The Dragon Heir

I had half-expected the crowd below to dissolve into panic. That would have been the reasonable response to cart-sized volleys of fire dropping out of the sky like some kind of deranged meteor shower.

Instead what followed was something closer to… recognition.

A bell started up somewhere in the city, cutting across the streets with the specific cadence of something that had been rung for this exact purpose many times before. People moved fast, but not badly. No one was climbing over anyone else. The red cores pushed forward almost in unison, forming a line as they activated a barrier that spread across the square below in one clean motion.

Even Alexei, who had visibly startled, recovered within seconds. I could feel mana activating through several of the accessories he was wearing. Defensive enchantments, in all likelihood.

As it turned out, unnecessary.

The moment the first projectile entered the edge of my perception I reached out and crushed it. I was still not entirely accustomed to the particular way my mana handled momentum. Anything moving fast simply ceased to move when I willed it to, as though the world briefly forgot what motion was and had to be reminded. It was effective and slightly wasteful and I was still calibrating the middle ground between the two.

It got the job done.

Below, several of the flaming volleys broke apart against the barrier over the square and dispersed without consequence. The barrier held cleanly. The ones that found the buildings around the city rather than the square were a different matter — nobody intercepted those.

Which showed me something I hadn't fully registered yet.

These structures were absurdly resilient.

I had already noticed that the architecture here was built to a scale that suggested the original designers had expected very large occupants. But projectiles of that size, moving at that speed, and the buildings simply cracked. They didn't fall. Nothing came down. A few new lines appeared in the stonework and that was the full extent of the damage.

More to the point, this did not feel like a surprise attack.

The response was too clean and too rehearsed. The kind of efficiency that didn't come from training alone but from repetition, from having done exactly this enough times that the body moved before the mind finished processing the alarm.

Which raised the obvious question of who, exactly, kept making the decision to attack them.

I had been drawing a comfortable amount of information out of Alexei up until this point. Several threads had started finding each other in my head, but there were still gaps that mattered. It appeared those gaps would need to wait their turn.

I kept my expression composed and turned back toward the window.

"Well," I said, "it seems you have your own situation to attend to before we continue our pleasant little exchange. From the look of things outside, this would qualify as a surprise attack — and yet the people here seem remarkably unsurprised by it."

Alexei was tense, but he managed a laugh, the dry and thoroughly humourless kind.

"You get used to it after the hundredth time," he said. "Particularly when the enemy in question has made a habit of striking without warning." His eyes moved toward the burning sky. "I mentioned earlier that this place already had its own inhabitants when we arrived. Some of them have been content to leave us alone."

A pause as the second wave of fire volleys struck. None landed closer this time.

"Others have not. A few of them have been very committed to the idea of wiping us out entirely. For a while they came fairly close to managing it. And one of them even believe this city is sacred ground and that our presence defiles it. In their eyes we're trespassers squatting on something that belongs to them."

I filed that away.

I had already understood that collecting the keys was not going to be a clean or simple business. If anything, looking at the full shape of what Alexei had described, it was beginning to seem as though my own purpose here might be wound up in exactly that — finding the remaining keys, seeing the trial through to whatever it was supposed to become.

The more I gathered, the more I found myself returning to the same conclusion.

This place might be the very first trial the Colosseum had ever built.

There were still details that didn't sit flush against that theory. And I had no reliable way of knowing yet how far back I had landed. But everything I had collected so far was pointing in the same direction, and the evidence was not being subtle about it.

A trial that barred anyone above red core from entering. Inside it, participants clearing challenges supposedly laid down by a dragon. The first phase — the tournament that selected the champions — hadn't even been part of the trial proper. That had been something the sects constructed themselves out of necessity and collective anxiety.

But that didn't meaningfully undercut the theory.

The overall skeleton was still standing.

Perhaps the whole thing had simply grown as time moved through it. Modified by whoever had their hands on it at the right moment, or adapted by the system itself as circumstances demanded things of it. That particular question could wait. It wasn't the pressing one.

