Dragons, even undead skeletal ones, were difficult opponents. Sheer size was a quality all its own, both in terms of offense and defense. The living ones could shrug off hits that would kill smaller creatures, and the undead versions were even more durable. Physically attacking one was an exercise in futility.

Worse, dragons had enormous mana cores, easily hundreds of times the size of a human’s. Attacking their cores directly was almost as difficult as fighting them physically. There was a reason they were the world’s apex predator, or at least they had been back before Ammun had inadvertently driven them to extinction.

“What’s in New Alkerist?” Querit asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “How long has it been taking them to get a portal open to a new location?”

“Ten minutes? Why am I not worrying about it?”

“Because I’m going to take care of it myself. Ten minutes isn’t long enough.”

“If I knew where the portal was going to open…” Querit began.

“Temporal scrying won’t work. Ammun wards against it.”

“Smart of him. In that case, there’s not much we can do to delay them.”

I’d have to fight the dragon at stage six, which wouldn’t even do me any good as I’d be hundreds of miles from my demesne. Ammun had made the right call not sending it here. Knowing what I did now, I almost regretted not using the time I’d had to take advantage of the mana resonance point, but it had been the right decision at the time to go after more knowledge first, and even if I’d started the second I’d woken up, I still might not have finished in time.

Besides, it wasn’t like I hadn’t made any preparations at all. I’d known that dragon was going to be a problem sooner or later, and I’d had years to get ready for a fight with it. If it was just the dragon itself, I could at least hold it off. But it wasn’t just the dragon. Averin was a stage four master mage, or at least he had been a few years ago. He could very well be stage five now.

There was no reason to think a few hundred or even a thousand zombies wouldn’t be accompanying him, complete with necromancer squad leaders. There might be some other surprises in there, too. Ammun had had just as much time to cook up his series of distractions as I’d had to prepare myself for them.

“Take Ashinder somewhere out of the demesne,” I said. “I’m going to meet Ammun’s monster and put it down. If you want to help stop whatever else is coming, I won’t turn it down, but be prepared to fight stage four and five mages.”

With only minutes on the clock, I didn’t have time to argue or explain. I teleported to my workshop and pulled out a crate full of gear I’d made specifically with this fight in mind, loaded my phantom space with everything I wouldn’t be wearing directly, and telepathically reached out to my family.

‘Ammun is throwing a heavy hitter at New Alkerist. He’s somehow discovered your presence there. Start the emergency contingencies to get everyone you can out of the town. It’s probably going to be nothing but rubble by the time the fight ends.’

* * *

The portal opening wouldn’t be subtle. It couldn’t be, not really, with something dragon-sized coming through it. It was smaller than I’d been expecting, but not by much. Technically, it only had to let the skull pass through cleanly, since the rest of the dragon’s body was bones unconstrained by things like muscles or tendons.

Below me, farmers ran for the relative safety of the town’s barrier, abandoning their tools in the fields. I’d dropped a single platform in the center of town that connected to Derro after I’d arrived, but it wouldn’t have anywhere near enough mana to take more than three or four groups. At most, a quarter of the town would escape through it. Most of the children at the school would be teleported out through their own safe room.

And that left better than two hundred people with no choice but to flee on foot or stand and fight. Despite my urgings, they’d foolishly chosen the latter. The barrier wasn’t going to protect them from a dragon, but if I could keep that monster fully occupied and draw it away from the town, the wards might save people from the weaker mages and their zombie minions.

Averin was going to crack it open in under ten minutes, though. After that, all bets were off.

I watched the townsfolk scramble around below me and tried to pick out my family. Mother and Nailu were already in the shelter below the school. Father was busy helping organize people, and Senica was, inevitably, preparing to repel the invaders along with two dozen other mages. Not a single one of them was past stage two. If it came down to a fight, they’d die.

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‘You’ve got the recall pendant, right?’ I sent to her.

‘Yes. Stop pestering me,’ she thought back.

‘I won’t be able to save you if things go wrong on the ground. It is very possible that a lot of people are going to die in the next half an hour, and I’d prefer you weren’t one of them.’

‘I’ll be fine. I’ve got this under control. You just focus on what you’re doing.’

I very much doubted things would go anything like how Senica envisioned. She’d hunted monsters a few times. She’d sparred with other mages near her skill level under controlled conditions. But she’d never faced anything like this. Unfortunately, Querit hadn’t shown up yet. I wasn’t sure if he was going to.

A flash of blue light split the sky, and a portal started to unfold. A bleached-white maw came through, razor-edged teeth on full display, followed by the undead dragon’s empty eye sockets, then finally its long, swept-back horns. By itself, the dragon’s skull was probably more than a ton of weight. It was bigger than most of the houses in town, and that was only the start.

