and waving into the air as he fell halfway to a knee.

A blur of motion appeared by his face and Rimni was there, stabbing both daggers into the pirate's left eye. Rat Knight and pirate let out accompanying screams of pain.

“HOT!” Rimni shouted. Balthazar's scream was an inarticulate gurgle. He brought up a blazing hand and slapped Rimni away like a fly. Rimni's daggers dragged a trail of blood and slime from the pirate's ruined eyeball as he was thrown away.

But he and Aurina had done their jobs. They had distracted Balthazar Nodd long enough for Andry and Tyram to get close.

There was no finesse to their attack. They didn't have the time or the focus for anything detailed. The two knights delivered blow after blow after blow into the pirates gut, screaming in rage and agony. Every strike against his blazing skin burned their flesh but they ignored the pain. They fought much the same way Balthazar had tried to shatter the planet earlier, punch after punch harder and faster and harder and faster, over and over and over until they finally felt their target's balance fail and then, in almost perfect unison, one last mirrored uppercut to the pirate's chin that sent him flying.

His hands waved in the air as he flew back, and one of them swept over the knights. Specifically, it swept over Andry. The Lion Knight's body blocked most of it from touching Tyram at all. Andry screamed in pain and collapsed to the ground, Tyram kneeling at his side.

“Andry!” he said.

“Gahhh that hurt!” Andry screamed. Tyram didn't blame him. Three blackened lines ran across his face, right arm, and chest. Not to mention his cracked, burned hands, although of course Tyram had a set of those too.

“I'll bet,” Tyram smirked. “You look like you've been grilled.”

“I'm not sure I actually like you with balls,” Andry said.

“You'll be fine,” Tyram told him. “He must have been losing his focus, it's nothing a few weeks and Regalia backed healing powers won't fix.”

“Definitely don't like you with balls,” Andry coughed. “Can you got back to being whiny please? Or maybe just shut up all together. You can talk long enough to tell me we got him and he's staying down.”

That would actually be a good thing to check, Tyram thought, looking over to where the pirate lay on his side in the dirt. His skin was losing its molten glow, and steam was rising for his body. The pirate rolled onto his back, looking up at the stars. A dim haze of light was appearing across the horizon.

“Dawn soon,” Balthazar said, his voice a raspy hiss that faded into a fit of coughing. “But you can still see the stars. You know how many of those I been to? Hundreds. Hundreds of'em. And there's still so many I never seen...”

He lapsed into coughing again. For a while his coughs and the wind across the fields was the only sound.

“You know I used to be a knight?” he said. “Yeah, I was a big damn hero. The Order of the Alabaster Mantle, that's who we were. Don't think anybody remembers the name. Hey, you guys an order? You got a name?”

“We're the Knights of the Alicorn Shield,” Tyram said.

“Hey, that's a good one,” the pirate said. “Not making fun, it really is. My first regalia was the Rhinoceros Regalia. Got broken in my first real battle. Some guy knew auram tricks broke my regalia and knocked me out. When I got up everybody was dying, and I got so mad and...well, I guess the auram I built around the Rino Regalia was enough to make my Indomitable Regalia. I killed everybody. Wipe out the whole battlefield. Didn't know my own strength, you know? Didn't matter. All my friends were dead by then anyway. Didn't want to be a knight after that, so I went off on my own....”

The ancient pirate pulled himself up off the ground, and for the first time he really looked old. His long white hair and beard were matted, filthy, covered in blood. His muscular body was stooped, and his limbs trembled with age. Somehow he looked softer, weaker than he had even when he was coughing up blood. He straightened his back with an audible series of cricks and pops.

“The wind,” Andry said, looking around. “It's all blowing towards him. Not just in the direction he's standing it's all flowing straight at him, from all directions...”

“For what it's worth I'm sorry,” Balthazar said. “You're tough. All of you, strong as hell. And maybe you deserve to win this fight. But I can't let you. I can die, but I can't let you kill me. I owe it to them. To my old friends back when I was knight. To everybody who ever sailed with me. To everybody I ever killed. Everybody who ever got to be a part of my legend. Because if I let you kill me it'll all be just a part of your legend.”

“What are you doing?” Tyram demanded, clenching his fists. Or trying to. His right fist would close, but his left arm refused to respond. Looking down it had an extra stripe across it. He figured it must have gotten hit at the same time Andry did at the end. He couldn't lift it at all.

“One last trick,” Balthazar said. “I got no blood to carry on. Nobody to take up after me, to keep the legend alive. So I can't let you kill me. I gotta die in style.”

“That didn't answer my question,” Tyram pressed. Can I do anything to hurt him with only one arm?

“I ever tell you how my Regalia works?” Balthazar said. “We do like to brag about our powers, don't we? But I don't think I did. Any energy. Any energy my body makes I can make stronger. And everybody who ever captained a starship knows everything in the universe makes gravity.”

Balthazar looked up at the sky again, reaching up his hand as if trying to grasp the stars.

“This is harder than I thought,” he said. “Never tried to mess with my own gravity before. But if I got it figured right though, once mine's a lot bigger than the planet's we'll pull ourselves out of orbit. The shock of it's gonna rip this dirtball apart, and then we all fall into the sun. Or crash into another planet. Or maybe we'll just drift off into the black and freeze, I dunno. Doesn't matter. Any one of those is an ending worth my legend.”

“No!” Andry said, trying and failing to stand. “We've got to--”

“Don't,” Tyram said. “You can't stand. I'll handle it.”

“You'll handle it?” Andry said incredulously.

Well I'm bluffing of course, Tyram said, walking up to the pirate. But he doesn't need to know that. I have an idea but...well, this either works or we all die.

He poured enough auram into his legs for one last charge. And the rest of it, all the rest of it, went to his right arm. The glowing dragons flared with light and suddenly they didn't seem like tattoos anymore but the coils of an actual dragon, huge, wrapped around his arm. Somehow his fist and the dragon's head occupied the same space, his burned knuckles erupting from between its glowing jaws. He ran forwards, opening his palm.

Balthazar brought his arms up to block. Tyram ducked under them. His palm slammed into Baltazar right in the center of his torso, where ribs and stomach met. And for the first time since he'd used it to kill Jarlo—even if you counted arresting his fall from the air car which was only something similar—Tyram unleashed his most powerful technique. More powerful than it had ever been, strengthened by his new reserves of auram, his more complete knowledge of the Dragon Regalia, and his newfound force of will.

The dragon made of light wrapped around his arm shot forward like a striking snake, drilling a hole through the pirate's torso and rising into the air with a spray of blood. It arched its back, silhouetted against the partly-risen sun as it let out a deafening roar. And as it vanished into sparkling auram, on the ground below Balthazar Nodd fell to his knees, the dawn visible through the gaping hole in the center of his body.

“Well damn,” he said. “Guess it's your legend now. ”

He rolled onto his back, staring up at the disappearing stars.

“Still,” he said, “gotta admit...that was a hell of a way to die.”

That last syllable stretched out into a slow hiss of breath that didn't so much end as fade away. The pirate's body slumped, his regalia disintegrating into motes of floating light, and Tyram was left standing over the mortal remains of Balthazar Nodd, once the strongest man who had ever lived.