Chapter 262 - East
On the eastern battlefield, Lucy stood against the Azure Dragon, heart beating wildly.
The Azure Dragon uncoiled across the sky, mist trailing from its scales as it moved. Its golden eyes found Lucy and it stared directly at her.
Lucy took a deep, nervous breath. She was not nervous often. It was just a game. An exhilarating game, but ultimately nothing more than fiction. She had no reason to be unironically nervous…
Except… Lumi.
Her paycheck now depended on her performance. And thus she snarled and stared back. She held six daggers sat between her fingers, three in each hand, with imperceptible strings attached to each. The strings ran from the pommels to rings on her fingers, thin enough to barely be seen by the naked eye. She fixated on them, knowing her performance would decide everything.
The dragon roared and the storm above it answered. Lightning was cracking down
Lucy was already moving. Running, low and fast, her feet finding the gaps between lightning strikes before they even landed. The first bolt hit where she had been standing. The second hit where she had dodged. The third she slid under, her back against the dirt, and she felt the heat pass over her face close enough to sting.
The dragon tracked her with its eyes and sent a wall of wind shearing across the plain. Lucy jumped. The wind caught her midair and she let it take her, riding the force backward while she flicked two daggers outward.
The strings followed. The daggers embedded in the ground thirty feet apart and Lucy yanked herself sideways, pulling her body out of the wind's path entirely.
The dragon's head snapped toward her new position. Its mouth opened and mist poured out, rolling across the ground toward her.
That…
Lucy had no idea what it was. Probably poison mist. But even if it was something else, it didn't matter. The point was she couldn't touch or breathe it in.
The mist was wide enough such that left or right, there was no escape. But Lucy was already familiar with what to do in these scenarios.
Lucy threw two stars upward at an angle, then yanked the strings. The stars hooked onto nothing, nothing except each other, and the force of the pull launched her straight up over the mist cloud. She flipped twice in the air and threw a single dagger down into the trunk of a tree, then pulled herself toward it hard. Her body shot sideways and she caught the tree with both feet, crouching against the bark.
The mist passed beneath her.
The dragon's tail came around and shattered the tree at its base.
Lucy was already in the air again. She threw a star at the falling trunk, caught it, and used the momentum to swing herself around to the other side. The trunk hit the ground and she rode it down, crouched low, her eyes never leaving the dragon.
Fast!
That was the first thing Lucy noticed. The Azure Dragon was too fast for her. Every exchange took everything she had just to survive, and she hadn't even touched it yet.
The dragon coiled and suddenly lunged at her like a spring while its jaws opened wide enough to swallow her whole.
Lucy threw four stars at once at the ground around her in a semicircle. The strings went taut and she pulled, yanking herself flat against the dirt and sliding forward directly under the dragon's head. The jaws snapped shut above her. She felt the wind of it, heard the clack of teeth the size of her arm.
She didn't have the time to even grin at the success. Her breath was heavy as she finally caught sight of her destination. The dragon's throat.
Her hands moved as her two daggers stabbed upward, one into each side of the jaw. The dragon immediately flew back up, and she yanked the strings and pulled herself up onto the dragon's own head.
The dragon froze for half a second. It was not used to things climbing onto it.
Lucy drove a dagger down toward its eye.
The dragon shook its head violently and she was thrown off before the blade landed. She tumbled through the air and threw a star behind her, catching a protruding rock, yanking herself out of the path of the dragon's snapping jaws by inches. Her shoulder wrenched painfully in its socket but she didn't let go. She redirected her trajectory, swung wide around the dragon's flank, and landed in a crouch thirty feet away.
"Hah… hah…" Her breath was weak as her heart pounded in her ears. She felt… alive. Yet annoyed at once. It was contradictory, but she couldn't dwell on the feeling. The dragon turned to face her again and its eyes were different now.
It had expected to kill her by now.
Lucy's lips pressed together. She hadn't landed a real hit yet. Nothing that mattered. A scratch on the jaw, maybe. That was it. The dragon was still pristine, still untouched in any way that counted, and she was already burning through her stamina just staying alive.
The dragon's chest expanded. Mist began to gather around its throat again, thicker than before, and Lucy knew this would be bigger.
She threw three stars to her right, embedding them in a line along the ground, and pulled herself sideways in a sequence of sharp jerks. The mist erupted in a cone, covering the entire area she had just been in, and she kept pulling, kept moving, refusing to stop even as her arms screamed.
A bolt of lightning came down directly in her path.
Lucy reversed her pull mid-motion, snapping herself backward, but the shockwave caught her anyway. She tumbled, lost control of one of her strings, and hit the ground hard on her side.
"Shit!" She quickly checked her HP, relieved it was still over half.
She rolled to her feet immediately. The dragon was already coiling for another attack.
