V2Ch105-The Distractions
As the dragon stared Tybalt down and rapidly charged its attack, two things happened at once: first, Edwig grabbed hold of Tybalt from behind again.
Second, as the flames gathered in the dragon’s throat, a great fireball - larger than any Tybalt had ever seen - flew into view and burst against the side of the great beast’s head.
The necromancer stared, fear and adrenaline coursing through him - a different kind of fear than before dominating his thoughts.
The dragon twisted his neck to the side - Tybalt saw, exposed in profile against the moonlight, the figure of the rider - and then the necromancer was gone, pulled below ground once more by the mummy’s Underworld Motion.
Fuck…
“Edwig, we need to surface again!” Tybalt ordered.
“Yes, master. I will find a safe place to surface.”
“You have to surface somewhere inside the town!”
“What? I… master?”
“You understood me correctly. That was definitely my fiancee’s fireball. She’s in trouble. She just caught the attention of a dragon to help me get away.”
“I’ll take you to her.”
“Good.”
They began moving around, swimming through the earth like it was water. The dragon’s flames did not chase after them this time, which made Tybalt fear what they might be doing to his fiancee instead.
Damn it, Ella, I told you weeks ago that I didn’t want you to die for me! If I have to go down, I’d rather go down alone. And now you’re pregnant too! Fuck!
After perhaps two minutes that felt more like thirty, the necromancer and the mummy emerged. They were right beside the town wall. Edwig had obeyed both Tybalt’s orders and his intent well. Mariella stood there, just a few feet away, breathless and sweaty but looking perfectly healthy.
Smoke had begun to fill the sky from the burning buildings, but all Tybalt could see right then was Mariella.
“Hey,” she said, panting. She curled her lips into a tired smile.
Don’t “Hey” me right now!
“Get out of here, Mariella!” Tybalt barked. “The dragon just wants me. You need to leave.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, but she shook her head instead.
“It’s completely ignoring me, anyway,” she said, pointing. “My fire didn’t do a damn thing.”
The necromancer turned and saw, a few hundred feet or so away, the dragon breathing flames onto buildings - and taking up the rest of its attention was Kistana, shooting her ballista-sized arrows. Tybalt could see her even at a distance, because she was leaping through the air, darting from rooftop to rooftop. The red Huntress aura that normally surrounded her was so bright and intense now that she looked almost like a miniature sun.
Yet the creature ignored her as best it could, keeping the arrows out of its face with its massive wings. Wherever they actually struck on its body, including the seemingly thin wing membranes, the projectiles bounced off harmlessly.
“My quarrel is not with you, cat!” the dragon bellowed in between destroying two buildings. “Desist!”
Tybalt felt two more zombies fade away and realized what the dragon was up to.
He’s targeting all those in the town who have succumbed to my infection. Trying to contain the spread? From the way he was talking earlier, he’s a bit of a humanitarian.
The necromancer reached out and felt for the threads of power binding the undead of Whadesport together. He thought he could pull at them, drain their undeath energy out to power himself up - a better use of that power than just letting it be dissipated when the creatures were destroyed. With enough power, perhaps he would stand a chance against the dragon.
He tugged at the threads, then frowned. A tiny stream of mana moved toward him. The energy was coming. This was a remarkably easy power for him to use, even without the skill for it, because he had an intuitive grasp of the structure and energy within his creatures. He had noticed it before, how easily he could unravel Baldwin if he chose.
But the undead he sought to reach were far away, and his pull wasn’t strong enough for him to draw the energy quickly. He would keep going, but this wasn’t going to let him overcome the beast in the next few minutes.
As his power worked its slow way back to him from the creatures, Kistana ignored the dragon’s words and kept shooting arrows. And the behemoth kept treating them as minor irritants rather than a serious threat.
“I’ve never seen Kistana’s aura look like that before,” Tybalt said, a little stunned by the sight in front of him.
She looks… so powerful and graceful.
The catgirl continued to zip around the town at incredible speed, completely undaunted by her failure to do any damage, moving to different angles of attack to try and get good shots at the dragon’s weakest points - mainly various efforts to shoot at the head, though she did not seem to have landed any arrows there yet. She moved more quickly and with greater assurance than Tybalt remembered. Her energy was palpable even from far off.
“You just bring out the best in us,” Mariella replied with a slight smile.
“Still, you get out of this place,” Tybalt said urgently.
“How about we all leave?” said another familiar voice that seemed to speak out of the open air.
Then Dero became visible.
“Kistana’s buying us a little bit of distraction, along with the dragon deciding it has a mission to wreck the town or something, so let’s go,” she said. She looked at Tybalt. “I heard you wanted my help anyway?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But the situation’s changed a bit.”
“How?” she demanded.
“We can’t just Teleport out like I was hoping. Dero, if you’re willing… I need you to get me close. Up into its face. I have an idea for how I might do some actual damage.”
“Why? Why the fuck can’t we just leave? This is crazy! That’s a fucking ancient dragon, Tybalt. Those scales are almost completely impervious to magic. You’re not going to ‘do some actual damage.’ You haven’t found a weak spot or something. More like you barely survived an encounter, and now you’re begging for death! Fuck. Why does it always have to be the hard way with you?”
“I would love to leave. But it has a way of finding me. It tracked the plague here! It found me through my mana signature when I was hiding in an alley. I didn’t do anything to get its attention but let a little mana leak out. If we ran away…”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence. From the tense expression on her face, he could tell that Dero understood.
The dragon would just track them down again. Or at least Tybalt.
“Fuck! Gods fucking - argh!”
“Just get me close, all right? Please. With your invisibility skill and teleportation. Let me try my thing as a stealth attack. Right near the dragon’s head.”
