Averin wasn’t stupid, despite his inexplicable desire to bring Ammun back from the annals of history. His questionable motives aside, he was perfectly aware of how overmatched he was without the dragon’s help. There were really only two possible options: he either fled the field back through a portal, or he found some way to stop the fight.

Whether it was because he knew the price of failure if he ran back through that portal, or because he didn’t think he could reach it without me catching up to him, Averin decided to fly directly toward New Alkerist instead. Mana surged out of him, building itself up into an expensive master-tier spell with a lot of shifting pieces that made it hard to identify.

I had seconds to deal with him, maybe a minute or two at most, before the spell I’d tangled the dragon up in expired—or more likely was broken early—and I’d have to fight them both at the same time again. That wasn’t an experience I was eager to repeat, which meant I needed to prioritize saving as many of those seconds as possible.

So while I could have probably caught up to Averin through flight, I opted for the far more expensive instant teleportation spell instead. My mana crystal was over half empty at this point, meaning I needed to start being thrifty with my tactics if I couldn’t end the fight soon, but I was confident there was enough mana left to finish the job.

I appeared twenty feet in front of Averin and immediately blasted a wave of dispelling magic over him. He was too skilled to let his constructed spell collapse from just that, but it gave him one more thing to juggle. His speed suffered from it, giving me enough time to start moving and match his pace so that he didn’t just blow past me while I was reorienting myself.

Up close, I could see that he’d advanced his mana core to stage five under Ammun’s tutelage. That would complicate things, since it gave him a body akin to a mana crystal. He’d naturally resist just about all magic by virtue of draining the mana right out of it. Some spells, such as offensive transmutations used on his body, would outright fail with no effort on his part.

I hated it when my enemies enjoyed the same perks I did.

Force spells were a good opening move and, at this range, it would be near impossible to miss. I flung out force cleaves, conjuring waves of them three at a time. Averin’s shield ward soaked up most of them, but the sheer momentum and weight of the spells knocked him around enough to disrupt his attempt to reach New Alkerist.

Averin tumbled away in an uncontrolled spin that took him several seconds to pull himself out of. Impressively, he never lost control of the master-tier spell he was building. He even managed to fend off my own probing tendrils of mana, but that was a losing proposition. Even if we were at the same level of skill, it was far more difficult to defend a spell construct than it was to break one.

And we weren’t at the same level.

Averin knew it just as well as I did, and he didn’t try. After repelling my initial attempt to break it, he simply detonated the spell in my face. Concussive waves of force radiated out in every direction, steered subtly by their creator to focus on me. I was battered over and over again, each wave weakening my shield ward as I was thrown back. It didn’t take much to break the defense completely.

That hadn’t been the purpose of Averin’s spell. He’d planned to use it on the barrier protecting the town. Arguably, I should have let him instead of intercepting him. The spell was specifically designed to crack magical defenses through repeated and mounting pressure, perfect for stressing a barrier powered by a ward stone.

As an unfortunate consequence, it also worked against shield wards. Only the fact that I was flooding the ward with mana in the fractions of a second between each wave of force energy, and that my own mana-crystal body was soaking up some of the power of the spell, kept it from pulping me up in the sky. I was left to weather the attack as best I could.

If all I’d needed to do was defend myself, I could have managed it without being in any real danger, but Averin’s attack also presented me with an opportunity. Such a large amount of undirected force had also cracked his defenses, too. Admittedly, being at the epicenter of the eruption of force waves was making things a lot easier for him, but he hadn’t escaped the power of his own spell.

I had a small window of opportunity to smite Averin out of existence, but only if I could survive the onslaught of magic and strike while he was vulnerable. Fortunately for me, the bottleneck in maintaining my shield ward was in how fast it could accept more mana, not in how fast I could supply it. The rest of my attention was going toward counteracting some of the force waves to prevent the ward from being overwhelmed and shutting down completely. I could survive a few seconds without that.

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Whether it was coincidence or strategy that saved Averin, I couldn’t tell. Either way, his flight spell ended and he started falling just as a lance of force shot through the space his head had occupied a fraction of a second earlier. Cursing at the unexpected drop in elevation, I descended to chase after him and fired off a second spell.

This one struck true, tearing into his mana-reinforced body and leaving a bloody, gaping wound. It wasn’t as much damage as it should have been, but it proved that he’d overwhelmed his own defenses with his force explosion. He was vulnerable, and I had whole seconds left to take him out before I needed to switch my focus back to defense.

