The Volcano Dragon, Nexark
After the magic of Finality shattered and vanished, the air among them froze solid. In that stillness, only Capra spoke, perfectly at ease.
"So, in short, that was a natural twenty. A critical success... Well, well. Looks like today just isn't our day to die."
Pale was on the verge of answering that breezy remark with a hollow smile when the dragon roared.
"You dare—!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
For an instant Nexark could not accept that Capra had destroyed the magic of Finality. Then his rage detonated.
They had broken Irok Dehaja's spell and averted the worst, but now Pale and his companions had to meet an ancient dragon's majestic fury with nothing but their bare bodies. Even so, facing an enraged ancient dragon was far preferable to standing before a magic that had been like the authority of a god.
Meanwhile, red light began to pour from the gaps in the scales that armored Nexark like plate. It meant the dragon had assumed a perfect battle stance. Energy flooded from the nuclear-fusion reactor of his heart into every part of his body; the scales hardened in composition, and his strength climbed still higher.
Pale had driven Nexark off once before, but that victory had been nothing but luck. The dragon, bound in a human shape, had been unable to bring his full power to bear, and a desperate gambit had even succeeded in poisoning him—an exceedingly exceptional chain of events. This Nexark was different. He stood in flawless readiness, without a shred of carelessness. Against an ancient dragon at full strength, the Pale of the present had little chance of winning.
The only hill they had to lean on was Serzif, a Guardian Saint, standing on their side. Their opponent, however, was an ancient dragon who had lived long past maturity, and an ancient dragon's experience made his strength impossible to predict. That made him dangerous. Serzif herself was hardly at her best; she had already burned through a considerable store of magic.
Damn that Pale! If he had a trick like that, he could have said so sooner!
She was cursing him thoroughly in her heart. Had she known he possessed a way to answer the magic of Finality, she would never have poured her power into a futile effort. But Pale had not known what Irok Dehaja's magic truly was, nor had he been certain Capra could destroy it. There had been nothing else he could do.
At last the ancient dragon's wrath took shape as magic, and announced the beginning of the battle.
Nexark gathered a vast tide of magic into his right hand and drove it into the ground. The earth surged upward. At the heart of the rising mass a colossal crater opened, and magma red as blood began to spill down through black smoke.
A volcano was born in the middle of the desert. A calamity-magic that could rewrite terrain—the sort of thing that belonged in a history book—unfolded before them.
From the heart of the volcano he had made, the dragon spread his wings and roared. The roar was laden with magic, and that alone was enough. Every mage of the cooperative, save Pale, Capra, and Serzif, lost consciousness and collapsed.
Pale endured, but his skull rang and spun, and he barely forced back the vomit climbing his throat.
"So this is the power of an ancient dragon... A roar alone is enough to turn a man's stomach."
Serzif, a far more seasoned mage, weathered the roar without so much as a change of expression. Capra, for reasons of her own, merely frowned as if the noise were annoying, and took no harm at all.
Then the volcano erupted in a tremendous blast, hurling magma and stone, and the dragon remained utterly unbowed above the seething rock, flaunting his majesty.
When fireballs and boulders came screaming in, Serzif met them. Six swords of light, each the length of a longsword, formed in the empty air and split the massive stones hurtling toward Pale's party cleanly in two, intercepting them.
The lava that had begun to flow was Pale's to answer.
Pale struck the ground again with his sword-staff. From the three-dimensional magic circle woven of characters that spilled from the scabbard, a Twisted Beast in the shape of a gigantic toad was born.
Its name was Zoark. Toad-like though it was, horns crowned its head, a long tail trailed behind it, and its hide was a thick exoskeleton hard as steel. Zoark drew a huge breath, swelling its belly, and the moment it exhaled, a waterfall of water roared from its mouth.
The water crashed into the descending lava and the two canceled each other. The lava hardened as if a line had been drawn across the earth, and a barrier rose.
Then Serzif went on the offensive. She turned the six swords of light to attack and sent them flying at Nexark. A sword of light cut every substance, and a dragon's scales were no exception. The blades punched through Nexark's scales, bit deep, and drew blood.
They went no farther. Lodged in shallow wounds, they stuck fast and would not move. He had used the fact that a sword's cutting force exists only along the edge: the instant the blades of light sank into his hide, he brought pressure to bear on their flats and stopped them from driving any deeper.
The dragon's chest began to shine. The light traveled from his breast, up his throat, and toward his mouth. It heralded the use of a dragon's most threatening and lethal weapon.
KRA-KO-KO-KO-KOOM!!!
A dragon's breath like a tide of blue flame poured from Nexark's jaws. It was the energy of a fusion reactor given vent—a storm of ultra-high-temperature plasma, the kind that rages across the surface of the sun. A plasma tempest of tens of thousands of degrees came down on them at hypersonic speed, past Mach 7.
