Chapter 18
Walking into a dragon’s lair was a novel experience for Roden. At first the sheer magnitude of it was spine tingling. By the end of the first hour of stomping through the icy caverns the novelty was wearing off and the place started to remind him of a date he had planned for his wife where they got to walk through marvelous structures made out of solid ice. He was pretty sure they were billed as Ice Castles, but to call those structures a castle while on the world of Mir seemed like sacrilege.
Everything around him appeared to be solid ice. The men hadn’t anticipated the lair to be quite so large. From the outside it looked like an icy crown on top of the mountain. At that point they knew it was more involved than simply sitting on top of the peak.
The walls were clear in places and allowed sunlight to shine into the deep tunnel they walked. To call it a lair seemed a bit generous to Roden. The entire thing was just a winding chamber that wrapped around the top of the mountain contrary to what the outside had suggested. Despite his growing frustration, Roden couldn’t help, but feel a sense of awe at the beauty of the icy walls as they shined and glistened in the sun’s rays.
As they neared a bend in the tunnel, Errrkkkk raised a hand halting the group. Riakon and Roden both looked at him expectantly.
“I think I hear breathing, cacaw.”
Once he had drawn attention to it, Roden could make out the sound as well. It was the sound of smooth bellows, or the sound a soft breeze makes as it slips through an alley.
“I hear it too.”
Riakon unable to hear the sound, but still wanting to be involved hefted his hammer. “Then it’s almost showtime gentlemen.”
As quietly as their training and skill would allow, the three men rounded the bend and were greeted to a wide cavern dug into the side of the mountain. Unlike the tunnel, the cavern had dark walls made of mountain stone.
However, it wasn’t the drab stone walls that drew their eyes. That honor belonged to the sparkling piles of gold and ice that wrapped around the mostly circular room. Roden could just make out the various odd pieces of treasure poking out of a pile here and there, but the majority of the bounty was gold with a layer of ice over top.
In the center of the horde was the strangest and largest pile. It was pure white snow sprinkled with gold, which gave it the look of an unfinished sundae. If not for the inherent draw of gold, the snow would have been significantly more striking, but no adventurer worth their spark could avoid eyeing up such a magnificent treasure, even Roden was no exception.
“Gentlemen, I think the dragon might be in the pile of snow.”
If not for the enormity of the situation Errrkkkk and Roden might have put their heads in their hands and shook their heads, but in the presence of a dragon all jokes must be pushed aside. Instead they shared a glance and nodded.
They were about to enact one of their many plans. Catching the dragon unaware was one of the last things they thought would happen, but hoped and prepared as best they could. Roden applied all of his buff spells and activated his cloak as Errrkkkk took a position a little deeper in the tunnel from where they had come.
Riakon had been the hardest to incorporate into the battle plan. His only resource for reliable damage to a fucking dragon was going to be his breaths, but the idea was to save those for if the dragon was out of reach.
Instead Roden conjured his Nimbus and hooked it to Riakon. They hoped the added mobility would be enough to keep him within reach of the dragon’s more sensitive areas. The places where a hammer blow wouldn’t be easily ignored.
Then came the part Roden wasn’t particularly looking forward to performing. He stepped out of the mouth of the tunnel into the movie theater sized cavern and began the process of drawing magic into his arm and hand.
He overcharged the spell as much as he could before raising his arm toward the dragon under the pile of snow. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He could feel the cold air enter his lungs. He waited until just the spell had just reached the zone of perfection. He released his grip on the magic’s leash and sent it streaking toward the waiting mound of powder and saurian with its incantation spoken no louder than a whisper, “burst.”
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The beam of lightning crashed into the lower portion of his target. On impact, snow was thrown high into the air as the beam erupted into a cascade of jagged arcs within the falling snow. The sound that followed the crash of lightning was ear splitting.
A sharp piercing screech rang through the cavern rattling Roden’s bones. Within the cloud of snow Roden could see the shadow of a massive figure. It had reared back in pain and surprise, but it was rapidly gaining consciousness and clarity.
When it slammed its foreclaws into the ground its head managed to leave the obscuring cloud of snow. At that moment Roden was struck by the sight of a living breathing dragon. When its eyes locked on him, he felt a weight bear down on his very consciousness.
Every part of his survival instincts told him to leave and never return to this god awful place. He nearly drowned in the feeling before his mind recognized the intrusion and he was able to push back against it. When he felt that crushing presence leave him, he let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding.
The dragon before him was strange, it didn’t have the typical craggy appearance he came to expect. The head that poked out from the flurries that concealed its body was sleek, almost smooth. It held no horns or sharp protrusions. It had a more lizard-like appearance than the typical dragon from myth.
Its most distinctive feature was a long bright blue flap that stuck out below its jaw. To Roden’s surprise the dragon addressed him in a sharp voice spoken far too loudly.
