My trajectory was off by a hair. Instead of slamming full force into the Dash’Ora, I sailed past it with only a hand brushing against the smooth red scales. I circulated some heart energy and blasted it to my side, hoping to redirect my momentum back toward the creature.
It helped, but only slightly. My energy redirected me enough to grab the Dash’Ora’s tail as I blew past it. I scrambled for purchase on the tail’s scales, and the creature jerked back from the effort of halting my momentum or risk being yanked along with me. I was momentarily worried the tail would come off.
The fear wasn’t necessary, and the Dash’Ora’s tail remained firmly attached to its body. Still, it whipped me around, trying to knock me off, but I held tight, slowly climbing my way up to its back. The Dash’Ora bucked and twisted, so it flew upside down, nearly causing me to slip off.
I released a grunt of effort and commanded an influx of energy through my meridians to push my muscles and grip to new heights. I put the House Coin in my mouth to hold and then drove my hands deep into the Dash’Ora’s hide. The scales split apart under my pressure with a welcoming ease. The beast shrieked in pain, twisting into a downward spiral.
But now I had a firm grip. Even as my lower body flailed without purchase in the spiraling movements, I wouldn’t fall. When I’d stabilized myself enough, I pulled one hand back and jammed it further up its back. Not deep enough to cause any fatal damage, though certainly with enough force to cause permanent injuries.
“Just… stop… moving,” I growled.
As if in response, the Dash’Ora screamed and its tail curled back to strike me. I knocked the tail aside with some energy, returning my focus to controlling the creature’s flight path—preferably toward an easier-to-ride Dash’Ora. Or, even better, toward a wyvern I could commandeer.
The current Dash’Ora had a sort of semi-humanoid figure where it stood on legs like a human, but where humans had two arms, it had eight with four on each side of its torso. Actually, as I looked closer, it had two arms on either side of each of its two torsos. The sight was particularly gross, like watching someone stack a torso on another torso. Its wings beat with heavy, almost wyvern-like flesh. It screamed and squawked with something that seemed like a beak but revealed three rows of sharp, edged teeth. Its narrow, bird head attached to the stacked torso with a long neck that swiveled and twisted even as I struggled to control it after making my way to its multi-torso body.
“Save the duke!” I mentally screamed to the Duke’s knights, using the House Coin as the medium. “He was hit by the fire.” The coin vibrated with my energy and the links connected to it hummed with my message. Hundreds of messages were returned to me immediately.
“Where is His Grace?”
“I’m coming!”
“Hold on, Lady Silverwater, we’re almost there.”
“I’m diving, I can see him falling.”
“What about General Roderick?”
The rest of the messages were distorted, and I couldn’t make out the precise words other than the extreme fear and desperation being relayed. I worked hard to keep my emotions neutral with a slight lean toward worry. I had no idea whether my feelings could be sensed the same as I sensed theirs and did not want to test the theory.
A few wyvern riders dove from their positions, darting through waves of fire still burning away the Dash’Ora no doubt to save their Lord.
I ignored them, slapping the side of my Dash’Ora’s head whenever he went off course. It would waver in the air, chittering with anger, but under my sheer strength around its neck and the force of my will, there wasn’t much room for it to fight back anymore. The Dash’Ora were known to be immune to most direct mental manipulations due to some biological material of their bones… or was it the matter of their brains? Regardless, I knew it couldn’t be completely controlled and didn’t bother. Instead, I slowly released an ever-increasing amount of Authority to stir its fear and drive it toward the action I wanted.
This time, I pulled hard against the Dash’Ora’s neck so it would turn a sharp left. Fortunately, it obeyed and rammed right into the path of an oncoming riderless wyvern. The two creatures entered into a battle of claws and teeth for only a split second before I plunged lunar-empowered fingers into the base of the Dash’Ora’s skull and ripped out its brain. It was a shame I couldn’t collect its core, but that wasn’t exactly a luxury I had at the moment.
I tossed the brain as I leaped to the wyvern, letting it fall with the Dash’Ora’s corpse down into the ruined city now alight with the bright blazes of hundreds of individual fires burning the grounded Dash’Ora. Once I’d gained control over the wyvern, which responded extremely obediently to my commands as if sensing I was human, I pointed the wyvern toward the giant summoning portal above Sealrite and increased the speed of my energy circulation while drawing on the moon’s lunar rays to empower my lunar-attributed energy beyond what a silver core should wield.
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A thought occurred to me, and instead of only drawing on the lunar rays, I reached out with my senses and tried pulling on the lunar energies all around us. It struck me how similar this process was to how Nasq described absorbing mana from the surroundings. I had always been able to draw in the moon’s lunar energy but had never really considered why I’d only been able to do that with lunar energy. I’d simply assumed it was an issue of my lacking true affinity with other attributes. Until I’d learned about mana, the action of drawing in lunar energy had been more akin to empowering the lunar energy in my core rather than absorbing an outside source of energy.
