Then she dropped, her wings spiraling around her and the spell dissipating into nothingness. I let out the curse I was holding, leaped over the crater in front of me, and began running toward her.
A beam of light filled the spot where Lyria had been a moment ago.
Behind me, situated on one of the citadel’s towers, Miya prepared another rune-encrusted arrow. No doubt she was patiently readying those magical circles of hers so every shot would punch a hole in Lyria. Unlike Ilsa’s ballistae, Miya held a natural advantage over Lyria. Astral energy was far denser than sorcerous energy, and Lyria’s draconic body was made of the stuff. Miya’s attacks were the equivalent of shooting a steel-tipped arrow into cloth. The best part was that Lyria knew it.
No, that was the worst part. I’d much prefer her roaring in pain, collapsing to the ground, and letting me chop her head off. Now she was dodging Miya’s arrows because she knew getting hit even once meant death.
Imperial soldiers formed a mass in front of me, blocking my path. My attention was split between the dragon dancing in the air between arcs of red light and the fools who still supported said dragon even after she had disintegrated a hundred of them. I charged the soldiers, my greatsword cleaving through their plate armor like it wasn’t there. They screamed in response. Their spears and axes bounced off my armor in a weak gesture of defiance. Ten down. I swung twice more. Twenty down.
They broke, fleeing to the sides with their shields still raised. Above me, Lyria roared. Black light filled her claws, an orb in each hand.
I raised my shield. The buildings around me vanished, taking the lives of every soldier around me with them. Before they vanished, I saw another explosion in the distance. Lyria had attempted to intercept one of Miya’s shots, her sensory abilities having improved enough that she was now predicting when Miya was going to fire.
The whine I heard as the magic faded made it clear that her attempt had failed. Dust began to fill my vision. I heard thrashing, followed by a crashing sound and the shattering of stone. It sounded like Miya had struck true, bringing Lyria down.
Stepping out warily toward the source of the sounds with my shield raised, I saw her. She was almost as large as I remembered. Not quite the size of a keep, but close. Her head alone was big enough that I doubted I could choke her to death even with the thickest tree in the Empire. She rumbled along the ground, turning from her side and onto all four feet. Masses of blood oozed from a wound in her side, where Miya had scored her. She was missing huge chunks of scale. Nothing deep enough to truly wound her. Her spell must have sapped a lot of the energy from the shot.
I fired a flare into the air, signaling that the beast was down but still active. In moments, she would soar back into the air and start bombarding me again.
Her eyes flickered to me the moment I used magic. I smiled at her, although it wasn’t from kindness. Not that she could see my smile behind my helmet.
“All alone, are we?” she said, her voice booming across the city. “That wasn’t very smart.”
The buildings to my right exploded as her tail flicked through them. I rolled. The scaly appendage soared over me. Flames burst toward me and I cleaved toward them, not having the time to project a barrier. Runes flickered on my sword and a blast of magic exploded from it. The fire parted around me like an ocean around a prophet, and I maintained the flow of magic into my sword, the strain pulling at me more and more with each moment.
Then I was sent flying, my ribs creaking. My armor was glowing, the runes redistributing the impact as much as possible. They had overloaded. I could feel the pain of broken ribs. Hopefully no internal damage. A building caught me, the stone holding strong against my body. It hurt a lot less than Lyria’s swipe did.
I projected a barrier in front of me, ignoring every warning of death my body was sending me. Dozens of black blades shattered against the golden light, glowing with barely contained magical energy and leaking rainbow liquid. The blades were magically unstable and about to explode. The blasts shattered my barrier instantly, knocking me to the ground.
Vision left me for a moment. Everything was blurry.
Heat seared every part of my body, jolting me back to life. A great red glow was filtering out from every orifice of my breastplate. This rune was one of my better tricks to stay in the fight but also a last resort. My body burned with magic that was killing it with every second the rune was active. But it was better than dying to this dragon.
