Floor 14: Defense of the Drina River (3)
The black dragon Sarkage came flying with the moon at his back.
A vast, luminous moon — and a black dot set within it.
As the seconds passed, the dot began to swell. What had been no bigger than a fist finally spread to cover half the moon.
With Sarkage's entrance, the mood of the battlefield flipped once again.
"KROOAAAAAARGH—!"
Once more, the dragon's roar rolled over the river like a storm.
At the cry of the apex predator, a few of the lizardmen dropped their weapons from their hands.
And the instant that roar ended, thousands of wyverns shrieked in unison.
"KREEEEAAAK—!"
"KYAAAAK!"
It was as though they were answering the dragon's roar.
Then, a beat later, I felt a wave of mana ripple out from the dragon in the sky.
At the same moment, the wyverns went berserk.
They accelerated as if someone had jabbed them full of stimulants.
The Night Witches, thrown off by the wyverns' sudden, transformed offensive, wrenched their brooms around in a panic and scattered into evasive maneuvers.
But unlike before, they couldn't slip away cleanly.
"KREEAK!"
"KYAAAAH!"
A few Night Witches failed to dodge in time and were seized by the wyverns, bitten and torn.
A witch dangling limp from a wyvern's jaws, then dropping toward the ground below.
I had to run over there and save her—
The moment I shifted my weight to move, I caught sight of the witch's throat — already half torn out. Too late.
BOOM—! KWA-BOOM—! Explosions thundered one after another, late arrivals to the carnage.
"GYAAAAH!"
"GRRRRAAAAGH!"
The ground shuddered as if an earthquake had struck.
The broom a witch had been riding had crashed down onto our own lines.
The bombs detonating all at once carried a power beyond all reason. Over two thousand imperial soldiers vanished without so much as a speck of dust left behind.
Damn it.
The wyverns' attack speed had become absurdly fast.
The cause, presumably, was the black dragon — Sarkage.
The dragon's roar, and the mana wave that followed it. Something had clearly changed in the wyverns after that.
Dragonspawn.
That was what the Night Witches had called the wyverns at the very start.
They really did resemble dragons, now that I thought about it. Dragon blood running through a wyvern's body — was that why they received some powerful buff under a dragon's control?
There was no way to know for certain.
"KROOAAH!"
With a short roar, a single wyvern belched out flame.
So now they can even breathe fire. Wonderful.
It was a pitifully small tongue of fire compared to a true dragon's, but it was an unmistakable breath attack all the same.
Haah…
The dragon's appearance had flipped the board of the entire battle in one stroke.
More and more Night Witches began to fall under the wyverns' ever-fiercer assault.
And with air support crippled, the allies holding the high ground along the river were feeling the pressure mount as well.
I have to save the Night Witches.
The dragon's return didn't mean the river's water had come back.
Evidently, the dragon had spent the last hour dealing with the river completely.
The great U-shaped gorge still ran dry. I had managed to hold it alone for about an hour, but only by pouring mana into it without reserve.
Any more was impossible.
So if our forces were to hold the river's high ground without water, the Night Witches were indispensable.
Damn it — aerial combat is the one thing I can't do…
Kasatum's Sky Shoes guaranteed only two leaps, even in empty air. They didn't let me dart freely through the sky.
And hurling lightning across the heavens would drain more mana than my remaining half could bear. Better to fight the way I had been.
Haah… What do I do?
Expecting anything from Ha Heijeong was a stretch too. During the hour I'd been desperately holding the line, there had been three great waves of flame. She'd burned through a lot of mana herself.
Not to mention she was busy commanding the whole field—
No. Wait. There was no reason to keep fighting in the air at all.
The heart of it is that all of this is happening because of the dragon.
The maddened wyverns. The vanished river. And amid this chaotic battlefield, the dragon was sweeping everything before it — sky and ground alike.
Dozens of magic bolts chased the Night Witches through the air like homing missiles.
Magic Missile.
Unlike the climbers' spells, theirs were absurd in both size and speed.
The witches twisted and rolled like acrobats, dodging in every direction — but escape was impossible.