Serzif formed a gigantic sword of light overhead, set it at a slant, and sheared the breath aside. That alone could not stop it completely. So Capra stepped in. The sword that nullified magic had already returned to her hand, and with its power she held back the plasma storm spilling over the great blade of light.
Between them, half the dragon's breath was deflected wide. Capra barely stopped the rest, and took burns across her whole body for it. They were not as ruinous as the last time—her arms were not reduced to charcoal—but blisters rose all over her, her skin flushed a furious red, flesh melted, and muscle showed through.
The dragon's jaws closed. The breath ended, and the light in his chest went out.
Even a dragon cannot loose his breath in succession. After he uses it, the output of his heart drops for a time, and his physical ability weakens with it. The heart needs several minutes to recover.
Serzif gave him no room to regain his momentum and hurled herself into a furious assault. She sent the same gigantic sword of light that had checked the breath straight at the dragon. The enormous blade swept along a path from his right shoulder to below his left hip.
A sword of light that severs all matter can sever a dragon's body as well. Knowing that, the dragon resolved to pay a price and blocked. He set his right arm across the blade's path. The sword sheared through the arm and, its force unbroken, threatened to carry on and take the body with it. In that instant the dragon poured a vast quantity of magic into the arm and severed it from his torso with his own will.
The amputated arm was sealed in chains of flame heavy with magic, and those chains bound the sword of light in place.
"One right arm is a cheap price."
Even having cut the limb away himself, Nexark sounded indifferent.
When the gigantic sword of light she had spent so much magic to raise failed to land a decisive blow, Serzif clicked her tongue inwardly. Time is always on a dragon's side. So long as a heart that draws near-infinite power from nuclear fusion still beats, a dragon can recover his strength and counterattack whenever he pleases. Human vitality has a limit.
Then the volcano erupted again. From its mouth rose a storm of searing ash—a pyroclastic flow, the most powerful and the most dangerous product of a volcanic blast. Magma and pulverized rock came flying in a single mass. Dust of that density physically grinds down whatever stands in its way, and anything alive that takes the heat head-on cannot survive.
The volcano itself had been made by magic, but its magma and stone had been drawn up from the real crust. Capra's sword could not defend against them, and because they were not magic, their force was the force of the real thing.
Serzif moved first to check the wave of dust rolling in. A curtain woven of her swords of light stood across its path. Defense, however, was not her specialty, and her magic was already far too depleted. In the end the dust smashed through the curtain of light and bore down on Pale's party. The barrier had weakened it, but what remained was still a power like a natural disaster.
Pale summoned Riexzar, a Twisted Beast in the shape of a lion whose entire body was solid rock, set it in front of them as a shield, and had Zoark—already summoned—spray water to hold back the heat.
Grrrk—skrrk—skrrk—grind!!!
Dust from the pyroclastic flow slammed into Riexzar, and the sound of stone being shaved away filled the air. Pressed tight behind the beast, Pale and the others shuddered at the might of a dragon who could manufacture a natural disaster by hand.
The flow passed. By good fortune, they kept their lives without grave injury. The two Twisted Beasts summoned outside to defend them were not so lucky. Riexzar and Zoark were swept up in the surge and died, and their summonings came undone.
Where they stood, the ground was already buried under a stratum of volcanic ash. It was hard to tell that the place had ever been a desert.
And while they had been resisting the pyroclastic flow, the time a dragon's heart needs to recover had already elapsed. Once more his chest began to shine. He prepared to spit the power of the sun from his mouth.
"You stopped the first breath well enough... Then I wonder. Can you stop the second? I look forward to finding out."
Light began to gather in his jaws along with the taunt. Serzif frowned.
"Whelp. You've been preparing something since the very start. Can that thing bring this dragon down?"
Even before they arrived, Pale had been secretly assembling a magical compositional formula. It was so complex and so vast that even Serzif could not grasp what it contained.
"If I can finish it... almost certainly."
"Good. I am not at my full strength, and I cannot swear that pouring out everything I have would fell that dragon. This time, I will bet on you."
Serzif spoke as if setting her resolve in stone.
"Your father called you the masterpiece of the Dragonheart family... I will believe that was no empty boast."
She gathered even the magic she might have used to attack, shaped it into a bulwark of swords of light, and then the power of the sun began once more to pour from the dragon's mouth. A storm of ultra-high-temperature plasma, the kind that scourges the face of the sun, came roaring in at a speed that casually surpassed the sound barrier.
Serzif's wall of swords began to hold the breath back. But her strength had already reached its limit. Holes opened in the barrier. The dragon's breath leaked through and threatened Pale's party.
It was Capra who stopped it.
