Chapter 15: The Dragon Falls
Mephistopheles came forward again and the synchronized dance resumed.
"Left!" Arthur called.
Vedas was already moving left.
The claw passed through empty space, and the dragon’s tail came immediately after, and Vedas’s shield was up before the word left Arthur’s mouth. The impact sent him sliding rather than stumbling, and he stayed upright.
The crack in the shield had grown another inch.
The crater noise had become continuous, a constant sound underneath the fight that rose when Vedas survived something and rose further when the spear found gold. Golden blood was still dripping from two separate places on Mephistopheles’s scales. The dragon had started doing something it had not done once during the entire opening of the fight.
It was getting angry.
Its strikes were still fast, still more than fast enough, but they were filled with the intent to make Vedas feel pain. Vedas leapt out of the way as a tail came crashing down and smashing deep into the ground.
Leon’s eyes had narrowed.
Arthur could see that too.
Then Mephistopheles left the ground.
Its wings spread and it rose in one motion, and the golden light that gathered between its jaws was different from the breath attack from before. This one was brighter and had far more mana inside of it. The temperature in the crater had begun to heat up as the light illuminated the area.
Students began stepping back.
Several followers retreated without deciding to.
The brown hair boy turned and took three full running steps before his momentum ran out, and he stopped and turned back, and realized he was the only one moving. His monkey looked at him. He looked at his monkey. The monkey smacked the back of his head and faced forward again.
Above them all, the dragon became something that looked like a second sun.
Arthur’s grin widened. "Vedas!"
The Goblin Warrior looked up.
The pillar of golden fire came crashing down.
Arthur didn’t move. "Slide!"
Vedas ran straight into it as the crater screamed.
Several students screamed.
The followers looked at the point where Vedas had been and collectively lost the ability to form words. Then Vedas dropped flat at the edge of the pillar and slid forward on his back, shield raised over his body, and the fire washed across the metal and the world outside the shield vanished into gold.
His armor blackened. The shield turned red. The heat was enough to make the air around it visible.
Then he came out the other side.
The entire crater froze.
Vedas pushed himself upright from underneath the front edge of the fire pillar, directly below the dragon’s jaw, and drove his shield upward in the same motion.
The edge of the cracked metal connected with Mephistopheles’s jaw, and the dragon’s head snapped back at the angle of something that had not been expecting impact from below.
Arthur pointed. "Climb!"
Vedas jumped, grabbed a scale, found the next one with his other hand, and pulled himself up the dragon’s neck. The crater made a sound that was less a cheer and more an expression of collective disbelief at a volume that carried past the trees.
"He’s on it!"
"He’s actually on it!"
"HE’S RIDING THE DRAGON!"
Vedas raised his shield and brought it down on the dragon’s back, and the BANG that produced rolled across the crater and back. He raised it and brought it down again. And again. Mephistopheles twisted and rolled and threw its weight sideways, and Vedas held on through three of these before the fourth threw him loose. He came down hard in a section of broken ground that did not cushion the landing in any meaningful sense.
Yet he stood again.
The dragon circled above, bleeding from more places than when it had first been hit. It was furious and wanted to unleash hell.
Arthur looked at Vedas. "This time we use the spear."
Vedas went still and he looked at Arthur. Realization appeared on his face, and he looked at the spear in his hand and then at the dragon above and then at Arthur again.
Arthur’s grin was the confirmation he needed. "Now!"
Vedas planted the spear vertically into the earth in front of him before rushing to it, and set his foot on the shaft of the spear. The spear bent under him and he rode the bend and it released, and the force that launched him upward.
The crater stopped making noise for the length of time it took everyone present to understand what they were seeing.
Vedas flew upward like something gravity didn’t apply to it.
His shield left his hand mid-flight and spun through the air. It connected with the side of Mephistopheles’s face with the force of everything behind it. The dragon’s head snapped sideways and the breath attack that had been building in its jaws fired outward in the direction the head had gone.
The golden fire erupted across the forest at the edge of the Entrance Realm.
The brown hair boy jumped out of the way and pulled the money with him. While other students and beasts near the flames rushed out of the way, some even rolled or dove away.
Vedas caught a scale on the way past the dragon’s neck and swung himself onto it and wrapped both arms around the neck and locked them there, and Mephistopheles immediately understood that the situation had changed in a way it did not have a framework for.
"Don’t let go!" Arthur’s voice came from below.
"NOT PLANNING TO!" Vedas yelled back, from above.
Arthur laughed. "GOOD PLAN!"
Mephistopheles stopped fighting like a dragon.
The wings beat once and the dirt and loose stone in the crater blasted outward. Then the dragon shot upward, and the crater shrank beneath them, and Vedas’s arms tightened around the neck even as the wind hit him hard enough to make breathing require active effort.
The dragon twisted.
Rolled.
Dove and pulled up and dove again. The sky and the ground alternating so quickly that Vedas lost track of which direction anything was in. His grip slipped on one exchange and for a second he was hanging from one arm with the ground very far below, and then he found another scale and pulled himself back and locked his arms again.
