The earth practically exploded beneath the Kirin’s feet as it raced along after Susan. Each kick of its hooves struck the ground in a furious rhythm that sent it rocketing forward at near supersonic pace. Susan watched it move with a careful eye, then twitched her wings to skirt the edge of another town that had popped up among the forests she was flying over.
The monster following her was dogged in its pursuit. Whatever obstacle it met was bowled through with little to no regard for if it was a wall, tree, or mountain.
Susan was just glad that it was nighttime, and she was able to cut across roads and interstates with impunity thanks to the lack of cars. Though even with the cover of darkness, she had no doubt that this chase would make national news the next day.
The BSMP, obviously the party at fault for this, were probably going to cause a panic ten times the size of the one caused by the dragon battle last month. She was going to have to wait to worry about that though, for now she had to survive this fight.
Down below the ground transitioned from forest to grassy plain, and Susan breathed a sigh of relief as she finally spotted the blue line of ocean water up ahead. She spared another glance back at the Kirin, and smiled as she saw it finally beginning to slow down.
It came to a stop on a grassy knoll a few miles from the start of the beach, still staring up at her. A glow of magic appeared surrounding it, and so Susan turned her attention back forward and increased the power running through her Dragonheart.
The air rushing through her chest increased in intensity for a moment, and a crack echoed around her as she passed the sound barrier and the shoreline at the same time.
Her tail turned to catch the air, carefully positioning herself so that she was flying southeast. She looked back one more time to see the Kirin rapidly shrinking as it faded into the horizon.
The glow surrounding it grew, then receded in on itself as it flowed back into the Kirin. Bending low, the creature crouched for a moment, and then shot forward in an explosion of sand.
Its hooves hit the water and kicked off of it before the surface tension could break, and then the enormous metal horse was galloping over the waves. It quickly shortened the distance between them, the water kicked up by its charge forming a wide wake behind it.
“Now that’s just bullshit,” Susan spat before accelerating even more.
Her claws began to glow with magic, and a hand came up to sketch in the air.
“SUSAN!” Someone shouted from her back, and Susan stopped midmotion.
“WHO?” She roared back.
“SUSAN WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?” The voice continued and Susan quickly recognized it.
“Abana, is that you?” She yelled, now trying to be heard over the roaring air.
She twisted her head around to see Abana standing in the center of her back. She had her arms crossed, eyes narrowed in a glare directly squarely at Susan.
“Yes,” she answered, “now why the hell is there a trail of destruction across half a damn continent?”
“Not my fault,” Susan snapped back, “the BSMP summoned a thrice-named archdragon to kill me, I had to get it out of the country somehow!”
The person on her back said something very un-magical girly and fell silent. She turned to look down at the Kirin running along over the waves after them.
“Alright,” she forced out, then turned back to Susan. “What’s the plan?”
“We need to keep the damage contained to the Antarctic Continent,” Susan said. “I need you to evacuate and ward the place to hell. Then find and destroy whatever the BSMP’s using to keep him summoned.”
“Got it,” Abana quickly nodded, then frowned. “But what about you, will you need any help holding him off?”
“No, focus on keeping the damage contained.”
Abana met her eyes for a moment. Her jaw clenched, but she gave a second nod of confirmation.
A shimmering pillar appeared in the air behind her. She stepped through it and vanished from Susan’s back.
With her gone Susan returned her focus to her flight, then raised both arms and began sketching glowing lines.
A few seconds later, a runic circle flared to life. Mana poured into it from her body, and the fabric of space around her began to change. A mile ahead of her the air began to warp, thickening until it resembled an enormous magnifying glass showing an image of icy seas and distant cliffs.
She grit her teeth, and then she was flying into the warped space. A moment later she was flying above the ocean half a world away, the blood of several hundred unfortunate birds speckling her scales and her entire body feeling like it had been put through a blender.
For a moment the peace of the isolated continent washed over her. The only noise she could hear was the distant rush of waves and the screaming protest of air blowing past her. Nothing else disturbed the world.
