Nuprima. The largest of the three moons, and the most magically dense. Its incredibly harsh climate makes even living in protective domes a challenging proposition. Most people who stay only do so for one lunar cycle, but its bountiful supply of crystalized mana make Nuprima extremely lucrative for those who can survive its dangers.

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Poison gas blasted out, and Jair jumped straight into it. A spark, and the explosion of vivid green fire threw him upwards. He slashed out blindly through the glare, and Maelstrom bit deep into something solid. He held on tight as the sword was almost wrenched out of his grip.

Then they were out of the cloud, into the open air. The dragon roared and crashed into the dome, claws digging into the glass and sending cracks down its side as it slashed its tail through the air.

Jair's armor clanged as he was slammed against the glass. He was better prepared for the disorientation of being flung about on the dragon’s long flexible tail, and used the momentum of the swing to his advantage. He released Maelstrom and jumped, pushing off from the dome and the dragon’s tail in the instant of contact, then recalled Maelstrom in a flash of silver and slammed it home further up the dragon’s tail, closer to its main body.

It tried again, and he repeated the maneuver, eliciting another pained roar. Instead of repeating a third time, the dragon launched itself into the air and twisted, belching more poison gas at its unwelcome passenger.

Jair snapped his spark gauntlet, igniting the cloud before the dragon was ready. The blast wasn’t enough to hurt it, it was immune to its own explosions, but it disoriented it enough that it didn’t immediately notice Raina running out from the bottom of the tower and down into the tunnel.

With an angry hiss, it landed on the top of the northern library tower. Jair winced at the shriek of magically-enhanced silver and steel crushed in its claws, digging deep into material even Maelstrom struggled to pierce.

He wasn’t the only one with deadly weapons at his disposal.

The dragon’s head whipped around, body twisting to bring Jair close enough to bite down on.

Jair declined, dropping off the tail and onto the bent and twisted rooftop.

The dragon snatched at him with a claw, covering the attack with another blast of gas.

Maelstrom recalled to his hand, Jair ducked and stabbed upward. The blade screeched against scales as the heavily-armored claw slammed down. The force of the collision drove him backwards. Neither Maelstrom nor the dragon’s body would yield, so his tiny human body was the only thing that could be moved by the clash.

“Positioning,” he muttered, staring up at the monster’s massive body, a dark silhouette through the fog of its poison breath. He now knew he could slice it into nice big dragon chunks and leave it to bleed out, but it didn’t matter how sharp his knife was if he couldn’t reach the pieces to chop.

Its tail smacked into him and threw him off the tower. He stabbed out with Maelstrom, but the angle was wrong. It skidded off the protected ridge across the top of the tail and failed to find purchase.

There were worse ways to die than falling from the tallest point in the Institute, but he didn’t have the chance to hit the ground. The dragon swooped around to catch him in its mouth.

At least he still had functional arms at this point. He slashed Maelstrom up through the roof of its mouth, and got spat out for his trouble.

Ah. There was the ground. Even further away this time.

Armor was surprisingly useless at protecting one from a fall.

He still instinctively tried to activate Lift, but without an imprint the spell didn’t exist. And he’d burned most of his manabody on protecting from the heat and explosions, anyway.

On the one hand, he’d distracted it from Raina for at least a few seconds. On the other, its fixation on her made the prospect of chopping it up easier than when he had its full attention.

Plenty of time to figure out which worked better.

He landed hard, followed immediately by the foreclaw of a diving dragon. The pressure from both sides crushed his armor flat, and destroyed most of his body in the process.

He automatically activated his soulspell the moment his life ended. No point hanging around after that.

Golden light consumed the hours, returning him to the previous day.

“I've been doing this for my entire life. How can you—” Raina broke off as Jair staggered.

Same as before, evening art homework. Standing in their living room with oversized easels and a variety of charcoals.

“You alright?”

Jair nodded. “Fine. It’s a lot of preparation to go through for a few minutes of action, you know?”

“Is it?”

Jair contemplated his ruined sketch, a wobbly line scrawled through the middle of it from when he’d reverted in. “We may focus on the key exciting moments, but there’s a whole lot of life in between.”

“I suppose that’s true, if you think of a drawing like a performance.”

“It’s hard to remember, sometimes, the value of those repetitive hours. It would be so much easier to disregard them, disconnect, only pay attention to what feels important.”

Raina considered. “If I’m not paying attention to practicing, it could impact performance?” She added a few more lines to her canvas. “But I pay attention to everything, so how does that explain your sudden jump in skill level?”

Jair grinned at her. “If you pay attention to everything, do you really pay attention to anything?”

Raina frowned back. “You can’t say you’ve suddenly increased in skill at multiple disciplines because you were giving each your complete focus."

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“Why not? It’s true. I have spent many months doing nothing but drawing, studying art, and practicing the secret techniques of ancient masters.” He added a few more scribbles to his accidental scrawl, turning it from a flaw into an artistically placed branch bisecting the primary subject. “Remind me why we’re drawing Terluna fauna?”

“Is that what you’re doing?”

“Apparently so.”

“We’re supposed to be practicing the Eraial techniques.”

“Ah, lots of spirals and variation in line heaviness throughout a continuous stroke. Yes, Terluna flora lends itself well to that technique.” Jair returned to his half-finished depiction of a quraam, one of the curly-furred flying serpents native to Terluna. This one was rearing up, horns out and hood twisted inward protectively.

The hours passed, familiar hours, repeated twice over and beginning now to lose their novelty. He worked through the night to finish the modifications to the walls, went shopping, and draped frostvine nets over the tops of the library towers.

Raina collected her new custom armor from Lord Veshin, and arrived to the walltop at the designated time looking like a mildly confused warrior princess.