“Sure, let’s both fucking die.” Despite the choice of words, she gritted her teeth and nodded as she spoke.
“But first, get Mariella out of here,” Tybalt added.
“Wait, I- ”
Dero grabbed Mariella’s shoulder with one hand, disappeared, and then reappeared without her a moment later.
“Thank you,” the necromancer said.
A part of his brain noted things about the Teleport skill that he hadn’t perceived before. He could tell now that it wasn’t her destroying her own body and reconstituting it, as he had first imagined, but rather moving through an in-between place before reaching a new location. Magic Sense was good at picking up on those little details.
The void, he recalled. That’s how she’s described it.
“Mariella’s still in the town,” Dero reminded him. “I can’t Teleport in or out of Whadesport. Pretty sure this place has an anti-Teleport rune, so anyone passing through the walls would get… hurt, probably, let’s say. But I put her in a safer place than we’re at. She’ll be able to leave if she wants to.”
“Thank you,” he said again.
“Let’s just go before I regain my senses. Are you ready?”
“Give me just a minute.”
He pooled the gathered mana streaming in from his undead power sources in his chest and concentrated its potency for a solid thirty seconds, then nodded.
Dero stepped behind Tybalt and climbed onto the necromancer’s back. Then he saw the dark elf’s mana surge up and surround both of them.
He couldn’t tell exactly what was happening, but he could guess. He sensed the way that it interacted with the light, sending it to another plane of existence. Was it teleporting the light away?
Regardless of the mechanism, Tybalt knew they must be invisible.
Then they disappeared.
They reappeared in midair, just a few feet from the dragon’s head and slightly above.
As the beast closed its maw, fresh from unleashing another burst of its fire against a building, Tybalt reached parallel height with the creature’s head. He let loose a cloud of his own breath.
Breath of Decay.
The dragon’s nostrils twitched as it visibly inhaled at the same moment that Tybalt’s exhalation filled the air.
Yes! Yes!
The glowing yellow eyes widened, and then they glowed slightly more brightly. The irises began to follow Tybalt’s motion through the air, and the necromancer knew that somehow, Dero’s invisibility had been penetrated.
The jaws opened as if the dragon was already preparing to charge another burst of its fiery breath.
Then the effect of Tybalt’s Breath of Decay took hold.
The dragon’s scales, its tongue, its eyes, its teeth… Every part of its head began to rot.
The scales turned the ugly color of dishwater and started to peel away, the tongue turned gray and disintegrated into a little pile of ash within the open mouth, the eyes melted in their sockets, the teeth started to fall out.
Just as quickly, new scales sprouted from the flesh. A new tongue grew in the old one’s place. New eyes formed from where the congealed lumps of the old ones had been. New teeth grew.
The dragon gave the invisible flying duo an appreciative look, again making it obvious he could now see right through Dero’s skill.
“Good try.”
He charged mana through his throat and into his jaw, and Tybalt saw the concentrated energy turning into flames.
Then a massive crimson arrow flew right into the beast’s eye.
The great jaws snapped shut as the dragon let out a grunt of irritation. Pain?
“Stupid lizard! You forgot about me!” came Kistana’s voice.
Dero teleported herself and Tybalt back, out of the dragon’s potential line of fire but not out of the town. They were behind the dragon now. The necromancer got a view of Kistana, poised on an opposite rooftop, still clutching her bow. Sweat poured down her head, neck, arms, and legs, and her whole body shook with effort, but she conjured another giant crimson arrows and loosed it. Then another.
She and Tybalt’s eyes met for a fraction of a second in mid-arrow generation, and he saw she wore a determined grin. The catgirl was in her element. Her smile seemed to grow just a little wider when she saw the necromancer.
The dragon roared, towering over Kistana, his full attention on her for a moment.
She shook, and Tybalt felt a surge of the pressure that had almost paralyzed him before. The arrow she was midway through conjuring almost vanished, but she gritted her teeth and made it solid.
“I told you, my fight is not with you,” the dragon said with a snarl.
Tybalt barely saw what happened next. Out of the corner of the necromancer’s eye, the dragon’s tail whipped forward, blindingly fast. The great beast was apparently no longer in the mood to act mercifully. Tybalt could barely track the motion. He heard bone snap as it made contact with the catgirl, and she went flying. Dero jumped off of his back and teleported away, and then Kistana had disappeared too.
The dragon turned around, pointing its head back at Tybalt, and plucked the massive arrow from its eye. There was no apparent injury there. Just two intact eyes. Like the arrow had just been an irritant stuck under its eyelid. Tybalt felt somehow, absurdly enraged at the dragon for not being injured after all the effort Kistana had put in.
The monster stared the necromancer down.
It opened its mouth, the flames still there, still charged.
“Goodbye.”
The dragon breathed out - and Dero appeared beside Tybalt. She grabbed his arm, and they disappeared.
They reappeared by the town gate, and she dragged him, half-stumbling, through the now open doors. A crowd of people was pouring out, and they mingled with the group.
Then suddenly Tybalt found himself in the desert, far from anything. They had teleported again, he recognized.
“Where are we?” he managed, head jerking back and forth.
The dark elf let go of Tybalt and exhaled heavily.
“Middle of nowhere,” Dero said. “Hopefully it takes him time to track us here. We don’t know how good he is at that yet.”
“Thank y- ”
Then the dragon appeared, a massive presence cutting Tybalt off in the middle of a word.
“You cannot escape me, human,” he said, looking down at Tybalt and seemingly ignoring Dero. “I have a lock on you now.”
The great maw opened, and a torrent of flames poured forth.