Topher had expected an insta-kill blast of dragonbreath, but instead the great beast drew back its vast head and snapped forward at him, like a striking snake. It was impossibly quick for its size, but still had to move its colossal body the tremendous distance involved; though it seemed almost instantaneous, he was dimly aware that the entire event took nearly three seconds to transpire. But his brain was numb, hopelessly stuck; the hard, cold mathematical reality of oh shit I need to dodge now was buried so far beneath HOLY SHIT GIANT DRAGON that he might as well have been frozen in a block of ice.
He might have died ignominiously right then, crunched like an hors d'oeuvre beneath the Toyota-sized teeth, if two figures had not swiftly stepped past him. Zanasha, diving bravely and gloriously in front of him, let out a triumphant shout as she struck the dragon's oncoming maw with a Mighty Blow; Rudo, conversely, merely picked up Topher bodily and quick-stepped him in the opposite direction. The end result was that the dragon's massive jaws clamped shut with a thunderous impact slightly to the left of where Topher had been standing, while Topher himself ended up winded and dazed behind a low mound of jagged concrete with Rudo and Hana attempting to discern whether he was all right.
He tried to respond, could not; his brain was on fire with the twin blaring alarms of Oh Jesus, I almost died and how the fuck did she deflect that? Ignoring his other two companions, he poked his head up to see what Zanasha was doing next.
As he watched, awed, she dashed and leapt with stolid grace around the dragon's attacks; a massive claw the size of a schoolbus crashed down just at her heels, and she somersaulted over it (the phrase two hundred pounds of metal and sex floated through Topher's mind unbidden) to strike in passing at its tree-trunk tendons. But her blade, as powerful as it was, merely skated over the creature's iron-hard flesh with a spray of sparks; her Dash Skill was keeping her alive, but even her strongest attacks weren't getting through its Defense.
Abruptly, Topher lost his view; he was confused for a moment before he realized that Rudo had pulled him back down. "Mister Bailey, I do not think it wise for you to expose yourself to attack," he commented with unshakeable aplomb; Topher gaped at him. "Your time is perhaps better spent devising a way to disable or slay the creature."
"Me?!" Topher asked, astonished. "What the fuck am I supposed to do? That thing's the size of a whole-ass city block!"
"I do not know," answered the Innkeeper imperturbably, "but I trust that you will find an answer." Without waiting for a response, he turned away and was gone, leaping with unlikely grace and alacrity for a man in his late fifties towards the fray. A cataclysmic roar stunned Topher, and he clapped his hands to his ears while the ground trembled and quaked with the force of Vashyarl's wrath. Dumb name for a dragon, thought Topher, then chewed on his beard as he began to think furiously.
His usual tactic -- wand-spun low-level spells to conserve mana -- were obviously not going to be effective here; even the beam he'd shot at the Capras, which had easily been the most powerful spell he'd ever produced, had no hope of penetrating the monster's scales. He'd have to think of something different, but his brain was coming up empty; shaking his head, he disregarded Rudo's admonishment and peeked over the low wall he'd been cowering behind for another glimpse at the battle.
Things had gone very quickly from bad to worse; Zanasha, now clearly too tired to dodge, had been shoved to the side by Rudo, who was deftly using the terrain to obscure the dragon's line of sight and blunt the force of its blows while making attacks with a dizzying array of weapons he kept producing from and secreting inside his jacket. But, like Zanasha, his strikes merely bounced off the creature; even unusual and clearly situational weapons were having no effect.
Of course not, thought Topher stupidly. They never expected to kill this thing with their weapons. They're all counting on me. He considered making a Wyrd, but decided against it; he'd be too vulnerable while crafting it, too distracted to defend himself against it if it went rogue, and too low on MP to do more than gamble on it. He needed something better.
After considering and discarding the ideas of using an Entangle (even if it completely immobilized the beast, his companions' weapons clearly wouldn't be able to capitalize on it) or something clever like a Minor Illusion (yeah, right), he decided to try his luck with an empowered Lightning Bolt spell. Even if it didn't faze the dragon, it would take some pressure off his companions for a few moments without costing him too much MP; and now that he wasn't crapping his pants with shock and fear, he could utilize his Attract Object unique skill to use the same momentum dodge he'd used against the Peryton and the Phantom Barghests. With luck, it would confuse the guardian long enough for his companions to recover and pull his bald, flabby ass out of the frying pan.
Grimly, he began to spin his Stylus through a resolute twenty spins (he probably wouldn't destroy the whole dungeon), then set his feet under him; from this position, he could dodge or scurry, or even Conjure a Shield if he thought it would make a damn bit of difference. Standing up, he yelled, "Hey Ugly! Do you know what happens to a dragon when it gets struck by lightning? Poreg Orv Teijuc Vil Danx!"
The bolt which erupted from his Stylus was nearly two feet in diameter; it blasted outwards, nearly bowling him over backwards with recoil, and shot upwards with chef's-kiss-perfect timing directly into the dragon's face as it turned towards Topher's taunt. Its colossal head, flopping bonelessly from a neck like a stretch of freeway, rocked back upwards and over as though he'd decked the dragon with a mighty uppercut; for a moment, its four enormous feet lifted off the ground from the force of the impact. Then it fell back to earth with a crash so violent that a great cloud of dust flew outwards like someone was pointing a leaf blower at Topher's face, and he flew backwards and nearly brained himself on a nearby wall.
