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“Eep!” Raina squeaked from behind him, as Ryenzo’s glare fixed on her with a bright and eager glint.
Jair whipped his sharktooth out of his soulspace in one hand, the one for ‘No’. He honked into it again and again, interposing himself between the dragon and the girl it had come to consume.
“I have waited. I am hungry. And I am still angry. Your arguments are not sufficient.” The dragon leaned down lower and tossed aside their building’s roof. A moment later, her massive claw crushed their kitchen into the dirt, leaving them exposed from the side as well as above in the wreckage of their home.
Jair had no idea how to answer her. He swapped out for ‘Wait’ and hissed into it, keeping Maelstrom pointed directly at the dragon’s snout with the other hand.
Ryenzo’s face came closer, poisonous fume huffing out from her nostrils as she snorted. “I see no progress on bringing your other friend. Why should I sit in your miserable sands?”
“Wait. Wait, wait.” He pointed at the sun, waved an arm to indicate it falling, then rising. He repeated this several times to indicate the number of days until the lunar passage.
Ryenzo showed no sign of comprehension. “I tire of this, human. I have rested and I have pondered. I will no longer be delayed in this dreadful place you call home. Vengeance is but one of the things I have to do.” She lunged forward.
Jair jumped forward between the dragon and Raina. Ryenzo’s long flexible neck circled around him, tight and close enough that he couldn’t move. The dragon seemed unconcerned that the strength of its lunge drove Maelstrom straight into its body.
So quickly was the loop thrown around Jair that Raina barely had time to jump back to avoid Ryenzo's fangs, the attack all but simultaneous.
Not one to be deterred by such minor danger as a vengeful angry dragon, Raina slashed out with her own soulsword. The slender dark blade passed through Ryenzo’s lower jaw, leaving a shallow slice behind.
Ryenzo didn’t even flinch. Before Raina could do anything more, the dragon’s other claw came around at her from the side, ready to grab and crush.
“No!” Jair didn’t need to move; he and Maelstrom were already in intimate contact with Ryenzo’s body.
Darkflame flared up at a thought, pouring out of him and Maelstrom both to burn away the dragon’s body around him. Her head disappeared into ash, the reaching claw disintegrated, and Jair fell to the ground.
Raina stood with her back to her bedroom door, as if that would help anything, eyes wide and black sword raised.
But there was nothing left for her to fight. The back half of Ryenzo’s body was still in the process of burning away, but without a head or foreclaws there was little it could do, however tenacious her manabody may be.
Jair grabbed Raina’s hand. “Move. We have to get to the transit platform before she comes back.”
“What do you mean, comes back? How could anyone—eep!”
Jair didn’t wait to argue, just swept her up and jumped down from the half-destroyed house to the dusty ground beneath.
"Trust me. We have to go. Now."
“Okay, I’m coming, put me down.”
“Don’t stop. We need to get to the transit platform.”
Raina didn't argue. They ran across the untouched half of the campus, quickly falling in with several other students and even a couple teachers fleeing in the same direction.
The destruction behind them made what had happened to their house look tame. Ryenzo had crashed right through the outer wall, as though to make as dramatic an entrance as possible, then stepped on half the student village on her way to them. One of the two library towers had been toppled, shattered into torn and melted pieces where she’d torn them apart.
Having the Institute so isolated in the middle of nowhere, well over an hour away from the nearest city by any normal non-transit transportation method, may be helpful in avoiding distractions for the mageblade students, but it was not ideal when in need of a sudden evacuation.
Though, to be fair to the Institute’s creators, dragon attacks were never part of the local standard. They foresaw the kind of disasters that required brief student quarantine in the maze below the school, rather than the kind that flattened everything and tore up the basement for dessert.
Many of the students were taking refuge in the dome, as though expecting it to provide some sort of shelter to them. Jair remembered far too many times when Ryenzo cracked that particular building open like an egg. Only because the dome was not in a direct line between the wall and Raina's location had it been spared.
Jair and Raina were not the only ones heading directly for the transit platform, however. A significant number of people pressed around it already, anxiously awaiting their turns.
