“Of course, this wouldn’t be a good story if it ended just like that,” I imagined Ed saying.
While the rest of the boys and I were waiting, behind the bushes at the edge of the clearing, Ed had run out of the cave like a man escaping from a gunfight. I have seen the sort a few times before, in the old downtown neighborhoods. I had never visited Boulavie Queen, but I had lived for a quarter of my life in the guts of East Arkhmein, and I imagined both being the same.
In those kinds of neighborhoods, people get mobbed and stabbed on a daily basis. It’s just a matter of time before it happens to you. I had been mugged twice there, after exiting a convenience store. That’s why I stopped going there by myself. I took my friends there just to get something to eat. I always felt strong in numbers.
People get into all sorts of violent situations in Arkhmein. Only two muggings for me, but my friends were mugged even more. And one was even killed. I was never that unlucky. That’s why I fought so hard to become who I am today, to be able to fight for the unfortunate and weak, and now I fight for my people.
It happened to me and it happened to my friends. Even worse things have happened to others, and I am meaning to get rid of it all. Ed and Ted were the ones that made me believe it was possible.
I thought I was stronger when I went out to fight a dragon. Ed had asked me and Ted to come along into a battle that easily meant our deaths, and yet he trusted me with this. I thought I had finally achieved that which eluded me, the strength and courage to fight against danger.
So, how come I had stood so still and frightened when the dragon tried to eat Ed?
I wanted to blame it all on that explosive shriek and growl from the dragon that had stunned me completely. I wanted to fight it, but I couldn’t. I used up all my mental strength and will to come out of the trance. But nothing happened. I simply watched as my best friend was hypnotized into accepting his death, and I was letting it happen.
Maybe I felt relief that the dragon had frozen me in place, and I used it as an excuse for my inaction. I wanted to blame myself, but all I could think of was that it was impossible, that I was frozen like the rest, and that Ed’s death would not be my fault. His death would not be on my conscious even when I blamed myself in front of others.
It couldn’t really be me. It was all the dragon.
And just as I was accepting my situation. Just as I was letting the tears flow in the place of my grief and weakness. Ted rose from beside me and pointed his gun up with shaky hands.
His face was a mix of yellow and blue, stripes flaring in every direction, like a screen refresh flickering during a low-frame recording.
The deep black, two-dimensional-looking shape of the lizard popped off from the red background of the forest, like it was pasted on my vision. It was descending on Ed, maw unhinged, drooling, its bright teeth contrasting with the rest of its voided body.
And yet, that pristine black cracked at the force of a hypersonic rod impacting on it. The scales cracked and shattered, raining all over the destroyed forest floor in a shower of fluttery black debris that disappeared and reappeared with every turn and rotation.
Thanatophagon — baptized by Ted’s spray of steel — reared from its serpentine pose and roared at the sky; convulsions twisting its body with the peppering of steel quite like salt would a worm.
His alien war cry, in the form of rumbling shrieks, woke something within me, and I saw myself rising, gun in hand, finger on the trigger, sights aligned with the shape of the twisting lizard. I didn’t even have to think about it, it was instinctual.
Kill it.
My mind hyper-focused on that one single task. My cavewoman brain had nothing else to think about, the world was suddenly so clear and so simple. There were no other problems or issues, there were no other things to think about. I had a one-track mind, and I knew that I was to kill the damn lizard. Shoot it until it died. Kill it until it's dead. I wanted the thing dead dead.
Kill it. Kill the lizard. Kill it.
“KILL IT!” I screamed, ripping my voice to shreds in the process.
And my gun, obeying Newton, kicked against my body. And the rods, obeying Newton, ripped against the dragon.
All I needed to do was kill the lizard and my friend would be safe.
Kill it and Ed will be safe.
Life was simple like that, I knew.
----------------------------------------
I was supposed to be eaten.
My mind turned back to normal with the scream of pain of the dragon, and, like a starter pistol, it made me run towards safety, towards where the real guns were being fired from.
I heard Tedet and Misa screaming and saw them shooting their guns at the dragon.
It didn’t take long before their guns ran out of ammo. The dragon would only be slightly perturbed by the pain and I knew more problems would come if we didn’t try to do something about it.
“Shoot it!” Misa screamed. “Keep shooting.”
