CHAPTER 363 – DRAGON FIGHT II
Tom grimaced as he ran.
How had that happened? How was he only thirty metres from it?
It made absolutely no sense. It was almost like it had teleported. Then his common sense took over, and he examined the issue logically.
After a moment’s thought, he concluded the giant must have paced backwards while he was distracted destroying the insect… But that meant it would have to have moved further away from the dragon.
Why would it retreat like that? What did the new positioning gain it? And did it involve him? That last was the million-dollar question.
Fifty metres was nearly an insignificant amount. For the giant, it had only been a couple of steps, but the question was why?
No one was going to answer him, and they didn’t need to. It didn’t take a genius to see through the civilised actions they were all pretending to follow.
It was now only thirty metres from him and given the weapon the giant used and its wingspan. Yep, he was almost certainly in range and would hazard that was deliberate.
Throat dry and with his deeper fears realised, he acted.
He sprinted directly away to establish the distance that Clare had instructed him to maintain. Technically, the giant had done nothing to break their gentleman’s agreement… yet…. This could be a figment of his paranoia, but that subtle shift backwards was unexplained. He, Phil and the wador leader being forced through this portal to be next to the giant was in of itself suspect. To a suspicious mind you could read an intent to eliminate the strongest of the other competitor species.
Basically, he had a bad feeling about everything, and he was sure it came from that little extra True Dreaming imparted into his subconscious.
As he ran, he craned his neck back to watch what was happening. He needed to see the throw and confirm the impact.
The dragon was still facing away from them completely oblivious to the threat that had come from her blind side. Another blast of her magical breath was unleashed. From the way the energy was focused, it was definitely aimed to kill one of them. He couldn’t say who because it was a long way and the dragon itself obscured his vision, but he could imagine the teleports going off as whoever was targeted fled those deadly attacks.
The giant moved. It took four massive steps forward and then launched its spear.
Tom’s mind did the calculations. They were six hundred metres from her and from the testing that meant there was only half a second before impact. Black Dodge was obviously inactive, but his enhanced attributes that let him move ten times faster than a human from earth let him spin and watch the event unfold.
His eyes were fixated upon the dragon even if his hands scrambled to pull away the tracking ring off his finger, which he found to his annoyance was tighter than it should have been. Sabotage, misfortune or some minor skill the giant possessed. He suspected it was the latter. The inventor didn’t make mistakes and if it had wanted to stop him from getting the ring off then doing so would have been made impossible.
Cursing in his head, he continued to spin the ring to pull it off his finger while watching with wide eyes what was happening.
The spear was massive.
It was closer to a telephone pole than the weapon that Tom used. It flew from the giant almost too fast to see and if it had been any smaller his eyes would have been unable to track it. As it was, he followed its entire flight toward the equally gigantic dragon.
The critical True Dream, the genesis of his entire plan had been months ago. However, he could distinctively remember the exact spot on the long neck that their weapon needed to strike. It was ironic that this specific dragon had shown him the weakness by using it on another of her species in a meanspirited, petty, meaningless attack.
Ironic, but vital for his survival, Tom acknowledged with an internal smile and rising anticipation.
The projectile struck perfectly and even from this distance Tom was convinced that he could see the bones in the neck shift. The artery to the brain would now be blocked and she would be on a timer.
Her head snapped toward them.
Yes, he screamed inside. We got you! You’re dead.
All their invisibility skills were active, and he was pretty sure she couldn’t see them. But her eyes were searching and caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise.
* Abandon the tracking ring.
* Fate Spike the giant.
* Flee from it as fast as possible.
The words from Clare’s instructions were projected instantly into his head.
There was no delay in their delivery and nor did they distract him. They were like a memory, a moment outside of time, a reminder of the critical position that he was in, and that the dragon’s searching eyes were possibly not the greatest threat that he faced.
The giant was turning in his direction.
His heart thumped, and he could feel the spike of adrenaline and the rising blood pressure.
