“Weeeeeeee!”

Brownie Mikle’s shriek of glee sounded next to my ear as I zipped through the forest. He was standing on the top of my Masspack, hanging onto my hair and his hat at the same time, although my Vajra had cut down wind resistance to nothing more than a fair breeze.

However, he obviously didn’t have a lot of experience at shooting through the forest at a base 90’ move, the equal of a riding horse at full gallop, and I could maintain this pace a long, long time.

We were whizzing through the forest, trailed by the patient mass of Forge and my belongings, anchored to my belt. He might have ridden animals before, but the smooth skating of my lightfoot technique was something completely different, more like power-gliding than running, and the way I swayed back and forth to avoid the forest giants around me drew more whoops from him. If I took some sharp turns and spun entirely around a tree or two just for the fun of it, he wasn’t complaining at all.

I danced headlong down mountain slopes, or just plain threw myself off of a cliff or two, sliding down the air to an open area to resume my run. Mikle was whooping and laughing the whole while, even as he pointed here and there towards open areas to run through.

Startled flocks of birds flew into the air. Rabbits ran away. Deer herds scattered. Bears huffed and looked up as we streaked by. Clouds of pixies roiled in our wake and tried to catch up, failing. I blew by a couple trolls fishing in a river, extended my lightfoot down a bit, and caught both of them right in the face with a spray of water. They roared in fury as Mikle’s gleeful laughter mocked them.

I ran across a lake on misting heels, and found a couple giant otters trying their best to pace me as I did so. I reached down once, twice, and scooped two pike out of the waters before they could dart away, holding them up as I glided along on forward momentum.

“Lunch?” I asked the otters archly, as their heads broke the water, looking hungrily at the fish.

I tossed both kicking fish into the air. Lean brown forms lunged up to snatch them in midair instantly, and I laughed and picked up speed again.

Just running like this was immensely cathartic. The main use of my enhanced physical ability had been just using it as a better way to butcher things. Just flat out running at inhuman speed for miles and miles was just so… refreshing.

Of course, I was running towards a big fight, so there was that…

-------

I tilted my head sharply.

Something was roaring… in two-tones. And something, things?, was/were shrieking in response.

I panned the whole sky, flipping around to skate backwards across the water.

Blurs of black at eight o’clock. I fed Essence to my Mask of Clarity, and my view leapt forwards by a factor of ten. Miles became mere hundreds of yards.

Griffons. And… a dragon?

A two-headed dragon, with a rider…

I swerved, altering course urgently. “Goodbrown Mikle, I’ve got a fight coming, you’ll probably want to get off until I’m done.”

“A fight?!” He sounded excited. “Fighting what?”

“A two-headed dragon. It’s probably attached to the incursion you were telling me about.”

“Oooooh…” His emerald eyes were sparkling with excitement. “Can I stay and watch, m’lady?”

“Stay tight in that pack and don’t move.”

He crouched down promptly, taking my words very seriously.

“Not the griffons?” Tremble spoke up. Mikle nearly jumped out of the pack.

“Who was that?” he exclaimed, looking around wildly.

“Those griffons sound like recruits to me. Goodbrown Mikle, that’s my Sword, Tremble.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Goodbrown Mikle,” Tremble said cheerfully. He peeked over the edge of the pack and stared down at her in her sheath. She waggled her quillons at him.

“Ohhhh, a talking Sword!” His little eyes went wide. “A pleasure to meet you too, goodblade!”

“Just keep your head down, and Sama and I will take care of this overgrown mudworm,” Tremble said confidently. He nodded dumbly at her words, and turned his eyes back forwards.

“Can you really kill a dragon?” he asked in my ear.

“Yes. You’re probably going to be uncomfortable when I extend my Null, so be ready for it.”

“Your Null?” he asked, and then gasped as I extended it out for one heartbeat.

To a Fey, having their intangible connection to the land and magic severed so smoothly and completely was like being smothered in a wet, heavy blanket. No use of magic was possible in my Null, magic was as silent and still as iron. Despite himself, he gasped, and I felt him shiver on my shoulder.

