Milly jumped off the roof, desperately suppressing a scream so she did not attract the dragon’s attention. With arms pressed against her side, she channeled a torrent of air from each palm that propelled her forward, praying it would be enough.
Don’t look down. Don’t look down. Come on. Just another foot. Oh shit! Too far! Too far!
Milly altered the angle of her blast to slow her momentum as she nearly flew past the dragon entirely. She landed at the edge of the monstrous beast’s head and an instant later dropped to her stomach. She glanced back at the rooftop, now a hundred feet away.
I guess I’m stronger than I thought.
Pressed flat against its ice-cold shadow armor, her fingers gripped tightly beneath the razor edge of a single, Milly-sized scale to prevent her from sliding off. Every twitch of the beast’s head threatened to dislodge her, as if she rode the world’s most dangerous bull. Her only hope was that it remained oblivious to its unexpected rider.
Steeling herself, she activated her Spectacles of Hidden Design.
I hope this works.
The lenses flashed, and she returned her gaze to the scale she grasped with aching fingers, willing herself to be no more noticeable than an insect. An eternity passed in a second. Milly’s anxiety hovered at the breaking point.
A message appeared at the bottom of her vision, and her heart collapsed.
ERROR. UNABLE TO PENETRATE DRAGON OF ENDLESS SHADOW’S SCALES.
Shit. Shit, shit, fuck. This is why Luna said I had to get close to it. But every inch of its body is covered in those light-absorbing scales. How am I ever going to…
There was a flash of red in her periphery, and Milly’s turned her head towards the dragon’s fiery red eyes. The beast was watching the players desperately scramble off the beach towards the towers, the sea, and the northern trees. The dragon’s chest rumbled with sadistic amusement.
Milly’s spectacles suddenly flashed as she stared into the dragon’s unaware left eye.
CORRUPTION LOCATED.
SCANNING ANOMOLY.
PROGRESS: 1%
Oh, you have to be kidding me. I have to stare it in the fucking eye? Luna, what the hell?
As the final player on the beach fled off the beach and from the dragon’s sight, Milly felt the dragon’s legs flex.
You have got to be fucking kidding me!
The dragon launched itself into the air until it hovered three hundred feet above the Castle of Glass, the lazy strokes of its wings sending hurricane gusts across the sand and prairie. It scanned all four terrains within its shadow barrier, amused by the game of cat and mouse.
The movement jarred Milly to her core. She tightened her grip on the scale, drawing blood from her fingertips. The momentum pressed her against the creature, and her ribs would have shattered from the pressure of its sudden acceleration had her toughness not been so high.
She fought through the pain and steeled her willpower, never taking her gaze off that fiery left eye.
* * *
Calista hid beneath the northern pines, the stabilized Passiflora resting protectively in a bed of moss beside her. Beside them, the bars of the shadow barrier buzzed as if electrified.
The Huntress watched the shadow dragon launch itself into the air. The beat of its wings caused the pines to shutter above her. The snap of fractured wood echoed in the copse of trees, and Calista instinctively covered the fairy child with her body as a forty-foot pine came crashing down behind them.
“Psst… Calista, over here.”
The whisper came from beyond the barrier. Calista looked up and saw Whitewing and Lightpaw on the other side, barely contained terror splashed across their faces.
“What are you two doing here?” Calista whispered harshly, afraid that even the smallest sound might draw the dragon’s ire. “Get your people as far away as possible. Once it’s finished with us, it’ll come after you.”
“You didn’t abandon the faires in our time of need, and we won’t abandon you in yours,” Lightpaw said in a way that tolerated no argument. “Our healers and warriors are searching for a way though this barrier. We’ll get your people out.”
“You’ll just become trapped in here with us,” Calista protested. “Please, Lightpaw, protect your people.”
Calista’s hand settled protectively on Passi’s shoulder. The bars that formed this prison were just wide enough to fit the child through. Gingerly cradling Passi in her arms, she wrapped the fairy child’s wings around her body until it looked like Passi had been encased in a transparent cocoon.
“Whitewing, Passi is badly hurt. She needs healing, or she’s not going to make it,” Calista said as she slowly slid the child along the ground and through the bars with less than an inch of leeway on either side. “Please, you need to save her. I promised Milly that I’d protect her, but I can’t… I can’t let Milly face this danger on her own. I need to find her.”