The dragon was a long way away. Yet despite the distance, it had a presence that made it feel more embedded in reality than everything else. If he searched for an analogy, it was kind of like the stone in the underground. She was more real than everything else and evil in a manner that only the most depraved of humans could imagine. A sense of malice radiated from her, and it was obvious she had the competency and will to wield her immense power to deliver violence. Just the act of her looking in his general direction was like a physical assault. Worst was the knowledge that she was actively searching for him.
All those impressions were real. Her strength was not faked, her desires were like a bonfire that would melt the very skin of reality to her will, but despite that she was not the true threat he faced. That was turning to get him.
The tracking ring was resisting his movements, but it was almost free, and Tom’s attention shifted to the third ring on his hand, the one that he had possessed for the longest.
He focused on the giant.
Despite everything, he was not cowered. It might be ahead of him currently, but that was a transitory state. Tom would survive this, prosper, get stronger and then next time they met in single combat he would be able to destroy it. Even here today, it was not over.
He, too, possessed weapons that were to be feared. He might not have the innate power of both of those beings, but he had tools that could still be effective. Ways to hamper them. A scalpel rather than a broadsword, but if he cut in the right place… he, too, could kill. It was surgical precision as opposed to overwhelming force, but you played the cards you were dealt. Stood firm and fought back.
Briefly, the special ring on his finger created a link to the distant dense pool of fate that stretched from the giant’s gut to his brain.
A spark of energy shot out from the artefact that he had been awarded in that first trial.The one that almost killed him. It struck the giant and tore into its fate. The mass of power cracked like an ancient building caught up in a one in a thousand-year earthquake. Chunks fell away and at the same time a flame took hold. The pieces of broken fate were burning, the entire reserve turned into an inferno. But the ring’s power did not stop there. The haze, the loose protective fate aura that all creatures that generated fate created to ease their passage. A blanket of protection that was built up laboriously with a tiny amount added every day. That important shroud that was thicker for the giant than it should have been, began to burn as his ring moved to sever all fate connections. Racial gift or dedicated skill whatever had strengthened its fate links could not suppress the flame like stuff his ring had created. If anything, the extra fuel made it all burn hotter.
In under half a second, probably before it even realised that it was under attack the giant became bereft of fate.
The giant’s head turned and stared straight at him.
It knew what he had done.
Pinned by the gaze of both the dragon and the giant, he felt like he was an insignificant insect. Both of them, undeniable forces of nature effectively beyond his comprehension wanted him dead. They were super intelligence and had the capacity, the skills and spells, to unleash untold devastation. And it felt like he was held to the ground by their power.
The tracking ring was almost free, but it was still connected.
The giant staring him down swung its club. It didn’t turn to look. It was as if it was practising a standard blow and aiming for something to its side and behind it. Like you would strike a stationary combat dummy in your blind spot. It was eyeballing Tom, apparently one hundred percent focused on him, but it wasn’t a random flail of its weapon.
The strike was targeted.
It knew exactly where the wador leader stood, and the catlike alien hadn’t been warned by Clare. It had not been maintaining distance like he had been, which meant it was in range.
Why it had not fled yet was a mystery. It was possible that it was not as perceptive as Clare, but that thought did not sit right.
The massive chunk of tree came down directly over its head and an instant before it hit its intended victim the wador vanished. It had not used the teleporter artefact but something shorter distance and it was intelligent enough to break the tracking ring at the same time.
Not so stupid, Tom thought. It had come prepared with a different plan to evade the threat.
The club slammed into the empty dirt, leaving a divot the size of a car. Tom was too far away to tell, but he felt no tremors through his domain. No shockwaves were released like a blow of that impact should have generated. It had suppressed them and given the closeness of the dragon Tom respected that decision. The method it used to move silently and eliminate the vibrations that its every stride should have created was apparently a flexible ability.
Fear had slowed time to a crawl. The dilation was more potent than what Black Dodge achieved, but his body was unaffected. While his brain perceived things faster, he was locked to his usual movement speeds.
The corners of the giant’s lips quirked upwards. The start of a smile intended for him. It was cocky enough to taunt him, and Tom had to admit it was infuriating.