The pressing one was simple enough.

To finish my own trial, I needed those keys.

I already had one, technically. I had allowed Alexei to keep it for now — he needed to present it to his leader, and I had no immediate use for it sitting in my hand. But I would want it back eventually. I wanted to test it properly, get a feel for exactly what kind of power lived inside it.

"If they've managed to strike without being detected this many times," I said after a moment, "and if this has been going on as long as it sounds like it has — I assume you tried building some kind of early warning system."

Alexei nodded grimly . "We did. Enchantments, detection wards, every sensing tool anyone could think of or construct. None of it registered them. Whatever magic they're using to move doesn't fit the categories our systems understand. We suspected spatial mana initially, or perhaps a dark mana variant with a strong concealment specialization. But it appears to be a combination more advanced than anything we have a reliable counter for."

Unlawfully taken from NovelFire, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

A small shake of his head.

"Working that out cost us a significant number of lives."

His gaze drifted back toward the sky where burning streaks were still falling in long patient arcs, indifferent to whatever was happening on the ground below them.

"So now we focus on the one thing that actually holds. Defense."

I turned that over quietly.

Advanced elemental combinations were not something most people ever genuinely understood. The basics were common enough, but once elements reached advanced states the interactions between them became a different subject entirely, one that most people never lived long enough or trained hard enough to read fluently. That gap hadn't closed in the present day either, from what I had gathered. Some people understood those combinations. Possibly entire institutions did. But that knowledge lived behind doors that were kept very deliberately shut.

Gwen had implied, more than once, that outside this continent the picture was somewhat different.

Still.

A concealment method that slipped past conventional detection entirely.

That sat next to something familiar.

My own Quantum concealment did exactly that. My upgraded stealth folded around magical perception as well, moving through it without disturbing it the way a hand moves through smoke.

Were these attackers using something in that family?

I supposed I was about to find out.

They had interrupted what had been a genuinely productive conversation, after all. That was rude. And if someone was going to be rude to me, I saw no particular reason to absorb it quietly.

I had just reached that conclusion, nodding slightly to myself, when a familiar voice arrived through the Observer's Mark.

"I would strongly advise against whatever you are currently considering, main body."

Ah.

Curious Clone.

I shifted my focus along the link connecting us. Through it I found her standing on the massive wall that ringed the city — the one that housed the enormous serpentine creature I had clocked earlier, still apparently dormant.

While I had been sitting here drawing information out of Alexei, I had not exactly been idle on other fronts. I had been cycling clones in and out at intervals. Lazy Clone and Terrorist Clone had been running rotations through the underground cathedral as their timers burned out and reset, keeping watch just in case they were still somehow indirectly spying on me.

I had the tools to avoid leaving blind spots.

It would have been wasteful not to use them.

Curious Clone, meanwhile, had been sent outside to explore.

Sitting still had its own advantage. It let Core Stabilization do its work in the background, steadily refilling my mana while I ran the clone rotations on the side. Efficient and very tidy. This system rewarded patience, which I was perfectly capable of when the situation called for it.

And now Curious was the one speaking.

I didn't hear her talk often, so it still landed strangely— my own voice coming back at me with all the warmth carefully removed from it, like someone had taken the original and adjusted the settings downward until only the functional parts remained.

'Did you find something?' I asked through Observer's Suggestion.

The clones carried whatever I knew at the moment of their creation, and since I had been cycling them continuously throughout the conversation with Alexei, Curious already had the full picture.

"Negative. No immediate threat detected." A brief pause. "However. You are about to intervene in an ongoing engagement while your true capabilities remain unregistered by every organization present in this trial. There are at least seven separate factions operating here. Strength assessments across all seven are incomplete. Acting now would close a window that will not reopen."

She paused again.

"This place exists to test you. The test does not distinguish between enemies and obstacles. Caution has served you. Abandoning it for what is essentially a property dispute would be suboptimal."

