Chapter 58: DD3 Chapter 004 – Storm

The warrior peered down at the sprawling city below her from the relative safety of the dragon’s back. Nestled at the base of Typh’s serpentine neck, just in front of her powerful wings, Arilla had a perfect view of the attack as it unfolded miles below. Together they watched from on high while a horde of tiny figures in the distance left the campgrounds to the south and made a mad dash across the five miles of open ground that separated them from Helion’s looming city walls.

With what passed for their cavalry out front—mainly wargs running on all fours, along with a smattering of classers riding exotic beasts—they rapidly ate up the distance between the two settlements. As fast as they were, It wasn’t enough for them to escape unscathed. Alarm bells quickly rang out all along the southern walls, and moments later glowing arrows and vibrant spellfire started to light up the night. 

Uneven volleys of skill-empowered attacks rained down from the battlements and thundered into the mass of charging classers. From their vantage point just below the clouds, Arilla could see the bodies thrown high into the air, along with sprays of displaced earth from where the defenders’ strikes hit and missed respectively. The sheer quantity of missiles—mundane and otherwise—that descended upon them in those first few minutes was staggering. If it was any other force on Creation, then Arilla would have expected them to buckle or at least falter beneath that onslaught, but Typh’s army had faced a Monster and won. 

The nonhumans and adventurers amongst the dragon’s still-growing horde had certainly been no strangers to violence before that triumph. But the battle for Rhelea had taken the steel they each possessed and honed it into something else—something unflinching. Helion’s defenders did their best, and people certainly died in droves, but the same soldiers who had once charged willingly into the endless waves of tentacled horrors were not about to be stopped by mere men.

Fire rained from the sky, the ground shook with successive impacts, while steel, stone, and lightning ripped their way through the cavalry’s charge. And yet the men and women who raced towards the city didn’t even slow down. With a song on their lips ringing out through the night, the people of Rhelea traded subtlety for valour, and trusted in their leaders that, when they reached Helion’s southern gate, the doors would open for them. 

Arilla’s heart swelled at the sight and sound of it, and from the approving tones emanating from the dragon she rode, she knew that Typh felt the same way.

They had done this. Win or lose, the two of them had changed Terythia forever. Just the precedent of humans fighting side by side with dozens of other species would never be forgotten. At least, for as long as there were people left alive on the continent to remember it. 

Of course, they weren’t going to lose. If everyone on the wall was working in concert to repel the dragon’s invading army then things might have been different. With Tamlin’s reanimated dead ‘manning’ the most important section of the fortifications, those in the best position to turn the charge were actively trying to limit the casualties. The arrows and siege weapons that descended from the gate Typh’s army was assaulting, fired noticeably wider and slower than their contemporaries. There was no accompanying spellfire or the tell-tale glow of offensive skills that outlined the whizzing bolts in the darkness of the night.

In hindsight, it was obvious that the ruse wouldn’t last for long.

All at once, the halting attacks that originated from the gatehouse stopped, and the siege weapon emplacements were turned on their nearby ‘allies’ before they resumed with a vengeance. Ballista bolts, boulders, and barrels of alchemical fire were launched from the building's flat roof, down the lengths of the walls surrounding the gate and into the packed ranks of the city’s defenders. After the initial shock, chaotic fighting broke out all around when Tamlin’s dead rushed forwards to take advantage of their opponents’ surprise.

The fighting was fierce, but even with everything going in his favour, the necromancer’s forces were hopelessly outnumbered. Fortunately, Tamlin didn’t need to win; all the boy had to do was hold his ground for a handful of minutes and the outer-city would fall. 

Arilla and Typh, both watched in anxious silence while the fighting carried on and their cavalry inched closer to the gates. The warrior in her yearned to take her place on the walls where the necromancer’s minions were steadily being pushed back. She knew that her presence would almost guarantee that early success, but Arilla had an entirely more important—more dangerous—role to play in the battle for her country’s capital.