I’ll come back stronger, he promised himself furiously. Next time we meet I won’t be a rat for you to squish as an afterthought.
Finally, the tracking ring slipped off his finger and fell to the ground.
The giant vanished from his sight instantly, as did Phil’s presence, but Tom didn’t care about that.
The simple fact was that he was too close to it. He had to flee if he was going to survive. Barely a hundred metres separated them, which to it was only a dozen steps. His only chance was that his invisibility was truly as powerful as the inventor promised. He leapt into a sprint, running at a right angle to the giant rather than directly away in the hope that the unexpected direction would mislead it.
“How?” the dragon thundered. “How did you know to target there. Have your GODs cheated?”
It punctuated every word with a globule of flame. They weren’t as large as the concentrated breath attacks, but they were numerous. Over twenty left her mouth in the couple of seconds it had taken her to yell. They were launched with what appeared to be a random spread to pepper all the land that the attack might have come from. Her assault spread all the way back to the portals and covered a wide slice of the zone. She had no idea where the attack had come from apart from the obvious answer of somewhere behind her. She really didn’t know where the spear had been thrown from. She had failed to pierce the inventor’s invisibility protections, so all she could do was hope for a random stroke of luck to hit or flush them out.
Tom tracked the first blob of energy to confirm their potency. It struck the ground and obliterated everything within forty metres.
They were lethal and simultaneously much smaller than he expected.
He hurriedly did the calculations and tried to keep track of all the various trajectories the missiles were taking. She was not making it easy to do so. Some had a flat, fast route, others looped slowly and worse some actively changed direction mid-flight.
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Despite the quantity she was putting out, the area she had to carpet bomb saved him from undue worry. Her attacks were going to impact less than five percent of the land they could be hiding in so there were lots of places to run to avoid them.
He was not currently in any danger.
One shooting past to his right abruptly changed direction. It was suddenly heading straight down.
Time slowed.
Mentally, he flinched.
Black dodge was active.
Out of the corner of his eye, he tracked the missile and where the point of impact would be.
Thirty-four metres, it was enough. The attack was survivable.
Instincts honed over decades took over. He threw himself to the ground and utilised a teleport to hasten the action. Without conscious direction, his domain reacted. Stone grew around him, curving in a half dome to protect him from the coming magic explosion.
Everything went white, then blue. Heat assaulted him and the concussive force went straight through the barrier like it wasn’t there. Despite the bulwark he had thrown up, he was tossed forward.
He rolled twice and came to his feet.
Then froze as he prayed that his invisibility had either held or reasserted itself fast enough. The slight red glow from his stone skin worried him. If he hadn’t been spotted, and the invisibility was as effective as he suspected, it would just be a matter of surviving long enough for the dragon to die and then sneak into the undefended exit.
There was a flicker of movement in his peripherals.
All of his alarms blared simultaneously.
A club was heading toward him.
One that was thicker than an average tree. He caught a glimpse of a badly burnt arm as he triggered Crystallised Moment to gain a chance to think.
All of his tools felt useless. The giant had clearly been caught in the centre of the blast that had caught him at its edges, but the damage done was not material.
Enough, he ordered his brain back on track. The giant’s level of damage was irrelevant. It was clearly functional, so surviving its clinical blows was all that mattered.
His dodge skills were helpless in the face of its overwhelming power and speed. He searched for escape factors. Any trick he could play to avoid it? Or a counterattack to at least hurt it.
There was nothing.
His mind turned to dodging. To avoiding the attack and a six times speed multiplier was a massive boost, but even with that ridiculous advantage there was no contorting of the body that could save him. The club was too wide and was moving too fast.
At the last moment, he triggered Channel Damage Mirror right in the way of the swinging club. He focused the force on its elbow. It was a physical attack combined with a concept or skill that made it inevitable that it would hit. Tom had been able to tell that much from his attempts to avoid it.
His mirror shattered on impact and there was a small squirt of information that told him that as hoped the attack had been reflected back on the giant at eighteen percent efficiency but it had been spread over an area effectively as wide as his body.