“Who the fuck!” The dragon stood up strong and bellowed, “You insignificant–”
His soliloquy may have continued, except while the dragon had its attention on Roden, Riakon atop his Nimbus zipped across the head and delivered a strike with his hammer to the dragon’s head. Seeing Riakon go on the offensive brought their plan back into the forefront of Roden’s mind.
“Lux!”
He spoke the incantation and launched the spell. Riakon’s blow did little to move the dragon, but Riakon’s strength was enough to garner its attention as he completed his flyby hammering. Roden’s lance sprouted from the dragon’s cheek before it could formulate an attack.
They executed that very plan repeatedly. Roden would deliver a spell powerful enough to draw the dragon’s ire, alternating between his lance and eye beams all the while his Sylvan Bow peppered the dragon from just over Roden’s shoulder.
When the dragon would turn its attention on Roden, Riakon would harry it with powerful strikes to its joints and head before flying off again on Roden’s cloud. While effective in keeping the dragon distracted, both men could tell they were barely damaging the huge lizard.
Once the snow had settled into dust on the floor of the cavern Roden was able to see the entire dragon for the first time. Which in his mind looked like a giant lizard. It had four powerful legs and a sleek wide body.
Its white and grey scales appeared smooth, counter to their expectation the dragon would be heavily armored. As the beast swiped and snapped at Riakon, Roden started thinking of the beast as nothing more than a magical lizard. That was until one of his attacks caught it in its eye.
That time the dragon braced itself on all fours, turned its head toward Roden, opened its mouth and drew in a great breath. Its body ballooned out, its ribs expanding to accommodate the sheer volume of air it pulled in.
The pull was great enough to drag Roden a few feet. Which in his mind was a few feet in the wrong fucking direction. The frill below the dragon’s jaw began to glow blue before it slammed back like a lever action rifle.
A gale of super chilled air escaped the dragon’s maw. Roden wanted to be anywhere else, but he could tell he had nowhere to run. Instead he manifested his Aegis and hunkered down behind it as the dragon’s arctic breath slammed into his shield. Any thought of the thing before him being just a big lizard vanished as the truly frigid air sapped the warmth from his core.
While in his icy predicament, some part of Roden’s mind had solved his long standing question about how exactly cold magic functioned. There couldn’t be such a thing as cold energy. Anyone who had taken a physics class knew cold was the absence of heat energy. As he felt his warmth being pulled away by the rushing wind he realized cold magic was actually a vacuum that pulled energy, by extension heat, into itself. That coupled with a blast of super chilled gas was more than enough to chill something to death.
The thought distracted him enough to endure the pain of being nearly frozen solid. If not for his aegis, he may have been completely encased. Luckily, his Aegis had taken the brunt of the dragon’s attack and left him with a thin layer of frost covering the rest of his body.
Roden dared to peer over the top of his shield and saw the dragon had reengaged with Riakon, but with its full attention. It darted after him. Riakon flew higher toward the ceiling to avoid its claws. To his horror the dragon leapt onto the wall and scurried after him like a gecko after a fat bug.
“Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,”
The sound coming from the tunnel was their signal. Riakon was unfortunately the one they had decided should be the bait for their plan and he executed it dutifully. He dipped down and flew straight toward the tunnel.
As they had hoped the dragon chased after. It dug its pickaxe-like claws into the icy walls and pulled itself into the tunnel like a kid trying to go fast down a waterslide.
Roden couldn’t see what happened next, but he heard their trap being triggered with Errrkkkk’s familiar,
“Caaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwww!!!!!!”
Up to that point in the fight Errrkkkk had been hiding. He waited in the tunnel absorbing the sun’s rays and gathering his chi. Unlike Riakon, Errrkkkk had reached his Point of Convergence in his full power. Not only were his chi techniques more powerful and easier for him to execute than before, but he had devised new tactics and techniques.
He took all of the power gathered up in his Soul Sphere and primed it in front of him as an orb nearly the size of the tunnel. Next he focused his chi and crushed the sphere concentrating the power into a beach ball sized orb that hummed as it floated before him.
The next step was to gather up his chi in a supercharged Cacaw Wave. Both techniques were new and took him a long time to prepare which made them perfect for use as their secret weapon. He drew out his signature cadence as he brought forth his golden aura.
When Riakon entered the tunnel Errrkkkk was primed. When Riakon shot past him Errrkkkk unleashed everything he had stored up. His condensed Soul Sphere was propelled faster than ever before his beam that was more powerful than any he had unleashed against a foe.
The two techniques mingled and joined together into a wall of unrelenting energy. The blast washed over the creature as an irresistible force. Errrkkkk strained against the energy he was releasing. He dug his talons into the icy ground beneath his feet and leaned into his beam. However, when the energy attack dissipated there was no sign of the dragon. All that remained in its place was a gaping hole in the ice wall that let in a chilling mountain wind.