It should have been impossible for a battle with a titanic undead dragon to feel tedious, but honestly, that’s how it was. Without Averin or anyone else here to control it, and with its limited number of ways to express its mana, it really wasn’t that hard to outmaneuver it in the air while I whittled it down. The worst part of it was the knowledge that even a single mistake could end up with me absorbing so much kinetic force simply from impacting its body that it could kill me.

Ten minutes turned into twenty as we danced through the sky. I was forced to abandon casting master-tier spells in favor of attacks that I could recycle all the mana from, which slowed down my progress even further. The worst part of it was when Querit unexpectedly appeared in town and decided to help kill off the attacking zombies. The surge of mana he put out drew the dragon’s attention and required some quick thinking on my part to get it focused back on me, even though we were miles away from the town at the time.

Other than that, I splintered bones one spell at a time, leaving them scorched and scratched as I slowly broke down the web of necrotic energy tying them together. When I could, I took shots at its core, but rupturing an undead’s core didn’t work like it would on a living person. The dragon didn’t feel pain. It wasn’t incapacitated by the spell. If anything, springing a metaphorical leak helped it reinforce the magic animating it since it just pulled the loose mana into the spell.

I found that acid worked the best, especially the kind I’d produced with alchemy. Stored in fragile glass flasks, each one I tagged the dragon with clung to its frame and slowly ate through whatever bones they happened to break against. They were a constant drain on the monster, one that wasn’t going to fizzle out anytime soon.

Finally, I saw an opportunity to end the fight once and for all. If I was really lucky, the monster wouldn’t be getting back up. I’d been focusing a lot of effort on pummeling its ribs, trying to break them off to disrupt the net of necrotic energy surrounding them, and a telekinetically hurled boulder as we skimmed a hundred feet or so off the ground proved to be the last bit of effort needed to succeed.

Bone splintered and cracked, then a thirty-foot chunk of rib snapped and crashed into the desert below. Before the animating magic could crawl over that hole and seal it up, I darted in. A claw slashed through the air at me, but I had the dragon’s measure now. It was fast, but I could dodge its attacks as long as I paid attention.

Then I was inside its rib cage, ironically safe from practically anything the dragon could do to me. Instead, I had to worry about necrotic energy literally sloughing the flesh off my body as it tried to kill and reanimate me as an undead. Against any normal-sized beast, the aura wasn’t all that great, but in the heart of a gargantuan dragon, it was a very real risk.

With part of my mind devoted to protecting myself—and once again, I was thankful that my stage five mana core upgrade insulated me from harmful magic—I started slamming spell after spell into the dragon’s core. There was nowhere it could run to escape me now, no attack it could make to distract me. Its limbs scrabbled against its chest, unable to reach between the ribs to pluck me loose.

Its head turned on a serpentine neck and breathed deadly mana at me, but that just got sucked up by its necrotic coating, strengthening it but utterly failing to reach me. In vain, the dragon started flailing and shaking, perhaps thinking to jar me loose from my perch. I smiled grimly and held myself in place while I tore at its core.

The important thing to know about undead was that their mana cores were different from living monsters. They couldn’t produce mana, but they could process ambient mana much, much faster, and store significantly large quantities of it since filling their whole bodies didn’t cripple them with pain like it would a living being. That was one of the big reasons attacking the dragon’s core hadn’t been my initial strategy.

But now, I’d thinned out its protections in addition to incapacitating huge swaths of its body. Not only that, but I’d regenerated a significant amount of mana during the fight. It was nothing compared to what the valley made for me, of course, but it meant I had enough to infest the dragon’s mana core with a spell I’d been saving for the right moment.

An undead’s mana core functioned on similar principles to a house’s enchanting schema. It needed a constant supply of mana coming in to replace what it used with each passing second, and the spells that kept the body moving were carefully anchored in the core itself. In that way, the core was a battery, and it was possible to disconnect the spells from their source of mana.

That was a lot easier to do on a zombie than on my current target, but it was the same theory. But since the dragon could neither attack nor escape me while I was safely ensconced in its rib cage, the only thing I needed to worry about was it turning on New Alkerist to force me back out into the open again. Without a handler, I doubted it was smart enough to think of that.

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Just to be safe, I disconnected its wings first. Immediately, the dragon took a nosedive into the sand, rattling my teeth with the impact and leaving me in the darkness as the sheer weight of the monster partially buried it. It lumbered back to its three remaining feet, only to stagger when I clipped the thread tying the front limb that was still intact to its animation spell.

