The Calamitous Bob

Viv stood her ground while the rest of the fighters scattered, and the camp attendants scrambled back to the cover of the forest. Her defiance triggered something in the diving dragon. His attention zeroed on her.

It was so… feral.

She felt it like a physical weight pushing down on her, attempting to crush her before she could even fight. Her leadership and intimidation rose in response. They spoke of her soul, and said she would not fall so easily.

But she still, for one brief moment, let that fear overwhelm her. She allowed it to take hold of her, forcing a gasping breath from her lungs, flooding her veins with cold terror. She stared at the dragon like one stared at the sun. It was… the stuff of legend. As large as a plane. He had scales for water, fire in his belly, four solid legs for earth, and wings for the air. He was the wrath of the world itself, and it twisted to answer his call. Her breath ran short. The dust rose, ready to betray her, to slip under her soles, revealing the rocks underneath. She would be crushed, molten, burnt, and asphyxiated. This was the end of many stories. This was the kingdom destroyer. The prime antagonist of so many tales. Sometimes, evil incarnate. Viv allowed this terror to fill her and savored it.

And then, she crushed it.

"Deadland domain."

Pure black mana expanded around her in a sphere, cutting off the dragon's access. Now, the space around her was hers. It existed under her dominion. 'Always a chance' picked up to bolster her attacks. Her magic flared angrily to answer the call of the elemental war caster.

The dragon slowed down. Viv felt his surprise from the way he moved. She expected him to circle her instead but he kept diving, certain of his victory and uncaring about her status. He really meant to kill her. Mana gathered in an undirected wave to attack her but she blocked it with aegis, none of the hexagonal pieces even breaking. The unfocused mana scattered around her in an undirected assault, melting, burning, breaking, killing vegetation outside of the blighted circle by saturating it with mana. There was so much of it. Viv didn't have time to think about the others. She had to be ready for the next attempt aaaand here it was.

The dragon opened his mouth and spat fire.

An orange sphere expanded in Viv's eye, spreading to smother her from every direction. It was all above her like an umbrella and it was so. Damn. Bright. Like a second dawn. The orange blaze grew in intensity as it fell and she answered, even as the temperature rose.

"Nuée."

A thick black ball rose to meet the attack with a thud and then it exploded. A thick cloud of black mana expanded upward, a black breath to answer the red. Even as the two collided, sweat already covered Viv's brow. It was so far and yet so damn hot.

Around her, embers fell, igniting all that was left of the field. What it touched turned to glass while cries echoed behind her. The forest was catching on fire but Viv was too busy to do anything about it.

She felt her spell collide with the fire and knew it wouldn't be enough. It was like stopping a flood with a flimsy door. Her advanced stats allowed her to supercharge the spell and so she desperately flooded it with power until her conduits hurt. The cloud darkened, thickened. It was a plume of darkness swallowing fire up like a voracious tongue. Black and red fought for annihilation under the summer sky. Viv's core pulsed once. The energy increased.

She had defeated two gods and saved a third. She was no prey. Viv was the Light that Never Dimmed.

Nuée became an all encompassing cloud. It devoured everything, even the heat around her. The flames finally petered out.

The dragon veered off with a roar of outrage, which Viv could only see through the mad inferno thanks to her improved eyes. All around her was soot, saturated mana. An apocalyptic vista of maddened colors, but the dragon could not use that to hide from her eyes. He carelessly exposed his flank, so she took the invitation it offered.

"Hyperbeam."

Concentrated annihilation mana raked the dragon's flank, doing fuck all she could see but that was fine. The hiss of pain confirmed she had done something. The dragon dodged the end of the beam by rolling on itself but it had given her time to prepare for the next step. Except, again, it wasn't what she expected. Rather than a single massive assault, the dragon pelted her with a flurry of weak, disorganized attacks. The air between them became a torrent of fire and water and rocks, a shimmering hell that would undo lesser casters, but to her, this was nothing. They smashed into her shield. She felt all this aggression press against her defenses and fail. It was… inefficient. Blunt. She countered immediately.

"Astra swarm."

Black, whistling spheres raced in graceful arcs towards the circling dragon. He arrogantly flicked an arm and the first sphere was disrupted, or rather, the colorless containment field around the black payload was disrupted.

The first astra spell exploded, spreading concentrated annihilation mana as if it was flak. The detonation upset the dragon who fled before the rest of the swarm, giving Viv more time to prepare defenses, more time to engrave circles into the earth below her. Out of patience, the dragon climbed then looped down, grabbing the earth with his mind. A tidal wave of soil and stone formed under him in a wave of destruction, uprooting everything in its path. A lone house was instantly obliterated. She turned and attacked him with more beams, scoring glancing blows. Some of the scales darkened.

"Eldritch walls."

The dragon was forced to veer off, but the wave was launched, and it made right for Viv. Blighted earth rose in a cliff of grasping limbs. The attack dissipated against her defenses.

This time, the dragon screeched in anger.

