“It appears I have visitors.”

“It’s over.” I held my sword up, pointing it toward the man. “There are two of us here. You’re outnumbered.”

“And you believe that concerns me?”

I looked over at Tez, who gave me a weak shrug.

Well, it was worth the try.

“Why do all this? What was the point?” Tez spoke up, her bladed staff held at the ready.

“Why? First, the fact that two kids stand before me worries me that my investment in paying those raiders was quite wasted. Second, it would also mean you dealt with my two business partners. A shame.”

I felt a surge of unease at how the man seemed so flippant and unbothered to see us before him.

“What have you heard of the mythos of Sun-splitter peak?” The man suddenly questioned, taking me by surprise.

“A part of the sun fell here long ago,” I answered before flicking my sword. “But what does any of that matter?”

“You see, I was once a humble historian, or perhaps an archeologist, looking into ancient times. I discovered that there was some truth to that legend.”

I raised an eyebrow, curious how anything could be used to justify his actions.

“What the legend describes as a piece of the sun fracturing and falling here was not a part of the sun, as obvious as that should be. No, it was something else. Solarus, first of the True Dragons.”

I shared another look with Tez before coughing awkwardly. “A what now?”

“I shouldn’t blame you for your ignorance. You are children in a world of giants, things greater than you can imagine. In our world, there are humans, magical beasts, and monsters. Most don’t realize that there exists another group within such a taxonomy. There are the dragons.”

“And those aren’t magical beasts?”

“Hah, as if.” The man scoffed. “Dragons are those who defy the common law of magic. As for a True Dragon, those would be the supreme of the dragons, much as an elevated magical beast is the Supreme of the magical beast family.”

The unease inside me only grew as images of my former mentor flickered before my mind.

“The True Dragon that landed here long ago was wounded. Unable to recover, what do you think it did? Simply pass into the void?”

Before Tez or I could answer, the man snorted.

“No. It reformed a portion of its body and soul into a lesser form, the form of a human. Further legends suggested that this dragon, in the form of a human, would go on to mate with a human from ancient times, and a bloodline would be spawned between them. A bloodline with the heart of a dragon, but the magic of this family. And you know what I discovered?”

“I’m not sure I care, honestly.” I readied my sword as the man smirked, the beaten girl chained to the makeshift altar moaning in pain.

“There was truth in what I found. A single tale: the bloodline this ancient dragon bred into was not just a random bloodline. No, they held fascinating Kin magic. You see, they could invigorate the magic and essence of others. By breeding with this human, the dragon was doing nothing more than looking for a way to return to its former glory. Alas, it would fail, and the original body of the dragon would be lost, turning to stone within the heart of Sun-splitter peak.”

Putting the pieces together, Tez seemed to figure it out a moment before I did, pointing toward the girl who could have only been Rosalina.

“Then she is-”

“Yes! I discovered that the bloodline remains in the area, a secret only known directly by their family members. Of course, humans have loose lips, so the hints were there if you knew where to look. This girl, she is the key, the catalyst for my emergence as a god.”

“Right, I’ve heard enough,” I said, tired of his theatrical spiel. I launched myself forward, my body like an arrow from a bow, as I drew upon the full extent of my ruptured body.

I’ll end this before he has a chance to do anything.

I covered the distance in the blink of an eye, swinging my sword with all the speed and power I could muster as I aimed directly for his neck, intending to take his overly talkative head from his shoulders.

Got you!

I felt a moment of elation, my blade a hair’s breadth from his neck, but my high was short-lived.

My sword was suddenly halted, held in place as if stuck in a vice.

The worst part wasn’t even that it had been stopped.

It was that the man had caught it between two fingers.

“Incredible speed.” The man nodded, his dark hair hanging loosely around his eyes. “But you fail to realize just how out of your depth you are.”

Color. Pain. Light. Sound.

I felt and saw everything and nothing, my world inverting in on itself as the back of his fist connected with my chest, just below my ribs.

Then, like he was showing me real speed, I was launched backward, a single backhand sending me crashing into a boulder with a tremendous thundering crack. So great was the force of my impact against the boulder; I distantly heard it crack, shuddering as my body sagged listlessly against it.

Not good.

Part of my mind had escaped from the reaches of the pain, taking note of everything in a detached manner.

Not good at all.

My bones were broken. In fact, it would probably be faster to list which bones weren’t busted.

I used my top speed and mustered every speck of strength I had, yet the man had dealt with me as if I were no more than a petulant child.

