With the arrival of winter came one of the fiercest snowstorms Rai had ever experienced. Rather than hunker down inside the Tower, where magic kept the place comfortably warm, he and Isa were given a task by the Ruler: fly around the Plentira’s satellite towns and villages and see if there were any monster attacks that needed to be dealt with. The Comfort Zone spell was put to good use in combating the cold temperatures and their flying skills were put to the test as they rode through snow and wind strong enough that they had trouble seeing – and staying in the saddle. More than once, Isa complained about how they were even going to see the monsters if they existed.
Seeing the towns was easy, as they could have easily passed for cities of the era from which Rai and Isa had come in terms of size and population, and they also had a multitude of magical lights as well as wards to keep the snow from piling up on top of the buildings, intangible domes that pushed aside the snow. The villages were harder to spot, forcing them to rely on their map device and then fly in low to investigate. The snowstorm seemed interminable, still going strong after two weeks.
They were flying through the skies when a distant roar attracted their attention. Turning toward the sound, they were almost smashed into by a blue-white dragon soaring by. It was, as dragons went, relatively small: it was bigger than the two drakes, but not by a lot. It came out of the falling snow so quickly that they didn’t see it until it was passing them by, and it disappeared just as fast.
“Was that a dragon?” Isa shouted.
“I’m pretty sure!” Rai shouted back.
“That’s right! I am an almighty dragon! Fear me!”
The masculine voice of the dragon came from the direction it had disappeared into the blizzard, and with its final words it unleashed a mighty roar. Rai felt a shiver of fear, but fought through the oppressive effect. So did Isa, and even Braveheart, tucked away in the folds of Rai’s winter cloak. Their mounts, however, fell victim to the supernatural terror. Skycloud trembled but kept to his flight path, despite his obvious fear. Paxta, on the other hand, panicked and shot off at an angle, pumping her wings to speed herself along.
“Perfect! Flee like the weak, pathetic thing you are, you filthy drake!”
The snowfall was disturbed as the dragon sped after her at nearly twice the speed. Isa pulled Skycloud around and urged him to follow.
Rai held on to Paxta’s saddle horn for dear life as she hurtled through the white sky. Even over the howling of the wind, he heard the sound of the approaching dragon.
“I’ll hunt you down and tear you apart!”’
A snow-shadow fell over him as the dragon passed directly overhead, and then dropped down in front, causing Paxta to bank off to the side. The dragon matched her speed and direction, their wings almost touching, so that even as she tried to break away, he kept to her side.
“Hahaha! I do so love the way terrified drakes taste! Damnable pretenders to dragonhood!”
The dragon swerved, aiming a claw at Paxta’s right wing. She tilted, and his claws slashed along her side instead. She roared in pain and terror.
Rage flashed through Rai. He lifted one hand and pointed at the dragon.
“Maxed Out Star Enhanced Spell: Blazing Ray!”
Three beams of fire lanced out and struck the dragon, exploding and washing over him, giving him a turn at roaring in not just pain, but agony. The dragon immediately pulled away, disappearing into the falling snow.
“What kind of fire mage is that strong?! I’m weak to fire, but magic’s not supposed to affect me! Take this!”
A blast of overwhelmingly cold frost and frigid air shot out from the snow. Without the ability to move freely, Rai had no way to dodge, and Paxta didn’t see it coming. Ice crusted over steed and rider, and Paxta drastically slowed, barely able to keep herself airborne.
“Much better. You’re next, mage!”
I can’t see the dragon through the blizzard, Rai thought. I’ll have to use an area effect spell… I’ll use my newest fifth circle spell. “Flaming Wave!” he shouted.
An enormous conical blast of fire shot out from his hand in the direction of the dragon, briefly burning through the snow out to five dozen feet. A laugh was the dragon’s response.
“That’s more like it! See, I’m supposed to be able to completely resist spells! You must have just gotten lucky the first time. Now it’s my turn!”
The dragon swooped in close, and Rai got a terrifyingly good look at its open maw as teeth rapidly approached. He jerked away, but the dragon’s jaw closed in on his torso, teeth piercing through flesh like so many knives.
“Maxed Out Magic: Burning Palm!”
His free hand slapped against the top of the dragon’s head, sending a blast of flames over the draconic beast. The dragon released him and bit down again, teeth cracking bone. Rai screamed.
“MEEP!”
Braveheart jumped out from his cloak and landed on the side of the dragon’s face. Flames burst out from the point of contact, but they simply flowed harmlessly off the dragon’s scales.
Rai’s clothes changed and his sword appeared in his hand.
“Flaming Thunder Strike!”
He slammed the blade point first directly into the dragon’s throat, and a great burst of flames and lightning shot up the blade and into the dragon with a crack of thunder and a bright flash. The dragon went limp, and Rai was ripped out of the saddle by his sword as the dragon fell. He let go and grabbed Braveheart instead, silently and swiftly casting Flight on himself. The moment wings appeared, he quickly began to slow his descent, Braveheart in his hands. Once he had come to a stop, he deliberately started descending again, this time in a controlled manner.