She tried to relax and enjoy the comforting heat that radiated off of Typh’s massive body while she watched the scenes of violence play out. Her skill-enhanced eyes narrowed behind the slit in her helmet, and she worried her lip incessantly. If her nails weren’t protected by her gauntlets, she knew that she’d have already bitten them down to the quick. She hated that it was all occurring without her, that everything was ultimately coming down to Tamlin’s prowess and will.

For all the virtues of the plan, there was far too much responsibility and death heaped onto one unstable boy for her to ever be comfortable with.

“He’s actually doing it,” Arilla muttered, unsure whether she was supposed to feel awe or terror at the necromancer’s imminent success.

“Was it ever in doubt?” Typh rumbled.

“It should have been. He’s already a terror and he’s not even bronze,” the warrior stated.

“He’s hardly a terror. The boy is weak. Even weaker since he nearly killed himself,” the dragon argued.

“He’s taken and is now holding a fortified position by himself. I couldn’t do that. Not now, and definitely not when I was still at pewter.”

“You’ve spent so much time having your ass handed to you by Caeber that you’ve forgotten how strong you are. You could do it too, although I’ll admit that you’d have a little more trouble keeping the gates open seeing as you have just the one body.”

“That isn’t the point, Typh. He’s too young to be so powerful, not to mention how isolated and angry he is. It isn’t healthy.”

“Being alone and angry didn’t do me any harm.”

“You sure about that? Besides, you’re a dragon, Tamlin is a human. It’s different, he needs people around him.”

The dragon paused, choosing to climb higher into the cloud cover before issuing her response. With wisps of water hanging suspended in the air around them, the carnage below seemed to take on more ethereal qualities. The blue glow of the arcane shield that surrounded the palace looked haunting and beautiful, while the multicoloured lights pouring down from the Helion’s walls appeared decorative rather than an instrumental part of the city’s defence.

It felt wrong how pretty it all looked from between the crowds.

“Maybe you’re right. I’ll concede that I’m not the expert when it comes to humans, but what do you expect me to do about it?” Typh asked.

“You’re the closest thing he has to a mother,” Arilla said quickly, ignoring the unease in her stomach when she gave her answer.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” the dragon scoffed.

“Typh, you took an orphaned child with a class so universally hated that literally anyone else would have killed him on sight just for having it. You promised to teach and protect him, and you’ve been doing just that ever since. Food, clothes, company, he gets it all from you. You’re the only person he interacts with who doesn’t hate or fear him.” 

“Anyone?” the dragon asked, quickly honing in on the part Arilla least wanted to talk about. She knew that she would have killed Tamlin—or at least tried to—if it wasn’t for the dragon’s presence in her life softening her once absolutist sense of morality. The warrior was too ashamed of her answer to give it voice, even if she still wasn’t sure she was entirely wrong. How many levels had the necromancer gained tonight? How many lives had he personally ended? Did he enjoy it? With the levelling high undoubtedly singing in his veins, would he be able to stop by himself when the battle was done, or would he need to be stopped? 

“Anyway, you’re wrong. He doesn’t see me as a mother figure. He has a crush on me,” Typh stated, interrupting Arilla’s spiralling concerns.

“Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive,” the warrior commented.

The dragon shuddered, and Arilla had to rapidly adjust her grip on Typh’s ridged scales to avoid being dislodged.

“Humans…” Typh muttered. The whole thing was a very surreal experience for the warrior. There were times she forgot what the woman she loved really was. Dragons in the stories rarely shuddered, muttered, or sighed, and they never moaned, thrust their hips, or professed their undying love for lemon cakes and whisky. They were usually a lot bigger on razing villages to the ground and kidnapping innocent princesses, which admittedly wasn’t too far from what they had planned for tonight. 

Typh looked down at the city below, her eyes penetrating the cloud cover that had grown thick between them and Helion. She paused for another long moment while Arilla wondered if there was anything she could say to get the dragon to take Tamlin’s issues seriously. 

“They’ve made it through the gate. There’s fighting in the streets, but Helion is as good as ours. Are you ready for what comes next?” Typh asked.

“One moment,” Arilla answered, quickly bringing up her status.

