Being in a battle and not fighting was an awful feeling. Our initial purpose was to not antagonize the dragons, but simply to get rid of them. But now we were fighting, and there was hardly a spot on the roof that wasn’t getting sprayed with fire. Great Girl was wrestling with one of the two dragons that hadn’t been tossed back through the portal, but we couldn’t be certain the third wouldn’t fly back out.
I ran by the roof entrance to drop Midnight off at the stairs. Perhaps he should have waited there anyway, since he couldn’t do much in combat with low mana. Unlike him, however, humans made weapons that fit me.
I could hear the subtle clicks of Mono’s rifle among the cacophony of roars and crashes and the crackling fire. Fortunately, while Grasp was not able to completely stop a full sized dragon, she was able to angle its head away when it breathed fire so that the whole building wasn’t on fire. It was solid brick, but everything could burn if it was hot enough.
We were going to be nice to the dragons but they attacked first… and I wasn’t going to feel guilty at all about shooting a few holes in this dragon’s leathery wings when Mono was shooting a high powered rifle into its chest.
It drew close enough to grasp to claw at her, shattering through the telekinetic barrier she made- then sending her flying. While that might seem like a bad thing, being sent flying was much better than the alternative of absorbing all of the kinetic energy with your bones breaking or being cut in half. She didn’t topple off of the roof either, so all in all it was great.
In that brief moment where the dragon was alone, Great Girl flipped the dragon she was wrestling with onto its back, nearly crashing it onto the other- who was saved only by leaping backwards off the building. The building itself wasn’t so lucky, with part of the roof collapsing- but I didn’t hear another floor collapsing beneath so overall it seemed fine.
Mono ran over to the edge of the roof, getting a bead on the dragon that had dropped. There was some amount of magic involved with them flying to begin with, so it wasn’t strange it was able to hover there.
Great Girl ripped the dragon she was wrestling out of the rubble and spun a few times to build up momentum before tossing that one through the portal as well. We had a good angle here, which was part of the reason we chose it. And then… she leaped off the building at the sole remaining dragon, wrapping her arms around its jaw. Her momentum and weight sent the dragon crashing into the ground, making a shallow crater in the street.
The dragon bucked, tossing her away- leaving an opening for Mono to shoot. At that distance, my hand pistol wasn’t accurate enough. I could hit a dragon, but not anything vulnerable, like the cracked scales from Mono’s rifle. So I did the next best thing I could think of, which was getting Grasp to her feet.
“We need to watch the portal,” I said. “In case-” I took a shot as one of the dragons became visible on the other side. “-they try to come back through.”
Grasp nodded, reaching out for some chunks of the roof, her telekinetic powers latching on with barely visible strips of translucent energy. When one of the dragons approached the portal again, she tossed the five foot long hunk of concrete at it, sending it reeling away.
“Just give up!” Great Girl yelled in draconic. “This is our land and you’re. Not. Welcome!”
A dragon rocketed up above the roofline, but its trajectory was going to put it just below the portal. I had no way to help with that, but Grasp was able to nudge it up just enough that its upper body went over the portal, which sent it tumbling over the lip when it struck.
“Get up here!” I called to Great Girl, “We need to close the portal and I can’t really affect it from here!” I could feel a tenuous connection, but it was still a good thirty or forty feet away. With its size it felt like I was right next to it, but it really wasn’t.
Midnight scurried out from the stairs. “I need to get a weapon.”
“Or we need to not fight dragons,” I replied.
There was a loud sound as two hands suddenly grabbed onto the edge of the building, from which Great Girl yanked herself onto the roof- a task that was much more difficult than it seemed at first. We would really have to praise the architects and construction of this particular building for barely even cracking with that maneuver.
At thirty feet tall, Great Girl was hard to comprehend in size, the easiest comparison I could make was that her hand was about half my height, from wrist to fingertips. I could probably stand on the single palm she put down, but it was a bit awkward- so she placed her second hand for my other foot so I could take a wider stance. Midnight was on my shoulder, and Great Girl tried her best to move in a way that wasn’t too abrupt.
As it turned out, bodies made a lot of very small movements that scaled up significantly when one was thirty feet tall. She held us out towards the portal and managed to stabilize her arms- which would actually take a lot of strength.
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“Alright Midnight, let’s try a three to one split of continuous mana for Alter Portal,” I said, mentally calculating our remaining mana levels. There was a massive flow of mana through the portal, but having only been nearby for a couple minutes that would only make the difference of a point or two on the outside.
I had shrunk smaller portals before. It took somewhere around ten mana. This one was somewhere around five times as wide, but the good news was that it didn’t take twenty-five times as much mana. However, we only managed to get it about half of its diameter before I was wobbling on my feet. “Okay, stop,” I said to Midnight- though he’d already responded to my own cessation of activity. “We need… a second… could you set us down?” I asked Great Girl.
