Chapter 89: Champion, Chapter 22: Blinded By Light

Aidan

The Realms

Secondday, 3rd week of the 9th month, Age of the Chosen 1

Mid-Morning

Near Ceallach Macht, Mistvale Highlands

Lightning struck the ground in shattering blasts, sending clumps of soil and shards of stone skyward. Above them, a passion elemental fizzled out of existence, impaled by the dragon's breath. Fortunately, the monster was still distracted by its aerial opponents; none of the bolts landed near a Starchaser.

Aidan craned his neck to focus on the invader, but the creature moved with unbelievable agility and grace. His elementals had it beat for aerial maneuverability, but not by much. He had to shake his head in awe and despair as the dragon tilted its wings almost vertical and executed a pinpoint turn to snatch another elemental with its jaws. Fortunately, he still had some manna to spare, and this was his territory.

Aidan centered himself and reached into the pool of energy tied to him as Master of Caer Macht. To Brighid's left and right, the air began to shimmer as heat built up. Aidan thought back to Ailis's lecture on the nature of elementals and decided that he needed something able to withstand some punishment. "Let's fight fire with fire," he said with a grin.

"Is this really the time for puns?" Brighid yelled over her shoulder. Aidan ignored her, focusing on the two elementals coalescing on either side of him. It took more time and effort to manifest them outside of Caer Macht, but gradually their forms grew more distinct. Cores of shimmering scarlet stretched into sinuous, snakeline shapes from which swept white-hot wings. The two drakes grew in size and stature until they were fifteen feet from snout to tail; still nothing close to the real thing, but they should be sturdier than the birdlike elementals assigned to harassment duty.

"Now, as for the ones already up there..." Changing a passion elemental's form was easier when they were right in front of him, but even at a distance, it was a simpler task than forming new ones. Small, fast, dangerous enough to be a threat. "I wonder how far I can take this?" Aidan murmured to himself. "Can I...?" The seven birdlike elementals shimmered, then separated into swarms of smaller entities.

"Wasps?" Brighid asked, "How will that—"

Her question was cut off by a frustrated roar from above. "Not wasps," Aidan smirked, "fairies." The swarms billowed and swirled around the dragon, unleashing tiny, white-hot blasts of fire all along its sides. When the invader tried to strike back, the reformed elementals' distributed nature meant that only a handful of fire fairies died rather than the entire swarm. Then, the drakes struck, plunging out of the sun and latching onto the bases of the dragon's wings. They raked and bit with molten claws and fangs, tearing an ear-shattering scream of pain from their larger opponent.

"BRACE!" Aidan shouted as loud as he could as the wyrm plummeted out of the sky. He clutched tightly around Brighid's waist, and his lover planted her hooves. A second later, the earth shuddered and heaved as hundreds of tons of scaled terror impacted at terminal velocity. "NOW!" he yelled as soon as his bones stopped rattling. Suiting actions to words, he sent his enhanced Burning Barrage streaking through the air towards the stunned dragon. Sweat broke out all over his body as he wrestled with thirteen separate thought threads—the twelve fireballs and his body. The strain only persisted for a moment before the spell impacted its target, but that was enough to leave Aidan panting with the effort.

Another roar of pain split the morning air, but Aidan gasped out a curse. "Damnit, it moved its head at the last moment, missed the eyes and mouth."

And then the dragon was on its feet again, arching its neck and opening its maw. Tendrils of electricity arced between its teeth like they were a bank of Jacob's Ladders. Aidan didn't have time to warn Brighid, but she didn't need it. She twisted in mid-step, flinging herself into a tight turn and hurtling out of the path of the oncoming attack.

Then came the lightning, the thunder, and the pain.

Aidan's muscles seized as electricity tore through his body. Beneath him, Brighid screamed and convulsed, stumbling and slamming into the ground as her legs locked up. Aidan lost his seat on her back, flipping over her head and landing upside down on the hillside hard enough to make his vision blur.

"Chosen!" a voice thundered, reverberating off the hills. "Chosen! I will kill thee! But first, I will slay all thy allies and feast upon their remains!" The ground trembled, lighter than when the dragon crashed into the ground, but in a steady rhythm.

Aidan groaned and rolled onto his hands and knees, then fought his way to a standing position. He blinked to clear his vision, trying to focus on the dark mountain moving his way. The image resolved into a furious dragon stalking towards him, the right side of its head peppered with glowing fireballs that stood out like pimples on a preteen. Two were burrowing through the ridge above its eye, evidence of Aidan's near miss.

Starchasers darted between the behemoth's legs, hacking and stabbing with their weapons, but the beast paid them no heed. The drake-elementals plunged down from the sky again only to meet a contemptuous swipe from a long, sinuous tail that sent them tumbling and crashing into the hillside. Fire fairies wheeled and buzzed, adding their attacks to the scrum, but none of it was enough.

Then Fionn arrived. The aged veteran charged in from behind the dragon, outside its field of view, ax held in a two-handed grip. He ducked under the tail as it passed overhead, then swung. Unlike the steel weapons of the Starchaser rank-and-file, Fionn's enchanted ax bit deep into a gap between the scales on the Storm Conqueror's hind leg. Dark blood spurted out, splashing over Fionn's right side.

The wyrm growled and spun, lashing out at its attacker with a foreclaw. Fionn braced himself for the hit but was still sent flying from the sheer strength of the blow. Quick as a snake, the serpentine monster surged after him, only to whirl back towards Aidan when silvery flames slashed across its flank.

"Soul magic? I have changed my mind, Chosen. Thou art too dangerous to allow to live!" Once more, that cavernous maw opened wide, brilliant lightning gathering within. Aidan aimed his spell towards the soft flesh revealed by the impending attack, but the Storm Conqueror ducked its head to allow the beam to pass across its snout instead. Then its head shot forward. Aidan closed his eyes, knowing that he'd failed.

