In the back of his mind, behind the rage-induced madness, a little part of Sen knew that provoking the dragon was foolish. Yet, that tiny voice of warning was lost in the need to hurt. Whatever constraints, conscious or unconscious, that had held Sen in check in the past fell away. He cycled for what had become his go-to weapon. The dragon was far, far faster than Sen physically, but it wasn’t quite faster than thought. So, in the fractions of a second that it took for the dragon to flash from it had been standing to where Sen stood, Sen had erected a a solid wall of lightning. The ancient reptile wasn’t slowed much by it, but it was enough for Sen to sidestep out of the way. Of course, not being slowed and not being affected were two different things. The dragon roared in pain and the sound was so much more than anything with a human form ought to be able to produce.

Sen felt his eardrums rupture with a stab of white-hot agony that drove him to his knees. Even as he felt the ground beneath him, intuition drove him to slump to one side. The dragon’s foot slammed into the ground where Sen had been a moment before. A small crater came into existence in that spot. Ignoring the pain as well as he could, Sen cycled for earth. He closed his hand into a fist and the earth around the dragon’s foot clamped down and hardened into stone. Sen didn’t even know how he’d done that. He didn’t even care. He knew that it would only hold for a second or two. He activated his qinggong technique and blindly hurled himself away from the enraged dragon. Fighting up close with something that powerful was an instant death sentence. He had to keep his distance. With his eardrums ruptured though, his sense of balance was off. He lost his balance and toppled off the qi platform, only to feel a wind blade obliterate the qi platform and then detonate. He was driven hard into the ground, but he was still alive. It had been, what, five seconds of active combat with the dragon. He might have just set some kind of record by living for that long.

Realizing how irrational that thought was drove home to Sen just how broken and unbalanced he’d become. The pain in his ears was another misery and distraction that flared anytime he fell into something, or moved, or breathed. Of course, that pain just sent his rage escalating to entirely new levels. It’s a wind dragon, he thought. It’ll be weak against metal. Cycling for shadow and metal, he crushed them together with a kind of ruthlessly absolute will that would tolerate no dissent. The usual resistances either meant less to him now or were absent altogether, because he sent two dozen metal-infused shadow spears rocketing toward the wind dragon. To Sen’s surprise, the dragon chose to dodge. Sen used that moment to pick himself up on another platform of qi and fly in a different direction. Not wanting the dragon to feel like Sen wasn’t paying it enough attention, he sent half a dozen massive fireballs shooting toward the general area where he thought the dragon would end up.

Fearing that the dragon would cut him out of the air with another wind blade, Sen let himself drop back to the ground behind a rock. He spent an infinitely precious second or two to retrieve and down the most potent healing elixir he had in his storage ring. Hearing was too important in a fight for him to continue on in a deaf state. It had been a hard choice between one of his own elixirs and one of the powerful healing pills that Auntie Caihong had given him, but the pills always hit him hard. He couldn’t afford a wave of crippling fatigue as the pill restored him. Beyond that, there was precious little environmental qi in this little patch of deadness that the dragon apparently called home. Why it, or anything, would choose to live there Sen couldn’t imagine. Or, maybe, it was the dragon itself. Perhaps its mere presence was enough to do this to the place. Yet, that lack of readily available environmental qi meant his healing would rely on whatever qi he had stored away.

Fortunately, it only took a few drops of that pool of liquid qi to restore his hearing. Realizing he’d been stationary for three or four seconds. Sen rolled away to one side, got his feet under him, and simply launched himself through the air. The benefits of his body cultivation really paid off then, as his leap carried him nearly twenty feet. Or, it would have if a shock wave of force from the place where he’d been hiding hadn’t caught him and flung head over heels for nearly fifty feet. He managed to control his landing better with his balance more or less restored. Yet, the rage inside of him demanded that he act, that he attack. He drew on the qi in his core and sent a water blade nearly ten feet across at the dragon. The dragon sent a wind blade to meet it. The techniques met in the air and held there for a long moment. Sen couldn’t believe it. He was matching the dragon’s strength. That elation cracked at the same time his technique broke. It felt like something inside him tore in half when that technique broke. He coughed up blood, and almost went down again, but anger and fear kept him standing. If he was the dragon, this is the moment he would close the range.

Sen cycled metal qi, choking back the bile that rose in his throat, pushing past the stabbing agony in his head, and he drove his jian forward. He filled the thrust with all the metal qi he could muster. He was as stunned as the dragon looked when the blade met resistance. Sen realized that he’d had his eyes squeezed shut against the agony that still tore at his guts and clawed at the inside of his skull. He forced his eyes open, blinking away the red haze from the blood tears that were leaking from his eyes. The dragon was staring down at the jian that Sen had managed to bury in his chest. Sen felt ice stab into his soul when the dragon raised its gaze to meet Sen’s.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Ouch,” said the dragon.