“Calista, you can’t help your mate,” Elder Lightpaw interrupted, pointing up at the dragon three hundred feet above the towers. “The witch has taken the fight to the beast.”
Calista followed Lightpaw’s gaze and saw Milly’s signature witch’s hat poking out above the dragon’s skull.
The hand of fear grabbed Calista’s heart and began to squeeze.
* * *
“Now what, Alchemist?” Jacob Stone bellowed as the Dragon of Endless Shadows soared above the towers. “I can see us again. We’re sitting ducks out here. We should have fled into the towers.”
fought with the walls of lobby glass at their backs as the puppeted corpses of their former coworkers surrounded them. They were on the verge of being overwhelmed.
Rain bled from a dozen wounds. The poison in her gem had long since been emptied. She hurdled an explosive potion over Stone’s shield wall, shattering five of the corpses into tiny fragments, but the hole in the shadow forces was filled in seconds with more of the dead.
To her right, Elmer and Alison were struggling to hold their line, the exhaustion on their faces evident.
To her left, Cynthia Carthage was down to a single summoned creature. Blood streamed from between her teeth after the brutal destruction of her other two wolves. She was supported by Lucy, who had held two of the creatures with vines that sprouted from beneath her sleeves while Cynthia’s wolf tore them apart.
“Jacob, to your left!” shouted Edna Carthage, huddled against the lobby wall, as a deceased Farmer began to channel water magic to cover them in a thick mist.
“God damn it, Jeffrey, not you too,” Alison cried as she watched the mist forming around her former employee. “We’ve lost so many. How many of us are still alive?”
Stone angled his shield towards Jeffrey. His eyes glowed with an intense, icy blue, which his shield mirrored as it activated. The mist was absorbed into the shield as if it were a vacuum. A second later, Mohammad ended the shadow creature’s life with an arrow through its host’s eye.
“We need to move,” Rain said, eyeing the beach-side lobby entrance a mere thirty feet away. It was the same entrance Stone and his forces had locked and shielded during the Battle of Tower Beach, though she had little time to consider the irony of Stone’s situation.
Rain wanted to avoid the towers. The walls were flimsy protection against the power of the dragon, but with the horde that surrounded them they had quickly run out of other options.
If they could reach the lobby, they could dart out the northern exit and rendezvous with Calista in the woods. “Stone, use your shields to block our broad side. Everyone else, carve us a path to the lobby. I’ll protect the rear.”
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Rain snatched a bandolier containing four potions from her inventory. She drank the first, a healing potion, and smashed the empty vial into the face of one of her deceased customers. The creature clawed at its now useless eyes and fell back.
The second and third position were explosives, which she hurled into the thickest crowd of shadow creatures. Body parts rained down upon players and monsters alike, though they didn’t have the luxury of time to be sickened by the sight.
The final potion was a viscous black liquid – Rain’s Hail Mary concoction. This one was new. This one was dangerous.
She uncorked the bottle and splashed its contents on the six closest creatures. The thick, sticky substance clung to the creatures like tar. Rain took three quick steps backwards and snapped her fingers.
The tar ignited in intense flames, burning flesh and scorching bone. As the first creature died, the tar melted and spread to the creature behind it, and to the ones beyond that, in an uncontrollable inferno. A forest fire in a bottle.
“Don’t let the flames touch you,” she shouted to the defenders as they made slow progress towards the lobby door. “I didn’t have time to design an extinguishment formula yet.”
“Fuck, you are a scary lady, Rain,” Elmer said, impressed. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
Elmer gave a sidelong glance at Stone. “Other should remember that too.”
Stone scoffed, but he gave Rain a sidelong, reluctantly respectful glance as he held back the flood of creatures at their side.
They were only ten feet from the lobby when a tremendous roar reverberated across the battlefield. The dragon had seen the flames.
Rain glanced up. The dragon’s eyes were locked on her, its eyes filled with outrage as the light of her flames fought back its darkness.
“Ah, shit…” Rain swore.
* * *
PROGRESS: 57%
The dragon’s muscles tensed with an intense, egotistical anger as the flames below spread through its shadow creatures. Milly felt the shift in its emotions and she risked a quick glance over its head to see its source.
The dragon stared directly at Rain, its nostrils flaring with hate.