Disappointment ran through him. That was not going to disable it in the slightest. Even with the force striking a limb already weakened by the dragon fire eighteen percent was not sufficient. It was not like the giant was putting all of its power into these swings.
Boom!
Lightning flashed around him.
Tom realised instantly that Lightning Dodge had triggered. The giant was not using all of its power, but even a half swing by it was enough to kill him. Fifteen metres was the maximum distance the lifesaving skill could have teleported him to safety. He understood that it was not enough. Against most enemies, it was a great skill, but the giant had too much reach. Usually, the automatic teleport would separate him from the enemy by sufficient distance to let him reset, but fifteen metres for the giant was nothing.
It would hit him again and again, and then he would die. The teleporting artefact materialised in his hand and his mind forced the connection to activate it. The artefact had been created to help evade the dragon’s breath, but Tom needed it now.
He was flailing in mid-air. There was no ground to kick off to enhance his mobility.
Alarms screamed at him once more. The club was descending from above.
His mind latched onto the stone that was around his torso. A chunk broke away while the rest tried to yank him out of the way. His foot found the falling chunk, and he kicked off it to take advantage of his attributes and launch himself to safety.
None of it helped. He was too slow, and to add insult to the attempt the club corrected its trajectory. It was still on track to hit him dead on.
Boom!
Lightning crashed.
This time, he was on the ground and facing the giant, but luckily, he was behind its back. Which in practice was only a fraction of a second of delay, but that was time that Tom was more than happy to receive. Every advantage, no matter how small mattered when you were trying to conjure a miracle.
It rotated, moving way too fast for a thing of that size. It brought the club up. The tip of it towered thirty metres above him. That was equivalent to an eight to ten story building. He had to crane his neck to see it and then it started to descend.
And from the last encounter, he knew it would adjust if he tried to dive to the side. Incredible dodge skill or not, the giant’s club attacks were too fast for him and there were no more charges of Lightning Dodge to save him.
That was death ascendant.
The giant was grinning in an all too human way, but its eyes looked bored. This was no more than a perfunctory task to be performed. The execution of a boring job, disposing of the trash, a necessary chore, but not an enjoyable one.
Half a second that was all he had before the club, travelling faster than sound would hit him. He remembered the divot the last casual blow had left. This was not something that he could survive.
Crystallised Moment bought him another second to think. There was no question about how this was going to play out. His only hope was the artefact he clutched in his hand. Very loosely speaking the teleporter they had built was the size of a baseball but faceted with a gem like exterior. It was pretty small and unassuming for the hope it represented. He poured extra energy into it, hoping to speed up the process.
Time had stopped. The club hung frozen in the air, but somehow it was over halfway down already.
No genius ideas occurred to him
Time ran out.
He screamed internally as he kept channelling energy. This was not right. He shouldn’t be this vulnerable. He could move six times faster than his rank was supposed to allow, yet he couldn’t dodge a bored swing from this person.
The artefact in his hand activated.
He blinked in surprise.
He was elsewhere.
It had happened too fast for him to form coherent thoughts, but his brain had still tracked the club the entire time. It had been two metres above his head when he had teleported. That was a hundredth of a second, or maybe a thousandth.
If he survived this, he was definitely buying a level in Breadth of Serendipity.
Shock filled him.
Hardly able to believe that it had worked he half patted himself down to confirm he was still alive.
There were no wounds, no damage. The massive club had almost struck him on multiple occasions with him being literally teleported a moment before the point of collision. Three times on the edge of death and not even a bruise to show for it.
His luck was out of control.
Far away there was an explosion of blue as a full-blooded dragon’s breath attack stuck the ground. He couldn’t be sure, but he suspected that was the dragon hitting the spot he had just been fighting. Tom hoped the giant was dead, but knew he wasn’t about to be that lucky. Just like they had a method to survive the breath attack so did the giant.
Standing at a new location hopefully a long way from the giant unless it too teleported randomly near him he crouched down and hoped that the invisibility would keep him alive. There were no second chances now, no miraculous lifesaving skills or artefacts in reserve.