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For a moment, his heart surged victoriously with glee; then, after a breathless instant, an amused chuckle boomed forth from the dragon's throat. "Not what you expected?" it taunted in a voice like a Marshall stack at close range, levering itself upwards once more. "A well-timed surprise, to be sure. But not enough." It turned its head back and forth indulgently from Zanasha and Rudo (who were running about in expectation of another attack) and Topher (who was standing there open-mouthed) before letting its yards of lips curl back in a sinister smile. "But let us test your theory." Drawing back its massive claw as if to throw a building-sized baseball at Topher, its tongue lolled out of its mouth in a silent laugh. "Was it Lightning Bolt? I'll show you how."
Topher had just enough time to blink in surprise. "Poreg Orv Teijuc Vil Xegar," the dragon pronounced with relish, then pointed a foreclaw at him.
From the tip of the creature's talon bloomed a light as bright as the sun; he had just barely enough presence of mind to hop into the air and yank, as hard as he dared, on a distant concrete pylon in hopes of being pulled out of the blast's path. But immediately, he saw that he would be too slow; the lightning would travel almost instantaneously. He whirled his Stylus, once, with a flourish as he brought it up between them, and yelled out "ZOM VOQ!" just as the attack exploded towards him.
If he'd conjured a spherical Mage Shield, he would have been obliterated; but Zanasha's deflecting strike had given him an idea, and he gambled with nothing to lose in the split second remaining to him. Using the Priest Shield of Faith visualization, he summoned a massive ash-colored bulwark between him and the dragon, but angled, tilted hard to the right and slightly downwards so that the bolt was nearly parallel to its defending surface. When the blast came, searing the air all around the battlefield and deafening everyone with its thunderclap, Topher's gambit worked; the bolt, which surely would have destroyed him and most of the arena in his direction, banked downwards and to the right before exploding with enormous fury into the stone halfway between it and Topher.
The impact, of course, wrecked and demolished every solid object for a hundred yards; but Topher was already airborne, soaring away from the destruction on the wings of borrowed momentum. I'm an idiot, he marveled in passing, watching the cloud of debris shoot with lethal velocity outwards in every direction; I've been meeting every attack head-on and wasting so much MP instead of just expending a fraction of the force to redirect the strike. Physics. Hotaka knew his shit.
Below him, he saw Zanasha taking up a position on top of a crumbled skyscraper; her hair streamed behind her in the wind of the blast, and she was raising her sword up in a one-handed grip before her with the blade held flat against her other palm. "Ancient Blade Arts," she intoned, then drew the sword back with barely-restrained force; he could see every cord and knot of muscle in her body snapping taut. "Nether Lance!" And, with a scream of effort, she hurled the blade forward at the shadowy figure within the debris cloud.
The sword spun end-over-end for just an instant, then abruptly accelerated and shot forward with the velocity of a rail-driven projectile; in a solid beam of blue light, it lanced forth and drove itself visibly into the dragon's left eye. Topher's heart leapt up within him. No fucking way! She...!
Then, horribly, the dragon reached up and plucked the blade free; it held it daintily in a claw fifty times its size, turning it back and forth as the light caught its mirror-bright surface. "Valiant," it purred, "but you are in far, far over your head. Who do you think crafted this blade?" It chuckled, then tossed the sword away; Topher's heart became a lump in his throat as the glint of its steel vanished into the dust of the debris cloud.
Suddenly, Rudo was in front of it; his hands were on his hips, and his head cocked curiously to one side, as though the dragon were an unruly pet who had done something inconsiderate to the carpet. "I find that difficult to believe. Do you expect me to believe that you are a smith, in addition to being a dragon?"
"I am more than you can possibly comprehend," the dragon exulted. It raised its claws to the sky, arching its back as it roared its pride. "I am Vashyarl, Third of Five among the Immortal Beasts! I am the pointing finger of death upon the Infinite King's right hand!" It crashed back down onto the ground, shaking the entire dungeon again as it stared down with bloody, glowing malice at the tiny figure of the Innkeeper. "I have slumbered here for more than one thousand years, little morsel, and wake each time only to destroy such insects as you."
"But you are imprisoned," Rudo pointed out calmly, as though he were not facing down the kaiju-esque spectre of death itself. "Do you not wish to be free?"
The dragon laughed, and Topher recoiled at the madness he heard in its voice. "I abide here, insignificant speck. What difference to I, who have seen the rise and fall of the moon and the stars?!" It leered down at the older man. "Time between repasts such as you comprise is spent in pleasant dream. When the time for me to journey from this place, my master will retrieve me, and the centuries will have been as moments. I am immortal; invincible. And you are dead."
Drawing breath, it let loose a torrent of flame that dwarfed Topher's imagination; it was destruction itself, an annihilating tidal wave of plasma so hot that the stone upon which Rudo was standing sublimated directly into smoke and gases in the fraction of an instant before he himself disappeared into the cataclysm. Hana shouted in dismay, her voice ringing clearly out over the cacophony of the explosion.
Then, impossibly, Rudo's voice rose above the din. "You are powerful indeed." There was a wry hint of amusement in the Innkeeper's voice, as though being reduced to atoms had been quite droll.
"But I am over here."