"NOT TODAY!" he shouted.
The followers below completely lost composure. The shouting from the crater had passed the point of individual voices and become something undifferentiated and total.
Mephistopheles drove itself directly into one of the crater walls.
The stone exploded outward and Vedas disappeared into the impact, and when the dragon pulled back and the dust cleared, Vedas was still there.
One eye had swollen nearly shut.
Blood covered most of his face.
His armor had stopped being armor some time ago and was now more of a suggestion. His arms were locked around the dragon’s neck with absolute conviction.
The noise from the crater became something that did not have a word for it.
Mithra was shouting while Melo’s tails were fully extended and all three eyes were open. The research girl was somehow writing notes and shouting at the same time. Even Cassian had moved to the edge of the crater, close enough that his shadow reached the edge of the blackened ground.
The dragon climbed higher.
Arthur was watching the wings.
The frequency was off by a second that would not have been visible in the earlier part of the fight. But Arthur had been watching those wings since the first movement, and knew Mephistopheles was losing steam.
"There it is," Arthur said.
Leon heard him.
Arthur pointed upward. "VEDAS! IT’S WORKING!"
Leon looked upward and his golden eyes widened.
He saw it too.
The Goblin Warrior looked down at the wings. He could feel the change in the rhythm from where he was. The turns were slower. The climbs were less sharp. The creature beneath him was still enormously powerful and would remain so, but for the first time in the fight it was struggling with something that wasn’t Vedas’s body.
"ONE MORE PUSH!"
Vedas’s arms tightened. His whole body went into it, every injury and every remaining reserve behind a single sustained pressure around the dragon’s neck.
Mephistopheles’s wings stumbled, and then stumbled again, and the crowd below went quiet as the understanding arrived in each of them at different speeds and reached the same destination.
The cheering faded.
The realization spread.
The dragon... could lose.
Leon moved.
It was the first time he had moved since the fight began, and every eye in the crater that was not on the dragon turned toward him. He looked up at Mephistopheles and for the first time, shouted. "Crush him! Mephistopheles!"
The crater froze at the sound of Leon’s voice.
Because no one present had ever heard Leon shout.
The moment lasted one full second before the dragon roared and threw everything it had left into the attempt.
But Vedas did not release.
The dragon’s wings slowed while its struggles became heavier and less coordinated. The body that had moved through the early part of the fight with absolute efficiency was working against itself now. Arthur watched the moment arrive when the wings stopped moving and it began rolling over to its side.
"NOW!"
Vedas let go.
Mephistopheles rolled and came down onto its back, and Vedas landed on top of it. Before the dragon could process the change in weight distribution, the first punch landed.
He thought of the words at the ceremony, the ones that had decided what he was before he had the chance to decide anything.
He punched.
He thought of every crowd that had looked at him with that particular certainty, the certainty that something was already settled, already decided, already over.
He punched.
Then he thought of a hand extended without hesitation underneath a vendor’s stall.
He punched.
He thought of Arthur pointing at him in the middle of a ruined battlefield and saying, with no evidence and total conviction, that he wasn’t inferior to a dragon.
He punched.
He thought of the word partner, said simply and without ceremony, as if it had always been obvious.
Both fists came up and came down together.
The sound traveled through the crater floor and up through the feet of everyone standing on it.
Then silence.
Mephistopheles lay still.
Vedas sat on top of the Golden Dragon with his arms hanging at his sides. His armor in pieces and his shield somewhere behind him and his spear in the ground thirty feet away. He sat there and breathed, and the crater was completely quiet.
Arthur threw both hands into the air. "HAHA! I told you! That’s my partner! I knew you could do it!"
The sound that followed was the crater finding its voice all at once. The followers were shouting things that had stopped being words.
The black hawk screamed.
The deer’s light pulsed in rapid succession.
The Taurus roared, and the crocodile answered it.
Melo ran forward with all three tails raised and stopped just short of the dragon’s side and looked up at Vedas with all three eyes bright.
Mithra laughed and pressed one hand over her mouth and laughed again.
The research girl was writing with one hand and gesturing at the scene with the other, explaining something to the owl, who appeared to already understand and agree.
The brown hair boy was sitting down on a piece of broken stone, doing calculations that appeared to be making him feel a range of things simultaneously.
Then the noise stopped all at once, because Leon was walking.
He crossed the crater in an unhurried manner, and he stopped in front of Mephistopheles. The dragon’s eye opened and found Leon’s face and stayed there. Leon looked at it, then at Vedas sitting on its side, then across the crater at Arthur.
The silence held.
Then Leon said two words.
"I lost."
Warmth spread through Arthur’s chest at the same moment, sudden enough that he put one hand against it, and a screen appeared that he was not expecting.
[Evolution Path Updated]
[Full Requirements Unlocked]
[Goblin Commander]
[Requirement 2:]
[Gain Loyalty of 10 Goblins]
Arthur stared.
Then read the first line again.
"...what?"
Comments