Chapter 685: A Whisper Away
My three companions threw themselves at the unbound dragon. Elaine led the charge, soaking the dragon’s fire breath with a defensive magical technique. Fable followed on her heels, biting down on the dragon’s wrist. His weight threw the monster off-balance, and it roared, swiping at him with its other claw.
Fyren struck like lightning, revealing himself from the thick fur hidden behind Fable’s massive horns. His sword bit deep into the dragon’s hand-like appendage, infernal mana seeping past the scales into the exposed wound. The ensuing explosion blasted him away, but Fable dislodged and caught him, landing on a mound of rubble that had once been a mansion.
The dragon roared, the wound gaping wide, refusing to mend. It opened its jaws and released a torrent of fire at the grounded pair, but Elaine intercepted it with a wave of her sword, sending an arc of mana into the heart of the attack and detonating it prematurely.
Furious, the dragon rounded on her, but Fable and Fyren had returned to the sky, attacking its hindquarters. Elaine slipped away as it roared in pain, readying her next move.
The fight that unfolded next was unlike anything I’d experienced in the flesh before. Shockwaves, errant blasts of magic, and chunks of terrain torn from the spire smashed across the vast spire, obliterating everything but a narrow space directly around me. There was nothing special about this location, but by pure chance, it remained untouched for the majority of the fight. It’d taken me hundreds of visions to find, but I’d made my way here the moment Fyren and I were reunited.
As the fight wore on, I began guiding my companions. The dragon’s soul overflowed with mana, telegraphing its intentions a full second in advance. That wasn’t much time, barely a blink, yet a panicked thought was all it took to let them know something was amiss. With their superior reaction times, a second was more than enough to respond to the danger. They could reposition and work together to figure it out themselves.
Elaine and Fyren coordinated perfectly in this regard, and even Fable, despite not using language, kept up. I could feel the thoughts racing through the conduits of Mind Link, yet the unfinished spell meant I wasn’t privy to anything not directly meant for me. It left me with half a picture of the fight, made worse by my severely limited senses.
As the battle drew out, the intensity escalated. Everything moved faster and faster, causing more explosions and kicking up great plumes of smoke. Even something as simple as Fable lunging at the dragon released shockwaves, not to mention anything Elaine or the dragon itself did.
Soon, the velocity and acceleration became too much. Fyren was the slowest of them all, and I had the help of my predictions, yet there was no following his movements. It was different in the visions, when everything was tuned to my perspective. More and more, I found myself reacting to the effects of their attacks rather than the actions themselves, forced to intuit why a crater had suddenly appeared or where the long cut on the dragon’s flank had come from.
A jagged spire exploded behind me, causing me to scream. Debris rained around me, chunks larger than mansions, cracking my wards. I whirled just in time to see Fable force himself out of the rubble and leap back at the dragon.
"Already?" I whispered, clutching my staff.