“Rain! Run!” Milly shouted telepathically, but she knew Rain did not have time. The dragon was already starting to inhale, ready to engulf her best friend in its deadly shadow fire.
I will not let that happen. I will not sit and watch my best friend die.
“Fuck it!” Milly shouted, as she rose to her feet and stood on the head of the dragon. “Leave my family alone, you shadowy piece of shit!”
The dragon’s eyes flickered from Rain to the witch that rode atop its head. Its anger at the woman below was quickly forgotten, and its attention turned entirely towards the player that dared to presume she could mount the darkness.
That shift in its attention – that slight hesitation – gave Milly all the time she needed.
Staring the creature squarely in its massive eye, Milly combined air and fire in the palm of her hand and released a full power lightning bolt into its pupil.
The dragon had never known rage such as it did in that moment. The players below – the amusement of their deaths – was forgotten.
The light of the fire was forgotten.
Its shadow creatures were abandoned, and with its lapsed control, the puppeted corpses of Milly’s coworkers collapsed to the beach, lifeless once more.
The entirety of its being was utterly focused on the woman who dared to challenge it.
And all Milly could do was stare back, defiantly, and try to keep her knees from shaking.
* * *
Thunder boomed across the battleground as Milly’s lightning struck home. The gazes of the surviving players, and those of the fairies that waited beyond the barrier, were drawn towards the sound. Every last one stared up in utter awe at the indominable woman who stood atop the crown of the dragon.
Milly Persephone Brown – she who would defy the manifestation of darkness itself.
In that shared instant, every player suddenly understood why the CEOs had put the woman on trial, and why they had failed to bring her under their control.
For who could hope to control one whom even utter darkness could not intimidate.
The seeds of love and fear of Milly were planted in their hearts in that moment, and all notion that the CEOs had the right to hold her accountable faded into the darkness that surrounded them.
For whom amongst them would dare pronounce judgement on the Witch of the Castle of Glass – the woman without fear. The Savior of the Tower.
* * *
Milly had never felt such intense fear as she did at that moment, as the last echoes of her thunder faded into the distance. She tried to shovel that fear into Salem’s Fury’s flames, but even that fire had its limits.
She glanced at the bottom of her Spectacles.
PROGRESS: 71%
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Milly, why’d you have to go be a hero? Shit, why am I standing up?
“Milly?” came the simultaneous telepathic cries of Calista and Rain.
“Oh, um… hey, honey. Hi Rain. I’m a little bit busy right now,” Milly said, trying, and utterly failing, to sound nonchalant. “Can you give me a moment?”
Milly channeled her power once more and hurled a second lightning bolt into the dragon’s other eye. The resulting roar of absolute hatred shook the bones of every living creature below.
She held the dragon’s gaze as the progress bar ticked another percentage point forward.
“Rain, it was targeting you. I had to get its attention and buy you time. Hurry, get Elmer and the others to… Woah!”
The dragon flailed its head side-to-side as it attempted to fling the pesky human from its crown. Rain fell to her stomach, gripping the same scale with her bloody hands for support.
As it flailed, its tail slammed into the sixteenth floor of Freelancer Tower. It was like a wrecking ball crashing against an old brick building held together with papier-mâché. Shattered slabs of concrete and rebar plummeted towards the ground, smashing through the glass of the lobby and crushing the Farmer’s garden. The entire tower shook from the force of the blow, and Milly worried it would collapse at any moment.
Milly dug her fingers deeper beneath the ridges of its scales and held on for dear life. Her fingers bled profusely, and her muscles ached, but still ignored it and held on. With a flick of her finger, she created a stream of air that pressed down on her back to hold her against its flailing form.
All the while, her gaze never left the dragon’s eyes.
And the dragon’s eye never left hers.
PROGRESS: 79%
“Milly!” screamed Calista in her mind. “Just hold on! I’ll get to the roof. I can help you fight it!”
“No!” Milly shouted back, desperate to keep Calista safe. “Cally, I can’t do this if you are in danger. I need you to stay hidden. Please, love, just say where you are.”
Milly stole the briefest of glances towards the trees where Calista was hidden with her adopted daughter. Her heart fell. Calista had ignored her, and darted out of the forest, headed for Freelancer Tower.
“Cally! Cally, no, please don’t. Rain, stop her! Please, I can’t lose her. Please.”
