Osli Irres could not single-handedly bring down a dragon. Not with sufficient stopping power to prevent it from causing chaos. But he could hit very hard.

His augmentation spells were half physical, half elemental. The elemental side would be useless against the dragon.

The physical ones would not.

Jair's preferred gravity manipulation spells weren't directly inspired by Irres' fighting style, but they were similar enough that he felt immediate kinship with the man as they jumped into combat together.

Irres used his spells to surge forward, like an accelerant but a hundred times stronger. He flew across the gap between the walltop and the dragon, slicing deep into its wing with enough force that it lost its ability to hover.

The dragon spiraled down, reaching out with one claw to grab the tower as it fell.

Jair jumped on it, stabbing Maelstrom into its back. The furious creature whipped its neck back, ready to coil around him, but Jair was already rolling away. Irres wasn't quite as prepared. It swung in his direction as soon as it saw Jair was out of reach, and bit down on the older mageblade's sword with a metallic clang.

Irres tried to tug his sword free, but the dragon was stronger. With a quick wrench of its neck and growl in its throat, it tore the weapon out of Irres' grasp and spat it over the cliffside.

Unlike Jair's fully bonded ascension, Irres didn't have the power to recall his sword to him. Maelstrom was a tangible part of Jair's soul which no longer took up any space at all, leaving Jair's soulspace free to hold other things; Irres’ was a physical object stored in his soulspace storage.

But the dragon’s momentary distraction gave Jair time to jump over to its injured wing and stab down into its venom sac, making sure to scrape Maelstrom sharply against the scales in the process to throw up sparks.

The poison gas ignited, all but detaching the already-injured wing in the explosion.

The blast knocked Jair back, scorching his robes, but it entirely crippled the dragon’s ability to fly.

The dragon clawed its way up the tower, snarling, tail lashing out. Jair ducked. Irres rolled away. Then the dragon was out of reach, climbing upward with one wing and its claws. The second wing dragged limply behind it, barely able to twitch.

40 seconds. They were closer than they’d ever been. Ran would be nearly halfway to safety.

If they could just hold it another thirty seconds, it would be enough, but…

Jain threw Maelstrom. The blade glanced off its underside, knocking loose a couple scales but doing no real damage. Then it was up, crawling over the wall and out of sight.

He turned to Irres, but the man was no longer beside him. It took a moment to realize - he'd dived off the cliff after his sword. While that would ordinarily be a perfectly fine strategy if the goal were simply to kill their opponent, it ignored the fact that they were on a very tight timer here.

The dying dragon always made it a point to eat Ran first thing if possible, and the closer it came to death the more desperately it pursued him. Its single-minded focus was incredible, obsession bordering on insanity. Perhaps even into insanity. It was hard to tell, talking to any dragon was hard enough even on a good day.

By the time Jair reached the walltop, it was too late.

A single arm and crumpled shoulder-guard was all that remained of Ran, and a moment later the dragon snapped those up as well.

Of course.

Jair watched numbly as the dragon continued rampaging, mindlessly lashing out in its final moments. The administration building crunched under the dragon's bulk. Teachers, staff, and Headmaster Larenok ran out with various screams and shouts.

Irres flew over the wall as though shot from a massive ballista, pulled forward through the air by his sword’s absurd acceleration, then shifted angle and descended on the dragon with an earth-shaking downward stab.

It lashed out at him, but Irres avoided the strike with one final surge of motion that carried him far from its reach. The dragon was bleeding profusely now, sludgy ichor dripping from multiple deadly wounds, making the air sting with its acrid miasma.

Jair counted the seconds as it ate a couple random administrative assistants, broke lecture hall 3, and finally stilled in death.

Too long. Even with the addition of another mageblade the dragon survived too long after being fatally injured.

Jair descended from the wall and jogged over to Irres.

The older man hadn’t escaped taking injuries of his own. He was limping and one arm had been violently gashed open. Welling blood ran down to his elbow in crimson streams, the black lines of his spell imprints on his upper arm fully exposed where flesh had been torn away.

"No need to be concerned on my account. I'll live."

"How could we have brought it down faster?" Jair demanded. "I need to slow it down more. It's too fast, too close. Argh. How?"

"Calm yourself. You've just been through a traumatic battle. You need to breathe slowly. There's nothing more you could have done."

Jair slapped his hand away, in no mood to play games. "I know that. But you could have. What could you have done differently? Tell me!"

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Sometimes, there's nothing you can do." Irres spoke softly, gently, with a note of haunted sympathy. "Your friend wouldn't want you to blame yourself."

Jair took a steadying breath, calming himself forcefully. "I am not blaming anyone. The dragon was at fault. But we can learn from this. How can I slow it in future? How can you slow it?"

"It does no good to--"

"No! No. Things don't have to be like this. We can change it next time."

"Welburne, take a breath, it'll be alright. You're allowed to grieve."

"You don't understand. This isn't-- it doesn't have to be like this." He grabbed Irres by the front of his robe. "Tell me. What more can you do? If you knew in advance, what else could you try? If you could avoid the tail, if you kept your sword. Can you slow it down more? Can you stop it?"

"Let's go see the healer, you need to rest."

This wasn’t getting anywhere. "If you won’t tell me now, then I'll just bring diagrams with me next time instead."

Jair allowed himself to be led away, focusing inward to touch the golden star of his soulspell.