I shot to my feet and leaped to the side. A black wave rippled through the ground where I was, leaving it otherwise undisturbed. I ran. I needed to get close enough to Lyria that I could actually hit her. If I engaged her up close, then her spells were less dangerous.
Hearing a rumbling to my left, I raised my shield. Black light was disintegrating the buildings there. That was not good. I couldn’t power both this rune and a barrier.
All I could do was fight power with power. I cleaved toward the explosion with my sword and projected as much raw magical power as I could manage. Prismatic light shuddered around my sword and body as I struck at the encroaching blackness. For a moment, I wondered if I was going to die.
Then it cleared, and all that was left was a crater.
Lyria sat on the other side, mouth open and full of dragonfire.
Chapter 37
Lyria’s golden eyes glowed as she loomed over me, her dragonfire building more and more within her maw. The red glow from within my breastplate was a sign that I wasn’t going to be able to stop it with a barrier, and if she hit me with enough fire, then I couldn’t match it with my sword. This was the worst part of fighting somebody familiar with me. She knew so many of my techniques and gambits and had even helped me devise them, all those decades ago when we were so very close.
If I wanted to win, it had to be with something she didn’t know about. There was one such thing, but using it here was risky. Lyria wasn’t the greatest threat I needed to slay in the Empire or even the greatest dragon I knew of.
I hesitated. My spare arm crept toward my neck.
A snap of magic. Lyria shifted, buildings collapsing around her as she attempted to roll away. Too late. A roar split the air as a beam of light slammed into her body. Blood spewed across the rubble-strewn clearing.
I turned and ran. Fire streamed all around me, stone melting from the raw heat and fury that Lyria poured out in her pain.
“Mykah, you’re safe!” Miya shouted at me from atop a nearby warehouse. I had found her by running toward the magic I felt.
“Safe enough. How are your reserves?” I said, checking my own as I focused my attention on myself. The red light within my armor had finally gone out, which was a sign that my body was now able to run on my own magic. My body hurt like hell, but I could manage thanks to the runes I used and a lot of experience. Hopefully nobody asked me to do much for a week or two or maybe the next month.
“She was dodging too easily, so I spent more time firing faster and relying on Malenko’s arrows. I’m fine. You’re not,” Miya said. She had dropped to the ground and grabbed me by the shoulders with a frown. Unlike me, she wasn’t in full armor. She must have rushed to the fight and left her breastplate behind. I was troubled, although I hadn’t ever intended for her to battle Lyria up close.
There was a roar behind me. Leaving Lyria alone like this meant she might return to the rest of the battle. I couldn’t see any other dragons in the air right now, which meant that if we let Lyria get back up there, then the battle could very quickly turn against us. A single powerful spell from her could turn the tide. Hundreds of my elites were dead, a gatehouse was down, and thousands of Imperial soldiers were spilling into the center of the city.
I shook my head. “I have my methods to keep fighting. Didn’t you say you knew I could be emperor? This is my resolve.”
The look in Miya’s eyes made it clear that this wasn’t what she had in mind when she wanted me to become emperor. It was funny that our positions had been reversed. I had worried about
Miya and the others ever risking their lives against Lyria. Now, Miya worried about me.
Black light shook the buildings nearby, a sure sign that Lyria was growing impatient.
“I don’t have the raw power left to easily take her out, and she’s focused on me,” I explained, having clued into something that happened while Lyria was preparing my grave earlier. “You don’t have the accuracy to hit me at distance with your most powerful attacks, but Lyria is a different matter. When she’s focused on me, she can’t dodge as well. We’ll end this in one shot.”
Like when she had destroyed Talepolis’s gatehouse, although I didn’t say it. Lyria wasn’t forty meters of wall full of people. She was a butcher made of scales. If she disintegrated in a cloud of black dust and gore, all the better.
Miya nodded, her hair fluttering around her. Before I could step away, she grabbed me in a hug. It was only brief, but it was a nice reminder of why I should survive this.