Touching down onto snow, he kept himself just enough aloft that his feet brushed the top, as sinking down into the two-foot-deep snows would have made it difficult to move. He brushed the back of a bracelet – one that Isa had a match to.
“Isa… can you hear me?” he coughed.
“Rai! You still alive?”
“Barely. The dragon nearly bit me in half. Give me… a moment.”
Rai fished out three healing potions and quaffed them all in quick succession.
“Ugh… that makes me queasy. I don’t think potions are meant to be drunk in large quantities. At least my bones are all healed now – along with most of the rest of me. I’ve only got some sore spots left. Now to heal my cute little familiar, who is shivering in my hand thanks to the ice breath of that dragon.”
He placed his free hand a foot away from Braveheart and concentrated. One change that his magic had undergone since reaching fifth circle was that he could take his weakest attack – Elbolt, the non-spell magical ray of fire and lightning – and change it to heal rather than harm. He couldn’t use it on himself, but for Braveheart – and Paxta, when he found her – it would work just fine. At his current level of power, it had roughly the same healing potential of Isa’s Healing Blood first circle spell, which was a third of what one of the potions he just drank could do, and he could use the ability eleven times between nightly rests.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Warm, healing flames shot out from his hand and soaked into Braveheart. He repeated the act another three times, fully healing the carbuncle.
“All right. I don’t know where Paxta is; she’s still in the air.”
“What? Where are you, then?”
“The ground, or hovering right above it. I was… sort of dragged out of the saddle when I killed the dragon with my sword. I’m about to start searching for the dragon’s corpse, which I should be relatively close to. If only I could actually see through this snow…”
He found the dragon’s corpse at around the same time as Isa found him, drawn by the power of the bracelet, which allowed wearers to find one another as well as communicate so long as they were within a mile of each other. Paxta landed nearby not long after, and he used his healing beam five times on her to fully heal her. Once he had his sword, he stowed the body in a dimensional ring, once more borrowed from the Tower.
“Well, I don’t know if he would have been a threat to settlements, but he was definitely a threat to us,” Isa said. “Resistant to magic, but vulnerable to fire, huh? I thought all dragons breathed dragonfire, but you said he blasted you with ice and frost?”
“Yeah.” Rai stoked Paxta’s neck. “We should get back to searching.”
Several hours later, the storm had finally started to die, dropping the wind down to a more reasonable velocity and the snowfall from near whiteout to moderate, allowing them to actually see where they were going, as well as the lands below. Thus, when they approached a village on their map, they could actually see the village – and the pack of five-foot-tall, eight-foot-long wolves had begun killing their way across it, their steps light on top of the snow despite their weight. The dozen wolves were led by an alpha that was nearly twice as big in every dimension. This alpha walked through the air a couple dozen feet above the rest.
“Take me down!” Isa cried. Skycloud dove like a falcon toward the wolves, slashing the alpha with his claws at the moment he snapped his wings back open. Isa launched herself from the saddle, the snow below cushioning her fall as she landed in the midst of the wolves. Her halberd appeared in her hand, instantly coating in blood, and she gave the startled wolves a feral grin.
Half of them quickly surrounded her while the other half ringed around those. Frost expelled from their mouths, and when they opened their jaws, the area around Isa was covered in a cloud of white ice. When it cleared, Isa’s clothing was frozen solid and her scales covered in ice. She flexed, cracking the ice as she entered Berserk Mode.
“Dragons that’s cold! Allow me to return the favor! Dragonfire!”
A conical blast of rainbow-colored dragonfire shot out of her mouth, much stronger than the spell had been before she had reached the fifth realm, leaving the four wolves it caught in its area nothing more than charred, smoldering husks. The other four closest wolves rushed in, but even before they were able to bite, she whirled and cut down one of them in a spray of blood that stained the snow red. Acid continued to eat away at flesh within the deadly wound. Three sets of fangs scraped on her reinforced scales. She countered, slashing and stabbing, taking down two more wolves.
Then, with a sudden burst of speed from the renewable star energy in her mana heart, she swung again, converting a third circle spell’s worth of mana into a large splash of acidic liquid when her halberd made contact with the third wolf.
“That all you got?!”
The final four wolves rushed at in a semicircle. She felled one before it reached her, but the other three tore into her with teeth that carried a dire chill. They tugged in different directions, then threw her to the ground. Above her, the alpha, who had been kept occupied by Skycloud scratching and biting, repositioned itself and blasted the drake with icy breath.
“Stay alert!” Rai yelled, sending a Flaming Bolt down directly through the alpha. It howled in pain, then clashed with Skycloud again, biting deep into the drake’s neck and being bitten (and clawed) in return. Rai sent down three maximum-powered, star-enhanced Blazing Rays, one aimed at a barely-in-reach wolf on the ground and the other two at the Alpha. The Alpha, already heavily injured, expired immediately and dropped to the ground. The other wolf was still standing after taking the hit, but just barely.
When Isa got to her feet while still angling her body to avoid the wolves’ teeth penetrating her scales, the heavily injured wolf decided that it had had enough, but she didn’t let it escape, cutting it down when it turned to run. The other two took off in opposite directions.