"But we don't have our transit tokens," Raina exclaimed. “I have my personal one, but I'm sure the headmaster will have locked it out."
“That won't be a problem." If someone could be said to be a pioneer in the art of doing absolutely ridiculous things with impunity, it would be Jair. Specifically, he had advanced his nonstandard utilization of the manabody far beyond any reasonable limits.
Only the fact that he had died so many times in the development of those skills assured him that his discoveries should remain, at least for the moment, unknown to the rest of the world.
He had no doubt that some individuals had discovered at least one or two of his special tricks at one point or another throughout history, but they generally weren’t the sort of thing you would spread around. Upstanding citizens had no need of such techniques, and for those less upstanding… why give up an edge on your competition unless you absolutely had to?
The last of Ryenzo's body burned away behind them, and a particularly loud crunch alerted them to the fact that her replacement copy had arrived.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
"Human! You dare run from me?”
"Coming through!” Jair's body flared with darkflame as he bulled his way straight into the gathered students around the transit platform, giving them no time to do anything but flinch back in a panic.
He slammed his hand directly into the center of the transit platform and kept pushing, disconnecting his manabody hand from his physical one to reach inside the mechanism.
"Put in your token."
Raina looked like she wanted to argue, but she didn't speak and silently placed her token into the reader. "Destination?"
"Anywhere."
Veor's transit system was extremely advanced compared to those in other countries. Due to the presence of mana oases, they had much more available magic to work with at any given time than most other places would. Therefore, transit was relatively cheap to run here, where in other countries the expense would be prohibitive.
However, by opening their transit systems to all, Veor also opened itself to the possibility of being taken advantage of. When you needed to personally provide the mana for the transit as well as paying an access fee to reach it in the first place, there was a lot less possibility of exploitation.
To combat the rampant attempts at freeloading their public transit system, Veor's token system was state-of-the-art and second to none. The ability to lock and unlock specific locations from any given platform made it one of the most flexible tools ever to have been created.
But underneath the ability to lock and unlock individual destinations, the basic capability of connecting to anything else in the network had to be there. So all Jair had to do was remove the check that verified whether the specific token inserted was authorized to go to that location.
Raina tapped in the transit code.
Ryenzo’s wings sent echoing thrums vibrating through the ground and threw up sand in clouds as she took off.
Jair scowled and strained, his current manabody not ideally suited for such intricate work.
His younger self had worked hard on solidifying the edges to the extent necessary to unlock the Mageblade class, but his understanding of how a manabody worked and how to improve it had significantly increased in the time since he was this person originally. He’d need months if not years of work to get it up to the standard of flexibility and strength he was accustomed to.
It took four tries, a lot of awkward fumbling, and three quick flashes of darkflame to ward back those panicking students who'd gladly infringe upon his little project.
He finally located the right block, but not fast enough.
Ryenzo’s tail whipped down and slapped Jair hard enough to send him flying clear across the academy.
He barely registered he was moving before his abrupt flight ended as suddenly as it had started. He both heard and felt the sharp crack as his skull smacked into the sandstone of the outer wall.
Dizzied, he fell to the ground, and looked up just in time to blurrily make out what was happening.
Ryenzo wrapped her claws around Raina and took off, flying out over the wall and into the desert, leaving only clouds of dust and Raina’s lingering shriek in her wake.
Instinctively, Jair reached inward for his soulspell. This could not be allowed to stand.
Darkflame flared up around him.
No. Temporal Reversion. We need to go back!
Darkflame flared up around him.
Jair slammed his fist into the wall beside him, leaving a small hole and a fist-shaped scorch mark that flashed out, about eight times bigger than it had any right to be.
Come on!
Nothing but darkflame.
He couldn’t think, desperation flooding his body like nothing in living memory. If he was stuck in this timeline, what could he do?
Ryenzo had Raina. Even if she hadn't eaten her yet, that could happen at any moment.
No time to waste.
"Bladewalk." Jair hurled Maelstrom directly up, ascending until he reached the height of the towertop, then he caught the blade and threw it after Ryenzo.
Unlike a spell, which could be theoretically empowered to insane degrees, Bladewalk was only an ability and had no such overcharge options. The dragon's flight was significantly faster. Jair followed as Ryenzo flew straight to the north and east, gradually falling further and further behind despite his best efforts to catch up.
