Morwen felt a powerful thunderclap. A wave of radiant light and earth aether billowed out from ahead of her. The ground shuddered, and the tank veered hard to swerve something. When she peeled her eyes open to see what happened, she saw a massive form towering over the tank protectively. It looked roughly like Sala. But he’d grown much taller. His face was different now, it looked more like the Primals of old. More ape like.
The creature let out an ear-splitting roar that thundered across the landscape, blanketing everything with light magic. Undead staggered as their spirit anchor to the light realm flickered. The dreadlord winced with pain. The magnitude of Sala’s aura rippled across the landscape like a detonated bomb, incapable of being contained.
“Did Sala just become a Greater Primal?” she asked. The question fell off her lips in time with the thought. A primal transforming into the beastial form they’d first gained notoriety for was almost unheard of lately. Their control collars prevented the shift by managing their magic flows. Morwen had the runes on Sala’s collar adjusted so that he could cast as freely as any other mage. She didn’t even think he’d ever gain enough power to trigger it. That they found the situation so dire that he triggered it didn’t surprise her.
“That would appear to be the case.”
Sala had not only increased his size and mass, but his speed too. Yet he still maintained his heavy defensive spells, like stone skin and the golden aura. But when she scried him, there was a new buff. Two, in fact.
System Info: Greater Rage: Gain extra alacrity and strength. Greater Primal: The target of the spell assumes the form of the legendary Greater Primals. In this form, all stats are boosted for a short time limit.
Morwen could see that Sala had punched Ominek in the wounded face so hard that he’d shoved the dragon’s snout into the ground, and trapped the head there with his other hand, gripping the dragon’s neck in a powerful hold. Undead and other lesser dragons swarmed around them, battling the quickly folding ranks of marines. She wanted to chip in and help reinforce them, but she had her hands full enough with Ominek as it was countering his attacks.
Morwen knew Primals were capable of the transformation when they hit maturity, but she’d never seen Sala use it, so she’d just assumed he was incapable of it. Everything about Sala had grown in intensity. His stone skin veined with hot magma that boiled free like bleeding wounds, and his eyes boiled with intensity like miniature stars. His golden aura now also writhed like a radiant wildfire around him.
“Fennex, back us off. Let’s get some distance and give Sala support fire.”
“Yes, sir!”
The surviving tanks peeled off, and Ominek struggled to free his head. Sala frustrated Ominek’s efforts by maintaining his powerful hold and continued to pummel the dragon. Each strike smashing the dragon’s skull into the mud another centimeter and boiling away red scales. He’d punched Ominek rapidly and with so much power that it peeled away the scales around his eyes, revealing sinew and bone, and Ominek’s eyes glowed with hatred.
The wyverns’s spiked tail lashed out, but Sala dodged the attack, freeing Ominek’s head. The dragon reared up, wings flared out, head and tail coiled back to appear larger than the Greater Primal, but Sala showed no sign of being phased. He beat his stoney chest with his massive club shaped hands and roared defiantly. The howl echoing off the nearby massive mountain and rippling back into the valley they were fighting in. A surge of powerful light magic rippled outwards from the gold wreathed primal. Undead staggered under the oppressive force of Sala’s aura. Like puppets with half their strings cut.
Morwen’s body shook with the power of his roar to her bones. She had to clench her teeth to fight off the pain in her mind. She felt like her head might split open. Whatever edge Ominek had possessed, Sala had just equalized things for them. Stopping the dread lord like this clearly wasn’t something Ominek had accounted for. She saw a spell pooling in Ominek’s maw. One she hadn’t seen before. She saw a large pool of void, fire and soul. But a counter spell lanced directly into it from Yasiin’s rifle, shattering it into aether shards and causing Ominek to cough on the magical backfire. The enraged dragon roared again. Aether motes drifted from his glistening, toothy maw.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Sala charged, grabbing Ominek by his long neck and torquing him upright into the air until Morwen was certain the dragon’s tail was teasing the upper stratosphere, before bringing the massive dragon down to crash back into the surface. Mud and grass exploded in all directions, throwing the surviving tanks about like toys. Morwen quick wove a shield spell on Yasiin just in time to block several chunks of earth from smashing him out of the sky. The battlefield immediately took on a brown haze from all the displaced earth. Mud caked zombies stumbled about, with some of them buried under gobs of wet sod.
Ominek scrambled up quickly and pounced on Sala, clamping his jaws down on Sala’s forearm. She saw a dark, sickening glow building in his maw between the stony fur of Sala’s arm. Magma boiled free from Sala’s arm, Ominek’s fangs slicing into the stone skin like hot knives through butter. He’s bleeding, she thought. Then a more worrying realization settled in.
“He’s going to fire a disintegration at point black range. Dump everything you have into his back now!”
She started weaving the signs for a void ray, keenly aware that her reserves of void magic were dangerously low. She bit down and scraped every shred of magic free she had to spare. Letting out an inhuman howl of pain and determination as she fought to save her friend's life. Above her, Yasiin had cast an enchantment on his rifle, the golden ring spiraling around the muzzle of the rifle in a series of constricting and smaller rings. All he could cast was a simple void ball. But the enchantment would add its own magic to the spell and boost it to several levels of magnitude.
The tanks belched shells at Ominek’s scaled back. Marking their target. Morwen saw his muscles twitch, and the scales shifted in irritation. Then she fired her spell at the same time Yasiin’s enchantment sped up and increased his own spell. Both beams of dark energy slammed into Ominek’s back, drilling a deep hole in the dragon’s back that commanded attention. Blood drained free of the wound as the tissue that had been there moments ago just evaporated.
Ominek let go of Sala’s arm and howled in pain and rage. Before the dragon could retaliate, though, Sala seized Ominek by the throat. The dragon coughed several muffled spells, muted clouds of aether blurting out between gasping breaths. In a blur, the dragon’s head slammed down into the ground as Sala roared again. Ominek’s talons lanced out and raked deep furrows into Sala’s stone skin. Three long slash marks etched the stone skinned primal’s ape-like face.
Fennex tank buffeted from the impact and the blonde lieutenant at the controls cursed in his New Eden drawl. The engine whined a high pitch as the hover drive pushed the vehicle away from the two titans battling. The main gun fired, giving them an additional bump backwards. Morwen emptied a mana potion, clawing for a desperate few more points of aether pool than she had. The need to keep up the attack loomed over her like a dreadful shadow she feared she’d never escape.
The dragon’s wings pumped several times, and Ominek tried to take off before Sala gripped his tail and swung him back down into the surface. A geyser of mud and grass plumed into the sky, worsening the muddy haze. Ominek tried to scurry away and get some distance between him and the greater primal, but Sala was on top of him in an instant. Forcing the dread lord to choose between ignoring him or ignoring the smaller mages put the dragon in a precarious position. Either way, he lost. It just depended on the speed he lost and the cost of the victory that he exacted.
Fennex’s tank maneuvered around the two giants for a better firing position, and Morwen saw a powerful orb of golden light growing in Sala’s maw. The raw power in it was staggering, and she wondered if Sala intended to burn the dread lord out of existence. Before she could see the answer, though, something else drew their attentions. Something powerful just flexed its magical muscles, leaving billowing ripples of aether that fanned out like waves in an ocean. The aura crashed over all of them.
Undead collapsed and the few remaining marines not dead already fell to the ground whimpering, unable to fend off the assault. Sala and Ominek both turned back. All thoughts of their battle paused. In that instant, something greater had appeared. Something different. Something divine.
All eyes turned to Akamori.