Not good.

My eye slowly drifted to the side, just in time to watch as Tez was swallowed up by a pillar of fire, a shade of hateful crimson.

Not good.

I needed to heal, to fight, but I couldn’t move.

C’mon.

I closed my eyes, terrified that my body seemed so eager to drift away, but I forced my mind to stay anchored and not fade into nothingness.

Come to me.

I had once considered that my body, formed partly through the reincarnation magic of a Great Sage, was something more than the sum of its parts. If I was right about it-

C’mon, come to me!

Then there would be a chance.

Drawing as heavily as I could on the mana around me, it began to rush through my damaged body without moderation. In as bad a shape as I was, I couldn’t even feel the familiar pain as mana was rejected; I simply pulled in more to replace what was lost.

C’mon!

The good news, the surprising news, was that I was right. Mana flowing into me, I felt my body respond, regenerating blazingly fast.

The bad news was that ‘blazingly fast’ meant that the cuts covering my body healed in seconds instead of days. It would only take a few short weeks for my bones to stitch back instead of months or years.

The worst news was that I highly doubted I had minutes, much less days or weeks.

Damnit!

Tez was dead.

I was more than likely moments from dying as well.

The man wouldn’t be stopped.

Justice wouldn’t be brought.

It would all end for naught.

“Well, isn’t that interesting?”

I opened an eye, looking to see what the man was talking about.

There, where I knew I had seen Tez engulfed by a pillar of flame, the girl stood, no worse for wear.

How?

The answer was obvious, my eyes locking upon it a moment later. Hanging around her neck was one of the scale-like rocks she had picked up, glowing as steam billowed from it, cracks rapidly forming.

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Scale… scale… No, no, it couldn’t be.

Could it?

The strange rocks that looked like scales didn’t just look like scales.

They were scales.

What was it he said about the true dragon?

Its body had turned to stone within the heart of Sun-splitter Peak, the scales of earth originating from its petrified form.

There must be something else!

I felt lost and disoriented. It was as if I had been picked up and dropped into the final pages of a storybook, fighting against some grand villain.

Unlike the hero of one of those stories, I hadn’t gone through some epic journey to uncover lost secrets or find the weakness of the evildoer. I’d come to a village, helped fight the occupiers, then went straight to confront the bad guy. I’d rushed in without a plan, too busy thinking about how I felt rather than being smart. I’d tried to convince myself that people of power like my master were rare.

And yet, somehow, I’d run into someone with that same domineering aura of strength.

Damnit!

The pillar of fire formed around Tez, and I watched as she fell to her knees, clutching at her neck.

“I didn’t realize there was still a scale with some juice left. How lucky for you.” The man seemed unbothered, enjoying the sight. “Unfortunately for you, and something I learned some time back, those scales need to release the magic they dampen in the form of heat. A true dragon would be unbothered by their heat, but you are human. So, how long can you hold out before your very lifeline is responsible for burning you to death?”

Magic dampening?

Damnit. Damnit. Damnit.

There was just too much I didn’t understand.

Then think, you moron!

A True dragon turned to stone within the mountain. Magic dampening scales. A bloodline created to be capable of somehow preventing the petrification of the injured true dragon.

Think!

My eyes widened in desperation, and the synapses of my mind fired all at once.

According to his story, the true dragon had created a vassal with a portion of its power, but what if it wasn’t a choice but desperation? Unable to tap into its former strength, it crossbred with a bloodline to facilitate the reclamation of its former power. For whatever reason, it had failed, and ages had passed.

The man wasn’t powerful because he was naturally powerful; he absorbed it from elsewhere, trying to make it his own.

It’s the girl! The girl lets him draw power from the mountain!

Much of what I had was guesswork, but my theory felt right.

New plan.

I redirected the mana, healing my body, focusing it on one spot.

My mouth.

Other than a locked jaw, my mouth was left intact. I felt my jaw loosen within moments as I turned my eyes to the chained girl.

She was beaten and broken, her eyes empty as she lay beside the makeshift altar.

She’s the key.

It would be through her if there was any chance of surviving.

How?

I could give her a nice little pep talk in a perfect world. Then, she’d release her power on the man, or however he was using her and depowered, we might have a chance of beating him.

Minus the fact that I was a broken mess, but I’d fret about such details later.

In reality, the moment he saw me trying to get through to her, the man may simply choose to end me then and there.

I needed to get through to her in one stroke and find a way to galvanize the girl before he killed me.