The final please came out as a desperate mental whimper – the cry of a woman at the verge of losing everything she cared for in the world.
The dragon stopped flailing, the persistent woman still stuck to its scales like an oversized tick.
“You dare to defy me, witch?” came a vastly deep rumble from the depths of the dragon’s darkness. “I shall destroy you down to the smallest fiber of your being. I shall carve your soul from your heart, and shred it over a millennium, piece by piece. You shall feel pain like no other, but first I force you to watch everyone you love die.”
“You can talk?” Milly said, startled. Keeping her eye fixed on the dragon, she tried to plead with the beast. “Listen, you’re not supposed to be here. Don’t you know that? It was not your time. It was just an error. An error!”
PROGRESS: 82%
“An error?” The Dragon of Endless Shadow mocked the very notion. “I am the manifestation of darkness itself! I am no error. The only error this day was you daring to defy me. Allow me to show you what such an error delivers to you.”
The dragon landed on the beach, obliterating Shufflebottom’s stage beneath its clawed feet. The ground trembled with each step as it turned towards Freelancer Tower, and just as it reached the tower Milly saw Calista dash into the lobby through the forest entrance.
“Now watch as I tear apart your home, and those you love with it!”
“No, please, you can’t. Cally! Cally, get out of there!” Milly screamed aloud and telepathically.
The dragon pressed its clawed foot against the southern wall of Freelancer Tower and, in one fluid motion, it obliterated the fourth floor.
The appendage tore through steel and concrete like a knife through hot butter. The elevator cable snapped, glass shattered, and fragments of rubble were hurled into the neighboring towers and into the lobby below.
Milly watched in horror as Freelancer Tower crumbled. Rubble rained down upon the lobby as the tower twisted and groaned, splitting into fragments as gravity tore it from the air. The upper floors clipped Tower Two, blowing out a section of its seventh and eighth floors. A great cloud of concrete dust and sand cascaded over the beach and out into the ocean, accompanied by a symphony of tearing metal.
“Cally! Cally!” Milly shouted desperately in her mind. “Cally, please!”
Calista did not respond.
“Rain?” Milly called hopefully, but no response came. Their mental connection had been severed.
Tears streamed down the face of the Witch of the Castle of Glass as sorrow overwhelmed her.
She fed her sorrow to the flames of Salem’s Fury. It was an emotional fuel the likes of which the flames had never experienced, and they roared to life under the pure, agonizing grief of the woman it served.
Milly felt a flare of intense power. She turned her grief into rage as she returned the dragon’s hate and loathing ten-fold.
PROGRESS: 91%
Milly stood on the head of the dragon, channeling her winds to hold her firmly in place.
“Is this not enough to deter you, little witch?” the Dragon of Endless Shadows snarled. “Perhaps I shall…”
Milly did not let it finish. She extended both her arms towards the eye that shone with such hatred, and gathered as much magical energy as she could handle. She pushed beyond her own limits, until she felt magic flood every fiber of her being.
With a snap of her wrists, she sent the entirety of her enhanced magical power – every element and power she had access to – straight into the dragon’s fiery red eye.
Lightning bolts and blankets of fire. Shards of ice and blades of air. She lifted a block of concrete rubble from her obliterated home with telekinesis and shaped it into tiny bullets with earth magic, then shot each one straight into the dragon’s pupil like rounds from a machine gun.
For the first time since its creation, the Dragon of Endless Shadows experienced real pain at the hands of another being. It was a small – almost insignificant – pain, yet it was still pain.
And, for a fraction of a moment, it felt something else for the first time, emerging from beyond the pain.
Fear.
Fear that it was not the invincible force of nature it believed itself to be.
Fear that, after bringing so much darkness and death upon the world, it too might suffer the same fate.
Fear – an irrational yet consuming fear – of the woman that rode atop its crown.
These humans – and the enjoyment it derived from their slaughter – was no longer worth the risk.
The dragon launched itself into the air, hurling towards the apex of its shadow barrier in its desperation to escape. It did not slow when it reached the bars – it smashed straight through them, and the barrier that had encased the Castle of Glass shattered.
Milly hung on, her gaze still fixed on the dragon’s eye and the murderous rage that shone like a beacon in the darkness.
And in its depth, she saw her own rage reflected in its depths.
PROGRESS: 100%
SCAN OF ANOMOLY COMPLETE
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