Then she glanced down. Over top of the waves below a second tunnel of compressed space ran, pointing Northwest like her own. A moment later the Kirin appeared through it in a roar of water and noise. Its head pointed up, and quickly latched onto her and the Kirin’s path turned towards her as it resumed its pursuit.
Susan rolled her eyes, then her body, and then she was flying directly south and into the heart of the icy continent below.
It was only when she reached an endless plain of windswept ice that she began to slow down. The world was empty below her, utterly inhospitable to even the barest hints of life. The only thing visible from where she flew was a line of enormous mountains huddled on the distant horizon.
She lowered herself until she was flying just above the lines of snow below and closed the flaps around her torso. All four limbs hit the ground at the same time, digging channels through the ice below as she drew to a stop.
Turning her head to face the way she came, she took in a heavy breath and let it out.
Behind her the Kirin came to a similar stop, a thunderous roar echoing over the barren plain around them as all four legs dug into the ground to bring it to a halt.
“Greetings and salutations, Terminus Rex,” she said, voice booming over the snowy tundra. “May I have a moment of your time?”
“Why?” The looming Kirin said in a voice that was deep but quiet. “So you can set off whatever trap you have placed here?”
“No,” Susan said quickly, “I just want my allies to finish warding the continent.”
That earned her a raised eyebrow from the Kirin. For the first time since she had seen him, he turned away from her. Then he was walking to the side, circling her at a slow pace as both dragons eyed each other.
“How… egalitarian,” he finally spoke, “not something I had expected from a kingdom slayer.”
“Destroying empires isn’t exactly something I was planning to make a habit of,” Susan said with a shrug. “Honestly I‘d rather not fight at all, if I could help it.”
That earned a huffing laugh from the Kirin.
“Have you heard my other names?” was all he asked.
His words earned a nod of grudging acknowledgement from Susan. Archdragons' names came from their accomplishments, feats so great that they spread even to other worlds in legends and cautionary tales. Susan herself hadn’t exactly wanted to be known as ‘the Ruin that befell the Atlans,’ that was just what the Themians called her.
Like she had told Abana, the Kirin before her had three events he was named for. The Blight of the Dragon Lords, the End of Conquest, and finally, the name Susan knew him by.
Terminus Rex, the Last King.
The two fell into a lull. The Kirin maintained its slow pace as it walked around Susan. Off in the distance, Susan could see the barest hint of a flash. She wasn’t sure, but there should have been a research station in that direction. It appeared the Guardians were doing their job, though Susan wished they could maybe do it a little less efficiently.
“Why?” She asked, the tension finally getting at her.
“Because all power corrupts,” Terminus proclaimed like a school teacher, slow and loud. “And to be a dragon is to have a power like no other. I have seen the destruction wrought by this corruption. You have seen it too, in the destruction you have brought to an entire empire.”
“Don't you dare defend them!” Susan snarled, her entire body whipping around to face him.
Terminus continued his slow march, raising one huge eyebrow at her outburst.
“I had not intended to,” he rumbled. “But you must understand the cause of my concern. After all, is there anything that sticks out to you, looking back upon the ruin you left behind?”
The silence stretched out once more as Susan looked away and her shoulders slumped.
“…It was easy,” she muttered, and Terminus nodded.
“Indeed. Once a killer, always a killer. Once a ruiner, always a ruiner. It is such an easy slope to fall down, to give into the urges of destruction and tyranny. And so I have taken it upon myself to tear out that dark urge by its roots. To destroy every dragon.”
Susan fell silent again, a wind whipping by and stirring up eddies in the snowy plains.
“Every one?” She finally asked, “What if the dragon were pure of heart?”
“An interesting argument,” Terminus said, then tilted his head in thought. “But the power presented by dragonhood is not one that tempts the pure of heart.”
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Then his eyes narrowed and his gaze returned to Susan. “And even if one existed, we both know that you are not it.”
“Harsh,” Susan said, voice much lighter than her heart. “But fair.”
A shimmering pillar appeared in the distance, and both Archdragons shifted to look at it. Abana stepped out of it, and looked around until she spotted the two of them.