“What was that?” he asked nervously.

“It’s magic going silent and still. The magic is still there, but it is not and will not move, or change, or condense, or anything. It’s a Null, basically forcing magic to stay magic, and not allowing it to be wielded by other powers.”

“That sounds very powerful,” he admitted meekly.

“It comes with the side effect of not being able to use or project magic at all. So, great defense, but misses out on all the real fun of magic.”

“You can run on water…”

“That’s my Tats. I can use magical items that are bound to me. I can also use ki, as long as I don’t project it or spend it. I basically have to treat myself like some sort of magic item, rather than a spellcaster or something. No magic for Sama.”

“Oh.” He kind of squinted up ahead, where griffons were swooping and circling around the dragon, trying not to be caught by the much bigger beast and its greater threat range, but also clearly very pissed off it was present. The thing just looked wrong. The spikes weren’t symmetrical, the scale patterns were irregular, and one head looked nothing like the other, to the point it was some kind of grayish-black thing with mismatched horns, a cancerous thing grown on the body of the real dragon, an infection slowly spreading across it as it grew stronger.

Did it have three claws in front? Eesh. Scale, wingspan about sixty yards, pretty impressive, although it didn’t satisfy physics at all, but who cared about physics in Magic Universe, right?

Two-headed mutated dragons. Those usually came from… Klaw?

Eff me. And that freaking rider was wearing spike-festooned Demon-patterned dire harness skinplate. This was a Dark Gods incursion?!

They were doing their aerial ballet over a rising cliffside, trees below, swooping this way and that as the dragon changed direction.

I aligned my ki and screamed out in proper Celestial, “Get him higher in the air and over a clearing!”

My voice wasn’t hugely loud, but it carried like a bullet out ahead of me, not dispersing. It didn’t matter that it was in Celestial, except to the dragon and its rider. The likelihood they could speak the language of Heaven was infinitesimal, given where they came from.

But I had the Whiskers of the Wild up, giving me a cat-face paint job with whiskers and a black nose, and my words could be understood by any animal… and that included griffons, the sacred magical beast of Aru.

I saw great golden eyes glancing my way, easily making me out since I was definitely the fastest thing on the ground around… and the only thing on the water, as it were.

The dragon saw me too, but that didn’t mean much to it, as it could tell scale, and, well, I was pretty small. Running across water that fast was neat, but c’mon, I just couldn’t be that much of a threat, could I?

The griffons heard, and the sheer fact they could hear and understand me across that range must have had an effect. The big one with the dark crest that seemed to be the leader began to shift their formation, moving up higher and to one side as they made their runs. The dragon obligingly shifted direction to both meet them and evade them, rapidly shifting as their belly runs raised scratches on its thick scales, snapping and clawing off feathers in passing.

The rider didn’t have a ranged attack, but was waving around a Sword worthy of an ogre, as if holding it would incite the griffons to attack him personally and get themselves chopped in two.

Despite how fast they were moving, there was a lot of back-and-forth motion, so I was catching up to them very quickly. I left the shoreline with a hop that took me fifteen feet into the air, Mikle whooped despite himself, and I was hurtling past the forest giants and the sparse undergrowth, alternately skipping over falling trees and hopping off them, zigzagging a path through the green and brown at breakneck speed. I was gradually getting enough height to take it right to the major lower branches, so widely spaced they were like a very long-stepping road above the ground, and actually faster to travel on than the ground.

If you were fast enough and had good enough balance. +35ish Balance modifier said this was like an open road to me. If it seemed a bit Narutoish, I could only pout that I didn’t get to soar for ten seconds between steps, and I definitely wasn’t letting my arms drag back.

Forge carried on in my wake like a champ, magically keeping tight to my tracks.

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Clearing up ahead. I gained two tiers of height as I shouted towards the skies, “Griffons, break in all directions with a power glide!”

