Magma Dragon's Heir

45th of Season of Fire, Year 1197 AL

Mana gathered around Newt as noon approached, but it was thinner, weaker.

“They are killing me. Help me, please,” it whispered in a broken voice.

“I will. Don’t worry. Today we live or die together.”

“They have sensed that a large part of my attention is here. They are greedy ticks; they will hurry here the moment the celestial fire descends on you.” The voice hurried. “Seal the breach, it will sever their power—”

The flame descended, unfeeling and uncaring, cutting the mana’s words short. Newt channeled as much of it as Magmin could handle without injury into his friend. The rest he used to temper and expand his realm, but also to fill his mana reserve to the brim.

The flames passed, and mana’s faint whispers returned.

“They come. Seal the breach…”

Newt felt the urge to rush towards the crack, but he held firm, waiting for the final traces of mana to disappear, lest he give away his plan to the outer gods.

Finally, the last trickle of mana entered his body, and the world returned to balance. Like a shooting star, Newt flew towards the rendezvous point where saurian exalts and human forces awaited.

After twelve hours of flight, a sense of wrongness crawled its way into his heart. Something nasty and unnatural was approaching. Over the course of two hours, the sensation rose from a whisper to a scream. It warned not of danger, even though there was a sense of danger about it, but primarily his instincts told him that whatever was approaching could taint and twist him.

Newt shuddered; the prospect scared him more than death ever did.

The vileness reached its crescendo, then lessened. With every second, it grew quieter and quieter until two hours later, when it completely disappeared from Newt’s perception.

Twelve more hours of uneventful flight passed, the crack in the sky growing closer. Oddly, there was no particular wrongness about it, even as Newt reached the gathering of exalts a mere two thousand miles away from it.

“They all took the bait,” Newt said as he arrived, and the human exalts nodded. They too sensed the wrongness, and they sensed when it departed.

“You all know what you have to do,” he hissed at the saurians, who fanned out, moving towards the imperial forces, all except Magminion, who carried the human forces inside his realm.

“Let’s go.”

Magminion, Newt, and the rest of the human exalts flew straight towards the camp, and five hours later, they were within fifty miles of the settlement.

Newt’s mana sense detected the defenders. The human forces were in camps, waiting for the end of the world and for their overlords to take them to the next one.

Newt had expected wards and fortifications, exalts armed to the teeth and waiting, but that was not the case. The forces of the imperials and the cultists were celebrating in the ashes of the civilization they had destroyed.

Then, alarms sounded, and merriment turned to calls to arms and preparations. Auras flared, and Newt counted their enemies.

We haven’t lost yet. The situation was grim, but not the grimmest they could have imagined. Apparently, some exalts had been sacrificed along the way.

There’s one hundred and twenty-seven of them remaining. And the number of those beneath the seventh realm are practically negligible.

Exalts still outnumbered Newt’s forces two to one, but ninth realm saurians should hopefully even out the odds. As for the total number of combatants, imperials had less than two hundred thousand, but they made up for it in quality.

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While the imperials organized, Newt’s side approached, discussing their strategy as they took in the situation. Six minutes later, there was less than ten miles between them, and the imperial forces were ready for battle.

“Now,” Newt roared in snake speech, and in the next moment over one hundred saurian grandmasters appeared next to their overlords, chaos erupting a blink later as thousands upon thousands of saurians manifested out of thin air.

Terrified and maddened, they stormed towards the humans, and the carnage started.

The orderly warfare Grand Scholar had expected was nowhere to be seen—mayhem ruled. Bodies froze and crumbled, or exploded with flames and turned to ash. Rocks crushed some unfortunates, while others burst into blood and gore, slashed to pieces by cutting winds.

Newt saw a figure wearing the pure gold of an emperor and flew straight at them.

Newt’s evolvium glaive, the one he expected would follow him for life, had failed to keep up ever since he had reached the ninth realm, so Newt summoned a brilliant white glaive of blazing rock.

