It was beyond obvious that Ammun was controlling both of the undead dragons, but I suspected he’d split the workload between himself and his shadow. In a way, that was good for me, since it meant this battle was tying up more of his resources, but it did make things harder. Both monsters worked in perfect unison, and with Ammun coordinating them, they became his eyes so that he could target me with long-range spells.

That was why I wasn’t terribly surprised when explosive waves of force started detonating in my flight path, both in front of and behind me. They were extremely localized, only twenty feet across, and well-timed to batter my shield ward. More importantly, they disrupted my movements and gave the dragons time to close in on me. Archmage I might be, but I still wasn’t keen on the idea of being within biting range of a monster a thousand times my size.

I threw up a force wall of my own to block a set of snapping jaws and slipped away, but without anything to anchor it to, the spell was quickly overloaded. I gained a bare hundred feet of distance before another force wave blasted across me, throwing me sideways into the other dragon.

It was waiting for me, anticipating the collision, and already had its jaws open to reveal pale white teeth and the black-purple knot of necrotic energy that moved it. If I let those teeth clamp down on me, there was no doubt in my mind that they’d overpower my shield ward and tear through my body. Fortunately, I had other options.

Undead weren’t powered by muscles. Even the ones that still had them didn’t use them. The necrotic nets woven around their body moved them like puppets, from the biggest to the smallest, and these dragons were no exceptions. I couldn’t destroy their animating cores easily, but I could still attack the net. Sure, it would repair itself, but I only needed a few seconds.

Blades of dispelling energy whipped through the air, targeting either side of the dragon’s jaw and severing the connecting energy that controlled it. Abruptly, it no longer had a maw poised to tear me apart. When I slipped past the teeth, it lacked the ability to close them around me, and I found myself in a position where any attacks on me would damage the construct Ammun was controlling.

This wasn’t a good place to be, of course. I gave it ten seconds at most before the dragon regained the use of its mouth and started trying to kill me, but that was more than enough time to destroy it. Magic rippled through my outstretched hand, slamming into the back of the skull and blasting a hole wide enough for me to pass through.

I was inside its rib cage now, past the defense its necrotic net granted. The dragon twisted into a corkscrew spin, trying to throw me around and prevent me from doing what Ammun knew I was about to do, but it was too late. I was already ripping apart the dragon’s core. It unraveled in moments, and bones started raining down from the sky to crash into the trees below.

I deflected the spine off to the side to avoid being slapped by it on the way down, then spun in place to face the final remaining dragon. It had been a bit of a risky tactic, but that was a dragon destroyed with a single master-tier force spell and a bunch of advanced-tier magic that cost me nothing. Even better – it was nothing I hadn’t already shown Ammun I was capable of.

The third dragon flew in toward me, perhaps hoping to overwhelm me with sudden ferocity. At the same time, another force wave blasted across my back and tried to throw me forward. That trick was getting too predictable to work, though. The instant I felt the magic burst into existence, I threw out my own force wave, just strong enough to meet and cancel out Ammun’s spell.

The end result was that instead of crashing into the dragon, I glided forward a few feet, then flew past it when I wasn’t where Ammun was expecting me to be. I left behind a floating mine field of dispelling waves, none powerful enough to break the animating core on their own, but hopefully enough of a distraction that Ammun would focus on defending his minion from that and lose track of me.

Necromancy was a powerful branch of magic, but not because it was inherently stronger than any other one. Ammun himself was a representation of what heights a powerful necromancer could strive to, an immortal being who could come back from his physical body being destroyed endlessly. He would never age, never tire, and never die. Whether that was worth the price was a matter of debate, but he’d evidently felt it was a good trade.

But in terms of destructive power, there were plenty of conjurations that could equal necrotic magic. Invocations could strengthen a mage to temporarily match the most powerful of undead in a physical contest. Enchantments could enslave victims to the caster’s will to create an endless legion of minions.

The true danger of necromancy, that one thing that made it unique, was that it was self-propagating. Necromancers were rightly feared for their ability to raise whole armies to fight on their behalf, but the wise archmage knew that the clean up after that army was destroyed was the real challenge. Necrotic energy didn’t like to break back down into raw mana and return to the Astral Realm. It lingered, a blight on the land, and attached itself to other, suitable vessels.

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Or, in the hands of a skilled necromancer, it was harvested to enhance his remaining minions.

We’d been fighting a moving battle thus far, which meant that the first dragon I’d killed was almost a mile back. The lingering necrotic energy wasn’t close enough to matter, but that wasn’t the case for the second dragon. Ammun directed his remaining minion to dive into the devastated stretch of forest where the fallen bones were still laying in dust-filled craters.