The more I thought about it, the more my original assumptions seemed wrong.
Had I truly not drawn on outside energy from the moon? Had it truly only empowered me?
No. I had pulled lunar energies into my core that I hadn’t created.
But that didn’t make any sense. If that were true, then wasn’t the lunar energy I gathered outside my core actually mana? If so, how was I storing mana without a magic core?
That led to a rather interesting question.
Was there any true difference between mana and energy, aside from where it originated? If not, why did the two create different types of cores?
The unanswered questions continued to plague me even as the power in my core filled to bursting. I knew I wouldn’t be able to come up with the answers on my own no matter how much I thought the issues over. I was not a scholar of magic, heart energy, or even cultivation, at least in the theoretical or educational realm.
I was a ruler. A conqueror. A warrior. A queen.
I would simply need to find someone to discover the truth for me. Or with me, whichever was necessary.
When I’d reached the limit of how much energy I could circulate into my core, I pulled it all out and condensed it into a single line of power. If I tried to spread my attack out to match the size of the magic circle, I wasn’t sure I could break the spell. The amount of energy my core could hold and create was high for a silver core, but the magic circle had been created with Runic influence and seemed to be around the power of a platinum core Awakened.
I didn’t know what a magic circle was per se, but summoning portals weren’t rare on Ordite. However, ones this size were still not particularly common. In Ordite, I had canceled many circles by interfering with its central power source. If I wanted to close it, short of overwhelming power, I would need to hit the circle’s center and overload that one spot.
Which is exactly what I did. A single line of massively condensed energy tore through miles of distance upward into the sky, spearing into the blackness of the portal until it disappeared.
The following sound was both concussive and cataclysmic. Part of me had hoped the portal would quietly blink out of existence. Most magic did when it was voided.
Summoning portals usually didn’t. Forcefully closing a rip in space generally had a rather annoying recoil. Still, I had hoped that perhaps magic summonings would be different.
They were not. If anything, they were worse.
“To the ground,” I commanded with the House Coin, taking the lead and urging my own away from guaranteed pain I was guaranteed at my current distance. “We’re all going to die if we stay in the air. Fly down, now!”
Fortunately, the summoning portal was tens of thousands of feet above the city. The waves of explosive, chaotic mana buffeted my wyvern and everything else in the air as well. We didn’t crash exactly, but I certainly wouldn’t refer to the subsequent landing under the concussive barrage as safe.
Wyverns and their riders dropped to the ground in a semi-controlled but wholly desperate attempt to escape the destruction. Some made it more safely than others. I wasn’t sure if any hadn’t made it, though no calls for help echoed along the House Coin links.
For my part, my wyvern crashed into a mound of dirt with enough speed that I was fairly certain the beast had killed itself. Instead of checking, though, I squeezed under the wyvern’s corpse and pulled the wings together to protect me from the stray bursts of frenzied magic cracking the air amidst the destruction like tiny, angry vines trying to kill everything escaping its path of rage. The wyvern twitched, alive. But instead of scurrying off in fright into the night to survive, the creature instead curled tighter around me as if… to protect me?
Despite myself, I couldn’t help but feel thankful to the creature I’d thought to use as a meat shield. I placed my hand on its chest and began to circulate energy not into my own body, but into the wyvern. Strengthening it and creating a protective layer around its black scales.
The lines were rather oddly quiet. I hadn’t been part of them for long, but they were never completely quiet. Even when no words were transmitted, emotions always lingered.
It remained quiet throughout the backlash of destroying the summoning portal. That silence was not broken when the explosion ended. Nor did it break when knights began staggering back to their feet, attempting to steady and orient themselves.
Until a single deep voice, filled with sorrow and pain, echoed along every linked line of communication.
“He’s dead. They’re both dead.”
A chill of success crawled down my spine. “Who?” I asked through the House Coin, though I already knew the answer.
"The Duke," came the response. The feelings and emotions that answered the call nearly overwhelmed me. Thousands of people were transmitting their sorrow, sadness, despair, and pain.
"We need to regroup,” I commanded, my voice firm though I made sure to add a touch of grief. “We cannot let their deaths be in vain.”
I pushed away the wyvern who ruffled its wings before tucking them by its side. The Wyvern was a bit smaller than the others but stared at me with a sense of curiosity that I returned with a pat to its side. "Good job."
"Where are the Cael Knights?" I asked.
"They ran during the explosion," someone responded and I nodded, though I realized belatedly no one but the wyvern could see it.
"Alright. Everyone should gather back at the duke's central building and each platoon should send out a pair of scouts to keep eyes on the Cael soldiers. They won't leave here alive," I promised and was rewarded by a tsunami of rage and determination from those linked to the House Coin. Linked through me. Only me.
I grinned.