And with that, Shkadaur rose from the bushes, next to my friends, and pointed its ceremonial saber at the dragon, and chanted a spell I had never had the luxury of knowing. Its wordings weren’t in any radera language I knew, although that’s not something so surprising given I only knew of a few.
However, with its spell, I saw the ground rip open under Thanatophagon, swallowing its legs and crushing them with the force of pressure from the surrounding rocks. The sheer force that opened the ground also ripped into its legs, most likely rupturing its skin and scales.
Padrict rose up next and pointed with its wand, clenching his hand into a fist next to it. The floor, from just beyond me, exploded, sending compressed rock flying right into the dragon. This attack was nowhere near as powerful as guns, but it was far more unrelenting and with a lot more mass behind it.
With the dragon stuck in the ground, and a wall of mass flying at near-sonic speeds, it would surely fall over, and with some luck, break a few bones.
However, there was nothing of the like.
At this, I turned around to do my magic.
“Spada!” I cast.
The ground that was sheering under the dragon erupted into a spike that should have impaled its vulnerable stomach. Not only did the spear fail to impale the dragon, but it failed to erupt intact, as the sheering forces ripped it in half, sending the two halves in wide angles. As if that wasn’t enough, the floor that was holding the dragon, cracked up, bursting up from under its feet.
The dragon essentially erupted from the ground by no will of its own. The magic between the two Orders of Magic had successfully destructively interfered, creating chaos in the forces and resulting in the explosion of incompatible magical flow.
The dragon was free and mostly unhurt. But mostly, the dragon was angry. Furious.
This was our cue to run and spread out.
Thanatophagon opened its maw and I knew what it had in store for us beyond its slithering tongue and blue-glowing larynx.
“Run!” I commanded.
“Spread out! This way!” Misa followed it up. “Ed, away from us!”
I turned ninety degrees and sprinted like hell. I was about to be breathed on by a million particles, just like we were before up in the Ark. This time, however, I had nothing between it and my own body, like the suit that protected me from all kinds of radiation. While it wasn’t a perfect barrier (and nothing is), it at least reduced the probability of being affected by radiation.
I turned my head to see the dragon directing its maw towards me, following me as I ran. On one side, I was relieved that my friends were safe, but on the other, I was panicking knowing this could be the last thing I’d do in my life. I thought of all the stupid things I had done throughout my life. I thought of the time I put my hand inside a blender, or another when I turned on an engine while Tedet was working on it. I thought of the duel with the torviela and the fight with the demon. I even thought of that one time I drank spoiled milk due to hunger.
None of it came close.
But a ray of hope peered through. Two figures ran towards the dragon and jumped on its forelimbs as it stood on all fours. While the two mechanogolems were essentially two rats to a person, the dragon reacted to them like it had just been jumped on by two venomous animals. It flinched at the touch of them and it gawked and squeaked, shaking its front legs like trying to get rid of pieces of toilet paper stuck to the sole.
One of the golems lost its grip and slammed on the forest floor, while the other managed to climb a little further up. To this, the dragon slammed a claw into it, ripping from it its legs and arms, and throwing the body away towards the trees at the edge of the clearing, disappearing into the forest.
The dragon stood on its rear limbs and roared while looking for something, likely more golems, around it. The slight distraction was enough for us to spread out and prepare our new stations. Tedet was the first to attack, at the command of Misa, trying to hit as many of its shot into the dragon’s head, but missing most of them. Misa was still getting into position before I decided to take a stand where I was and prepared my magic.
The dragon quickly realized that it could not get distracted by the golems and needed to be prepared to defend against another onslaught of pure Newtonian firepower.
I created another spear from the rock floor just below the dirt and directed it right at the belly of the dragon. The point slammed into its side, but the dragon skin managed to hold itself rather than being pierced. On the other hand, the dragon screamed in agony as the point of the spear slammed into it with such force it must have felt like getting stabbed through a thick piece of layer. No blood, but one hell of a bruise for the next two weeks.
The dragon slammed its claws into the ground and ripped the pieces of wood and branches it had left before, as well as the rocks created from our previous spells, and threw them at Tedet. Wooden and stony debris were launched against the short man hiding behind the trees. Huge pieces of rock cracked the trunk, forcing the radera to come out of his hiding spot.