Name: Arilla Foundling

Species: Human

Age: 19

HP 2490/2490

SP 2489/2490

MP 1790/1790

Strength 80

Dexterity 40

Vitality 75

Intelligence 5

Willpower 5

Charisma 30

Class: Noble Slayer - Level 89

Slayer’s Strength - Level 88

Slayer’s Promise - Level 87

Slayer’s Steel Level - 85

Slayer’s Resilience - Level 89

Slayer’s Sight Level - 81

Noble Slayer - You have overcome the odds and slain those who should have been above you. As a result, this class strengthens your ability to face challenges above your level.

+4 Str, +2 Dex, +3 Vit, +1 Cha, +3 Free Stats at each interval, [Warrior] tagged.

Slayer’s Strength - You may spend stamina to temporarily increase your effective strength score. This increase is determined by (stamina spent * 3) + this skill’s level, with the maximum stamina spent per second capped by this skill’s level.

Additionally, while in its active state, you may treat noble defensive skills as having their effective level reduced by half this skill’s level.

Slayer’s Promise - You may add this skill’s level to your attributes’ effective scores, providing that the bonus does not exceed your charisma score * 3. Additionally, you may treat this bonus as doubled for the purpose of determining the size and regeneration rates for your health, stamina, and mana pools. When facing a noble you may temporarily triple this bonus for determining your resource pools’ regeneration rates.

Slayer’s Steel - You may add this skill’s level to your effective strength score and gain damage mitigation to match. Additionally, your body will gradually incorporate metals to reinforce itself, and grant wielded equipment that matches the metals in your body the benefits of your strength score.

Slayer’s Resilience - You may add twice this skill’s level to your effective vitality, willpower, and charisma scores for determining your resistance to bleeding, curses, diseases, hostile magical effects, noble skills, pain, and trauma shock.

Slayer’s Sight - You can see perfectly in non-magical darkness, and you may add this skill’s level to your effective willpower score for all purposes related to directly challenging stealth-based skills and illusion-based magic. Additionally, you may spend stamina to perceive the future actions of nobles and those sworn to them, at a rate of 1 stamina for 0.1 seconds of foresight; stamina spent in a single second cannot exceed this skill’s level. 

“I’m ready,” Arilla said, confident that everything was as it should be. She belatedly checked that her sword was still slung over her back, and hunkered down, pressing her armoured body firmly against the dragon’s smooth scales.

“Good. Now hold on tight, this is going to get bumpy,” Typh warned and a moment later, the dragon pulled her wings in close, wrapping them protectively around them both. 

Predictably, they then fell from the sky like a large, scaly rock.

Typh activated a skill as they plummeted, and Arilla immediately felt it try to draw on her mana. Her class recognised the ability as noble in origin, and she had to force it to back down so that the dragon could take her due. The rushing air thrummed with a vibrant energy while Typh began to glow brightly. Thick streams of golden light—mana visible thanks to its growing intensity—rose up from her people in the streets miles below, doubtlessly drawing the eyes of the city to the falling dragon above them.

Any lingering wisps of clouds quickly burnt away beneath the halo of Typh’s building power, and with all that light so high up in the sky it was thoroughly unsurprising when Helion’s defenders decided to respond.

Ritual spells and siege weapons were turned away from the army entering the city and for the first time attacks originating from the inner-walls that surrounded the palace raced up to meet them. 

Typh unfurled her wings, abruptly arresting their fall and banking hard to one side to evade the oncoming storm of skill-empowered missiles.

The wind rushed over Arilla’s armour as she hugged her body close to her draconic partner’s while Typh dodged and weaved erratically in her descent. Every inch of downward movement put them closer to the King’s palace and the myriad of weapons and classers that protected it. The raised scales on the dragon’s back suddenly seemed like massively inadequate handholds when the warrior found herself repeatedly flipped upside down and spun around while Typh contorted her massive body between streaming lances of fire, ice and ghostly projectiles that refused to obey Creation’s laws.

With her dexterity score pushing Typh ever downwards at increasingly terrifying speeds, the air resistance hammered into Arilla whenever she tried to lift her head up from the dragon’s scales. The warrior held on for dear life, and she had to pray that every near-miss that wooshed past her ears, was just that, a miss, and not another spell or spear impacting the woman she loved. 