"Scream all you want. You are just too sloppy," she thought at him in the way Arthur used.

The dragon flinched. It was confused. That confusion only made it angrier.

"Vicious little thing," Viv hissed.

Right. Time to go on the offensive. She had to get him to get closer if she wanted to hurt him seriously. The dragon roared again, peppering her with spells that achieved nothing. Viv was a fortress.

Fury blinded him. She used the opportunity to infuse a defensive circle around herself. It would last long enough to fit her needs.

[Aspect of the Destroyer.]

Viv rose above the earth on abyssal anchors. Her core pulsed again, then more mana flooded her. She had expected it. The 'light that never dims' was making her stronger the longer the fight lasted. There was so much power to play with, her mind could barely handle it all. Again, the temperature plummeted. Around her, fires died out. Even the dragon felt that something was wrong. She was now airborne, a challenge, and yet it didn't dare approach. That was fine. She would force it.

Two fingers aimed at his distant shape, she aimed.

[Sequence: Astra swarm, hyperbeam, hyperbeam.]

The dragon pulled mana to himself in a disorganized vortex. The swarm of astra spells would have been easy to dodge, but the shield was so large that it caught and detonated them all in a shower of annihilation shrapnel. The hyperbeams burnt the dragon's side while Viv could maintain them on target, which was rather hard at this distance. She still lacked practice.

It was enough, however. She had caused pain. An angry aura flooded the region, Viv meeting it with her own. The dragon accelerated with gray mana, first rocketing up and away from her spells, and then down. It clad itself in fire. This time, he was going straight for her.

Finally.

Viv didn't bother attacking him, or even trying to slow him down. She double, triple-checked her spells, and then she waited. The dragon was a meteor roaring towards her, unstoppable. So she wasn't going to stop it.

When it was too late to change course, Viv simply shadow walked away to a nearby spot.

The dragon landed in a cataclysmic explosion that leveled the nearby forest. The shockwave made the blighted land buck under Viv's feet, but her control leveled it again. The dragon's roar of triumph turned into a hiss of frustration.

Shapes moved inside of the cloud. To Viv's surprise, Marruk smacked the beast in the snout with her huge mace, then retreated behind her massive shield. A tail whip landed upon it with a firm clank and yet, somehow, the Kark still held. Zero-Five's axe bounced on his flank as it was exposed.

Those two idiots were going to get themselves killed.

"You missed," Viv drawled in the most dismissive tone she could. The dragon's pride, already wounded, sent him into a terrible fury. He charged her. She got a very good view of the knife-sized fangs closing down on her.

[Aspect of the guardian.]

The dragon bit her shield, attempting to crush her like a nut. He failed.

"Shatterstar."

The shield turned as black as the void, then immediately exploded outward. Hexagons bit into the flesh of the dragon at point blank range. Blood seeped from a few cracked scales. The roar turned into a whine.

It was time.

Viv let the aspect of the guardian fall, right hand forming a claw in front of her. Wounds in the fabric of reality formed each finger.

This was going to sting.

"Guillotine."

Massive void blades slashed at his massive form. She didn't try to enclose him — he was too large — she merely willed him to fall.

The blades bit deep. Flesh parted, and blood sprayed the savaged soil in a splurt of crimson liquid. The skin of his left wing broke. He screamed. Mana wailed with his agony.

The scent and sight of blood made Viv blink for a second. It felt so surreal. The dragon was bleeding.

Arthur's brother yelped in fear. He took to the sky, gray mana propping his wounded wing. He flew away. Viv let him. She didn't have a way to corner him and finish the job anyway.

She stood there, watching the dragon turn into a small dot at surprising speed. The last pieces of flaming rock fell around her like rain. Silence returned to the ravaged field. The colors returned to a normal state, but the land didn't. Nothing would grow here for seasons.

Viv shook her shoulders, remembering a quote from earth that she had really enjoyed. Tales and stories were more than true, not because they told that dragons existed, but because they taught dragons could be beaten. She had believed in her own legend, and she had beaten a dragon.

Funny thing was, Arthur was much harder to stop. For one, she was impossible to pin down.

Marruk and the Kark ran to her, clearly amazed. Even the Hadals watched the skies with naked disbelief.

"Wow," Marruk said. "You've done it. You've beaten a damn dragon."

"Yeah. By the gods, he was fucking stupid, wasn't he?"

***

It took some time to mop up, not because there was anyone to defeat but because of the fires. Viv was forced to manually walk from one to the other, smothering them with black mana so they would stop burning. At least, most of the trees on fire had been flattened by the shockwave of the dragon's landing so the blaze hadn't spread too far.

Mercifully, no one had died on account of having fled as fast as they possibly could before the more calamitous spells had started flying. Thank the gods for people with brains, Viv thought. Except for Marruk and Zero-Five, bless their hearts. The only difficulty came from the animal handlers. The horses and cornudons were spooked. It took most of the morning to find and calm them all down. While Viv busied herself with dousing fires, she checked her latest notifications.