Light flared beyond his eyelids, and thunder shook his bones, but, somehow, there was no pain. Aidan cracked open an eye, half-expecting to see the inside of the box canyon.

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A tall, muscular centaur clad in heavy chain mail stood in front of him, holding a broad-bladed greatsword before her. Tendrils of electricity arced along the sword's edge, but she appeared unharmed.

"Sorry to be so late. Did you miss me?"

"Nice entrance, Ysbail," Aidan couldn't help but laugh. "Nine-point-five out of ten. No time for banter, though."

"Yeah," she grunted, hefting her blade, "I see what you mean. Got a big, ugly fucker to handle." Aidan could hear the grin in her voice as she continued, "How much armor do you think we could make out of all those scales?"

"Hoh, interesting," rumbled the dragon. "Breath Parry, was it? An Adventurer, then. Thou shalt not be the first such to fall to me, little centaur. Come then! Show me your skill!"

"I hate it when they talk," Ysbail muttered. Nonetheless, she raised her sword to shoulder level, then slashed diagonally across her body. To Aidan's amazed glee, a shimmering arc of compressed air launched forward, screaming through the space that separated the opponents. The dragon blocked it with a foreleg, but Aidan noted another splash of sizzling blood spattered across the ground.

Ysbail followed in the path of her sword beam, closing the distance with startling speed. She reached the Storm Conqueror only a heartbeat after her initial attack, and her blade flashed in the morning sun as she carved into its leg. It cut cleanly, and Ysbail was past it before the monster's blood could splatter onto her. She was rewarded for her effort by a swipe of the dragon's tail as it reared up onto its hind legs. Aidan could hear the crunch of the impact from where he stood, but rather than being thrown through the air, Ysbail only skidded across the ground.

That kicked Aidan back into gear. No single one of them could handle this threat; they had to work together. Unfortunately, he didn't have many appropriate tools. He'd dealt thousands of damage to the dragon by this point, yet there was no indication that it was anywhere close to death. Burning Barrage and Soulfire Blast were still cooling down, so they were out. Lifespark wouldn't work. Flame Jet wasn't worth getting into range. It was probably immune to Electric Arc. Given the wide-open environment, he couldn't even fall back on Phoenix Pyre; the dragon could just walk away from the area of effect before the damage ramped up enough to matter.

That left acting as a support. Aidan could heal people, and he could summon additional combatants. He would have to hope that was enough. He went looking for Brighid, not that he had to go far. She was a few yards behind him, still stretched out on the ground. Aidan's heart skipped a beat when he saw the smoke rising from between the joints of Brighid's armor, but she was still moving, and Ailis was already by her side, hands glowing brown. He scrambled over to the mother-daughter pair and knelt down beside his lover.

"It hurts," she whimpered, writhing and convulsing in pain.

"Shh," Aidan hushed her. He reached out to lay a reassuring hand on her shoulder but jerked back as electricity leaped from her pauldron to his fingers. Seeing Brighid jerk in pain at the reaction, he started casting Pulse of Life.

"The breath is still affecting her armor," Ailis explained. "There is nothing I can do about that; it might be best if we get her out of it, but then she would be unprotected against physical attacks. I can manage her Wounds, however."

"From what I've seen, nobody can stand up to this thing's attacks anyway. Come on, love, let's get this off you."

"You just want—" Brighid gasped and jerked as Aidan started working on her armor, causing electricity to arc between them. "You just want to get me naked in front—ow!—in front of everyone."

"If I wanted that—" a roar of pain interrupted him. He looked over his shoulder to see that Ysbail had managed to cut off the last ten feet of the dragon's tail. "Nevermind, no time for flirting. We need you up and healed ASAP."

While he stripped the armor off Brighid, Aidan focused on summoning another pair of passion elementals. This time, he opted for full-on firepower and toughness at the cost of mobility. Their fires coalesced into a rough oval shape that grew more defined as the seconds marched on. The base of each elemental was a long rectangle with beveled edges. Two rows of rudimentary, non-functional wheels formed underneath each, then ovals extracted from the rectangles' tops. Each oval sprouted a long pipe of searing flame.

"What sort of monster are those?" Ailis wondered.

"Monsters from my world. We call them tanks. Not quite our equivalent of dragons, but they're the strongest thing we have on the ground." With a mental nudge, he directed his two newest elementals into action. They sped forward, aimed the barrels of their not-actually-rifled-cannons towards the Storm Conqueror, then fired.

Twin sonic booms echoed across the valley as superheated rocks launched from the elementals, followed a split second later by a deafening howl of pain from the dragon. Black blood spurted from two wounds in the monster's chest near its neck. Its head swiveled towards the tanks, and electricity began to gather in its mouth again, but the elementals fired first. One of them missed, but the second shot struck square in the center of the dragon's left eye.

With another ear-shattering roar, the Storm Conqueror launched itself into the air. Its wingbeats weren't as sure and steady as before the battle, but it gained altitude nonetheless. "Enough! I underestimated thee, Chosen. Know that ye have made an enemy of Karsarrym the Storm Conqueror!" With those words, the immense invader fled the field of battle, trailed by Aidan's elementals.

"We... won?" asked Brighid, awe in her voice.

"We drove it off," Aidan confirmed, "but I wouldn't say that we won." He looked around the valley, taking in the broken remains of the Starchaser caravan. More than a hundred civilians lay dead or dying, and he would be surprised if even half of the contents of the wagons and carts were recovered intact. This had been a costly fight, and Aidan knew that Karsarrym would be better prepared for the next one. He watched the dragon flee to the southeast until it became nothing but a black speck on the horizon.

Zurai

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