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Typh was not above suffering in silence, and with her body vibrating so strongly with all the mana she was accumulating, the warrior couldn’t tell if the dragon was taking any hits. Looking out at the multi-hued chaos of hundreds of whizzing manabolts, some passing mere feet beyond the thin slit in her helmet, Arilla had to wonder when exactly she’d joined Typh in her insanity.

They had gotten close enough to the ground that the air was now filled with whistling arrows and glowing spellfire. Even with Typh’s wings carrying them around the palace at fantastical speeds, the sheer quantity of attacks targeting them were impossible to completely avoid. Arilla heard, rather than felt, countless arrows and manabolts bounce off her thick runeplate. She was shocked by how the majority of these low-levelled strikes failed to even scratch her armour’s paint, let alone touch the deep mana reserves that empowered her runic gear. She didn’t remember when it had happened, but at some point along the way, she’d become truly dangerous in her own right.

She craned her neck to one side and saw panicked figures racing along the fortification’s battlements. Weapons and spells were readied and loosed in her direction without any real hope of them making a difference. It had only been a few minutes since the attack on Helion had been announced by the ringing of alarm bells to the south, and the heavy hitters would still be putting on their armour, not manning the walls.

Typh came to a stop directly in front of the palace’s main entrance. She hovered in the air above its mageshield, maintaining her place with thunderous beats of her large wings. No longer crushed by the rushing wind, Arilla sat up and wondered how many mages it took to power such a colossal defensive spell. The translucent blue bubble surrounded the entirety of the palace along with the city’s barracks—a large blockish building—and another irregularly shaped complex which she knew housed the Royal Alchemical Stables.

There was another dragon in there. One that would hopefully be freed after tonight.

The draw of mana from Typh’s noble skill spiked, jolting Arilla from her thoughts. The bright halo of light surrounding the dragon winked out as she opened her mouth and exhaled.

Arilla had seen Typh breathe fire before. In the months they had spent on the road she had even helped her practice raising the skill towards its cap, but this time was different.

Instead of a long stream of golden flames that hammered home with the force of an avalanche, concentric rings of spiralling runes hung suspended in the air in front of her open mouth. Shining with an intensity unfamiliar to the warrior, the arcane symbols pulsed like a racing heartbeat. In time with that accelerating tempo, a small sphere grew from the centre amidst an audible crackle of golden mana. 

The sound of Typh’s building spell could be heard above the din of hostile magic and fearful yells that were directed at them both. Spears and arrows clattered off of her scales like rain, while spellfire splashed harmlessly off the dragon’s broad chest. Typh couldn’t shrug off everything though, more than a few siege weapons and ritual circles had the time to aim and fire at her while she remained stationary. Arilla felt the shuddering impacts run through the dragon, and her dismay only increased when she saw the sprays of blood and torn scales rain down to the ground.

It was horrific, but it wasn’t enough to stop her. Not in the time they had.

With a resounding whoosh of displaced air, Typh finished her spell. The pulsating sphere of golden light at the centre of the dragon’s runic circle expanded until it was several times the size of the concentric rings of mana. Like a switch had been flipped, the sphere erupted into a thick beam of golden energy that raced towards the palace’s arcane shield.

The sky boomed with the spell’s passing, the stench of ozone filled the air, and when it hit, spidering fault lines spread throughout the arcane dome before it shattered into falling pieces. Jagged shards of hardened mana rained down onto the palace scoring thick groves in the elegant masonry. Windows were smashed and flowerbeds were crushed. Of course that all paled in comparison to the dragon’s spell that continued to push through the building. The continuous beam of golden fire scorched a wide line of trailing devastation that carved a great furrow through the earth and split the palace in two.

There was a momentary lull in the hail of attacks directed at the two of them, likely from the defenders blinking the spots out of their vision. Before their attacks could resume, Typh flew forwards into the burning wreckage, entering the palace in her spell's wake.