Firing off a flare into the air as I ran toward the massive magical presence I sensed, I began to scheme. Lyria was large enough that Miya could get a clean shot from pretty much anywhere, so it was more about buying time. Of all the spells that the black dragon threw around, the most intriguing was the rupturing one that tore along the ground. It would disrupt any magic I was using, including runes. For that reason, Lyria rarely used it. The paired runes on my sword were well known to her, although I had never tested whether the disruption effect would overpower my spell-absorption ability.
Otherwise, the main thing I needed to do was stay as close as possible to the nasty golden eyes that glared down at me right now. Dragonfire exploded at me, but I didn’t use a barrier, spotting the black orb hovering between her claws. Instead, I surged to one side, legs burning with the power to send me flying over the rubble. So little of this portion of the city remained after Lyria’s tantrum that this was almost an open clearing now. I put aside the thoughts of how many had died due to not evacuating.
Fire raced after me, the magic within it causing it to bend and chase me like a dog after a bone. Lyria’s tail lashed out at me from the other direction, and black light rushed at me from her front. It looked like a checkmate from the first moment I encountered Lyria. She was rearing up, her claws glowing with black energy as she empowered them for a swipe at me, should I somehow defend against this.
I didn’t bother with defense. My momentum rune glowed, and I flickered forward. The black orb nearly clipped my helmet as I neatly eased my way past the unexploded spell and moved toward my opponent. As Lyria’s massive form loomed directly above me, her eyes widening in surprise, I leaped up at her neck with almost all thirteen runes on my sword glowing magnificently.
The dragon roared and swiped at me. Two waves of black energy flared toward me from her claws. I snapped my sword at one and caught the first wave of energy. It vanished into my sword. Then I fired it at the other wave of energy with a flicker of will and the glow of a rune. The two opposing waves of energy met in mid-air with a crack.
Ignoring the energy waves, I soared past her claws and toward her neck. She snapped at me. I snapped back, my sword meeting one of her teeth.
A shock wave burst out from the impact. I felt my bones rattle. A ripple ran through my muscles as the force of meeting Lyria’s attack head-on was rammed into my brain through my nervous system. It wasn’t a nice feeling.
It hurt her as much as it hurt me, sending her head flying backward, and she practically toppled over. A dust cloud began to rise into the air from where she crashed into the ground as I not-so-gracefully sank to the ground myself.
The crash put me out of commission for a few moments. Long enough for me to question how long Miya had left to prepare. I could hear Lyria’s whining. Pulling myself to my feet and stumbling toward her, I saw her golden eyes. A black orb lazily whistled overhead and disintegrated the warehouse that Miya had originally been on. I looked behind me and shrugged. Not knowing where Miya was but knowing she wasn’t dumb, I doubted the attack had hit her.
“Where is your bitch, traitor?” Lyria roared at me, pulling herself to four feet and glaring at me.
I didn’t dignify her with a response and instead raised my shield. Her claws were glowing. Dragonfire built up in her maw once again.
Clicking my tongue, I decided that Miya needed more time. My sword hummed and runes glowed.
Miya fired.
The reaction from Lyria was instantaneous. She skidded on the spot to face the upswell of energy in the world, a ritual circle springing to life beneath her. The dragonfire burst out in front of her, not as a weapon but as a tool of spellcasting—a single ancient draconic rune intended to ward off danger. One of her claws snapped off a separate spell behind it, a second and much smaller ritual circle appearing around the rune. A great translucent barrier of crackling black light snapped into existence, aligned with the larger ritual circle around Lyria’s feet.
All of this took place within a split second and caused one of the largest surges of magic from Lyria I had ever felt. She wasn’t merely casting spells simultaneously but was pushing her body to its limits to respond so fast. Even for a dragon, the magic it took to move so swiftly was the sort that would cause long-lasting physical harm. I wasn’t the only one taking steps that would require weeks or months of recovery time, even with magical regeneration.