I tore out of the branches of a big old maple fifty feet above the ground, heading for the ground as the aerial melee up above was arriving at the center of the clearing.

They all reeled off as one, breaking off in dives and swoops in every direction away from the dragon, leaving it looking in every which way in confusion, wondering which one to chase.

I slammed down to the ground, and blew my Full Null Interdiction, complete with Stillflight ™ out.

King Gravity woke up, looked around, and wagged his finger at these creatures that had been ignoring it. The Veil snapped to immediate attention, and locked down like steel.

The dragon a couple hundred yards above me began to fall. So did the griffons, but they were rapidly moving away from my Null, and were power-gliding as the effect washed over them. They began to drop with squawks of surprise, but reached the edge two hundred yards out and regained normal flying ability before they hit the tree tops.

Not so the dragon, much heavier relative to them, and when I hit the ground with a power-slide, I resumed my run to keep up with what remained of its forward momentum as it began to drop very quickly. Behind me, I let Forge’s link with me fade, and it rapidly lost all ability to move, sinking down to mere inches above the ground as the Interdiction hit it, yet still glided for some distance on momentum behind me.

Multi-ton flying reptiles don’t have a lot of time to think when the normal rules of lift and mass suddenly click into effect again.

It beat those great bat-like wings frantically, but couldn’t generate the lift to stay airborne. Its forked tails lashed about, it roared in a very discordant fashion, and it even vented some acidic clouds and black-shot flames out as it fell. The rider swore and pulled at the useless reins as the dragon rolled helplessly, and it finally tried to just stretch its wings out and glide down at uncontrollable speed as I chased it… oooh, was it going to hit the edge of the tree line there? Damn, those big ol’widespread wings and moving at that speed…

The crash was everything you might imagine a huge reptile with its wings spread that wide might have running into trees over seventy yards tall and girths big enough for half a village to dance around, or something. I heard it scream in mismatched voices, saw wings fold over and back in unnatural ways, and large branches breaking off like cannon shots, bending and twisting the main body as it ricocheted off the trees like billiard bumpers. The screaming roars of pain cut off with the surety of ramming head-on into an oak tree that didn’t have the good sense or lack of tonnage to move out of the way, and who opted to just take the hit and ignore said dragon’s crushing impact.

Roots did flex a bit, though. Took it like a champ.

Tremble was now fully in hand as Mikle sucked in what passed for a deep breath on my shoulder.

“Wow! You brought down a dragon! That wasn’t magic?”

“No. It was stopping the dragon from using its magic to fly. Dragons are way too heavy to fly, they use magic to compensate. I basically sent out my Null to remind gravity that it is king, and the dragon took a header. Gravity’s a bastard when you flaunt him.”

“Oh.” Mikle mulled that over as we reached the tree line, and I did a parkour jump off two trees to get up to the branch level, paralleling the broken and shattered two-foot-thick limbs that had been shattered as all the dragon smashed into them at a hundred mph.

It hadn’t actually managed to get all that far in, getting smashed aside by one tree, bouncing off another, and then ramming full on into that oak and leaving quite a wet dent behind it as it fell down to the forest floor.

A 20d6 fall straight down wouldn’t have been enough to kill it, but multiple impacts, now, that was a good way to add dozens more d6’s onto the stack. However, Damage Reduction affected each smaller impact, where slamming into the ground was one big hit.

I wasn’t exactly the kind to sit around and wait for it to recover, either.

Hell’s bells, the rider was still alive!

The dragon was moving slowly, a combination of half-stunned and probably having its ribs all broken. The rider was cutting himself out of his saddle slowly and a bit awkwardly, probably used to having others strap him in. He had even managed to keep the ogre-sized Sword, and was lifting it in one hand, poking it through the leather straps.

Well, I can’t pass up a target like that, now, can I?

He had good instincts, somehow managing to turn his head impossibly far around in that armor and see me as I swerved onto the dragon’s backside and came right for him.