The dragon roared at Tedet and began its crawl towards him when Misa peered beyond her tree and showered the dragon in steel. Unlike the marksman that was Tedet, Misa couldn’t get a shot on the dragon’s head and decided otherwise to try its thorax. The steel rods managed to hurt the dragon enough to make him flinch.
Padrict followed Misa with another attack of rocky bullets directed at its moving head, trying to distract it enough.
With its claws, Thanatophagon covered its face, trying to turn away from the incoming rain of rocks.
More golems ran forward, with the previous two, slower than before, starting toward the dragon. Like little detritivorous critters towards a carcass, the golems began swarming the dragon. In its fear, the dragon swiped its tail, catching several golems and launching them at different angles toward the sky, floor, and the foliage and trunks of the trees at the edge of the clearing. Many golems skipped the trashed floor, like stones on water, sending pieces of branches and litter as they did. They flailed and rotated on several axes, some breaking pieces of their bodies away, ending up limbless and stunned.
Those who survived managed to get close enough to the dragon to be in range from its claws. The sharp dark nails dug into one or two golems as the dragon clawed wide, trying to catch as many bugs as it could in one swing. At least one, of the two caught golems, instantly shut down and hung limply, still stuck in the claws after the couple of swipes. But not all golems were caught into the defensive measures, and managed to either dodge or were out of range of the attacks.
When the only five golems I could spot jumped onto the dragon’s rear and front legs, as it fell on all fours after losing balance, I decided to take the opportunity to strike once again.
Pointing my staff, I created another spear on the ground. While the dragon was distracted with the golems, I tried impaling it through its stomach, but the dragon moved just as the spear projected up from the ground, glancing the abdomen. The rock spike did not penetrate the dragon, but the tip ripped into the skin as it glanced him.
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The dragon roared again and clawed at the golems as they rode him up to the back. The tail smashed and slammed into the debris on the ground, continuously sending rocks and lumber in every direction. Once or twice the dragon directed a throw of rocks towards me or Misa, either deliberately or accidentally. Maybe even incidentally.
While everyone kept moving and shooting, Shakadaur even tried to slam gusts of wind to throw the dragon off balance as it stood on two legs, the dragon simply kept itself on the defensive.
I was thinking we were pushing the dragon back into a defensive position. It barely had time to attack when it had to defend itself from any type of strike from all sorts of directions. Meanwhile, we were basically unscathed from his attempts to deal us damage. I wasn’t scratched at all.
Were we really fighting the dragon on even grounds? This was supposed to be the ultimate creature. Wizards and knights would die in scores fighting against dragons, but we were managing to push ours back against the figurative wall.
How was this even possible? How could a dragon be this defenseless against humans? It has the strength and even the magic to do it. The dragon had just spoken my name and almost made me get myself eaten. So, what was making it look so dumb against our attacks? Was the dragon unable to react to our attacks? Did he not know how to deal with us? Did he not know how to fight?
And like a strike of genius, my mind called out eureka.
Of course, Thanatophagon did not know how to battle! It lived all its life in the ark. All it did was sit and take in radiation. At most, it swiped away a bunch of little machines that tried to take its radioactive food. But he lacked battle experience. It had never known about humans, let alone know that he had to fight them eventually or even how to do it.
It used the soul gaze to learn things from us, but all it could take was knowledge. Even if we knew about how we fight dragons or how dragons fight against humans, that experience would not be able to pass through the soul gaze, except only for the information.
This was a child who learned about war in encyclopedias, only to be thrown in the middle of a war-torn battlefield. How could anyone expect him to fight us?
But us? We may not know how to fight a dragon, but we knew how to fight. And we knew how to fight things bigger, stronger, and more magical than us. By pure experience, the dragon was outmatched. History teaches us a much smaller army can defeat a much bigger one if they are well trained and commanded expertly.
Thanatophagon never had a chance. It was doomed to lose the moment we decided to fight it.
Such an anticlimactic battle. One that should’ve been sung through the ages as a victory of David against Goliath, will be remembered as an adult taking away candy from a child.
It even made me feel pity for him.
The dragon that used to look like an insurmountable obstacle, death personified in a gigantic lizard that spewed relativistic particles of death, now looked more like a baby being eaten alive by millions of ants. We might have stepped on the lion’s tail back in the Ark, but now the lion had shaken the hornets’ nest.