The building was huge, but even with such a wide path of destruction running through it, in her true form, there wasn’t quite enough space for her to fly. So with her wings folded in, the dragon scrabbled over the still-molten stone in her efforts to penetrate deeper into the palace.

Typh’s form blurred and suddenly Arilla was falling, rolling over hot, broken stone with the dragon—now clothed in human skin and nothing else—collapsed by her side. 

“Are you okay?” the warrior asked, clambering to her own feet before extending a hand out to help Typh to hers.

“Yeah, those last few attacks hurt. I’m fine now, it just took a lot out of me. Give me a moment,” the dragon responded.

“I’m sure we’ll have a lot of those…” Arilla trailed off, looking back over her shoulder where she could already see soldiers running down the walls and heading towards the palace. Frowning, the warrior retrieved a small bundle of cloth from her pack and handed it to Typh, who quickly put on the summer dress.

“Thanks.”

Clothed, the dragon paused for a moment before wrapping herself in another layer, this one made from thick scales of golden mana. With that done, the two of them then turned and raced for the nearest door, all too aware of their not-too-distant pursuers.

They sprinted through halls, and as they got further away from the blast site, the palace quickly transitioned from fire-blackened stone and still-burning furniture to marble tile and plush carpets. Grand paintings lined the halls, with decorative vases and statuettes tastefully interspersed throughout the open spaces, not that Arilla had the time to appreciate such finery.

She ran through the palace with the dragon at her back as fast as she could move. With her considerable dexterity score and even better vitality, she was only slowed down by the restricting mass of super-dense steel she had encased herself in. Still, her speed put the unclassed and the low-ranks to shame, and soon any signs of pursuit were a distant memory. 

Periodically, servants caught sight of them and screamed before fleeing down a staff corridor, but all too often low ranking guards thought it was their duty to get in the way of the charging warrior.

Arilla shoulder checked another barred door, which didn’t so much come off its hinges as it did disintegrate. She stepped into the hall beyond and saw a sea of nervous eyes staring back at her from behind the visors in their helms. 

“Run,” she warned them, knowing it was futile, but offering them a way out all the same.

With a defiant roar the men charged. Dozens of low-pewters raced towards her with their weapons held high, and Arilla—clad in the finest runic armour Typh’s craftsmen could make—sighed.

A sword bounded off her helm and she barely even felt it. Spears and hammers clobbered into her while she slowly reached for her sword. The path of her arm was completely unaffected by the low ranking soldiers’ blows, and she saw the fear grow in their eyes as they watched her fingers wrap around her weapon’s hilt. 

Arilla didn’t have time for mercy, but she couldn’t bear to kill more soldiers who were just doing their duty. With her effective strength score her skin was tougher than iron, and that was before you considered the effect of her defensive skills which further augmented her body with actual steel and flat system granted damage mitigation. Her armour even received the same benefits, and so when the low–ranking guards did their best to stop her, their combined efforts couldn’t even drain a drop of mana from the runes etched deep into her gear.

“I’m sorry.”

Arilla swung her sword, and the front rank of soldiers died, gore spilling down to splash at her feet. The second rank rushed to fill the gap and with another lazy swing of her zweihander, she was stepping over their bodies too. The warrior carved her way through half of them before they broke, and she made a point of not chasing them down.

“You could have done something,” Arilla said once they were gone.

“I could have, but I don’t want to waste my mana. I can’t pull that halo trick again with all this stone in the way, and we both know there are Alchemical Knights somewhere in this palace,” Typh answered. 

“You’re right,” the warrior sighed.

“Of course I am; now we need to get moving again before they surround us with classers who can actually hurt us.”

Arilla spared one last glance at the dead men whom she had splattered against the walls and forced herself to move on. She wondered how many new faces she would be adding to her nightmares tonight, but Typh wasn’t wrong, they had to move.

She started running again and Typh followed. Together they barged through more doors, and swiftly caught up with, and pushed past some of the guards who had chosen to fall back deeper into the palace. Arilla knew roughly where she was going. It had been surprisingly easy to get a map of the King and Queen’s quarters, but with every minute they wasted they gave the royal couple more time to escape.