"Barrier!"
Belatedly, the witches threw up shield spells. Useless.
CRACK—! The missiles slammed in at terrifying speed, tearing through barriers like wet tissue paper.
Witches bursting apart midair or plummeting from the sky.
And in the midst of it all, the dragon was breathing down onto the ground.
Flame gleaming a deep venomous green — a poison-fire breath that blanketed the earth below.
"GRRRAAAAAK!"
"S-spare me…!"
"AAAAAAAH!"
Because they were packed so tightly together, soldiers and climbers alike couldn't scatter in time — the breath simply swept over them.
Where the fire passed, only melted corpses remained. Above them, dark green smoke billowed up in thick clouds.
It was poison on a level that couldn't even be compared to what we'd faced from Herkest, the black dragon of Floor 11.
Within that deep green haze drifting on the wind, our own soldiers dropped like flies.
Right beside those burned or melted, allies poisoned by the fumes collapsed in heaps.
A few of them came stumbling out of the smoke, coughing violently.
So this is what Ha Heijeong meant — the Bug Queen's elixir was the setup for Floor 14.
A battlefield drowned in poison. Without a powerful rank of poison resistance, no one could endure it.
I didn't know what poison resistance level the people coughing their way out of the haze had… but it probably didn't exceed 6.
Mine was 13. I likely wouldn't be much affected by the poison.
But that didn't give me anything special to do, either.
Haah. It's time, then. Time to play my last card.
Black dragon Herkest.
On Floor 12, linked to Floor 11, I'd received a poison-resistance earring from him. An earring that even came with a bonus: a high chance that dragons I met would treat me favorably.
And Herkest and Sarkage were both black dragons.
The poison resistance, and the fact that they're the same kind of dragon.
Given how the Tower worked, the two were probably connected — but I couldn't be sure. Ha Heijeong had said personal floors and group floors were never linked to one another.
Of course, my personal floor was different from other climbers'… but the risk was still enormous.
Ha Heijeong had called Sarkage a calamity. Even the me of now could never face him head-on.
There was no point in charging at the dragon from the start — if things went wrong, our whole plan could unravel, or I could die.
That was why I'd kept Herkest's earring as a last resort.
Even if the dragon turned friendly, whether I could turn an enemy into an ally was another question entirely.
But I couldn't stand by any longer. The plan had already fallen apart.
If things went on like this, Floor 14's trial would end half in failure — just like Ha Heijeong's first regression.
I couldn't sacrifice hundreds of thousands of climbers to spare my own single life.
And if it comes to the worst, I have the transfer item. I won't die even if it goes badly.
I had to place my hope in the earring.
"Sarkage!"
I shouted, pouring mana into my voice, but the dragon didn't spare me so much as a glance.
Had the sound not carried?
It was possible. The battlefield was deafening — the clash of weapons, the wyverns' shrieks, the screams of the dying. The bombs of the bombardment brigade detonating all over the field were almost an afterthought.
Somehow, I have to get close to the dragon.
The black dragon hung impossibly high in the sky — too high to reach even with Kasatum's Sky Shoes, and far too dangerous to approach when he descended to breathe fire on the ground.
And trying to catch him in between was hopeless too — wyverns always swarmed around him. Short of moving freely through the sky, I'd be a sitting target.
That was when I spotted a Night Witch flying low, evading a wyvern's pursuit.
Yes. That was it. I'd get to the dragon on a broomstick.
The idea struck me like a bolt out of the blue. The moment the thought crystallized, I leapt straight up from where I stood. Still not enough height.
A second leap off empty air, courtesy of Kasatum's shoes.
"Erendil!"
The Night Witch turned her gaze toward me, rising into the open sky.
A brief meeting of eyes.
Erendil was sharp.
Scarcely a heartbeat after our gazes locked, she swung her broom around toward me.
Matching her timing, I pushed off the air once more and changed direction — my third leap — and at the same instant hurled lightning at the wyvern chasing her.
"KREEEAAK!"
The wyvern took the bolt dead-on and plunged toward the ground, and I landed astride Erendil's broom.
The broom lurched violently under the sudden added weight.