That Sword tried to move in total defiance of physics, but there was still some pulling at it as he literally flicked his wrist and cut at me with a Sword that had to weigh at least twenty pounds. I shook my head to myself as I left the ground, and the stroke that was supposed to bisect me became a step for me as I went for the paler, mismatched dragon head.

It saw me coming, but that didn’t do a lot for its half-stunned brains as I came down and buried Tremble’s yard of steel into its eyeball, and let Banefire to Dragons and the Valorous Charge finish the job the oak had started.

Nor did I stop. I dumped momentum into its brain, fired off the Banesharding to liquify its gray...and purple...matter, and then promptly shot off forwards as the other head made an aborted attempt to snap at me. Its bite closed on empty air, and it snarl-hissed, a bit on the weak side, as I booked out of its field of vision, sort of lunging after me futilely.

“She’s coming around!” the rider howled in textbook written-in-blood-and-entrails Demonic.

The dragon pulled back, just in time to see me coming right around the tree, running horizontally on the trunk with Dragon Walk and misting heels, and then I smashed into the side of its head, Tremble leading the way.

It definitely didn’t have any Soak, and any Health Qi seemed to have been used up trying to survive being a pinball. The dark head was smashed over to the side, and its startled roar was cut off abruptly as the Banesharding went off inside its brain and liquified some crucial portions there.

I rode the writhing head all the way down to the ground, pulling the full length of Tremble up out of all that steel-hard bone and meat with ease as I stood up and looked at the spiked armored hulk riding it.

He cut down with great authority now, hewing through the straps, the saddle, and into the scales of his ride without a care, and he was free. He was even confident enough to swing his leg over and slide down in my direction, the spiked metal of his dire harness rattling and gouging the thick scales of his slain mount.

He definitely wasn’t expecting me to clear the ten yards between us before he could hit the ground, and his sword was out of position. Suddenly I was directly below him, frozen and in position in the Archer Stand Thrust, extended up at his seven feet of bulk, and perfectly set for his throat, just as Tremble flared with antipathy.

The sudden rising of Bane/Human, Anathema/Mortals, all that Soulfire, and Bane of Legends, just to be on the safe side, caused just that little moment of hesitation. His gauntleted hand came up to grab Tremble’s blade and try to wrench it, but I was locked in position, he almost sliced off his fingers as demonic metal squealed, and then that narrow gap between his helm and throat became a road into his throat and brain which Tremble slid perfectly into.

At least four hundred pounds of mass slammed down on me, but I didn’t move, my ki locked as the point of Tremble refused to budge. His weight slammed his skull down at me, and there was a screech as a foot of Tremble erupted out of the top of his head, right through the thickness of his helm, his own weight driving him down impossibly far on my Blade.

I looked into his bloodshot eyes, the hatred and fury there meeting eyes gone to jet and silver with my Mask. But there was no hiding the fact that I was half his size and less than a quarter his weight.

His eyes were absolutely incredulous when Mikle sat up and spat on his helm from safe on my shoulder, rat-tat-tat curses going off in Fey to shame any auctioneer.

Still, he was alive long enough to see the Banesharding flow up out from Tremble’s guard, a shining point of light the exact hue of his Warped blood, spiral up the Blade, and there was a wet splot and flaring of vivic energy as Tremble shifted to Final Rest Mode and made an end of this hulk.

I stepped aside as his arm fell down, and the dire Greatsword with irregular spikes and arcs on it bent more than physics allowed and tried to hack into me. Thwarted, it chopped down into the tough earth beneath it, going in an inordinate distance as its smoldering presence seemed to orient on me hungrily.

“Oh, LUNCH!” Tremble proclaimed eagerly, and rather abruptly the Greatsword’s sulfurous flames dimmed down and the aggressive presence faded away as I heaved the mistflaming corpse of the rider off to one side. Tremble flashed down to dagger length and then back to full length, instantly extracting herself from skull and helm.