The dragon’s skull slammed down into the dirt. Its weight was too great for its back legs to support it that way, especially without its wings functional. This wouldn’t last long, unfortunately. The spells repaired themselves automatically, as long as there was still mana to consume. That was all part of the plan, though; I was hungry for mana myself. I just wanted it to hold still while I latched onto its core like the world’s biggest parasite.

I wasn’t going to get back all the mana I’d spent on this fight, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to take it from the dragon so that, with nothing left, it would collapse into a regular skeleton again. Then I’d destroy the damn thing so there was no chance Ammun could resurrect it. At least, that was the theory.

What actually happened was that the dragon’s crash and subsequent belly-drag across the sand taught it that while it couldn’t get through its ribs to attack me, other things could. Even as I started draining its core dry, a never-ending stream of high-speed sand rushed through the ribs and slammed into me. I held my place through a judicious feed of mana into my shield ward, but that much weight wasn’t easy to deal with.

Worse, I’d actually underestimated the dragon. The thing was just so damn big. Even my more liberal estimates as to the size of its mana core had fallen short, and it had barely used a quarter of its mana over close to forty minutes of nonstop fighting. It would take me hours to steal the rest of the mana, and I honestly wasn’t sure my mana crystal could actually hold it all, even with the slight transference loss figured in.

It was a moot point. The sandblasting might not have been enough to dislodge me, but it did thin out the web of necrotic energy between its ribs. The instant the dragon regained control of its front leg, it reared up, swung its head down, and blasted another beam of mana into its chest cavity. This time, it wasn’t stymied by its own defenses.

I channeled some of my stolen mana into a barrier to deflect the mana, but that wasn’t going to hold for long. If and when it failed, I’d do something else. I’d fought too long and too hard to give up my position here now that I’d secured it. The dragon’s death beam ended, but I could feel more mana shooting up the length of its neck so that it could try again.

Abruptly, its head snapped off to the side as a chunk of stone the size of a building smacked into it. Querit came into view at the edge of one of my divinations, still in his combat frame and flying in the air. Two more boulders floated behind him, an impressive piece of telekinesis. Without hesitation, he launched one and then the other at the dragon’s skull.

“Keiran!” he called out. “Are you alive in there?”

“Yes,” I yelled back. “What are you doing here?”

“Ammun’s invaders are dead. Or re-dead. Whatever. You know what I mean.”

The dragon’s head snapped back around like a whip and unleashed a death beam in Querit’s direction. It passed through him, leaving the golem unharmed. Without a living body to react to the mana in the attack, Querit couldn’t be hurt by necromantic abilities like that, a fact which the dragon was apparently smart enough to figure out for itself since it didn’t try again.

Unfortunately for it, its wings still weren’t functioning, leaving Querit to float in the air out of reach. He spent mana picking the boulders back up to pummel the dragon with them again and again, which honestly didn’t do much other than distract the monster, but it did give me a few more minutes to drain mana out of it.

A sudden surge of power shot through the necromantic enchantments holding it together, some sort of emergency response probably triggered by its mana core dipping below a certain threshold. Even as I did my best to stop or at least slow it, I watched cracked bones seal themselves all over its body and missing pieces start to regrow.

That wasn’t good. If that chunk of blasted-off rib came back, I’d be completely stuck in here. A skeletal dragon’s rib cage made for a fantastic prison, and I wasn’t confident I could blast my way out from the inside without killing myself in the process. Trying to teleport through a field of necrotic energy was an idea better left unexplored, which just left getting clear while I still could.

The dragon’s wings snapped back out to their full length and it leaped up into the air. Only my own flight magic kept me from tumbling end over end inside its ribs, but it did slow down my escape. I only just barely managed to squeeze past the reforming rib before the necrotic energy washed through the open hole, and even that was more thanks to luck than skill.

I was vulnerable when I fell through that hole, but the dragon paid no attention to me. It was on the wing, flying directly back to the still-open portal hanging in the sky a few miles away and not even bothering to respond to Querit’s final attacks before it got out of range.

“Looks like we drove it off,” the golem said as he came to a stop next to me.

“Yeah,” I said, frowning as I watched its retreating form. “Why, though?”

“It knew it couldn’t win?”

I shook my head. “The whole point was to buy Ammun time. It could have kept fighting, but maybe it didn’t need to. Maybe Ammun finished doing whatever he was up to. I thought it’d take a few more hours.”

“We weren’t able to scry the summit again,” Querit said. “Maybe if you try, you’ll have better luck.”

I nodded. “How’s the village?”

“Untouched, somehow.”

“Good enough for now,” I said. “Let’s head back to the valley and see if we can figure out what Ammun’s doing.”