Desperate not to fall, I wrapped my arms tight around Erendil's waist.
The smell of gunpowder bored deep into my nose.
"Hnk—!"
She barely wrestled the broom back under control, then throttled up again.
VROOOM—! Blue fire roared from the tail of the broom.
As the broom accelerated, the wind of the battlefield whipped past my ears.
The tang of smoke, the bite of gunpowder — and beneath it all, the sting of poison and the copper reek of blood.
Erendil banked through the air several times to shake off the wyverns, then twisted her head back toward me in alarm.
"Wh-who the hell are you?! Why — no, how did you just fly up here? What was that stepping-on-air thing? And how do you know my name?!"
"We need to get to that dragon. Now!"
"Wh-WHAT?! The dragon?!"
At the words go to the dragon, Erendil nearly had a stroke. With my arms around her waist, I could feel every muscle in her body jump.
Well, yeah. Fair enough. I must look completely insane.
But it was the only way to turn this battle around.
"If we want to win this war, we have to do something about the dragon! And I think I have a way to handle it!"
"You think you have a way?!"
"I have one!"
I couldn't actually be certain. But if I didn't say it like that, I didn't think she'd fly us anywhere near the dragon.
This was not the moment to give her time to think. I said it again.
"To the dragon! Fast! I can stop it!"
"Are you out of your goddamn mind?!"
Erendil yelled at me, but there was no room for a proper answer. Three wyverns came screaming in from the left.
I blasted them out of the sky with lightning, then spoke again.
"Like this, there's no hope! We have to reach the dragon somehow! Trust me!"
Erendil let out a long, deep breath.
"…Yeah. You're right. Now that the dragon's here, the battle's already lost. The Drina River defense line is going to fall."
Her voice was bloodless. As she said it, she dropped her bombs over the heads of the lizardmen below.
BOOM—! KA-BOOM!
The tremor that shook the earth was heavy enough to feel even from up here in the sky.
An immediate evasive maneuver followed, then I intercepted the pursuing wyverns with lightning.
"Damn it! Fine — let's go! I came onto this battlefield knowing the odds were against us, so we might as well bet on one thread-thin hope!"
"…Thank you."
Erendil wrenched the broom's head around hard.
Toward the black dragon.
Hundreds of wyverns flew alongside it, shielding it like an honor guard. We didn't need to get too close — only close enough for my voice to carry.
Erendil swallowed hard.
I could feel the shudder run through her body against mine. She looked like a woman who had made up her mind.
Like a bullet fired from a gun, we shot toward the dragon.
"KREEEEEAK!"
We were barely into the sky toward the dragon when the wyverns began to cry out.
They'd noticed us making straight for him.
Dozens of wyverns nearby hurtled themselves at us, blocking the flight path ahead.
"Hold on tight!"
Erendil wrenched the broom's nose down toward the ground. A heartbeat later we were plunging earthward in a steep dive, the wyverns' shrieks chasing after us.
I hurled lightning back at the pursuing pack, but I couldn't shake them all.
"Hold on! Tighter!"
At the last possible instant before we hit the dirt, Erendil hauled the broom around and up again.
Whew. We skimmed so low the broom practically kissed the ground as we climbed.
The flame jetting from the broom's tail scorched the heads of hapless lizardmen below.
"KREEAK! KREEAK!"
"KREEEEAAAK!"
"Wh-what the—?!"
"GWAHK!"
Behind us, wyverns piled one after another into the lizardmens' heads, far too late to stop us.
It was a dazzling display of flying from Erendil.
"Erendil! You know what? You just went completely insane back there!"
"I-I know!"
When I shouted in pure admiration, she answered in a voice shaking like a leaf. Apparently that maneuver had taken quite a toll on her too.
Most of the wyverns near the dragon had followed our tail, so the ones still blocking the path ahead of us were few.
The ones that dove at us, I answered with lightning.
And at last, we were close enough to the black dragon.
Close enough for my voice to reach. I poured mana into my throat and roared.
"SARKAGE! LOOK AT ME!"
And in that instant, my eyes met the dragon's.