“I have to say, this is the most expensive gift anyone’s ever given me.”

“If it helps you survive, it’s worth every nirei.” He pointed out to the distant speck, barely distinguishable from an insect but for its steady presence in the far horizon. “Coming soon. You clear on the plan?”

“Tower, tunnel, transit.”

They stood in silence another long moment, the tiny dot barely changing.

“You’re sure it’s a dragon?”

“It is.”

“And we can’t go anywhere to hide until it goes away?”

“Where would you hide?”

“Vaes City?”

“Can you imagine the destruction when a draconis matriarch pops out of the transit terminal in the capital?”

Raina winced. “Disconnect the relays? Shatter the mana crystal?”

“You know how dragons absorb magic?”

“Yes…”

“They don’t need relays and power crystals. Once a dragon gets into the transit system they can go anywhere within the network. Not just active platforms. It’s like…” Jair waved a hand at the wall behind them. “The mana grid feeds the platform, connecting them even when they’re not connected to each other. You can’t use the transit lines in the library to get to the main departure point, only to go up and down through the library itself. There’s no transit cable or line-of-sight connection on it. It’s a closed system. But it’s not, because it’s linked with the power.”

“You think a dragon can use any mana connection as though it were a transit cable? That’s insane.”

“Not really. Like how it’s forbidden to run cables or line-of-sight connections of any sort over rivers or channels. This is the same.”

“That’s… even more insane.”

“They eat every type of magic regardless of source, and you think hijacking transit lines is the crazy part?”

“Well… it makes the whole network one big vulnerability. Every city or settlement that links in is wide open.”

Jair laughed mirthlessly. “That’s the thing. You don’t know about this because they don’t need it. It’s a demeaning act of desperation to lower themselves to stealing the creations of lesser beings like us. Why bother when they can just demand what they want and have it sent out to them? If not for this one being on a very personal, very insane vendetta, that would probably be your fate as well. In a way, it’s a good thing it doesn’t have the presence of mind to make demands.”

Raina frowned. “Wait, if it’s not making demands, how did you find out it was coming?”

He pointed. “It’s right there.”

“You’re not going to distract me again, this is—”

“No, time to go. Tower. Now.”

“Once this is over—”

“I’ll answer everything. Go!”

Raina went.

Jair stood ready.

The dragon closed in.

Jair jumped into its cloud of gas, blasted upwards by the explosion of vivid green fire. He slashed out blindly, precisely, and Maelstrom bit deep into the dragon’s whipping tail. He clung tight to Maelstrom’s hilt as his momentum abruptly reversed.

The dragon roared and crashed into the dome, claws digging in and sending cracks across the dome as its tail slammed Jair against the glass.

Jair held on as the dragon smacked him repeatedly into the dome, trying to dislodge him. He did nothing else, waiting for Raina to emerge. The moment she did, Ryenzo’s attempts to get rid of Jair were forgotten.

The dragon roared its mantra and launched itself at Raina.

KILL THE CHILD, BREAK THE MOTHER!

Raina dove into the tunnel and the dragon crashed into the wall above her with a crunch of stone and cloud of dust. The spells on the wall flickered and one section died entirely.

Jair swung himself up, scrambling one-handed up atop the dragon’s tail. The dragon dug and clawed at the ground, breathing poison fog down the too-small tunnel as it tried to get at Raina, Jair on its back forgotten.

Instead of heading for the standard weak point, he slashed through the wing membrane where it connected to the dragon’s side. Slick and almost metallic in texture, normal attacks would slide right off it. Maelstrom sliced through it as though it were paper.

The dragon shrieked and spun, its overlong neck twisting around to grab Jair in its crushing coils, but he was ready. He jumped off and dove beneath the attack, using the dragon’s own flailing wing to shield him from its darting head.

Unfortunately, that put him out of reach of the rest of its body as well. It couldn’t get at him, but he couldn’t do anything to it either.

He’d get one good strike, but even with Maelstrom one wasn’t nearly enough to stop it.

It was too big. Too fast. If it lay down and let him do as he pleased, it would still take minutes to chop it up sufficiently, let alone one strike here or there in the middle of trying to not-die himself.

He didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to accept the necessity, but this wasn’t a fight he could win on his own.

He ran toward the rear legs, the one part stable on the ground, and the tail whipped around to smack him. He ducked and braced, and the hit only knocked him off balance instead of hurling him into the wall, and retaliated with a quick slash that gouged a small chunk out of the lashing tail before it was past and out of reach.

The dragon huffed a cloud of poison at him, which he pre-emptively ignited, but even that moment of the dragon’s head being rocked back by the force of its own explosive attack only bought him a split second.

Not enough to close the distance, no part of its body within range of his sword.

The dragon flapped at the air, trying to take off, but with one wing flopping uselessly its attempt was doomed to fail. It half rose into the air, then clawed at the wall as it began to fall over sideways. More sections of protections went dark, and Jair immediately saw the effect. The dragon’s every movement became instantly at least half again as fast, the weight of the air no longer fighting it.

Jair’s body couldn’t move fast enough to keep ahead of it. Its tail slashed into him again, blindingly fast, and before he’d even registered the collision he’d been grabbed in an oversized claw that crushed him as easily as it had crumpled the towers.

It didn’t even bother to finish him off, just crushed his armor into a ball and hurled him away.

Even at his best, Jair doubted he’d be able to survive the violent pulping of his entire torso. If not for the twisted metal keeping his body in a single piece, he’d have been scattered across the sand.

His lack of lungs or a functional heart didn’t leave him alive for long, but he had enough time to see the dragon resuming its furious digging for Raina before his vision stuttered into deathsight and he reflexively dove into his soulspell.

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