More soldiers got in their way, and unfortunately, none broke upon seeing the warrior’s and the dragon’s class tags arrayed in front of them. Again she had to kill nearly half of them before they ran. The plan had really glossed over this part she belatedly realised—the sheer amount of butchery required to ‘fight’ their way to their goal was far greater than she had anticipated. Arilla had imagined more frantic fighting and less pulping those too stubbornly loyal to flee. 

They frequently met combat classers with ranks higher than low-pewter, but with Typh following close behind her, anyone who posed a potential challenge was utterly annihilated long before they could ever cross blades with her.

After far too much killing for her conscience, and several raised barriers, they finally entered the wing reserved for the royal residence. The pair emerged into what appeared to be an opulently decorated waiting room, except this one was hardly vacant. Close to twenty iron-ranks filled the chamber, and they all attacked before Arilla could make an accurate count.

Her time training with Caeber saved her life as she immediately tucked and rolled forwards, allowing Typh to enter the fray. Lances of spellfire ripped through the air, and she took two solid hits against her armour that depleted large chunks of the mana that permeated the warded metal. She was lifted from her feet by the glancing blows, which conveniently carried her away from the arrows that would have otherwise punched through her helmet judging by how they soared over Typh’s head. 

Arilla crashed through a wall, only to be immediately faced with three low-iron warriors, any one of which should have been her match.

Despite herself, the Noble Slayer grinned behind her helmet, and the predator in her chest bared its fangs at the prospect of a well-deserved meal. Immediately she started punching above her weight, spending stamina at a perilous rate to activate skills that weren’t meant to be used for more than a second at a time. With [Slayer’s Sight] consuming 10 stamina per second, she could see their ghostly blades coming for her a whole second before they moved, a whole lifetime’s worth of notice in these sorts of lightning-fast fights. With [Slayer’s Strength] eating up an additional 30, she felt confident that she could at least meet their blows.

The three warriors came for her while Typh handled the rest, sacrificing her dress to shift forms again. Suddenly there was a hundred-and-ten-foot long dragon fighting where there certainly wasn’t room for one. Walls were smashed to the side, and large chunks of masonry fell from the ceiling. Typh’s wings, legs, and tail were all massive obstacles that moved erratically through the flow of the fight, providing a much-needed reprieve for Arilla and another source of devastating attacks for her foes.

High-ranking classers simply could not fight to their fullest without causing significant collateral damage, and in this struggle, no one appeared to be holding back. Arilla dodged and weaved, consuming her limited resources at a rate she knew she could not sustain. She could maintain an adequate defence for a little over a minute before she would run out of stamina and promptly be dismembered by her three opponents. That she held her own at all, was a testament to her intensive training and her lopsided skill choices. She could fight well above her level in a straight-up brawl, yet any one of the rangers present could have easily ended her from range with their bows if they weren’t busy with the dragon.

The fight itself was utter chaos. Dragonfire periodically ripped its way through the reception room, tearing down more walls and ceilings, and causing adventurers to unceremoniously scatter. Lances of magic—golden and otherwise—ripped through the air, vaporising anything they encountered without notice.

Arilla deflected countless strikes and made precious few of her own. Even with her strength score augmented by her skills, it was by no means easy. Two of the three warriors were faster than her, and it was only her skill-granted foresight that enabled her to avoid taking lethal blows. The one who was actually slower, struck with enough force that she felt the bones in her arms splinter whenever she was unfortunate enough to have to directly block a strike. While she was successfully avoiding a quick death, she was only doing so by accepting lesser injuries. Her runeplate, which had already deflected countless strikes tonight without so much as scuffing its paint, was steadily accumulating deeper scratches and wider rents at an alarming pace.

It helped that her foes weren’t used to fighting together—certainly not with a dragon thrashing about, and definitely not in their kingdom’s finest palace while it collapsed all around them. They got in each other’s way, and as she could intuit what they were going to do next far better than they could, she delighted in spoiling one attack with another’s unwanted presence. 