The sight of them standing together got a raised eyebrow, but after a moment she just raised her hand in a thumbs up and stepped back through the portal.
The next moment the barren plains exploded as both Dragons threw themselves at the other. Terminus threw a kick into Susan’s chest as her tail swung around to smash in the side.
Both were sent flying backwards, Susan landing in a messy tumble that she ended by grabbing onto the ground with all four legs and gripping. She wrenched to a halt, then opened her mouth and let loose with nuclear fire.
Susan’s breath attack was actually quite simple. She would open the carbon superstructure within her chest, venting the miniature sun out through her throat. The electromagnetic carbene rings within it would then concentrate and accelerate the superheated plasma into a narrow stream.
That part made sense, it was just the physics involved that complicated things. Like the fact that when she did the math, the final result said that when it exited her throat the hydrogen should be moving at a small percentage of the speed of light.
She wasn’t really sure. After all, hydrogen wasn’t even normally magnetic. But considering the theoretical power output of the electromagnets she was using, the laws of physics were more of a friendly suggestion anyway.
That was why she was very concerned when the beam of energy struck Terminus squarely on the chest, only to ricochet. It continued on until it reached the mountains behind him, scoring a line of molten stone across their slopes.
Terminus stumbled backward at the strike, but quickly righted himself and then fired his own attack back at her. Without the chance to dodge, the bullet hit Susan squarely in the chest.
She was sent crashing backwards through the landscape, her body punching into the snow and burrowing into it so when she came to a stop it was at the end of an enormous icy tunnel.
“Yeah, the North Pole would have been a bad idea,” she mused to herself, then raised both arms to her chest and began sketching runes on it.
As she finished, her entire torso lit up with glowing light. Her neck straightened, her mouth opened and she breathed fire a second time. This time instead of a mere beam of energy, what erupted forth from her mouth was a column of unbridled power.
The tunnel around her exploded, her icy tomb instantly replaced with clear sky. As the Dragonfire carved a tunnel forward through the landscape, Susan began to twist her body to the side.
The beam turned as well, and the entire landscape in front of her was transformed into a lake of melting ice. As the beam swept further on, Terminus appeared. Leaping upward to avoid the blast, he turned midair to point his torso towards her and his mouth opened.
Susan snapped her mouth shut, cutting off the beam before she leapt to the side. Then her world turned upside down as Terminus’s own attack struck the ground where she had stood.
Instead of digging a channel, the strike shattered the ground beneath it. A tidal wave of ice was blasted outward as a crater was punched deep into the landscape beneath.
Susan’s wings opened, stopping her flight and she opened up the vents on her chest to shoot upward out of the cloud of debris. She cleared it, then spotted Terminus landing a few miles away.
Her chest roared as air rushed through it, and she shot towards him. He spotted her, and then was running as well.
Susan quickly straightened her body and opened her mouth to fire blast after blast of dragonfire toward the fleeing Kirin. He dodged each one, zigging and zagging over the ice and snow as he fled toward the distant mountains.
Her attacks nipped at his heels over and over again, but each leap from the Kirin somehow had her over and under-correcting each time she lined up another shot. They approached the mountains quickly, and Terminus began charging toward the highest peak.
Coming in low behind him, Susan readied herself and fired another beam of energy towards Terminus. He ducked to the side, and the beam swept by to dig deep into the base of the mountain.
Another leap finally took him to the bottom of the mountain where he kicked out with both front legs to bring himself to a standstill. The mountain rumbled, rocks and snow falling from its sides in enormous avalanches as the entire thing shook.
Then with a crack that sent a blast of air blowing past Susan, the entire thing was torn from the ground and thrown upward into the sky. It blotted out the sun as it flew over her, then came roaring back down in a tidal wave of stone.
Susan pivoted, g-forces dragging at her as she turned midair and increased the jets of air running through her to their max. She shot backward, but wasn't fast enough, the jagged bottom of the mountain coming down around her like a hand swatting a gnat.
A quickly drawn rune flared to life, and another tunnel of compressed space appeared before her. Bracing herself, she flew into it only to have her entire body fold in on itself as it hit something.
