Dragon tongue didn’t have a word for ‘subtle.’ They just didn’t think that way, which wasn’t to say that they were stupid, just that the idea of being clever instead of crushing challenges head-on was synonymous with being weak. It was something lesser races did.

Dragons were straightforward. They shredded enemies with their immense talons, ripped them apart with their teeth, crushed them under great weight, or incinerated them with their potent fire breath. If, for some reason, none of that worked, they tended to use invocations to apply even more strength to their attacks, or conjurations if they needed some range.

Thankfully, their immense size and the need to consume massive amounts of mana worked against them when it came to igniting their cores. It was the rare dragon that reached stage one, and only generational talents could claim to reach stage three. That meant human archmages had the advantage when it came to spells, which was good, because it was the only arena we could claim that in.

Luckily for me, undead dragons had all the issues associated with needing massive amounts of mana just to survive, but none of the brains their living counterparts did. If I’d been facing a dragon of flesh and blood, I most certainly would have died. Even if I managed to win the fight, it wouldn’t be without the town below being utterly destroyed.

This particular dragon was well past a thousand feet in length if I included the tail. Its bones were stark white beneath a mesh of black and purple animating mana. Tendrils spread between the joints, holding everything together, and strung themselves through the fingers of the dragon’s wings. It shouldn’t have been able to fly like that, not with nothing but those relatively thin strands looking like black cobwebs forming its wings, but its flight was purely powered by magic, so it not only flew, it flew horrifyingly fast.

And it was flying directly at me, easily closing the distance as it burned precious mana to pack on more speed. There were times when being frugal was justified, especially in this new world. And then there was right now.

I cast a short-range teleport spell, timed perfectly so that the skeletal dragon would lose track of me just as its own muzzle blocked its view. A fraction of a second later would have meant being struck by a multi-ton behemoth. But this way, it couldn’t be sure what had happened while I was in its blind spot, at least not until I reappeared above and behind it and unleashed two more of the void bombs I’d stashed away. They veered in, targeting the wing joints to blow the limbs right off the monster.

It rolled at the last moment and took both shots to its ribs. Another cloud of powdered bone filled the air, though it was far from a lethal attack against a creature that was already dead. That didn’t matter, though; the physical damage wasn’t the point. Disrupting the necromantic animating web was. As long as that was fully intact, even striking its core was going to be difficult, let alone doing damage.

The dragon banked hard, practically curling up on itself as it changed directions and shot up at me. I was already retreating, a string of explosive inferno spells trailing out behind me. Undead monsters had singular focus, which could be both a blessing and a bane to them. It flew right through every single spell and completely ignored the scorch marks appearing on its skull.

Each spell chipped away at its animating energy, forcing it to spend more mana from its core to keep itself together. Fighting a dragon was a game of attrition, one which they were well-suited to win. I could be up here for hours leading this thing around, which was time I didn’t have!

Worse, I couldn’t even draw it away from New Alkerist yet. The portal it had arrived through still hung open in the air, but there was no sign of Averin. He probably knew I’d target him for immediate extermination and was hanging back, hoping the dragon alone could kill me. Unfortunately, that meant I couldn’t stray too far from the portal – he could just as easily destroy the town if he arrived and I wasn’t here to intercept him.

As long as the dragon was limiting itself to physically chasing after me, I’d only get caught if I did something stupid, like overreaching on the damage I was laying down on it. Unfortunately, even skeletal dragons had access to their mana and the ability to shape it. It wasn’t likely to use it, but I couldn’t discount the possibility that it might, so I had to let some opportunities to break it down slip past me since I would be leaving myself vulnerable if I tried to take advantage of them.

Below, six new portals opened up in a line a few thousand feet outside of town. Immediately, swarms of undead started pouring out of them at a run, all headed the exact same direction. There were too many for me to get an accurate headcount, but as long as it was just zombies, New Alkerist would be fine. I did my best to spot any necromancers in their ranks, but the dragon up in the sky was keeping me busy. Instead of targeted attacks, I had to settle for raining down wide-area conjurations and hope to catch someone important inside their reach.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

My ongoing divination perched high overhead alerted me of someone coming through the sky portal while I was busy dodging dragon teeth and raining fire down on the undead massed below. Even forewarned, I wasn’t able to dodge his attack: a fully-charged mana beam that arced through the open air unerringly toward me.

Immediately, the dragon got clever. Rather than snapping at me or taking a swipe with its remaining forelimb, it turned its dive into a spin and lashed out with its long, spiny, whip-like tail. At the same time, mana surged down its body, and a line of pure force arced out.