That much energy would destroy the body in hours at most, maybe minutes if Ammun was clumsy about weaving it all together. I’d probably be dead before then, and even if not, letting him stall me here for however long it took for that dragon to fall apart wasn’t a winning strategy. I couldn’t stop its descent, but maybe I could take it apart before it got there.

I started pulling together the same combination of master-tier force and dispelling magic I’d used to drop the first dragon in seconds, but this time, I didn’t have an easy, convenient target. I released both spells in perfect rhythm, thanks in part to my shadow handling one of them, and blasted one of its wings off. The bones exploded outward, showering a quarter-mile stretch of forest in a thin line and causing the dragon to shift from a dive into an uncontrolled spin.

It didn’t actually need the wings to fly, unlike a living dragon, so the loss of control was mostly a result of being hit with a massive amount of force. Still, that was enough to send it off-course so that when it hit the ground a few seconds later, it was a thousand feet away from its destination. Now I just needed to finish tearing it apart before Ammun managed to harvest that trove of energy.

A cloud of necrotic breath rose from the dragon’s maw, and this time I didn’t have a decoy ready to spin out. For just one dragon, though, I didn’t need it. It attacked my shield ward as I dove through it, but I was out the other side before the breath attack could find any purchase. I rained bolts of force down on it mixed in with dispelling waves to scramble the necrotic energy net, which wasn’t terribly effective, but I’d already pinned this dragon down and could afford to take an extra thirty seconds destroying it.

That was what I thought, at least, until a black silhouette appeared in front of me – Ammun’s shadow making an appearance. A beam of brilliant white mana lanced out of its outstretched hand, narrowly missing me as I twisted to the side. My shield ward lit up as it absorbed the stray mana streaming past me, but I’d avoided enough of the spell that it didn’t break.

My own shadow detached itself and flew up to meet Ammun’s, and I put the two of them out of my mind. I was more than capable of ignoring the draw on my mana core from its spells as it defended me. Shadows weren’t really something that could be killed, so the best-case outcome of that scuffle was imprisoning Ammun’s temporarily or banishing it far enough away that it burned up a lot of mana getting back to the fight.

Meanwhile, I had a dragon that was attempting to either get back in the air or claw its way through a few hundred trees to reach the bones of its fallen brethren. I wasn’t about to let that happen – not unless Ammun threw some new surprise my way.

Unfortunately, even if he couldn’t bring the dragon to the pool of necrotic energy, there was nothing stopping him from doing it the other way around. It wasn’t as efficient, of course, but what did he care about that when he had an entire moon to draw from and his shadow on-site to overcome any handicap distance might provide?

I sensed more than saw the necrotic energy start to clump together into a thick stream that wove through the trees. All of a sudden, I didn’t have a minute or two to destroy this last dragon. I had seconds unless I contested Ammun for control of the energy.

I could do it. I’d been a necromancer once. I still knew the magic, and I was far closer than he was. But I’d sworn never to practice necromancy again, and in all the other ways I’d failed and broken promises over my long life, that was one I’d held myself to.

Today wasn’t the day I broke my word on that, but I found myself irrationally angry at Ammun for putting me in a situation where resorting to necromancy was the best option. I didn’t need that kind of temptation. Rationally, it wasn’t his fault. He was a lich, after all. Necromancy was a huge part of his toolkit, even as an archmage.

For all that, it was with a touch more vindictiveness that was absolutely necessary that I slammed an enormous blast of force into the base of the dragon’s skull. A lance of dispelling magic preceded it, piercing the necrotic defenses protecting the bone and allowing the force spell to disintegrate a twenty-foot chunk of spine into powder.

Nobody else on the planet could have dove directly into a necrotic core and come back out unharmed. It was only the fact that my body was mostly solidified mana that resonated with the Astral Realm so much that it altered the mana flow around me that I wasn’t obliterated by magic that embodied the antithesis of life.

I tore it apart in seconds. Magic spilled from me, wastefully and with no attempt to recycle it and save my reserves. Blade of mana slipped through knots in the core and severed them, unraveling the whole net with the suddenness of a snapping line. What had been a moving, violent monster around me literally fell apart over the span of two seconds and became nothing more than a massive skeleton tangled up in the trees.

With no core to reinforce, the necrotic remnants from the other dragon had nothing to work on. Ammun released his hold on it and I flew up over the trees to rain destructive blasts of force magic down on the body. Leaving it behind for him to reanimate wasn’t a good idea, and I’d be repeating my spell on the other two in a moment.

I looked up at where our shadows were still tangling together, and I knew that he was watching me. I gestured down to the cloud of bone dust filtering through the trees and said, “You’re next.”