“Dragonfire!”
“Flaming Bolt!”
They didn’t escape either.
After the drakes landed, Isa healed herself and her mount with repeated applications of the Blood Elixir spell, then took care of Rai’s sore and tender spots with a Healing Blood spell. Rai stored the alpha’s body in the ring with the dragon’s, and the two of them then proceeded to check on the village.
-x-
“So it’s normal for the Ruler’s Tower to send random soldiers out on patrol?” Rai asked.
“Not so common for them to be drake-riders, but yes,” the village headman said. “Thanks to that, you arrived in time to prevent more damage. Without you, we might have all died. Frost wolves are dangerous alone; in packs they’re deadly even to groups of fighters, and with a cloudwalker alpha leading them… well, it’s a good thing you arrived when you did. You must both be quite strong to take on all that alone.”
“Oh, we are,” Isa said. “Especially me.”
“Isa, this is not the time to brag.”
“What bragging? I’m just stating the facts.”
“So… forgive me for saying so, but you two don’t seem very much like Tower Soldiers.”
“We’re not. We’re guests of the Tower who have been put to work to repay the hospitality,” Isa said.
“Or something like that,” Rai said.
The headman’s wife set two bowls of soup down on the table in front of Rai and Isa. The woman smiled at Braveheart.
“Who is this adorable one? I don’t recognize the type of beast. Is it magical?”
“Yi-meep,” Braveheart confirmed with a nod.
“Oh? Can you understand me?”
“Yi-meep!”
“This is Braveheart, my familiar. And yes, she can understand most words. She’s rather young and has had around half a year exposure to people, so she’s still learning.”
“Braveheart… was a valiant name.”
“She’s a valiant companion. She attacked a dragon to protect me.”
The headman and his wife stared at Rai, not sure if he was being serious.
“I’m completely serious. A dragon attacked me while I was flying on my drake, and Braveheart tried to fight back. Didn’t have too much effect, but the heart was there. She’s a brave and dependable girl.”
“Mi-meep!” Braveheart said, puffing herself up proudly.
“Well, I’ll be,” the headman said. “That’s one gutsy little rabbit-fox.”
“She’s a carbuncle, but yes.” Rai smiled and stroked Braveheart from head to tail. “I’m lucky to have her in my life.”
“Will you be staying the night?” the headman’s wife asked.
“If you’ll have us. I really don’t want to try traveling through that weather right now, even if it is finally starting to lighten.”
“Oh, you’re definitely welcome to stay! You did save our village, after all!”
-x-
The storm ended after lasting for nearly three weeks, and while there were several more snowstorms over the next two months, none were quite so severe or long lasting. There were a few battles against monsters and beasts, but nothing so challenging as the dragon or the frost wolves. They turned over the alpha and frost dragon to the Tower and received qi medicines made from both. By the end of the winter, both Isa and Rai had grown comfortable riding their drakes, and the drakes had grown comfortable with both being ridden and hanging around in stables within the city when the duo wasn’t on patrol. As spring approached, so did the time for their departure from Plentira and its surrounding lands.
Several individuals had parting words for them.
“You have been an excellent assistant, and dare I say student, Rai Flamme,” Nara the artificer said. “If you were to stay here permanently, I certainly wouldn’t say no to the help. I’m a long way away from needing a successor, but you’re a fast learner and I could easily see you being my number two in a few years. If your attempts to get home fail, know that you’ll always have a place here, as this genius’s sidekick!”
“Thank you, Master Nara. I’ve learned much from your tutelage.”
“Having you as a helper was a blast,” Onyx the smith said. “Isa, you’ve got a gift when it comes to forging weapons. When you came here, you were already pretty good, but now you’re truly skilled. Working with purely nonmagical tools, you can make a three-star weapon out of ordinary steel. With a Tower’s forge and a Master Smith’s hammer, that’s a five-star steel weapon. And I know you’ll only get better. If you ever retire from being a warrior, you’d find good work as a smith.”
“I enjoy it, too! But I’m not going to give up on becoming a dragon.”
“Well, you two… it’s been a rather crazy year since you showed up,” Floran said. “Nara told me you’re leaving the original star shard with us but taking the others. It’s a pity we won’t have further access to them, but… well, the God of Medicine is not someone to displease. I genuinely hope that you find a way back to your own time.”
“Thank you, Master Floran. It has been an enlightening year in more ways than one. If it weren’t for you taking the lead on integrating us into the workings of the Tower Masters, we might still be in Exija’s dungeons.”
“And I would have taken good care of you, too! Kidding. I’m sad to see you go, especially you, Braveheart,” Exija said.
“Yi-meep!”
Ruler Aurelia handed a scroll case to Rai. “A parting gift. Inside, you’ll find a description of the resurrection ritual. If you do make it back to your own era, use it wisely.”
“You have my deepest gratitude, Ruler,” Rai replied, tearing up. “This is… what I’ve been looking for for a long, long time.”
“You’re not old enough for that… but I take your point, and accept your gratitude. Good luck, all three of you.”
And then, as the snows melted to reveal flowers, they departed.