With this newfound realization, the plan changed from survival to something entirely different.
“Don’t stop!” I screamed my command. “Keep shooting! The dragon does not know how to fight! Be relentless!”
As if he knew what I had just said, the dragon reared its head towards me and roared.
But our very own Mars, goddess of war, blessed us with morale. Her scream commanded us to destroy the enemy.
“Keep fighting!” Misa commanded, mirroring mine. “Don’t let up! Spread apart! Keep him guessing!”
Now, the swarming golems ran towards the dragon with more determination. While before, they spread out their approach, now the machines were coming in recklessly. They were trying to overwhelm the dragon, rather than tire it.
However, Thanatophagon had lost interest in the machines and began approaching me. It bounded towards me like a bounding dog, only for it to stand up and spread its wings wide. Whatever it had in store for me with that pose, I could only imagine it was bad news for me.
“Take cover!” Misa’s words cut through the violence and destroyed the hesitation and fear within my body.
The spell was lifted, I came through the stun and regained my strength. With Misa’s command and the dragon about to do something, my only recourse was to run like the wind and survive.
The irony wasn’t lost to me when the dragon began flapping its wings and a gust of wind slammed towards me. With a flap, walls of wind, ever stronger, pushed me from the back. Leaves and dust took flight and began obscuring my vision, before branches began rushing past me.
Soon, the winds were so strong, the logs that were still spread on the ground around me began shifting in their beds of foliage. As for me, the wind caught me up straight with my flapping clothes, dragging me forward and tripping me as I walked. My movements became sluggish as I tried to keep myself from being dragged towards the floor.
Whatever I tried, I didn’t manage to stop myself from falling and rolling on the ground.
Thanatophagon fell on his forelimbs, stomping the ground as it did and making the world tremble around me. His roar was only a harbinger of more trouble, turning his open maw slightly blue. I knew what was coming. My lungs became empty and my abdomen turned void. I reached out with my hand trying to find my staff somewhere, but all I could find were branches and pieces of lumber.
I had no time, I had to do something. I had to put mass between him and me — a lot of mass. I had no space suit with me, and usually, the best kind of radiation shield is a metal because of its density. I had no metal with me, and even if I had metal, I wouldn’t be able to use it on time.
“Scutum!”
A wall of rock was erected before me. I knew this wasn’t enough. I cast the spell twice instantly after. Time was of the essence. Maybe two shields would be enough, but I didn’t have the time to calculate or even try my luck with just two.
My second wall was erected just as I witnessed the blue glow around the walls of rock flare above it and beside it. My third wall came up half a second later. The eerie silence as the glow grew brighter filled me with dread. Unlike fire, I would not know if I had done a good job until it was already too late. Either I’ll visit a doctor to find out I have been irradiated beyond repair or I will start vomiting and leaking blood from my mucus membranes.
I sat there looking at the sky and just waited for everything to pass. There was nothing to do but wait. I heard the sounds of people screaming and guns shooting, even the loud thuds of steel and rock slamming into the dragon until it finally roared, and the glow slowly disappeared around me.
I breathed in and waited two more seconds.
I stood up and brought my barriers down and witnessed two golems crawling inside the dragon’s jaws while another was trying to rip into its eyes. The dragon had been distracted by me so much that it had allowed the robots to crawl up its body and into its vital points.
The dragon had already bitten one of the golems in half, its body parts still hanging from the closed jaw. Another one was being gripped by the dragon in its claw, still moving, flailing to wedge itself free. Shaking its body like a wet dog, the dragon managed to dislodge a couple of golems, and followed up by throwing the one still in its claw towards me. I braced myself to jump away, but the golem had held just enough to be thrown into the sky, limbs spread akimbo, rotating around its intermediate axis, tumbling as it would.
Holding onto my staff, I prepared myself for another strike and grabbed a stone in my pocket. I felt the magical fatigue of using three powerful spells in less than a second. Like pulling a muscle or spraying an ankle, I had to start using magical crutches for the rest of the fight. The stones were those crutches, and I only had five of them, the other five I had given to Padrict.
That was a mistake in retrospect. I was the artillery barrage of our team. I held the most firepower and decided to give half of my ammo to the mortar team.