He swung at the imperial, who tried to block with his blade, but the tenth realm weapon melted upon contact with Newt’s conjured one.

Newt thought that was the end of the battle, but the imperial champion twisted his body, avoiding the fatal blow, losing an arm in the process. Newt punched before his enemy gathered his wits, blasting a hole through the emperor’s chest. He had killed a peak exalt in two exchanges that lasted less than a blink.

“You have ten seconds to help your people even out the odds,” an unknown voice spoke inside Newt’s mind. Newt looked up at the crack, seeing a part of an eye, its pupil focused on him. “Then you have to focus on closing the breach. You can slaughter all the mortals here, but if the vultures return before you sever at least a part of their power, you are doomed.”

A dozen questions sprouted in Newt’s mind within half a second of hearing the words, but a disciplined mind pushed them down. They weren’t important. He had enough time to find and eliminate ten to twenty of the toughest opponents, and that was what he would do.

Fortunately for him, after they saw him slay the man in golden robes, twelve cultists and ten imperials also wearing pure gold darted towards him.

Spears of metal, bone, blood, and fire shot towards him, as Newt coated himself in his pure white Magma Skin.

He dodged some missiles and blocked others, letting the spear of bone hit his leg to test its strength. It slammed into him like a rampaging trihorn, blasting off a chunk of his defense and sending him stumbling back, but even the direct hit he had allowed failed to really injure him.

Mana flowed out of Newt, refreshing his defense, and while the blow wasn’t dangerous, it had wasted some of Newt’s mana.

Dodge or parry. Newt acted on his decision, and in a matter of moments, the contest turned into an exchange of ranged techniques.

Newt defended for what he perceived as a whole minute, then found his chance and shot a blast of white-hot rock at the bone cultist who seemed to be the most invested into attacking him.

A white bullet flew so fast it looked like a beam. It struck the cultist’s head, blasting it to pieces, and the man fell. A woman wearing blood-red robes flew down to gather the body, but another bullet claimed her head.

“Don’t let your guard down!” A man in golden robes shouted, earning himself a bullet. It should’ve blown away his head, but he twisted, losing his lower jaw and all the teeth from his upper jaw.

He bellowed, but blinded by pain, he failed to spot the second bullet in time. Down below, ninth realm saurians started fighting amongst themselves, tearing at the bodies.

“Focus!” Newt roared, but the momentary lapse in attention resulted in a condensed boulder smashing into his shoulder.

The rock melted, shattering a part of Newt’s defense, and before he could regain his balance, a spear of bone smashed into his side.

Newt took two more hits before pushing his barrier a foot away from his body. He shrank it a moment later, but it had already soaked a dozen blows, wasting mana.

A second had passed, three enemies were dead, but the other nineteen had turtled up.

A ghost cultist dodged Newt’s next bullet, wasting it. He settled into defending again, looking for an opportunity rather than forcing it. He tried to fly closer, but they pulled back, showering him with conjured projectiles.

Newt retreated before the hail of magical missiles. Time worked against him and this stalemate was his enemy; the only good sign were the pained expressions of exalts wasting their precious mana.

They want to deal with me while preserving the most mana they can, but they saw that overextending or losing focus would get them killed.

Newt considered forcing an opening, trading a waste of mana for killing one of them, but eliminating one of nineteen wouldn’t change anything.

Shimmer answered Newt’s doubts. She blew a breath of dragonfire at his opponents, breaking their momentum as they shielded themselves. It was a split instant, and in that split instant, Newt was amongst them.

In melee, his physical advantage and mana superiority fully shone. He was a whirlwind of white, slashing and shooting bullets in all directions. The exalts disengaged, only seven of them alive, twelve bodies falling lifelessly towards the ground, some severed in half, others missing their heads or with gaping holes in their torsos.

I can deal with seven. Newt charged towards them again, thinking how he should reward Shimmer if they both survived the battle.