I felt a surge of mana. That had only happened before upon fully closing a portal, and I felt that perhaps… this wasn’t really the limit. “You feel that too?” Midnight confirmed.
“Yeah. I think… we can finish closing it in a bit here,” I said. “It’s just taking a second for this surge to actually settle.”
A small clicking sound brought my attention to Mono, and then back to the portal. One dragon had been poking its head through the portal. Nothing happened for ten or twenty seconds.
“You good, Midnight?” I asked. I could still feel the adrenaline in him, but my mana had subsided for the moment.
“As much as I can be,” he agreed.
Great Girl crouched down. “Ready?”
I nodded. “Let’s finish this.”
As we stood in front of and below the portal beginning our work, another dragon showed up. Mono shot at it, but it refused to pull back, breathing fire towards Midnight and I. I felt the scorching heat of the flames as my Energy Ward reached its limits and all that was left was the final barrier of the Power Brigade uniform. I shielded Midnight with my body- no point in having two people directly in the flames. “If you like having a head,” I said in draconic. “You’d better pull it back through the portal.”
With one final yank, Midnight and I cinched the portal closed like a drawstring bag. The closure of the portal began to release large quantities of mana, a byproduct of whatever method Doctor Doomsday was using to open the portal in the first place.
Great Girl lowered us to the roof, where Grasp was carefully putting out a few glowing embers. My face hurt. And my hair… was scorched off, which was technically better than it still being on fire.
“Wow, we should do this more often,” Midnight said. “It’s nice suddenly being full on mana.”
I looked at Midnight. He looked back at me. I felt increasing discomfort. “Midnight! Chain Lightning, right now!” I pointed to the sky. My cat buddy felt my sense of urgency, and did exactly as instructed. Maybe he didn’t know why. Could have been an invisible enemy, or some remnant of the portal that needed breaking. But he listened. Lightning shot out, fizzling away depressingly as there were no targets for it. I could feel my own stores filling rapidly as well, but I had a greater capacity. “Again!” I said, while I did the same.
The lightning was for no other reason than to shoot off my most expensive non-Gate spell. For Midnight, Chain Lightning was near his fatigue point- but no longer beyond it, especially counting upgrades. Thus, he managed two casts while remaining on his feet. He was just a little wobbly. “So why are we doing this?”
“Do you know what happens when you absorb more mana than you can hold? Twice as much, even?” I asked Midnight.
“No.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “But you were getting uncomfortable and I don’t want to find out the hard way.”
Midnight nodded, waiting for his mana to nearly reach full again before firing off a third Chain Lightning. For my own part, I let my mana reach full for a moment to feel what it was like firsthand. Having mana felt good. Having too much mana… felt dangerous. One more Chain Lightning put me in a fine place, while Midnight used four total.
Both of us ended a little bit below our maximums… but even if we had the mana, I wasn’t sure if we could really use more magic. I didn’t feel the same negative effects of mana crystals, so this was probably its own new thing entirely. Hopefully, it was short term.
Great Girl returned to her ‘normal’ size plus Enlarge, though that would fade soon enough. “Can you guys manage any more?” she asked. A clicking sound drew my attention to Mono, who was aiming at some sort of weird puffball above the city, the holes in it causing it to spew a green gas.
“Give us a minute to find out, I guess,” I said. “We can at least walk.”
“Yeah,” Great Girl said. “We kind of have to as well, since I don’t know if the elevator shaft is uh… still intact.”
“I’m pretty sure this amount of collateral damage is in the acceptable threshold,” I comforted her as we began to make our way down the stairs. “It was three dragons and we kept people unharmed. And the building is totally fixable.”
“Other places are worse,” Map agreed through our commlinks. “Also I’m going to assume that growling and stuff was helpful?”
“That was draconic,” I said. “We tried to tell them they weren’t supposed to be here, and they decided they didn’t care.”
“How would you rate your continued functionality?” Map asked.
“... I think I can do more. What do you think, Midnight? Are we capable, or am I just stubborn?”
“I’m tired,” Midnight said. “But I don’t feel internal pain. We might regret something tomorrow, but we can probably do more. Though… I don’t think we should touch any big portals.”
“Don’t worry about that too much,” Map said. “They were the priority targets, so most of them are assigned already. The best available option for you guys is to deal with street-level threats right now. Unblocking streets and guiding civilians while keeping away or defeating enemies that have reached the streets. Most things came through airborne portals this time, for whatever reason.”
“So fighting?” I asked. Fighting was good, especially if it was with things that were more… reasonable. Multiple dragons of that size were just too much at my level. Even if my level was now one higher.