Lorom Hadren held the unenviable position of chief custodian at the Astralla Institute. He was a mageblade, technically advanced, though he'd never been able to imprint more than the weakest of spells. His sword was dull with disuse and his spells were nothing to be impressed by, simple tricks that allowed him to perform his oversight and cleaning duties with excellence - light, lift, water conjuration. Nothing that would be of particular use against a dragon.
But he was someone, and someone who Larenok couldn't keep out of the academy by tying them up in bureaucracy for months since he was already authorized to be on-site.
At this point, Jair would take just about anyone.
"Mr. Hadren?"
Hadren looked up from his dimly-lit desk, frowning at Jair. "A student? Here?" He gestured around to the office surrounds as though to prove his point; more of a desk shoved into a maintenance hallway than a proper office. Pipes ran visibly overhead, nearly obscuring the ceiling entirely. A panel of levers behind him controlled the flow of water and mana through the academy.
"I need someone to help Professor Irres and I with an important exercise in two days. I know you don't do much fighting these days, but would you be willing to come and help? It would mostly involve throwing nets and ropes."
"You need me to throw nets around? What is this, a fishing expedition?" Hadren laughed, a deep guffaw that seemed genuinely amused.
"I just need someone to come up and throw some nets on a dragon. Nothing extreme."
"D-dragon?" Hadren's humor evaporated instantly, his posture tensing. "I don't know about that, there. Dragons aren't..." He kept shaking his head, as though unable to deny vehemently enough.
"Professor Irres and I will be the ones actually fighting it, you can stay on the towers and safely out of the way."
"I don't think so, lad. Being anywhere close to a dragon is too close, if you get my understanding."
"And you wouldn't be willing to assign a couple of your interns to help out either?"
Hadren drew himself up, affronted. "I would never send my lads into something I wasn't willing to walk into myself. Do you take me for a craven?"
Jair sighed. "No, I suppose not. It was a remote chance anyway. I don't suppose you'd come if I let you borrow my soulsword after?"
He withdrew it in a brilliant flash of silver, holding it up to display its pulsating glow.
Hadren's eyes widened, then widened further. "That's a beautiful sword, lad." His voice was hushed and reverent.
He reached out to it, hesitant, glancing to Jair for permission before touching it.
"Inspect."
Hadren took one look at the stats and fainted dead away.
-
“Professor Vern.”
"Yes, young one?" Vern squinted up, trying to see who’d addressed him.
Jair offered him a letter of introduction, covertly nudging the spectacles further from Vern’s reach as he did. "I'm performing an experiment an hour before sunset on the 18th. Is there any way I can convince you to attend?"
"Nothing comes to mind..." Vern trailed off, hmming as he patted around for his spectacles. Jair fluttered the page to distract him from the search, shoving them off the edge of the desk in the process. "I need a variety of ingredients and catalysts, I suppose. You could go collect those for me and I might be persuaded."
Jair sighed. He'd undertaken that fetch quest more than once. Despite his best efforts it was impossible to accomplish in three days. Several of the ingredients were non-local, either difficult to source or exorbitantly expensive, and two were downright impossible to get in time. Most suppliers would be helpless until the next terluna passage weeks later, and even ghostmoon smugglers couldn’t move any faster than a week.
"Do you need an assistant to help with anything? I can run messages, transcribe record spools, polish swords, inscribe constructs... anything."
"I could use an assistant..."
“I’ll do anything,” Jair promised desperately. “Just be at the wall on the afternoon of the eighteenth.”
Vern hmmed again, patting at his jacket. “The eighteenth is far too soon. You can’t expect an old man like me to be climbing that many stairs on such short notice. Give it another month, your experiment can wait. Once you’ve proven yourself and I’m not so far behind, I may be able to help out.”
Jair sighed. As he thought. Useless.
-
“Mr. Hadren, have you reconsidered?”
“No." The custodian's eyes widened in fear the moment he realized Jair had cornered him. He backed away, shaking his head. "No, no. Whatever you’re involved in, leave me out of it. Dragons and legendary weapons are above my pay grade.”
No point continuing to pursue that line, then. Jair crossed another option off his mental list.
-
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Jair approached the desk with careful hesitation, timing his arrival to coincide with the moment Sina Derall finished reading his essay. He’d put extra effort into it this time, subtly skewing his style and opinions to more closely match her own, revising it multiple times until it was perfectly clean and concise.
“Excuse me, Professor Derall?”
She looked up and smiled faintly. “Welburne. What do you need?”
"Are you free the afternoon of the 18th?" He let urgency tinge his voice the faintest bit, while remaining focused and direct. She would react poorly to excessive emotion, but without any reason to care she'd readily dismiss him.
She looked up, then, and he summoned Maelstrom. Holding the sword up, point down so only the less visibly warped top half showed above the desk, Jair met her eyes. "I need your help."
He dismissed it a moment later, the blade disappearing with one final flash of silver light, but Derall's gaze remained unfocused as though staring into the memory of the sword's presence.
Jair waited, allowing her to fully process whatever thoughts she was examining. He was in no rush.
"What kind of help?" she finally asked, meeting his eyes.
"My sword's advancement was unusual. I..." he made a show of looking around and leaning closer, lowering his voice. "I saw something. In that flash of light, I saw my death. I don't know why, but I also saw the only way to avoid it was to bring you to the tower overlooking the city." He looked away awkwardly, as though embarrassed to ask. "I know it's crazy. I'm not a seer. But it keeps haunting me. Again and again, as if I'm dying over and over the longer I avoid acting on it."