Miya’s beam of light, as piercing and majestic as it had been in the previous siege, crashed into Lyria’s protective barriers. The crackling black barrier shattered, the light of the circle vanishing with it.
The cost was great, however. The instant it took to pierce the barrier was long enough for the trail of light to vanish and the crack of thunder that was Miya’s shot to pass through my ears. The barrier had robbed the arrow of the power it needed to punch through the draconic rune.
The explosion of light told me we had failed. It was completely different when we destroyed the gatehouse in the assault on Talepolis. The arrow had burst against the rune formed of dragonfire. When my vision cleared, I saw Lyria standing triumphantly behind a still-burning protective rune.
Lyria blew out the rune, a symbolic step, as dragonfire was dismissed by magic. Her deep chuckle boomed around the clearing. She knew what Miya was capable of and had come prepared. It seemed like Lyria’s draconic visage was grinning down at me.
“Care to try again?” she asked.
Miya did. I imagined the arrow hurt.
The clearing exploded into dust, and I saw black powder fly up from where Lyria had been a moment ago. The powder was no doubt pieces of her scales. The lack of blood was disconcerting.
Then I realized I could still sense her enormous magical presence. I gripped my sword and prepared to charge. Flames stopped me, bursting forth from within the cloud and chasing me away.
I leaped back, looking behind me to see Miya nearby.
Roaring in defiance, oozing blood and pus from huge bloody patches bereft of scales, and having already tapped into her magical reserves, Lyria stood alive after taking the best Miya and I could throw at her. She stretched her wings out and laced the rubble with fire, as if daring us to try again.
Chapter 38
The tactic we had developed for taking down Lyria was deceptively simple. Lyria might be as tough as a magically reinforced gatehouse, but she could dodge, cast barriers, and generally make herself a lot harder to kill. Counting on a single shot with all of Miya’s power was the definition of planning for success.
Instead, we planned for failure from the very start: the shots Miya took in the air, when Lyria came down to attack me, Miya’s attacks against her on the ground. Lyria was one of the most powerful creatures in the Empire, if not the world. So we planned around needing to hit her twice, thrice, or as many times as necessary.
An elf had once shown me an impressive archery technique where she fired three shots in rapid succession by holding two in her fingers as she fired the first. Not needing to reach for her quiver between shots let her plant three sho
ts essentially in the same spot at the same time and punch through barriers with magic that was intended to handle only one hit. If an elf could do it with three, surely somebody else could do it with two.
Miya had spent the last week practicing how to fire two arrows rapidly. She would exploit any opening Lyria made with a second shot in quick succession.
Finally, the arrows I had crafted for Miya conserved her magical reserves. We only needed so much raw power in the overall shot and didn’t have an hour to build it up as we had when besieging Talepolis. By giving her arrows that did a lot of the work for her, Miya could use less energy, prepare her shots faster, and fire more of them in the battle.
To protect against something she thought was a one-off, Lyria had prepared a barrier that drew heavily on her magical reserves. She knew that we had obliterated a gatehouse and had prepared to stop us once. Now we could hit her with that technique a dozen times, easily.
The look of fear in those golden eyes was delicious to take in. She knew we could defeat her now.
“This is the end,” I said. “Whatever it takes, we’re killing her. Miya, prepare yourself again. I’ll charge in the moment you hit her.” I wasn’t going to wait this time and let her recover.
Lyria roared in response, clearly listening in. As Miya began casting her magical circles, fear clearly set into the dragon. I couldn’t imagine the emotion being anything else, simply because nothing else explained the dragon’s very next move.
A black shock wave came hurtling across the ground toward us. I blinked. If that hit Miya, it would knock her magical circles out, but she could cast more. Did Lyria think Miya could only use it once or twice more? Probably. I grinned.
My sword glowed, the absorption rune readying itself for a world-first. I thrust it out toward the wave of disruption, ready for it to fail. The world wavered for a moment, the magic churning at the magical plane. I got a distinct feeling of wrongness deep within my body as I channeled magic into the rune.
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