I wracked my brain, looking for something, but thankfully, my slow-moving brain was unneeded.

“Your father!” Tez screamed from inside her pillar of fire. “Your father sent us!”

The girl, whose eyes looked so dead, suddenly stirred as if she had just remembered that she had a father.

“What are you-?” The man narrowed his eyes, watching Tez on her knees within the pillar of fire, clutching at the scale and screaming.

“We’ll bring you back home to your dad!” I shouted, following Tez’s lead.

There!

The girl mouthed the word, wrapping her mind around it.

“Father?” I could almost imagine the word slipping between her lips as she looked toward me.

Yes!

“Enough playing.” The man looked between myself and Tez in the column of fire, wordlessly assessing who to deal with first.

The state of my apparent injuries convinced him as he strode toward Tez through his own fire, hoisting her up by the throat.

The scene was like a horrific flashback; the memory of my mother held aloft, replaying once more.

Except there was no Sage to save her like there had been for my mom.

There was no one.

I felt a flare of warmth burst around me, and for a split second, I thought I had been engulfed within a vortex of fire as well, except it wasn’t pain that coursed through me.

It was power, undeniable, unshakable power.

What?

I looked toward the only person who could have been responsible. She was on the ground, battered and beaten, but in what might have been her first act of defiance since she had been captured, she held a hand toward me as I felt my body surge with even more power.

Wow.

There was still someone who could save Tez, I realized.

Me.

Mana coursing through me, I instinctively felt it was different, a savage edge to the ordinarily tranquil flow.

It was just a taste of the power of a dragon, but I let it course through me, my broken bones snapping back into place as the world slowed to a crawl. I could see the man’s fingers tightening around Tez’s throat, the life in her eyes moments from being crushed.

Flow!

Mana roaring within me, I activated my ruptured body. Unlike anything I’d experienced, the rush that overcame me made every prior ruptured body look like nothing more than a sugar high. Flying forward, I absentmindedly noted the crimson flames flickering behind me like the tail of a comet.

The surprise on the unknown mage’s face was palpable as I appeared before him, only made better when his eyes widened in further shock as I kicked him straight in the chest, sending him crashing through boulders.

Releasing Tez after being kicked away, my arms swept out, catching the girl as she gasped for breath.

“You okay?”

She looked up at me, sharing the same look of surprise as the mage, before nodding, patting my arm as she signaled me to put her down.

“What happened to you?” Tez eyed me as I turned to face where the man had crashed through a boulder, slowly standing up.

“The girl. Rosalina. I think…. I think she shared with me some of the power that he has been drawing from.”

“Hmm.” Tez nodded, and I waited for her to exclaim that there was nothing she could do then, that she would take the girl and leave as I distracted the mage.

Instead, she looked between the girl and me. “Think you can get her to share some with me?”

“W-what?” I sputtered. “Don’t you see this isn’t the time for jokes?”

“I’m not joking,” Tez answered firmly. Grabbing at her shoulder, she ripped away the billowy over-shirt she had been wearing. As the only piece of clothing not directly touching her, it had been outside the protective influence of the dragon scale, the billowy fabric almost entirely incinerated. Beneath it, I saw her tightly muscled arms coiling as she spun her staff. “We’re doing this together.”

Before I could protest, red flames enveloped her, a gentler glow than the hateful flames the mage had used earlier.

“Huh. Well, that’s neat.” Tez whistled, basking in her own fiery glow.

“Watch out!”

I shoved Tez out of the way as a black metal spike speared out from the ground, where it would have skewered her through the heart had I not shoved her in time.

“This is what I get for gloating. I feel like sharing my accomplishments with someone who isn’t one of those idiotic raiders for once, and this is what I get in return.”

The enemy mage had pulled on metal gauntlets with savage-looking talons tipping the fingers, muttering the entire time.

“Once I deal with you two, I shall return to work. I tire of these sand-cursed peaks.”

Tez looked at me as understanding passed between us without a spoken word.

Tez rushed in from his left as I darted toward his right, our weapons blurring through the air. Even with our sudden rush in power, the man was still faster, drawing from the draconic power for longer than we had. With a clawed hand catching our weapons, he lashed out with a vicious kick into Tez, sending her careening across the ground. His focus now solely on me, the man sent a flurry of strikes in my direction, which I desperately fended off until he caught me in quick succession with several clawed jabs, my mana suddenly faltering.

Shit!