Tom doubted he had ever held himself so still, but after a moment curiosity got the better of him and his eyes started to pan around the surroundings.
He was far from safe, and it hadn’t skipped his notice that the giant had been tracking him. It had not found him because of the dragon missile, but rather that burst of flames had revealed the giant and given him a chance to react… Not that it had helped him. In many ways that close encounter with the dragon flames was a blessing. It had demonstrated that unless he was caught in the epicentre; it was survivable. It had also helped against the giant. Warned him and slowed it. The memory of its burned side was clear in his mind. It had been unlucky enough to have been hit almost directly by that breath attack and had only been hurt. Human’s Tom knew were nowhere near as durable.
The dragon could kill him by accident. He was, of course, better protected against that than the giant had been. All that fate they pumped into defeating the dragon had also had the secondary property of keeping as many humans as possible alive. That component would work in his favour while, in contrast the giant was completely devoid of any protective fate.
Despite that, he was cautious. Enemies far more powerful than him were tracking him and wanted to destroy him.
His eyes flickered over the surroundings and assessed the chaos that was unfolding.
There were multiple patches of burning ground. Dirt and stone that had been converted to molten slag and glass over a wide area.
Mini explosions continued to go off around the dragon’s head, but it was ignoring them as it searched for a victim. The intensity of the distracting magic had also dropped. Apparently, over twenty-five seconds had passed since he had entered the final layer. It felt like a lifetime and at the same time that sounded pretty accurate. Unfortunately for him, she was still examining his side of the zone as she looked for the person who had ultimately dealt her the death blow.
The dragon’s eyes Tom realised to his horror were focused on a point near him. He studied the patch of ground to see what she had spotted. A large part of him was hoping the giant would be revealed, but to his vision there was nothing there.
She clearly felt different because she opened her mouth and launched a glowing ball of fire.
Tom quickly checked the flight path and actively prevented his domain from summoning rock to protect him. He was far enough out that this missile would not kill him. Hurt him definitely, but he would survive, and he couldn’t protect himself with a stone barrier because he suspected that his invisibility would not be able to hide the landscape changing. The reduction in damage sustained did not justify the risk. Creating a stone wall would act as a beacon to all the enemies that were searching for him, and he didn’t know where the giant was.
The flaming missile arched through the air and was aimed directly at the spot the dragon had been focused on.
There was an abrupt flurry of movement in what had been an empty, burnt section of grass without anything larger than an earth fly on it.
For the briefest of moments Vidja was visible, holding up the teleporting artefact. There was a flash, and she vanished a moment before the homing magic breath reached her. Tom wondered how many others like him had already used their life saving treasures and how many of them were going to die in the last thirty seconds of the dragon’s existence. Right now, everyone with an active teleporter was distracting the dragon, but as those numbers fell, she would have time to target those cowering in place.
Vidja was gone and the missile instead of crashing into a human struck the ground.
Radiant heat reached him first. His skin had already been turned to stone, and he felt the intense heat and knew to anyone watching he was glowing a dull red. Then the shockwave of the wind slammed into him and sent him flying. He was picked up and thrown and he tumbled helplessly through the air with snakes of seemingly living blue flame travelling with him. When one of those touched him that area of skin heated and changed to orange.
He crashed to the ground, rolled and came to a halt over fifty metres from his starting position. He lay there and used Touch Heal to assess his health. There were a couple of broken bones and bruises, and a burst spleen. All of which he ignored. Even with his now massive reserves of mana, he couldn’t dedicate power to insignificant issues. His skin glowed red and every iota of his mana was focused internally to stop the living parts of his body from being cooked.
Ten seconds passed, and the critical levels of heat dropped to where he was winning the internal battle. Slowly, he pushed himself into a crouched position once more.