"You should speak to the headmaster if you've had a prophetic vision."
Jair paled and took a half step back. "No, he hates me, he'd be happy to see me dead. I don't want to bother him." He glanced toward the door as though reconsidering telling anyone at all, as though ready to flee.
Derall’s expression softened. "It's alright, if you don't want to tell him we don't have to."
We. That was a good sign. "You believe me?" Again, he held his tone in tight control, a faint note of hope buried in straightforward honesty.
She considered him, then held out a hand. “Can I see your sword again?”
Jair summoned Maelstrom and handed it over, not objecting as Derall inspected it closely. She turned it over, examining the partially-integrated materials along its blade, then the vividly clear stamp of his soulspell.
“Yes… this blade has transcended time itself,” she murmured, as though to herself. “A shame about the…” her fingers lingered on the smudge where the pearl-dust had been misaligned by Jair’s dying body falling across the molten metal.
“Can you help?” Jair asked hopefully.
Derall smiled and passed Maelstrom back to him. "I think I can spare a few minutes on the 18th to assess your performance in my class and options for advancement in the future. And if you'd feel better having our discussion on one of the towers, then I have no objection."
-
Jair, Derall, and Irres stood waiting for the dragon to appear. Ran once again hid in the tunnel below as he’d been instructed to do.
Jair would have preferred at least one teacher with ranged attack spells. Both Derall and Irres were close-combat specialized, but they only needed to slow the dragon down long enough for Ran to reach the transit platform once Jair stabbed it.
Despite his best efforts, none of the other teachers had taken the bait, not even with Maelstrom on the line. For whatever varied reasons, none of them wanted it that badly.
Jair suspected that if he offered Larenok the same bet, he’d come to the tower… but he also suspected there was a good chance Jair himself would ‘accidentally’ end up dead before the dragon was dealt with. Once Larenok had the scent of a legendary named item, he wouldn’t let it go. Last resort option.
Plenty of other things to try first.
Derall murmured quietly with Irres, her voice inaudible as they pored over the diagrams Jair had provided. Jair considered trying to listen in, but there would be time for that later if it became necessary. If he scared them off now, he’d have to redo at least the past day, and most of his loops ended up requiring two or three days of repetition before getting back to where he wanted to change things.
Starting over may be inevitable, but he grew tired of being weak and impotent. There were only so many times he could force himself through the same exhausting routines before part of him started to suggest that maybe he could wait to start on his body and imprints. After all, once he found the right path forward, he could go back and rerun the whole week properly. He didn't need to wear himself out and push himself past his current limits every day every time.
The rest of him prevailed, for the moment. He stubbornly refused to give in to weakness, driving himself relentlessly. He'd not come as far as he had by letting hesitation and discomfort hold him back.
The dragon appeared, barely a speck in the distance. Jair shouted and pointed. "There it is! It's coming!"
The two teachers’ heads snapped up, their conversation cut short instantly. Irres had his sword up before Jair finished his first word; he’d been holding his manifested soulblade loosely at his side during the entire conversation.
Derall pulled her sword from her soulspace a moment later - a massive two-handed weapon very unlike the standard rapier-types she used in class demonstrations. It might have looked out of place in her hands if he hadn't seen it dozens of times before. When fighting seriously she focused on weapon-integration spells almost exclusively, so it made perfect sense to use the biggest carrier she could handle.
Irres shifted to a two-handed grip as the dragon closed in, but his sword looked small next to Derall’s.
Jair quickly outlined his plan of attack as the dragon circled. It began to dive for the wall just above where Ran waited.
Jair ran to the edge of the tower and jumped off. He landed perfectly blade-first on the dragon's back, Maelstrom driving down through the vulnerable scales on its back and tearing a gash deep through its vitals. He released the sword and rolled away, dropping the remaining distance to the ground as the furious dragon swiped at him with neck, tail, and claw.
That was the signal. Ran fled for the portal.
Irres slammed down into the spot where Jair had been a moment before, his sword skidding across the dragon's scales before finding purchase and slicing down into its body.
The dragon roared and snapped its head around, hoping to crush Irres in its long snaky neck.
The old blademaster was quicker. He jumped free, though he had to leave his sword behind.
Derall wasn't far behind. Her sword sliced deep into the dragon's shoulder before she jumped free. She'd chilled it, Jair noted, frost rising from its blade.
Assaulted on two sides, the dragon whipped its tail at the new irritant, still trying to catch Irres with its jaws.
Jair's internal count hit thirty seconds. Ran would be nearly halfway to safety.
Unfortunately, Jair wasn't the only one to notice this fact. The dragon, sensing its prey getting further away, shook itself free of Jair's entangling net and bounded after Ran, one wing dragging behind it but the rest of it fully mobile.
"No you don't!" Derall stabbed her frosted blade into its rear leg just above the knee as the dragon ran past. She let out a startled yell as she was dragged along for the ride. Unwilling to let go of her sword, she couldn't do anything but hang on as the dragon ran forward. She’d slowed it down, but not by nearly enough.
Jair ran after them, but he knew it was too late for him to do anything. The dragon was moving too fast. Even with its multiple handicaps he couldn't catch up on time.
Sure enough, a moment later he heard the distinctive crunch of Ran's armor being ground between massive dragon teeth.
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