Before he could take advantage of my faltering mana, a staff swung out of nowhere, catching him in the head and tossing him off the side of the peak, where he crashed below.

“We’re even now.” Tez smiled at me from where she had caught him by surprise, recovering faster than the man had anticipated.

“I will not be defeated by some children!”

An explosion rocked the ground beneath us as the mage rocketed toward us from below, using an instant explosive burst of fire to propel himself up, followed by a second burst of fire to land back on the peak.

I can’t deny it. That was cool.

Back in the fight, he flung a hand forward, shouting.

“Rentorz!”

Like a tsunami, a magma wave swept toward us, threatening to wash over us and swallow us whole.

“Behind me!” I shouted as Tez, for once, did exactly as I commanded. I sheathed my sword, closing my eyes as I focused all the raging mana within me.

A strike so fast it can part the sea.

Those words laid the foundation of northern-style swordplay. The idea was that if one mastered the way of the sword, one could part even seas with a single strike.

Not quite a sea, but close enough.

I wasn’t a master swordsman, not by a long shot. But what I was, was absolutely brimming with more mana than I knew what to do with.

But mana was mana, and who needed overly showy magic when you had a sword?

Flow!

With the same surge of mana and speed I had drawn upon earlier to save Tez, my sword arced out from its sheath through the magma wave as it was about to crash down upon us. As fast as I unsheathed the blade, it was sheathed again, a lightning-fast strike.

The pure ferocity of my strike didn’t so much split the magma wave as it blew a hole straight through, the magma crashing harmlessly over the sides and seeping down the jagged rocks of the mountain peak.

Free of obstruction, I saw the mage staring at us in disbelief, huffing with visible exhaustion.

Thought so.

The mana I’d felt from him was oppressive, but it wasn’t endless. The dragon mana within him was still incomplete, and not just that, the magma wave he had thrown at us earlier had worn him out.

It was our chance.

I sprinted directly toward him as my sword began to clash against his claws in an explosion of metallic sparks.

“Damn… kid!” The mage panted before jumping back and whipping an outstretched hand toward me. “Scortar!”

A black metal spike was launched toward me, but his mana usage had grown sloppy and televised. I smacked the tip of the point out of the air before it reached me, thrusting at him as he continually backed up, eyes widening and desperately searching for an out, uselessly throwing more of the metal spikes in my direction that never got close.

Almost!

He was gassing out, desperate, and all but at the breaking point.

Almost!

A desperate animal.

Almost!

The thing about desperate animals.

Almost!

Is that when pushed to desperation-

Just a little more!

-they are often their most dangerous.

“If... I can’t… have the power…. No one can!” The man shoved away from me before turning on the beaten girl.

No!

I tried to give chase, but the man thrust a hand backward with a final desperate shout.

“Scortar!”

I’d grown used to the black metal appearing as spikes bursting from underfoot. As used to the predictable attack pattern as I was, I was taken off guard as a wall of black metal bars appeared not beneath me but instead sprung out in front of me, cutting me off.

I wouldn’t make it in time.

A clawed hand reached for the girl, her eyes growing wide with fear.

No!

I reared back before tossing my sword with all my strength, the only thing I could think to do. Panicked as I was, my aim was off, missing his chest entirely, but that wasn’t to say I missed him completely. Leading too far with my throw, rather than catching him through the chest, it spun through the air before lopping off his outstretched arm, cutting it off at the elbow. Still spinning through the air, it only stopped when it crashed into the strange altar.

Where both the altar and my sword exploded into a million pieces.

The mana rushing through me vanished as the altar was destroyed, but it wasn’t the loss of the mana that I found myself focused on.

My sword!

The metal bars were still in my way, conjured forth using elements found within the ground; they wouldn’t vanish with the loss of our dragon mana. Not just that, the man, even after losing an arm, still seemed hellbent on killing the girl, reaching out with his other clawed gauntlet.

So I did the only thing I could think of.

“Tez!” I shouted, knowing I wouldn’t be the one to end this.

Tez was already one step ahead of me.

From behind me, the girl slammed her staff into the ground, using it to pole vault over the bars. My eyes glued to her; I saw her body twist midair, pulling back her bladed staff before slamming it straight down.

Directly through the mage’s chest.

Eyes bulging, the man twitched, impaled by the staff, reminding me of a fish flopping on dry land.

One, two, three twitches.

Then he was still.

No final words. No promises of revenge. No last-second spells were thrown in his death throes.

Nothing.

He was dead.

It was over.