I wasn’t dodging all of that. The tail slash was doable with a bit of effort. The mana beam was chasing me across the sky and, in all honesty, would probably be easier to absorb. But the great thing about being an archmage was that I didn’t need to scramble to fly out of the way. I simply expended a ruinously large chunk of mana and teleported directly behind the man who’d come out of the portal.

As I’d expected, it was Averin. He’d been lurking on the other side, waiting for the moment to make his move. It was a good one, too. Whatever spell he’d used to create that mana beam had locked onto me and wasn’t letting go. It curved through the air to circle back to my new location, which amusingly enough was also Averin’s location. His eyes widened as he grasped the implication, and mana burst out of him in every direction.

My shield ward twisted the explosion of mana away from me and let it wash back toward the portal. If it had actually gone through, that probably would have been enough to destabilize it completely, but whoever had built that portal knew what they were doing. Mana rolled across its surface and slid around it, not stressing the rune constructs enough to collapse the thing.

It was tempting to finish the job myself, but the truth of the matter was that I had a lot less time and fewer resources than Ammun did. If I could force the dragon into a retreat back through that portal, I’d count it as a win. Destroying it probably wasn’t in the cards, especially not now that Averin was here to control it, as evidenced by the fact that the monster had pivoted midair again and had unhinged its jaws to reveal a maw full of rapidly-forming mana.

Averin hurled himself straight down as the dragon unleashed a blast of fire that traveled hundreds of feet. At the same time, the mana beam locked onto me closed in. Those could hit each other and see who won; I wouldn’t be sticking around to be part of it.

Battlefield teleportation was too expensive to use this freely, but dragons were so huge that it was impossible not to occasionally. There just wasn’t a better way to keep ahead of them. Even now, it was already reorienting itself, either having found me through its own senses or because Averin was directing it. My bet was on it being a mixture of both.

I threw fire from either hand as I flew backward, raining it down on Averin’s fleeing form as he dodged left and right. Then the dragon caught up to me just as the mana beam lanced by again, and I had to set off a force bomb to hold its jaws open long enough for me to slip out.

This was getting ridiculous. I needed to collapse that mana beam before it got me killed. The only advantage I had here was that I could predict its path, so, much like I’d done with the dragon, I started dropping mana disrupting spheres in my wake as I flew directly away from the mana beam. It cut through them, one after another, and the structure of the spell started to collapse.

Averin saw what I was doing and took manual control of his spell. It started weaving around the spheres, but that was well within my expectations. I simply willed them to move and intercept the beam again while I desperately flew at a sharp angle to avoid another lunge from the dragon. I’d hit it enough times now that the animation weave coating its bones was starting to thin, which hopefully meant I’d have a clean shot at its core soon.

Before that, I needed to take care of its handler, which meant finding a way to ground the dragon for at least a minute. I had just the thing to make that happen, but I needed to set up the right circumstances. This was going to be dangerous, more so than the rest of the fight had been.

I went into a dive, not aiming for Averin specifically but angling myself close enough that he took evasive action rather than risk it. The mage threw himself out of the way, only slowing down when he realized I hadn’t corrected my descent. By then, it was too late for him to catch up with me.

The dragon, on the other hand, could fly far faster than I could, and it had no problem chasing me down. More mana was gathering in its open maw to spew in a deadly burst of flame that would turn me into a piece of flying charcoal. I turned to look up at it, wanting to judge its speed with my own eyes. If I messed this up, there was a very good possibility that I’d be killed in the next few seconds, shield ward be damned.

I pulled two things out of my phantom space, took a breath, then teleported right next to the skeletal dragon’s open rib cage and forced a lump of glowing marble between bones bigger than I was. Immediately, the dragon roared, and the animating net jumped into place as it bucked against the interfering spell.

The disruption only lasted for a second before it was smothered by the sheer metaphysical mass of the dragon’s mana, but a single second was all I needed. I flicked what looked like a small seed made of polished steel through the gap in the dragon’s defenses, then threw myself as far away from the dragon as I could. It streaked past me, a blur of white and black, and I almost completely cleared its back legs without getting clipped. At the last moment, a foot of bone claw smacked into me, utterly demolishing my shield ward and sending me spinning end over end through the air.

I missed the effects of the seed, but by the time the disorientation wore off, I could see its results. The dragon rolled through the sky, completely out of control, as silvery tendrils thick around as tree trunks crawled through its bones and tangled things up. A few seconds later, the titanic monster struck the desert, sending a great plume of sand a mile up into the air.

I turned to Averin and started pumping mana into my shield ward to rebuild my defenses. I’d only get a minute at most before the dragon regained control of itself. That was more than enough time.