Before the rest of the monster could slither out of the portal, I launched my attack. In my hands was a new staff, one made of black steel, gold, and diamond. I’d crafted it with a singular purpose, and then it sat, fully charged and waiting for my command.

The force bolt that surged out of its tip was so overcharged with mana that the steel fractured and the gold started to melt. Only the diamond core held strong through the spell, and the enchantments I’d placed on it shredded themselves as the magic overloaded the staff.

A normal force bolt could split a man’s skull. One sized to do the same to a dragon needed to be hundreds of times more powerful. That meant the spell I’d opened with was a solid orb of pure force eight feet in diameter flying more than five times faster than I could at maximum speed. It was so fast, in fact, that it cracked the air with its passage.

Thunder rang out behind it, so loud as to be deafening all on its own, and the force bolt jumped through the sky to strike the emerging dragon’s skull. The dragon’s head snapped to the side, and a chunk of bone cracked and fell away from the impact. More importantly, it disrupted its smooth passage through the portal. The attack was only a stall to keep it trapped halfway here, but it gave me the opportunity to hit the monster a few more times before it pulled itself free.

I cast the ruined staff aside and let it fall to the ground below me. In its place, I pulled a ball of pure, empty darkness bound in runes that glowed gold from my phantom space. The ball immediately started crackling and the runes lit up bright as they struggled to contain it now that it was exposed to the air.

I might not have access to my demesne’s mana right now, but I’d brought a hell of a lot of it with me. The costs had been enormous, far more than simply casting the spells myself would require, but what was the point of having an archmage’s resources if I never used them?

The ball hissed and sputtered as I launched it. Unlike the force bolt, it moved at a more sedate pace, taking about twenty seconds to reach the skeletal dragon. As soon as it got close, mana flared from the monster and started pushing the ball off to the side. I wasn’t about to let that happen, not after how much work it had been to make the damn thing.

I pushed back against the spell—not telekinesis, but something akin to it—and corrected the ball’s course. More mana radiated out of the dragon, enough to overwhelm my own attempts to keep the ball heading in the right direction. That had been an inevitable conclusion to our little duel, but I’d hoped to hold my own long enough that the dragon couldn’t avoid the attack. In that respect, I won.

The dragon was halfway out of the portal, its ribs partially collapsed to let it slip through, when the ball reached it. Rather than take the strike head-on, it raised one of its forelegs to deflect the attack. Deflection wasn’t really a possible outcome, though. Detonation was the only way things could turn out.

Against a flesh-and-blood creature, the effect would have been fatal. The ball exploded outwards, expanding to a hundred times its original size as the gold-glowing runes containing it shattered. Everything inside its radius was deconstructed down to particles, removing the dragon’s front claw and part of its foreleg.

Chalky-white bone dust puffed out in every direction, but I knew the damage was mostly superficial. If Ammun wanted to waste the mana, he could even regrow the lost limb, assuming the dragon survived our battle and made it back to him. I wasn’t planning on letting that happen, but this was one of the few times since my reincarnation that I was entering a fight I wasn’t certain I could win.

Just because victory wasn’t guaranteed didn’t mean I was going to shy away from putting this monster down. If anything, Ammun had done me a favor sending it out here and now. I’d expected I’d be fighting it off while battling him directly. Meeting it above New Alkerist wasn’t ideal, but Averin acting as its partner was going to make this fight a lot easier than I’d planned on it being.

Two new master spells coalesced around the skeletal dragon, both freezing the air solid on either side of the monster and causing ice to form on its bones. The dragon twisted in slow-motion as it forced its way through the physical effects it was sandwiched between. While it fought through that, I used the last bit of time left to attack the animating energies binding its body together directly.

A good necromancer would always win out against any attempts to dispel their corpse-controlling magic, and despite the fact that I hadn’t taught Ammun any necromancy personally, I had no doubt he was excellent in the field. He’d turned himself into a lich, after all. However, Ammun wasn’t here, which meant that, at best, Averin would be contesting me. And he hadn’t yet made his appearance, probably because he was sending the dragon through the portal first to avoid me tearing him into bloody shreds and scattering him across the desert.

Smart of him, really. I’d do it anyway, but fighting the dragon at the same time was going to make it a lot harder.

My dispelling magic started to unravel the connections holding the dragon’s leg together, but it proved my point about their enormous mana cores making them a chore to fight and tore through my magic by sheer volume of mana.

Then it pushed through my spells and its wings unfolded as more of its body slithered through the open portal. An instant later, it launched itself forward into the sky, and the true battle started.