What to do now?
If I could use my fire spells, I could try siphoning all the stones into one single powerful spell. It would rip me to shreds inside, even turning me into a magical invalid for a week, but I think it would be enough to at least burst a hole in its chest or its stomach.
Just a minute ago, we had pushed the dragon into a defensive position. And while the dragon was mostly just defending again, I realized that one attack from him had decimated our strength. If he were to attack us upfront again, at least to any of the wizards, it could spell an inevitable defeat.
That was all it took. One attack. From having victory within our reach, I was contemplating total defeat. All of this in less than ten seconds and with only one single strike from the enemy.
I had felt the difference between us before, but that false hope during the early stages of battle deluded me to think we had a real chance, and that we were achieving it.
Not anymore.
So, what are we to do now?!
By the time I was done contemplating our new calculated chances, the dragon had fought off most of the golems and taken several shots to the head. I saw a stuck rod in its skull, very close to the eye. Those rods were nothing more than large needles. We needed something more.
As if to answer my conundrum, Padrict displayed a masterful use of magic and cut through the air with a spell, compressing the gaseous particles into a thin stream of air close to the dragon. The molecules rearranged, decreasing their entropy with the aid of magic and the sudden refraction of the air, turning nothing into a mirror, slashed through Thanatophagon’s wings, like a sword.
The dragon’s wings were slashed cleanly, but not chopped off. The deep wounds in its arm ran towards the membranes between its elongated fingers, cutting them like a blade would cut a sail. The loose skin flopped as the dragon flapped its wings in pain.
Shakadaur mirrored Padrict, swinging its blade like a swordsman, and in the wake of its blade, the wind refracted again exactly the same as with Padrict’s spell. Only this time, the line stretched out from the tip of the sword and towards the dragon. The wind blade slashed the dragon across the throat and continued towards its wings, cutting a hole in them.
The golems crawled on its body, from where they hung, to the dragon’s wings. Their hands gripped scales and then regular skin as they tried grabbing the cuts in them. In no time, the robots ripped the dragon’s wings further, stretching the wounds further. Some machines even reached within the cuts in the throat or arms and pulled out chunks of deep red meat, bloody and mushy.
A new roar like nothing we had heard before cut through our ears. The agony was now clear. Its previous roars were simple whimpers of fear or discomfort. Now, the dragon was truly suffering agonizing pain as the wizards were ripping it apart.
I had no such spells. I did not have the control my peers had. Theirs were not powerful. I’m sure, if I had just half of the control they had along with my strength, I could likely chop a wing clean off, or even try for the jugular and bleed the damned thing to death. But that kind of power with that kind of control, or vice versa, was reserved only for the highest rankings, the Arch Wizards.
Misa and Tedet paired up to shoot together at the dragon, now aiming for the wounds in his throat. With every shot, they had become more accurate. This time they managed to strike one of the wounds along with a golem, making the dragon shriek.
Again, I was astounded by the change in balance. Everything began with the dragon so clearly advantaged, only for us to push it against the ropes. In one single attack, the dragon had reduced my power to essentially nothing, and dooming our greatest advantage to uselessness. Only, now, we had leveraged the dragon’s distraction, towards the clear greatest danger, to strike a decisive blow. If we hadn’t knocked the dragon out, we had made it stagger with a clean punch to the jaw.
This was my time to strike. I had to use this advantage to pull my biggest attack against the oversized lizard and kill it for good.
I siphoned my stones, I tried doing all five but I felt the magic slipping through my finger, so I settled for three and decided to save the other two just in case.
I imagined a sword. A rock, Roman gladius held by the personification of Atlas — despite being Greek — peering its hand through the Earth — or Sovail — sword in hand, and stabbing the dragon into the throat. I imagined the Legionnaire Atlas in military Roman armor, the lorica segmentata, and the galea helmet.
I already had a Roman-style spell, which I had used indiscriminately to impale or stab my foes. Usually, I would refer to or describe it as spears. This time, I had the sensation that due to other spells used in this battle, I wanted to use a sword. And while Spada is a sword, I wanted my imagination and spell to be consistent with each other. I tweaked my usual spell only a little, and imagined only a stronger version of the spell. This was a magical trick some wizards liked to use, where a stronger version of the same spell would be named differently to fully encapsulate the difference in power in their minds and wills.