"Lucy!"
The voice came from her left, but she didn't turn. She couldn't afford to take her eyes off the dragon.
Lena landed beside her in a crouch, having teleported in from somewhere across the field. Her wand was already raised. "You looked like you needed help!"
"Help." Lucy threw a knife at the dragon's face. It dodged effortlessly, but that wasn't the point. The point was making it blink.
Lena cast without hesitation. "Blessing!"
Golden light wrapped around Lucy's body, sinking into her skin. She blinked. A buff? How come she hadn't been given one earli-
She removed the thought from her head. It wasn't important now.
"Holy Arrows!" Lena sent three bolts of golden light shooting toward the dragon's face. They weren't strong enough to do real damage, but they were bright, searing bright, and the dragon turned its head away from the flash.
Lucy moved.
She noticed the difference in speed. It wasn't absurd, but she was certainly faster now. She closed the distance, throwing two stars wide to either side, their strings trailing behind her. The dragon's head swung back toward her and she dove, sliding under its chin, and crossed the strings behind its neck as she passed.
She pulled.
The strings went taut against the dragon's throat. It wasn't even remotely strong enough to seriously harm the dragon, but the thin wire bit into the scales, and the dragon felt it. It shook its head in irritation and Lucy used the resistance to swing herself up onto its back.
The dragon thrashed immediately. "Hah!" She drove a dagger into a gap between scales to anchor herself and held on as the beast bucked and twisted. Her other hand threw stars at the base of its skull, each one finding the same spot, chipping away at a single scale.
The moment the scale cracked, the dragon roared and rolled. Due to the roll, Lucy had to instantly let go. She kicked off its back, threw a star at a nearby rock formation, and pulled herself clear just as the dragon's full weight hit the ground where she had been.
She landed next to Lena, breathing hard. Her hands were shaking now. The blessing was still active but it couldn't stop the accumulated strain of everything she had done.
"It's too fast," Lucy said between breaths. "I can't keep this up."
Lena nodded, and noticed that Lucy wasn't at max health. She hadn't had time to drink a potion and she would make sure she wouldn't need to right now. "Heal!"
Lucy felt the warmth go through her, and she let out a small nod of acknowledgement.
The dragon rose from its roll and faced them both. Its eyes flicked between Lucy and Lena, reassessing. There were two opponents now. One it could not catch, and one it had not yet figured out.
Lucy flexed her fingers around her daggers. The strings were still intact. She had enough stars left. She had enough left for several more exchanges.
The dragon's tail lashed and it charged.
Lucy threw a single star directly at its face. The dragon didn't bother dodging, the star bounced harmlessly off its scales, but Lucy was already pulling on a different string, which was the one she had left embedded in the ground behind the dragon during her earlier swing. She yanked herself sideways, perpendicular to the charge, and the dragon's momentum carried it past her.
"Blessing!" Lena cast again, renewing the golden glow around Lucy's limbs. Then, "Holy Arrows!" Three more bolts of light streaked toward the dragon's eye balls. The dragon turned its head away, but in doing so, allowed Lucy free time to move and set up as she wanted.
The dragon turned back and…
Where was Lucy?
It suddenly sensed her, and it turned to follow Lucy as its tail swept toward her legs. She jumped, but the tail was faster than she had calculated. It clipped her foot and she spun out of control. "Damn!"
She was so close, she wouldn't accept this! She was practically next to its head, so threw out three more throwing stars, eager to hit the broken scale.
She couldn't confirm the result. She had thrown a fourth star, which she had felt it catch something, and pulled. The string redirected her momentum just enough that she hit the ground on her shoulder instead of her head.
Her HP dipped again. Lena was already casting Heal before Lucy even stood up.
Lucy watched it back. Faintly, she saw some nearly imperceptible scale fragments fall from its head.
Her mind raced through options. She had hit it three times now, a scratch on the jaw, and twice on the cracked on the back of its skull. Neither mattered. Though she wanted to create and focus a weak point, was that working, or was she deluding herself?
She needed to find something that would actually hurt it, but the dragon's scales were too thick everywhere she could reach.
Everywhere except the eyes. The mouth. The reverse scales, if the myths were true.
The myths were always true.
But getting to the reverse scales meant getting under the dragon's chin while it was aware of her, while it was watching for exactly that. She had already gone down there once, which meant the dragon was likely hyper-aware of the possibility.
She glanced at Lena. "Can y-" She didn't even need to finish her thought, because Lena was already casting spells.
Lena grinned. She noticed that for some reason, the dragon was sensitive to light. She didn't know why, nor did she care right now.
She was spamming Holy Arrows aimed in a wide arc above and around them, each one bursting with bright golden light. It was a light show, nothing more, but it was a light show that filled the dragon's entire field of vision with searing brilliance.