A bolt of lightning arced out from my hand and scorched him, leaving streamers of smoke behind as he continued to fall. Before he got much farther, a second force lance tore off a leg, followed by a force cleave that bisected his abdomen. I finished him off with a small tornado of solidified wind centered around him.

Briefly, the column of air became a wall of chunky red gore. When the spell faded, there was nothing recognizable about the corpse. It was thrown wildly about, still caught in the throes of the ongoing force explosion spell.

That was one problem down, and with the distraction taken care of, I bent my full abilities toward keeping my own body from suffering the same fate Averin’s was undergoing. I managed to ride out the remaining waves long enough to escape the radius of the spell, a surprisingly robust distance of over five hundred feet.

Below, zombies continued their assault on the barrier at the commands of the necromancers who’d arrived with them. Various conjurations tested the ward’s integrity, but the amount of mana I’d left to power it was far, far greater than what a mere twenty or thirty mages of indeterminate quality were capable of overcoming. Unless something went drastically wrong, New Alkerist was safe for the moment.

Of course, with a massive undead dragon still in the area, there were plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong. I was hoping that with its handler nothing but scraps of bloody flesh, I’d be able to wear the dragon down without any further issues, but even that might not necessarily be a victory if it took me so long that Ammun finished getting his device working.

I’d killed Averin with plenty of time to spare, however. The dragon was still struggling to disentangle itself over a mile away out in the desert, though it looked like it was starting to win that fight. I had half a minute or so before that became a problem I needed to deal with again, which was plenty of time to prepare a good shot, or barely enough time to wipe out all the weak mages and undead fodder below.

“Eh,” I muttered. “The town can take care of itself.”

I flew over to the dragon. By the time I got there, it was nearly free, but my spell was complete. I triggered it just in time, and an abyssal maw opened up beneath the struggling skeleton. It fell in and I immediately landed on the edge, or as close as I could get with all the loose sand pouring into the giant hole and burying the dragon.

That wouldn’t do much to stop it, but my hope was that the extra weight from the sand would slow it down, and the jolt from falling and slamming into the ground would keep it tangled up a bit longer. I pulled out a metal pole covered in runes and drove it into the sand deep enough that only four feet were still visible, then flew a few hundred feet around the outer edge of the pit and did it again.

This trap needed five points all properly spaced out before it could be activated, which was a bit of a long shot to get up and running, but if I pulled it off, I might very well destroy this dragon instead of just forcing it to retreat. I had two down already, and it was still partially buried under the sand and struggling with the snare I’d implanted in its ribcage.

I was just setting up the third pole when a crack like a thousand trees breaking came from the pit, followed by a triumphant, guttural roar. I quickly placed the pole and started flying again while peering down at the dragon with a divination centered over the pit. It had ripped away the restraints and was now wallowing in loose sand, trying to extract enough of its body to climb free. With only one forelimb, it was having some trouble.

I dropped the fourth pole in place and oriented it in the right direction. One more to go, just ten seconds. The dragon finally ripped its hind legs free and shook loose sand out from between its bones. There wasn’t a lot of room in the pit to spread its wings, but then, it didn’t really need to. It crouched down, cat-like, and pounced on the wall.

Claws ten feet long dug through the sand and stone to find purchase while it flared its wings as best it could. I zipped through the air overhead, cutting across the pit instead of circling around it to save myself a second. The final pole materialized in my hand as I closed in on the last spot, but before I could drive it into the ground, the crack of stone filled my ears.

The dragon hadn’t escaped the pit. Instead, its weight had been too great, and whatever chunk of stone it had driven its claws into hadn’t been up to the task of supporting it. Rather than leverage itself out of the pit, the dragon slid back down, causing a miniature avalanche of sand and stone. That would have been fine, except in doing so, it had caused one of the poles to shift out of place.

I dropped the fifth pole in one smooth motion and darted back across the pit to rescue the wayward pole before it could slide into the pit, only to pull up short when a beam of mana shot out from between the dragon’s jaws. It missed me by a hair, and only because I’d sensed it coming at the last second and stopped short of flying into it.

The pole tumbled into the pit. I watched it slip into a free fall, then winced as the metal clinked against a chunk of stone in the wall and went spinning off. If I could have grabbed it with telekinesis, I would have. That might have salvaged my plan. But instead of doing that, I was busy dodging another death beam from the dragon.

It leaped again, and this time, there wasn’t enough sand in the way to stop it. The dragon bellowed as it clung to its perch, then jumped again. I barely managed to fly out of the way as its massive wings spread to their full length and pulled it back into the sky, my attempted trap left worthless below on the ground.