Even with deep burns covering her body, the sturdy frame of a magical puppet could still lift a sword. She endured, holding the plasma storm at bay with the blade that nullified magic. The time spent meeting the sun's fury head-on felt long as an eternity. Serzif wrung magic from herself through a pain that seemed about to split her skull. Capra, already numb through her whole body, could no longer even tell whether she was still holding the sword.
After that long stretch, the dragon's heart reached its limit as well. The breath subsided. The light in his breast went dark, and the sun's fury fell quiet.
Even so, a few minutes of recovery and he could pour out that fury again. He was the apex of living things, and a calamity.
The aftershock of the second breath dropped even Serzif, a Guardian Saint, and Capra, a magical puppet, to the ground. The last human mage still standing was Pale Dragonheart alone.
"Pale Dragonheart. How curious. Only you remain."
Nexark spoke as if the fact struck him as strange.
"I told you last time, did I not? That I would remember you."
He had not forgotten that Pale had poisoned him with Armedium Metal and put him through agony.
"How fortunate that you do not die easily. As the price for ruining my work, I will chew you to pieces."
"Which is why I said it last time as well, Nexark."
Pale faced the dragon without giving a single step.
He let out a held breath, and the magic he had prepared over so long a time shone at last.
A vast three-dimensional magic circle of luminous characters and formulae took shape, and it looked like an enormous egg. What broke the shell and showed itself was, astonishingly, a dragon of another kind.
Unlike Nexark, the dragon summoned by Pale's magic was sheathed entirely in snow-white scales, and its body was long as a serpent's. It had no legs. Instead, huge wings covered in white feathers sprouted along the whole length of that elongated form. Its face, unlike Nexark's, was gentle, the eyes and the lines of it elegant as a woman's.
The appearance was a lie. It was a terrifying dragon.
She was the founder and the origin of the Dragonheart family. For reasons none could say, the dragon called the Heavenly Thunder Dragon—Nephelion, who had lived more than ten thousand years—had made a contract with them. In exchange, the Dragonhearts gained the ability to wield powerful magic, and Nephelion's blood came to run in their veins.
The terms of the contract were simple: to summon Nephelion herself by means of the Heavenly Thunder Dragon's blood flowing in that line. Why she had bound them to such a pact, no one knew but Nephelion. Across long ages the Dragonhearts had tried, according to the contract, to summon the Heavenly Thunder Dragon Nephelion, and not once had they succeeded. A dragon is a mighty and higher form of life, difficult for human intellect to comprehend. To parse one was like a blind man feeling an elephant and trying to infer its shape.
Now, the family's long-cherished wish unfolded before their eyes.
"A mere human, daring to summon a dragon and make it serve!?"
Nexark spoke in fury.
"Impossible. With humanity's base intellect, a dragon cannot be interpreted."
"It was certainly difficult... I still can't claim I understand a dragon completely. I have no choice but to call this unfinished."
To interpret a dragon was a great work that even the still-young Pale could not complete if he devoted his entire life to it. That did not mean there had been no result.
"Truly a pity. A half-made dragon that can do nothing but loose a breath... I still have so much to learn."
The summoned dragon was too incomplete even to be called a counterfeit. And yet it could loose the single most powerful weapon a dragon possesses: its breath.
The Heavenly Thunder Dragon's dozens of pairs of vast wings spread wide, and then her whole body began to shine. A dragon's breath is an attack that turns the sun's energy, erupting from the heart, upon an enemy, but the precise method differs from dragon to dragon. Most, like Nexark, spit that heat directly at their foe. A few convert the sun's energy and use it in another way.
The Heavenly Thunder Dragon Nephelion was one of that latter kind. She transformed the sun's immense energy into a powerful electromagnetic field, and the long interior of her body became something like a particle accelerator. Charged particles were then accelerated by the sun's power and fired, their speed reaching near the velocity of light. The sun's force was converted into penetrating power, and a lance of particles that could pierce all things was complete.
"A human could never create a dragon's breath!"
"Perhaps that was true of humanity in the past. You dragons, possessed of a strength without end and forever unchanging, cannot understand us."
A single thread of light poured from the Heavenly Thunder Dragon's mouth.
The total energy bound in that thin beam surpassed even dozens of lightning bolts. A stem of particles in which the sun's energy had been concentrated struck Nexark in the chest. It pierced even a dragon's hard scales as if they were nothing, opened a small hole, and then exploded from within.
The blast tore a great cavity in his breast. Blood and flesh melted in the heat and boiled. His heart was already destroyed beyond any visible shape, and no dragon, however tenacious its life, can survive the loss of its heart.
Even then, spending the last brief breath that remained to him, Nexark left a final line.
With that single regretful sentence, the dragon crumpled where he stood, and died.