That was fair.

It was also getting exhausting, being reasonable all the time. I thought about it for a few moments.

'What if there's a smarter play than just staying hidden?'

"A façade," she said. "Yes. I was waiting for you to arrive at that."

'You were waiting for me?'

"You took eleven seconds longer than projected."

I suddenly felt a strange urge to throttle something.

'I was being thorough!'

"You were just looking out the window."

'That's part of being thorough—'

"Main body."

'Fine. Yes. A façade. I was already thinking that.'

"I know. I suggested it first."

'You suggested it four seconds ago.'

"Eleven seconds after you should have." Curious continued without waiting for my reply. "Anyways, yes, a controlled façade would outperform pure concealment in the current context. It allows you to shape their expectations into a predictable configuration, which in turn increases the likelihood they will reveal their own intentions without realizing they are doing so. You have sufficient ability to maintain it without strain."

Yes. That was exactly where my thinking had been going.

Then something else caught my attention.

'Why do you talk like that?'

"Like what."

'Like a very impatient golem librarian.'

"I select words for maximum information delivery and minimum misinterpretation risk," she said. "This is necessary because the main body has a recurring tendency to—"

"I do not have a tendency!"

The words were out of my mouth before I had finished deciding to say them aloud rather than through the link.

Silence. I kept my face composed and did not look at Alexei.

Alexei, for his part, developed a sudden and intense interest in the middle distance.

Right.

Curious had a little under four minutes left on her timer. I left her to whatever she had found outside and returned my attention to the room and the more immediate question of what, exactly, I was going to do next.

The façade idea was the right one. Rather than letting anyone here form an accurate picture of what I was actually capable of, I could hand them a different picture entirely. Something manageable. Something that didn't raise questions I wasn't ready to answer.

A support-type power, perhaps. That would do nicely.

I glanced at the table sitting between us.

Then I lifted it into the air. I could easily use it to carry both of us down there.

"How long are you planning to stand there?" I asked him. "Shouldn't we go help your people?"

Alexei looked at me for a moment like he hadn’t expected that question or my help at all. I almost rolled my eyes. He really was treating me like some unpredictable fae creature now, wasn’t he?

“Well… I don’t think that will be necessary,” he said, sounding a little frustrated.

“Oh?”

“You see, whenever those people start their attacks like this, it usually means they’ve already infiltrated the city. The volleys of fire are mostly for show. A distraction.” His expression hardened. “The real danger is something far worse.”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a small spherical construct before tossing it toward me.

“This is a defensive ward designed specifically to counter them. Keep it on you at all times and make sure you feed it mana regularly—”

He never finished the sentence.

“WATCH OUT!”

The scream tore out of him just as something punched through my chest.

Only then did I realize there was a massive black spear sticking straight through my torso, pinning me in place from chest to back.

Hoh.

I licked my lips as I felt my mana spike upward in response. The spear carried poison as well. Interesting.

It took a moment for the pain to properly register.

I turned my head and looked behind me.

What had materialized there resembled a goblin in the same approximate way that a house fire resembles a candle. The base shape was there, technically, but it had been extensively modified. Scales covered the skin. The maw was wrong, too wide and too full of the wrong kind of teeth. Leathery and veined wings folded behind it, and several other draconic features distributed themselves across its body in ways that should not have worked together and somehow did, producing something that landed in between grotesque and almost impressive.

It was grinning widely, the kind of grin a cat wore after stealing cream.

Victory.

That expression curdled the moment it registered that I was looking back at it with the calm interest of someone who had found an unusual insect.

In its hand a large runic construct of condensed mana rotated slowly, the same one that had produced the spear currently occupying my chest cavity.

“FILTHY SLAVE!” it snarled. “KEEP YOUR GAZE LOW!”

Twenty more dark spheres erupted from the construct.

They tore through my body in the next instant.

For a moment, I suppose, I technically qualified as minced meat.