The palace’s collapse, along with the cloying dragonfire and the storm of spells, had replaced the once crisp air with thick clouds of scorching stone dust that filled your lungs and burnt your eyes. [Slayer’s Resilience] and [Slayer’s Steel] enabled Arilla to ignore the worst of it, but visibility was poor and only getting worse. She could tell that the warriors facing her were also affected, as numerous times they hesitated when the only reason to do so was because they couldn’t see. Depths, she could barely see herself. If Arilla weren’t reacting to their ghostly before-images granted to her by [Slayer’s Sight] then she knew that her near-blindness would have cost her everything.

Her foresight didn’t just extend to the three warriors facing her. As far as she could tell, every classer trying to kill them had sworn an oath to the King and was subject to her skill. She could see their actions outlined with perfect clarity, even if she couldn’t see their bodies in the moment with all that dust in the way.

She positioned herself perfectly, and more than once a bout of friendly-fire saved her hide. It was the most elaborate dance of her life, and while juggling all those pieces in her head was a struggle, she loved it. Her class roared in anticipation of every step as she danced along that ever-thinning line, where a single mistake meant her death. The ever increasing part of her that was a Noble Slayer wanted nothing more than to drag the glorious fight out for eternity, for while she was slowly losing—dying even—she loved every vicious second of it.

A glowing blade scored a deep groove through her breastplate, the sheath of burning plasma that covered the blade easily overwhelming her runic-armour’s ability to repel. She felt her flesh sear and a spurt of hot blood trickle down, but with all of her defensive skills active it didn’t last long. She parried the follow-up thrust with the flat of her blade, redirecting the stolen momentum to spin around into a whirling strike that was easily blocked by another warrior’s immaterial shield that appeared out of thin air at the very last moment.

She felt, rather than heard his grin, and she knew that on some level he loved it too—what strange creatures warriors were.

Arilla leapt up into the air, a heartbeat before Typh’s thick tail lashed through the space they had gathered in to exchange blows. Her lover’s limb struck the warrior with a ghostly green shield and temporarily took him out of the fight. 

She twirled in mid-air, aware that she was putting herself in the firing line of a skill-empowered arrow before it had even been shot. She smiled behind her helmet when the strongest of the three warriors saw her for the easy target she was. He leapt up and swatted her from the sky with a powerful two-handed blow that caused a fresh burst of pain to blossom where his hammer struck her shoulder. 

Arilla bounced hard off the broken tiles that covered the floor and even with every part of her body reinforced far beyond mere flesh, she felt—and heard—something important crack. Fortunately, it was a worthwhile trade, for while the archer may have had a perception skill that allowed her to pick her targets amongst all the dust, the warrior who struck her did not. No sooner had he knocked her down did he find himself pierced by three golden arrows which promptly exploded, taking the warrior’s arm and a significant part of his chest with them.

The archer, seeing what she had done, flinched when she should have dodged, and as a result of this mistake, Typh ate her. The dragon chewed once and swallowed the ranger, before unleashing a fresh volley of magical strikes that pulverised the ground, scattering the iron-rankers throughout the charnel house that the reception had descended into.

The fight turned, and in the next ten seconds Typh killed and ate another three classers, while Arilla slowed her stamina consumption to focus on the one warrior facing her. They hadn’t beaten even half of the iron-rankers brought to face them, but they’d killed enough. 

Those remaining decided to flee. They weren’t knights, and the consequences of forsaking their oaths were far less pronounced, so Arilla didn’t blame them for cutting their losses. There was always another king to serve, and iron-ranks—even oathbreakers—were always in short supply.

“Are you okay?” Typh asked, her gravelly voice vibrating the rent steel of Arilla’s breastplate.

“Not really, but I can carry on. You?” Arilla responded.

“I’ve been better. I ever tell you how much I hate swords?”

“Frequently.”

The dragon barked out an awkward laugh, while the warrior tried not to look at the grievous wounds decorating her body. Typh blurred, shifting back into her human form, and suddenly Arilla had a very different issue with looking away. 

It occurred to her that she should have probably packed more than one spare dress for the dragon to wear.

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