Magma Dragon's Heir

47th of Season of Fire, Year 1197 AL

Newt touched the crack, and everything vanished from his perception. Time and space became illusions as he viewed the truth of the multiverse. He lived on but a pebble, a shining pearl of life floating through the dark ocean carried by currents beyond his understanding.

Empty husks shaped like the outer gods that had entered the world loomed over the pearl motionless. Their forms were gigantic before the world, but beyond them loomed something bigger. Its titanic eye moved and focused on the tiny speck of dust that was Newt.

“You don’t have time for this, and your mind is about to snap if you keep pushing. Burn the rift away to sever the connection between their minds and their bodies. Whatever stays on your side is yours to keep, the rest is my payment.”

Newt blinked and he was next to the golden crack.

He focused and sent a surge of mana into his hand. Then, he touched the rift and it caught fire as if soaked in oil, the gold burning white. He closed his eyes, and kept sending mana to feed the flames and stop them from spreading uncontrollably. For some reason, he had a feeling that when combined with the rift, they wanted to consume the world just like the outer gods.

Hardly a second had passed before something in the rift resisted. Three ropes as thick as trees pulsated with energy, trying to extinguish the flames, but the rift wanted to burn.

No, that’s wrong. Newt got a better feeling for what was happening after focusing. The world wants the rift gone and it’s helping me incinerate it.

***

This is no good, High Emperor Twinstrike observed the battlefield. Both sides were fighting conservatively, thankfully with only that monstrous red-haired exalt slaying anyone. He was so young, looking like he had freshly turned twenty, his potential blazing more strongly than his mana.

Thankfully, after making short work of twenty-three elites under his command, the red-haired monster left the battle. He loomed there, trying to seal the rift in space and time by burning it. A foolish notion, but as long as he stayed out of the fight, they had a chance.

Still, losing twenty-three exalts was a full fifth of what they had, and nearly half of their real elites. No, the best approach was not to antagonize him; as for the battle itself, he had two choices. One was to fight till the end, until both sides destroyed each other. He didn’t like that option. Even if his side won, the exalt calmly floating above the battlefield would make short work of wounded and exhausted, annihilating them in seconds. Twinstrike assumed that was his play, sending his subordinates to death, then sweeping through the imperial forces.

The second choice, the wiser one, was to retreat until the gods arrived.

They were at least as powerful as the red-haired exalt, and three on one, they would make short work of him.

Like everything he had done in his life, he acted decisively. “Retreat! Fall back orderly, minimizing losses.”

***

Yew, missing an arm, was looking death in the eyes.

“Retreat! Fall back orderly, minimizing losses.” The cry boomed over the battlefield, and Yew couldn’t believe his luck.

The madwoman before him glared at him, and he knew she would go for one final attack before she obeyed the order. He gritted his teeth, ready to dodge.

Her legs tensed, as did his. He moved, she moved faster. Pain flared from his chest. He fell, mana torrenting out of his body like water from a breached dam.

She stood above him, his heart in one hand, the other arm hanging limply. In the last moment, he must have taken a pound of flesh in retaliation, even if he didn’t remember it. Still, she grinned.

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She opened her mouth and took a bite out of his heart.

“Not too bad for an old scuttler’s heart.”

Yew’s vision blurred, and the last thing he saw as the world darkened was a bloody grin.

***

“Alas, it seems we will have to disengage for now, and won’t get to fight to the death.” The Thundertitan smiled at Gatemaster Greenthorn. “Do you intend to stop me, young one, or may I make my retreat unhampered?”

Greenthorn inclined his head, not dropping his guard for a blink. He sensed at least one exalt die after the retreat had sounded. While he could see some of the imperial forces disengage, it could be an elaborate ruse to slay the unwary.

The Thundertitan didn’t seem nearly as tense as Greenthorn as he moved away. He made no sudden attacks and moved languidly, but there was not a single chink in his defenses.

“I hope we speak again under more pleasant circumstances.”

The cultists and imperial supporters retreated, their forces followed by saurians beneath the sixth realm, whipped into frenzy by fear and the corpses they had consumed or fought over with the cultists attempting to fuel their vile arts.

While losses amongst the exalts seemed insignificant, the same wasn’t true amongst the lower realm fighters. Some of the ninth realm saurians that tried to match human exalts were wounded, though none were dead, which was surprising.

As for ninth realm humans and lower realm saurians, things weren’t quite as good.

Ten out of the one hundred and forty-three human grandmasters were dead, with the losses growing worse the lower the realm.

What are they thinking? Greenthorn wondered. Did they prepare a trap of some kind? Is it a seal?

Greenthorn looked around, exalts were gathering in one place and he followed them, quickly concluding they were all coming to see who had died. He was in for a shock when he got there.

The Grand Scholar? That was bad. He was their strongest human exalt, right after Newstar.

The man’s body was broken, a gaping hole in his torso. It had seemed so powerful in life and yet so frail in death.

“What now?” Sunset Shadow said what they were all thinking.

“We wait,” Patriarch Swordpeak said with the confidence he certainly didn’t feel.

***

“Why did we retreat?” the eldest ghostqueen and the most powerful member of the four cults shrieked at Twinstrike.

He looked at her like she was an idiot and pointed towards the sky and the menace still wasting insane amounts of mana to burn a mile-wide crack.

“For all of those who were too absorbed in your fights, and I know there are such amongst us,” he gave his cannibal descendant a hard stare, “that man over there took nine and a half seconds to dismantle a force of twenty-three exalts while suffering no injuries.”

Several disinterested sets of eyes, mostly resting on empty heads, looked up towards the threat.

“Had he not flown up into the sky to burn the rift immediately, we would’ve all been dead, along with all our forces. It would’ve taken him ten minutes at most to kill all of us, even if we all stood together, because the saurians seem to obey him.”

The flaming dragon exalt flying beneath his feet was a dead giveaway, but there was also the dragon that had distracted the ones who went to kill him. Neither could have possibly been accidents.

“As such, I have decided to act and save all our lives until combatants on his level joined us.”

“He is trying to seal the rift,” the ghostqueen shrieked something painfully obvious to everyone with eyes to see.

The rest of the exalts just observed the dynamics between the two most powerful sides. Which was fine with Twinstrike, they only needed them as fodder once they entered the new world and its unknown danger, the way the cults had used his ancestors ages ago.

“Yes,” he confirmed her obvious statement. “He is. Alone. Trying to seal a rift that had devoured tens of billions of lives and dozens of exalts and countless others. A rift kept open by three gods. What are his odds of closing it?”

“None,” the ghostqueen said with fanatic zeal.

“And, since that’s the case, why not let him waste his energy on it? He can’t have infinite mana, and the gods said they would be back in forty hours. It’s been just over thirty-one hours. Even if he could seal the breach, the ritual to do so had taken a decade. There’s no chance he can do it without spending years on it.”

Twinstrike smirked. “He doesn’t understand the forces he’s up against, and while he certainly is powerful enough to slay us with ease, that’s making him overconfident.”

The ghostqueen seethed. She couldn’t make herself admit Twinstrike was right. Millennia of hate and mutual killings had made their cooperation next to impossible, and had it not been for divine signs demanding they join into a single force, it would never have happened.

“I still don’t like it,” she finally said. “If this turns into a disaster because of this delay, it’s all on your head. We could have killed them all if we were decisive enough.”

Twinstrike nodded with dignity. He agreed with her final statement, but if they lost nearly all of their forces here, who would they have to pave the path in the new world? Sometimes, the zealots were incredibly short-sighted.