She came to a moment later, her body screaming at her as she ragdolled through the air. Her head stabilized just enough to see the mountain touch the ground, and then she was sent flying again as it impacted in a noise like a thousand thunderclaps.
The shockwave sent her tumbling back into the air, but this time she was ready. Both wings flared, and air rushed through her torso again to send her rocketing upward.
She cleared the clouds of snow kicked up by the mountains impact, quickly rising a mile into the air before turning back to look at the destruction below. The mountain had shattered; enormous masses of stone the size of hills tumbled like marbles even as they shattered under their own weight.
What once had been a plain was now a thick cloud of snow that roiled beneath her. The reverberations of the mountains impact keeping it airborne.
Then the golden hide of the Kirin appeared through the clouds, the horned head raised as he looked up at Susan.
Their eyes met, and Susan’s narrowed.
“You know what?” She snapped, “screw this.”
She turned and shot upwards again, Terminus shrinking into a glimmering dot below.
“Screw this Archdragon,” she continued, “screw the BSMP.”
The nuclear fire within her chest stoked until it roared within her, and she felt its heat even through the wall of the reactor built to contain it.
“AND SCREW THIS STATUTE OF SECRECY BULLSHIT!” She roared, pointing herself downward and letting loose with her dragonfire.
The column of energy came down like the hammer of God, striking the ground below to draw a huge channel into the ice below. A glowing line followed behind where it led, filling the line in as Susan turned her head to carve a miles wide line that circled around the Kirin.
It was only when the line was complete that she cut the flow of energy off. Then she was firing again, except this time making smaller and more minute movements to create a shape of ever growing complexity.
Another followed, then another, the shapes taking the form of impossibly huge runes that spread over the icy tundras like roads. Terminus fired shots at them, but quickly gave up as the craters his shots blew into the ground barely managed to scratch the enormous runes.
Susan finished with a flourish, drawing the inner circle in a single smooth movement like the swing of a headsman's axe. She was miles above the icy plains, but she still felt the pulse of mana as a runic circle a quarter of the size of Antarctica activated.
Below she could see Terminus running to escape the confines of the circle, but she just smiled down at him. Her grin widened as she began feeding mana into the immense construct below.
“Starfall,” she whispered the name of the spell as it activated.
-
Thousands of miles above Susan hung the impossibly large garbage bin of every space agency in the world. The parts and pieces of hundreds of rocket launches that to this day still remained spinning in an impossible dance of orbits.
One by one, they each began to glow and the millions upon millions of pieces of debris encircling the globe began to change in their course. All pulled inexorably downward towards the south pole.
-
The glowing figure stared down at John like an angry god. He looked up, and met the glare with an expression about as dead as his heart.
They stood in the small clearing outside of the service door Susan Hill had broken into earlier that day. The figure had appeared in a thunderclap a moment before, and it was only because John had expected the arrival that he had even been there to greet them.
“Where is the summoning circle?” The Guardian commanded in a voice that was a little too squeaky to be intimidating.
With practiced slowness, his mouth opened to respond.
“I’m afraid-”
He cut himself off as above, he saw something streak across the sky. A trail of glowing energy streaking behind it like a comet's tail. More followed, and soon the entire sky was lit up by glowing streaks of light shooting across it.
“Oh that’s not good,” he muttered, and the Guardian twisted to look up as well.
“That’s south,” she whispered, and her head came down again.
Then she was blowing past John, rushing into the confines of the bunker. He watched her vanish into the labyrinthine halls and sighed.
“If you had just given me a moment…” He said, then shrugged and returned his attention back to the light show above.
“I told them this was going to happen.”
-
The first pieces of space debris to strike Antarctica hit with little impact, falling down in small explosions that sent clouds of snow puffing upwards. Terminus watched them land, then looked back up at Susan with wary eyes.
His fears were justified when dozens more streaks of light followed, falling to the ground in a series of thunderous impacts. Susan watched his eyes widen as the first real wave of space debris came screaming down like rain, covering the hundreds of miles spread out below her in a thick blanket of explosions.