Her hum and chime had very, very ominous undertones. Meeting a Zeben-Slot Intelligent Weapon was definitely not on this demonic Blade’s wish list!

“Kreshken Mrog, Spewing Death,” Tremble said, with just that little bit of terrifying hum under her voice as I lowered her point down to that Sword. “Shall we compare Names? Mine… is TREMBLE!”

She shifted to Sundering mode, and I hacked her into the base of the hand-wide Blade, carving into the tainted demonic steel savagely, knocking it over and down to the ground, where she impaled it and nailed it to the earth.

Demonic flames danced around the Runes carved into it with a terrible light, but I could see the metal shivering. Vivic flames and Banefire to Demons started feasting, and Tremble began to sing a heart-shivering Song she had made up for precisely these moments.

Ill-wrought metal, pitiful moldering steel,

Come, come to me, come and let me feel

Your power, your might, your Name.

Your useless rage and bloody thirst,

Your reaping of souls, innocent and cursed.

Death and Ruin, all just a game.

Tremble, and know fear!

You thought you’d slaughter and reap,

Now your Name will forever sleep,

Tremble, I am here!

You drank of blood and souls

Stink of bitter, twisted goals.

Tremble, and learn!

Feel your Name now falter

For’er lost on Heaven’s altar.

Doom has come to Death,

To you who ended breath,

A meal in passing, a fitting end,

A fool’s mistake that I now mend.

Tremble, and burn!

La la la la, it was pretty catchy, especially in that crystal vibe cheerful clarity that was so wholly inappropriate to the words. The oversized demonic Greatsword wailed, the fires of wrath and ruin began to crack through the whole length of the hapless Sword as she fed on the power instilled into it, vivus purified it, and she drew it within.

She was a purified Curse, like anything demonic was going to scare her.

I left her to lunch as I headed back to get Forge. She cycled through the melody, and the massive Blade quavered beneath her as it slowly died.

Mikle had wide eyes as he stared back at her. “What is she doing?” he asked in a hushed voice.

“It’s a Named Weapon, so she’s burning its Name and extracting its power directly, far more efficient than Infusing or Investing. No different, except she’s killing something that was forged for nothing but slaughter,” I informed him. “It’s the fastest way to grow a Named Weapon. That big murder-chopper is just Drei-grade, all looks and not much real power. Half its power came from being wielded by that rider.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” the little Fey admitted in a hushed voice.

“If I’m right, this whole world hasn’t. That’s a Warp Knight Dragon Rider, its aura has nothing to do with this world at all. You’re Fey… can’t you feel that magic around it, that it doesn’t belong here?”

He craned his neck around and concentrated, as I pulled in my Null, leaving him exposed to the magic in the world once again.

He gasped. “That’s… so wrong.” He was shaking. “It’s not just Evil, or dark, or sinful, or anything. It’s… more than twisted. It doesn’t belong at all…” he whispered.

“It’s from the pet universe of the Four Dark Gods. You familiar with them? Don’t say their Names,” I admonished him.

“I have… heard whispers of them,” he admitted.

“I’m a Null, so I can say their Names, and they won’t hear me. Klaw, jRaztl, Amourae, and Riggibuhl is what I know them as, though they have as many Names as they can spin to avoid the attention of the Divine.”

I arrived at Forge, touched it, and it rose up to waist level as it anchored on me, its geomagnetism strengthened enough to rise a little bit off the ground, but no further.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked, then followed my eyes to the center of the clearing, where the crown of griffons was swooping down carefully outside the Interdiction Zone to land, and then heading my way with unexpected regality and power.

“I’m going to cut up a dragon, purify what I can of it, burn what I can’t harvest, and turn it into power comps.” I turned away and thumbed a finger at the griffons. “And probably give them a bunch of it to eat while I’m at it.”

“They won’t eat me, will they?” the brownie asked nervously. He was just about the perfect snack size of one of the massive creatures.

“Not while you are with me. If we play things right, we might be able to gather up some allies for this fight.”