And, so, I chanted. My new supercharged rock spear, now into a sword meant to slay dragons. The talon of the Imperial Roman Aquila, now a spell, now turned into a sword held by the Greek Titan, Atlas, himself. I felt only a little ridiculous, but mostly proud!
“Gladius Atlantis!”
The ground trembled like I had never felt it before. My spells had never been this powerful before. Even the dragon froze as it tried balancing itself. But by the time he managed to reincorporate in its four legs, the ground had pushed itself towards a center point. In the epicenter, a pike of geological significance rose with a speed I did not believe possible.
Explosion.
My eardrums must have burst. The ringing in my ears and the pain dropped me to the floor. I could not hear anything but a loud high-pitched whistle that my brain soon interpreted as white noise. My head ached like I had just been slammed with a sledgehammer, and my body recoiled as it tried bringing in air to my lungs. Had I taken a wrecking ball straight to my stomach? By all intents and purposes, I must have been dead, along with every human in a ten-meter radius.
But I was alive and wriggling in the ground. Only when a little of my hearing came back did I realize I was coughing and wheezing. Soon, the world came back in a flash, like the sound of rushing water as my head poked through the surface. I was back, thinking I could still hear the thundering of the explosion still echoing in the forest.
I looked at the dragon and found it pulling itself out of the massive conical pike piercing through the earth and into the sky, taller than the dragon was.
There was a gaping hole in its stomach, gouging. Blood dripped, shiny red.
This was it. I had done it. The dragon was going to die.
I looked at the dragon and I saw a multitude of emotions in its eyes. There was fury, hatred. But mostly, there was fear. Genuine fear.
Radera would have been completely unreadable if it weren’t for the coloration of their pimples. You would expect lizards to be as unreadable, but there was a connection between them and us, humans. We were life connected by a common ancestor — sired by Mother Earth. We were more connected than both of us ever thought. He and I didn’t need a soul gaze to understand what the other was thinking, we simply knew by a glance at each other’s eyes.
Death.
The dragon feared dying. Me, I reveled in the kill of the hunt. The tables had turned, and the dragon had become the prey. He knew.
With newfound realization, it did what most animals do when caught against a rock and a hard place. Like a cornered cat, with no way to flight, its instincts told it one thing: fight or die.
The dragon chose to fight like any other animal would. And I felt weirdly proud of that decision, but also afraid. There was nothing scarier than a mortal with nothing else to lose, but everything to win. Mortals fight savagely, to the bitter end, finding strength within the unlikeliest of places. Beyond Free Will, this is what most supernatural fear, the thrashing before death’s door. That’s exactly what the dragon did when he finally roared on the floor, leaning against the Sword of Atlas.
I was finally on my feet when the dragon fell on three legs, but still resting on the pike with a gripping claw. However, a moment later, my body felt heavier. I wavered for only a second as the sensation came and went. But, soon after, I felt it again, this time, stronger than before.
My head lolled downward, like I was falling asleep and I held up with more strength. My arms felt extremely heavy, my shoulders were weak. But, especially, my legs trembled and almost gave in as I tried keeping myself upward.
The sensation disappeared once more, and I almost felt like I was jumping straight up. My body was instantly lighter. That made me slightly dizzy.
Then the dragon cried, not like a powerful roar, but more like a strain of strength, a powerlifter lifting 200kg of weights above its head.
My body collapsed under its weight and I had to fight it hard if I wanted to lift myself, but the more I tried the heavier my body felt. This time, I didn’t sense it like my body being weak, but like my world suddenly being unnaturally heavier. It was even harder to breathe, not because my body pushed against my chest, but because I couldn’t expel the air within my chest even when I had the whole weight of myself on me.
It was almost like gravity had locally increased.
Then, I heard them, the branches breaking under the weight of others, as more weight was exerted on them from other bodies atop them. It wasn’t as if gravity had increased, gravity had increased!
“Sweet,” I began, forcing my voice to speak. “Mary.”
I had just burst the earth beneath the dragon that almost killed people with just the air pressure from the explosion. And, now, the dragon was increasing the gravity around us, to crush us under the thousands upon thousands of tons of air above us.
How are we supposed to top this one now?