Terminus flitted back and forth across the ground, masterfully dodging the falling stars. But the waves of impacts never ceased, instead growing more and more in intensity until the entire world seemed to be made up of shooting stars and explosive impacts.
Susan smiled as he vanished beneath the tide of explosions, finally letting off the flow of mana going to the magic circle. She was so glad that she had listened to that idle thought from when she was learning magic back on Themus.
Normally such wanton destruction would have taken a small army of dragons to fuel. But thanks to the wonders of space exploration, all Susan had to do was create a slightly overcomplicated pull spell and gravity did the rest of the work. The toughest part had simply been making sure she didn’t pull down anything important like satellites.
Below the cacophony of destruction finally began to die down, the last of the space debris vanishing into the pluming mushroom cloud of dust only to be followed a second later by the distant roars of their impacts.
Susan drew another runic circle, and as it activated the cloud of dust began to collapse in on itself. The clouds condensed into small balls of stone and snow, then fell back to the ground as a rain.
Susan hovered above it all, still looking downward in search of Terminus. If she was lucky he would be down for a couple of minutes, and-
Something struck her in the chest, followed a moment later by a roar from the ground. Susan screamed out in pain, and tried to take off. But the roar of air through her chest only served to make her twist in the air as she fell toward the ground.
She struck down, her landing punctuated by two following thuds as something hit the ground next to her. Struggling to her feet, she looked to see why she had fallen only to gasp in shock.
A massive gaping wound marred her side, blood flowing from it like a river while her left arm and wing lay on the ground a few meters away. She grit her teeth as she felt her failsafes take effect, the blood flowing back into the wound and beginning to clot.
She shuddered as she regarded the wound. Her redesigned nerves prevented her from feeling the pain, but the fight had started mere minutes ago and she had no idea how long it would take the guardians to shut off the circle.
A huff of air echoed to her side, and her head raised with a snarl to see the Kirin standing a hundred feet away. It looked the worse for wear, some of its scales torn away but almost untouched otherwise.
“How?” She gasped.
“There is a curious metal, difficult to synthesize without sufficiently advanced science or magic,” Terminus said, slowly crouching as he readied himself for another shot. “What few know is that it can be used to form flesh, a process I used to build this body.”
“You made bio-organic titanium?” Susan blurted out.
That took the Kirin by surprise. He paused in his preparations, the whirring of his chest dimming for a moment as he regarded her.
“You know the process?” He asked.
“Yeah, titanium is pretty well known here,” Susan said, and he blinked in surprise.
“But,” she continued, “You shouldn’t have given up on carbon.”
Her tail snagged her fallen arm, and she grabbed her wing with her working arm before leaping to the side. Terminus’s attack came a moment too late, blasting the land she had stood on into smithereens.
She brought the wing up to the shoulder it had been blown from, her tail doing the same for her arm.
Where the limbs met flesh, a whitish substance flowed from the wounds. Susan’s white blood cells, redesigned over a century of effort into something entirely new, grew out from her body to form a facsimile of the missing flesh. Then it began to change.
Bone and sinew regrew to reconnect the skeletal structure, with muscles forming around it. A moment later the top changed to show pinkish skin already growing a fresh coat of scales, and Susan settled back to the ground now on all four limbs again.
She looked back at Terminus, whose huge mouth had fallen open in shock.
“That is not the power of a once-named Archdragon,” Terminus spat out.
“Not all of us kill dragons for a hobby!” Susan shot back. “Maybe I just want to advance science, huh? Did you think of that?”
Terminus frowned at the words, then shook his head.
“No matter,” he said, “Conquest was no different. It was arrogant of me to expect anything other than a battle of attrition.”
His mouth opened once again, and Susan matched him. Both Dragonhearts roared with power as they prepared for round two.
Then Terminus blinked out of existence.
“Huh?” Susan blurted out, her head whipping around to see where he had gone.
There was no sign of him, the only thing surrounding her was shattered ice and the slow patter of falling clumps of rock and snow.
Then the realization struck her and she laughed.
“Hah, Abana did it!” She exclaimed, then collapsed in an exhausted pile of limbs.