Time fell away behind him as the past came rushing up to meet him.

He threw himself back out of the reversion immediately. Morning of the final day. The closest he'd gotten in a long time to an immediate repeat without the need to live through days of repetitive downtime.

Good. He didn’t have the patience to repeat everything right now.

Irres was already on board. Jair half-heartedly asked a few other teachers, offering them trades or bribes, flashing Maelstrom recklessly. He very nearly went to Larenok to beg Firdon's help. The stone mage might not be able to stop it, but they didn't need to stop it, only slow it down a little bit more.

He ignored Ran's attempts to draw him out of his frenzy, spending the entire morning drawing out every movement of the previous battle. Where Irres moved, how the dragon responded. What was the same as when Jair did it alone, what was different.

Ran was harder to convince to sit in the tunnel than usual, Jair's behavior of the morning spooking him, but with enough promises of every answer he could want tomorrow he finally gave in.

Jair waited atop the wall. The moment Irres arrived, Jair started talking him through the diagrams, much to the teacher's confusion.

"What could you do differently?" Jair asked, as soon as he’d run through the sequence fully. "I think losing your sword here is the biggest danger."

Irres took the stack and slowly flipped back through the pages. "What is this?"

"The future. We have ten minutes to strategize before the dragon reaches us. So what do we do? How do we slow it down?"

"You can’t break down a fight into such simple terms. There are a thousand permutations--"

"And we'll try every one of them if that's what it takes," Jair growled. "So what can you do differently?"

Irres looked between Jair and the diagrams, nodded slowly, and closed his eyes. He began moving slowly, taking steps, making sweeping gestures with his arms, then slowly shook his head. "In this scenario, there is no way to ensure success."

"We don't need to ensure it, as long as there's a chance we can get it eventually."

"We cannot stop it alone, if this is accurate. We need more people. A full hunting team. Traps, nets, harpoons."

"I have nets and ropes. No harpoons. Ran wouldn't buy the ballista."

"You are incredibly well prepared for something that should be impossible to predict."

"Yes." No point trying to deny it.

"What is going on here?" Irres gestured to the pages. "This isn't normal draconic behavior. What kind of dragon ignores its killers to go after a random student?"

At least he was taking the threat seriously, even if he wouldn't admit to being able to change anything.

"It's very angry with Ran's mother. That's all I've been able to discover. ‘Kill the child, break the mother.’ That’s the dragon’s mantra, repeated endlessly. Nothing else.”

"His mother incensed a dragon to this extent? How?"

Jair shook his head. "That’s the biggest question. Ran doesn't know anything, she left when he was very young. His father refuses to talk about it much, but when pressed he'll only admit that he was aware that she was leaving but not the specifics of why. Just ‘danger’. Presumably the dragon. I've never been able to track down the woman herself."

Irres considered him another moment before speaking. "You seem very deeply involved in this affair."

"I spent a long time trying to get to the bottom of it.”

The distant form of the dragon appeared as usual, swooping down in the ever predictable arcs that Jair could trace blindfolded.

Irres took the dragon’s arrival perfectly in stride this time, as though the diagrams had fully convinced him of the veracity of Jair's claims. He didn't try to fight in the same way again, either. Instead he shifted his attack angles, taking Jair's 'we'll try all of them' at face value.

It was such a relief having someone else who listened. He could convince Ran if he put enough effort into it, but he was the target so any change he made shifted things to a fairly extreme degree. This was different. Irres wasn't enough to change the dragon's pattern of attack, but he was enough to change how the battle played out.

He and Jair leapt into the attack a few seconds apart, their blades flashing in the sunlight. Irres slammed forward directly into the dragon's venom sac, tearing it open as the dragon's momentum drove it further into his sword. Jair waited until the dragon was nearer, but it took only a second for it to reach the wall. Jair jumped and slammed Maelstrom down into its back, slashing violently through its vitals.

Irres had reversed course, his sword's insane momentum pulling him upward as though flying, then he dropped down beside Jair in an equally thunderous stab to his attack in the previous loop.

The dragon snapped its neck around, hissing its high repetitive screech. Jair avoided it as he always did, rolling away. Irres jumped upwards, swinging his sword around in an arc, pulling himself along behind it. His arc shifted at a sharp angle as the dragon covered him with a plume of fire. Though less explosive without its poison breath, the attack still easily set his robes on fire. Irres fell, control over his spell faltering as he hurried to smother the flames.

Jair hadn't quite closed the distance before the dragon huffed one final time as though in resignation, then charged the wall. It scrambled up and over it, claws tearing huge gashes and sending stones tumbling to the ground below.

Twenty-one seconds.

Much less than what they needed. Far worse than last time.

Jair growled in irritation.

Above, Irres shot downward at a diagonal and disappeared back inside, leaving Jair standing outside the walls again.

He ran for the nearest door, but he knew it would be over by the time he arrived. He couldn't quite bring himself to believe anything was different, couldn't summon up the hope to lend extra speed to his steps.

The interior displayed a scene of devastation. The dome had been cracked, a section missing toward the ground while huge rends spread up the side. The dragon lay still atop a pile of crushed glass and broken bodies. Irres among them.

Jair frowned at the scene. They'd gained less time than they'd lost; the faster fatal damage only incited the dragon to move sooner.

They didn't need to damage it more, they needed to slow it down.

Maybe Irres’ analysis was correct.

They needed more people.

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