The mental strain of maintaining Bladewalk for such a long period of time gave him a throbbing, pulsing headache. With his full attention consumed by the pursuit, he had no chance to stop and think through things, no option for strategizing his approach. He wanted desperately to release the ability and find somewhere to rest and reassess.
But he couldn't let her get away. If ever Ryenzo escaped out of sight, she could go anywhere. He knew her home lair inside and out, but he had to be sure.
So all through the day, Jair flew through heavy desert heat across the merciless sand beneath the scorching sun, following the slowly receding form of the dragon he’d sworn to stop.
Jair knew Ryenzo's mountain intimately, having visited it hundreds of times in the past. A patch of green against the surrounding brown, a paradise amid barren stone and dust, the hunting ground for Ryenzo and her kin.
He knew the visitor entrance, where younger dragons came to make their appeals to the matriarch. He knew the upper balcony where Ryenzo would lie, sunning herself. He knew each of the treasury chambers with their peculiar collection of whatever trinkets Ryenzo had deemed valuable and worth saving.
What he did not know, was why the dragon would fly beyond the upper balconies toward the peak and its caldera.
So when Jair saw Ryenzo dive down at the mountain, rather than approach it from the side like she normally did, he felt a cold dread in his heart.
Ryenzo's mountain was a volcano, artificially agitated by what could have been a mana oasis were it not focused into the molten core of her domain. The dragon’s presence stabilized the area, which had not seen an eruption in living memory, and allowed the region to flourish.
The mountain’s top had sealed over long ago with molten stone gone solid, the peak and its slopes rich with trees and abundant plantlife not found anywhere but here. The caldera lake had no outlet to the sea, all its stolen rains channeled into the mountain and its surrounding valleys, hemmed in by the other mountains in the range.
But though the top may be sealed, the mountain was still hollow all the way down to its molten core, and Jair knew better than to trust any amount of stone to pose an obstacle to an angry dragon.
Ryenzo could shatter the mountaintop and drop Raina into the magma, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He was too far away.
Jair yelled hoarsely and pushed more energy into his Bladewalk, but since it was neither a soulspell nor any other sort of spell, this did nothing. Bladewalk would do what Bladewalk did and not a speck more. He could reduce his effectiveness by performing it suboptimally, but once he reached the point of doing it perfectly, his speed remained exactly the same.
It was another two hours before Jair arrived on the scene. Bladewalk was an awkward sort of levitation compared to Lift, more rigid in its capabilities, but not a real handicap for someone as experienced as Jair. He’d prefer to have his full set of abilities and spells, but he was perfectly capable of getting by without them. He made the adjustment in the first hour of the day-long flight.
It took another twenty minutes to get from the lower entrance of the mountain to the very peak and the shattered caldera. The evening sun cast long shadows across the valleys below, which would have been a treacherous environment to navigate if he’d been on foot. Not all types of creatures dragons kept around to hunt were placid herbivores.
Jair landed lightly on the rim, which provided him a lovely view of the interior. The broken stone was still damp from the lake it’d once held, the occasional ambitious water droplet managing to coalesce long enough to fall toward the fire below only to instantly evaporate.
The magma core remained the same as ever. He’d seen it many times before, albeit never from this high.
Of all the things he had seen Ryenzo do, breaking open the top of her own mountain was not one of them. This was new.
He stared down into the heat haze. No sign of the dragon, or Raina.
Several of Ryenzo’s inner tunnels opened out onto this central chimney, but he had no way of knowing which one she’d taken.
"Is that you, tiny human? I hear you, scratching at my window. Do not think you can change my mind with your tricks and your fire. You do not have the might to challenge me." Ryenzo snaked her head out from a side passage, and stretched her long neck out to peer up at Jair with insufferable smugness.
He could clearly see the way one particular coil of neck looped back on itself, completely concealing whatever was held in it. He didn't need to see Raina to be sure it was her. What else would Ryenzo be holding so possessively?
"I said I will wait," Ryenzo all but purred. "But I wait on my terms. Not yours.”
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