The predator turned away and his body almost sagged in relief as the tension that had built up from the subconscious effort of withstanding her gaze vanished. Her attention had switched back to the other side. The direction that at least from her perspective the main attack had come from. To the dragon with the exception of that single spear that was where most of the enemies had come from. The subtle changes Clare had made to the strategy became clearer to him. Her and the giant had organised all those with weaker stealth skills to emerge on the other side from the main thrust of their attack.
They had been visible as a result. Sacrificial pawns to give the rest of them a chance to live. He wondered if they had known and had gone, anyway. He suspected the answer was yes.
That shift of the dragon’s attention was like a signal for action.
Almost a kilometre away, there was a flurry of motion that caught his eye. Rahmat was fighting the wador with the yellow green stripe… The one that had helped create the teleporters.
Get him! Tom thought gleefully. There was no better human than Rahmat to engage an isolated wador in a fight. With the immense offense that the spear domain granted, Tom had no doubt that he would triumph by overwhelming his opponent. Anyone else, with the exception of him and Phil would be well and truly outclassed by any of the wador. This match up was insanely favourable to them.
A host of spears swept away from the human, an animated wall of deadliness. Each of them darting in and glowing blue just before they struck, but the alien had a domain which seemed to be the perfect counter for Rahmat’s.
Each time, the spear flashed forward a piece of metal move to intercept. The defensive item would explode and was reduced to slag, but the weapons did no damage.
Tom stared at the result in disbelief. He could barely comprehend what he was seeing. From first-hand experience, he knew how powerful those Power Strikes actually were… and yet somehow Rahmat was losing?
Protected from the spears, the wador struck back with tooth and claws. A claw slash turned a thigh to ribbons of flesh. There was a flash of white bone before it was replaced after a moment with a flood of red.
First blood… last blood… shock went through him.
Rahmat raised his teleporter to activate.
Another flashing strike disembowelled him. His stomach was torn open. One of the intestines were caught between the wador’s claws and dragged out… a long ribbon.
The human disappeared and wador’s jaws instead of clamping down on his neck hit only air.
Tom was in shock. The whole thing had been so fast it had given him whiplash. It had started so positively, an easy favourable fight and had ended to the red of human blood splashing everywhere. From start to finish, it had taken two seconds at most.
Rahmat had escaped the death blow but… he did not have Tom’s own highly developed healing skills and those wounds… those wounds had been bad even against his own distorted standards.
While still processing the shock result of the battle, his eyes flickered around, hoping that fate would have dumped the man close to him so Tom could heal him, but there was nothing.
Then there was a whoosh of blue flames as the dragon’s breath attack hit the area that Rahmat and the wador had just been battling on.
The dragon had not been distracted; she had not looked away rather she had feinted inattention and then struck the moment the two of them had revealed themselves.
Tom held himself dead still. He probably should have expected it. The dragon was not a monster. She was sapient, so of course she was smart enough to lay a trap for the unwary.
He stared at the burning desolation the breath had left and hoped it had killed the wador, but all of his prayers went toward Rahmat. However, in this environment with both the giant and the dragon to contend with he feared the worst. He had been teleported somewhere random and without aid, with such extensive damage in an environment this hostile… It was easy to imagine the outcome. He wished he had fate to use, but that all been spent on the bigger picture.
And another observation worried him. If their crafter had been able to beat humanity’s strongest fighter how many other people were they going to slaughter. It was quite possible that they were going to be unstoppable.
Tom stilled his thoughts. He had seen the fight between Rahmat and the wador there was no denying that it had happened, but there was also a contract in place to protect them against the majority. They were not supposed to be able to kill humans, but if Rahmat had been tricked into attacking first what would happen? He considered the contract and weighed how it might play out. The contract would still cause a backlash, but it would be no where near as severe as what would happen if the wador had initiated the fight. Survivable, with some temporary weaknesses as opposed to debilitating for days.
It was possible that an individual wador could kill one of them and if both encounters were the human’s fault then maybe two before the backlash from the contract became too material for them to continue. There was no danger of the wador killing all of them, but a couple of deaths were certainly possible. He was sure that Clare had thought of it as he had shared everything with her, but for now he would ignore the wador and focus on surviving the attention of the two stronger opponents.