The dragon nonchalantly reached up, wrapped a hand around the blade, and pulled it free from his own chest. With an equally casual movement, he tore the blade from Sen’s grip and broke it in half. Sen watched, half in disbelief, half in horror, as the broken pieces fell from the dragon’s hand to the ground. Sen looked back up and saw, of all things, disappointment in the dragon’s eyes.

“You really don’t live up to your reputation,” said the dragon. “I expected you to call down the wrath of the heavens on me.”

Then, the dragon hit him. Sen felt half of his ribs buckle under that blow before momentum caught up and sent him bouncing over dirt and rocks. Blood sprayed from his mouth and every time he tried to breathe, it became a battle to stay conscious. If not for the elixir that was already in his system, he’s not sure he could have stayed conscious. It was already working to repair the damage and restore his ability to breathe. Yet, the elixir was designed to heal, not to blunt pain, and there was so much pain. While his enhanced body could take a lot more punishment, when things did break, the agony of it was amplified. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t even remember what he’d last been trying to cycle, let alone actually cycling for anything. Another blow, this one to his stomach, sent him on another flopping, rolling, tumble over the rocky ground. At least, that’s what happened when he finally touched the ground again. Sen was certain that at least some of his organs had ruptured with that blow.

Realizing that he likely only had seconds to live, Sen decided that he was going to make the dragon pay in blood for this kill. He ignored the pain because it didn’t matter anymore. He ignored the way his body wouldn’t respond to half his commands because that didn’t matter anymore either. Those were only problems if he had plans for tomorrow. Tomorrow wasn’t coming, not for him, so he could put that all away. He felt a momentary pang of concern for Falling Leaf, but the dragon had very explicitly told her to stay out of it. He suspected that meant that the vicious old reptile planned to let her go. He thought about Uncle Kho and Auntie Caihong. He wondered if they would be disappointed by this death or consider it a fair way for a cultivator to go out. He thought they might be okay with it. After all, how many cultivators ever even saw a dragon, let alone fought one? He flashed for a moment on Grandmother Lu, but he had asked his teachers to keep an eye on her and, if necessary, to help her. It was a minor request, all things considered, and he thought they’d honor it.

Then, he thought of Master Feng. There were questions that Sen had always meant to ask the old man, about why he’d picked Sen, about why he’d never tried to ascend, but it had always seemed like there was more than enough time. Most of all, though, he asked himself what Master Feng would do in a situation like this. Sen smiled then. He felt bloody spittle drip from his bottom lip. He knew exactly what Master Feng would do. He’d make a statement. He would burn this moment into the dragon’s memory forever. So, that’s what Sen would do. He started cycling for everything. Splitting his attention that many ways hurt, but what was pain in the face of death but a minor, very temporary, inconvenience? It wasn’t like he needed to worry about healing from it. He pushed his qi channels to their limits, feeding each cycling pattern as much qi from his core as they could handle.

Then, he started layering it all together. Weaving it all together like a rope. Forcing the strands to merge, to fuse, to become something else, something more, something terrible. He wrapped that hideous, monstrous energy around his fist. Then, he fed it his pain, his anguish, and his regrets. So many regrets. How could anyone my age have so many? He fed it his killing intent, every last scrap of it, because why hold back in the last moments? Then, he fed it his rage. He pulled on that anger that had haunted him and hounded him. He drew on that inferno of fury until it was nothing but embers inside him, and then he drew on those. Hold nothing back, he thought. Nothing at all. While all of that felt like it had taken forever to his battered mind, he dimly realized that he’d been in the middle of that odd, almost accelerated state of mind he fell into sometimes when fighting. He lifted his eyes and saw the dragon bearing down on him, moving almost impossibly fast even to Sen’s enhanced eyes and thoughts. Then he let his gaze drop down to the hand where he’d summed up everything he had to fight with, everything he’d had left to give, or borrow, or spend.

He couldn’t even see his hand anymore. He didn’t even think that there was a human word for the color of that mass of qi around his fist. It didn’t look like a technique. It wasn’t a thing of beauty or balance. If hate could look like something, if it could take color, form, and shape, that was what was wrapped around his hand. Personified hate. More blood dripped from Sen’s lip. Sen didn’t look up at the dragon’s steps carried doom ever closer to him. He wasn’t calculating anything. He was too far gone for that, too deep into some other kind of relationship with the world around him. He was waiting until it felt right. He gathered himself. Tensed the muscles in his legs. He even tilted his head a little, as though it would help him hear the unseen moment when he should act. Then, it clicked. Whatever decided such things, whatever those perfect moments to act were, it had arrived. Sen drove himself upward, uncoiling like a spring, he felt more of his bones break under the force he exerted, but he did it anyway. He sent his fist lashing forward to meet the dragon’s. When their fists collided, Sen unleashed the hellish qi construction he’d forced into existence.

There was an explosion. Wind, metal, and earth ripped at him. Force and shadow buffeted his body. Water threatened to drown him or perhaps it was simply blood in his throat. There was a noise like the earth itself was wailing in agony. Then, there was nothing but silence and pain. Then, there was nothing at all.