Grey
The teal blade of Dawn's Ballad sliced upward in a lethal arc, aimed to sever Draneeve's head from his shoulders. Soulfire, that chilling, soul-erasing flame that was one of the two cursed gifts of this Basilisk blood in my veins, ignited along its edge, promising utter annihilation.
"Oh, is this a test, Great Vritra?" Draneeve crooned, his voice dripping with perverse delight as he executed an impossibly fluid, almost mocking backstep. The blade hissed through empty air where his neck had been. He landed with a flourish and bowed deeply, like a performer acknowledging applause. "I see… I am honored to entertain you while the Dicathians burn around us!"
The truth of his words was a chilling weight. Behind him, Xyrus City wasn't just burning; it was being consumed.
Detonations continued to thunder, each one igniting fresh infernos that greedily licked at buildings, devouring homes and shops. The separate blazes were merging, creating a monstrous, roaring wall of heat and light that painted the smoke-choked sky in hellish oranges and reds. The air itself tasted of ash and despair, thick enough to choke on, the screams of the terrified and dying a constant, horrifying counterpoint to the flames' roar and Draneeve's theatrical malice.
"You won't walk out of here alive, Draneeve," I hissed, the name a venomous bullet aimed at his core.
His masked head snapped up. Even through the porcelain, I sensed genuine surprise, quickly replaced by manic glee. "Oh! You honor me by speaking my name, Great Vritra! Please, please!" He spread his arms wide, inviting the chaos. "Let us dance! Let us show these mongrel Dicathians what true power looks like!"
Was this all a grotesque performance for him? A game staged on a canvas of suffering for Agrona's amusement?
'Papa?' Sylvie's mental voice, small and scared, pierced the din. She pressed against my leg, a tremor of white fur against the hellscape. 'What do I do?'
Transform use your Dragon form qnd fly! Go to the Academy! See what's happening to Tessia! The command was instant, desperate. Protecting Tess was paramount.
Sylvie didn't hesitate. A blinding flash of pure white light erupted beside me, momentarily eclipsing the fires. When it faded, a sleek, majestic black dragon with two horns, radiating power, surged upwards with a powerful beat of her wings, disappearing into the smoke-choked sky above.
As I turned back to Draneeve, the scene twisted further into nightmare. He wasn't alone. Held loosely in one hand, dangling like a broken doll, was an elven child—no older than eight or nine. Soot streaked her terrified face, tears carving clean tracks through the grime.
He had plucked her from a burning building nearby, her home collapsing in a shower of sparks behind him. "How pathetically weak they are," Draneeve mused, shaking the sobbing child slightly. "Luckily for them, we are here to bring salvation to their primitive society, right, Great Vritra?" His masked gaze fixed on me, challenging, taunting.
"Or perhaps… a demonstration?"
Rage, cold and absolute, crystallized my thoughts. I used Static Void without ansecond thought. Time fractured, the world freezing into a grotesque tableau. Flames hung suspended mid-roar, falling embers became glittering, motionless stars, the child's tears halted mid-fall on her petrified cheek. Draneeve was a statue of malevolent grace.
Within the frozen instant, I moved. Lightning mana, raw and furious, surged through my nervous system—Thunderclap Impulse. My Vritra-enhanced body became pure, terrifying speed. I blurred across the space, snatching the child from Draneeve's frozen grip with infinite care.
I placed her gently, impossibly gently, behind the relative shelter of a shattered stone planter five meters away, away from the immediate line of fire. As the frozen moment shattered back into chaotic motion, I simultaneously activated Realmheart.
The world exploded into vibrant, overwhelming hues of mana—swirling, terrified blues and greens from the fleeing citizens, the violent, hungry reds and oranges of the fires, and emanating from me… the stark, chilling white of decay, mingled with the vibrant teal of Dawn's Ballad.
The spell hiding my twin horns dissipated showing them to the world, the undeniable mark of my Vritra heritage, erupted from my temples, curling back like deadly ivory crowns.
The child gasped, scrambling behind the stone, safe for now. Draneeve's masked head snapped towards me, then to the empty space where the child had been. A sound erupted from him—not anger, but pure, ecstatic delight. "Marvelous! Truly marvelous!" He clapped his gloved hands slowly, mockingly. "And now you show your bloodline without shame! This is what I was waiting for! A true scion of High Sovereign Agrona, embracing his power!"
Revulsion choked me. Embracing this? The horns felt like brands of shame, symbols of the blood I despised. But they were power. Power I needed now. I stomped my foot, not just on the ground, but on the ley lines of earth mana visible through Realmheart. Blood Iron.
The cobblestones roiled like dark water. A jagged, spear-like rod of dark, crimson-streaked metal, cold and heavy with decay, erupted at Draneeve's feet, screaming towards his chest with lethal intent.
He reacted with serpentine speed, twisting aside. The rod grazed his cloak, tearing fabric but missing flesh. Distraction achieved. While his focus was on the decaying earth magic, I exploded forward. Dawn's Ballad, now sheathed in a crackling layer of glacial ice, met the wall of superheated air Draneeve conjured.
Not flames from his hands, I realized with Realmheart's clarity, but instantaneous combustion of the very air molecules in front of me. The ice on my blade hissed violently, steaming and cracking as it absorbed the impossible heat.
I poured wind mana into the sword, not to fan the flames, but to suffocate them, creating a vortex of vacuum around the blade's edge that starved the combustion. The wave parted around me with a furious shriek, deflected, but only just.
Draneeve's laugh was a maddening counterpoint. He wasn't aiming at me. His next combustion blast erupted high and wide, arcing over my head towards a group of elderly elves hobbling desperately down a side alley.
Bastard! I pivoted, abandoning my forward momentum, slashing Dawn's Ballad upwards in a wide, desperate arc. Wind and ice met the descending fireball. The impact was concussive, showering the alley in steaming slush and embers, saving the elves but costing me precious ground.
He knew. He knew he couldn't match me head-on, so he fought like the terrorist he was—using the city, its people, as his shield and weapon. Or worse… he was genuinely enjoying this macabre game.
He lifted his hands to his mask. With deliberate slowness, he unclasped and removed it, revealing a face that was both ordinary and utterly chilling. Sharp features, neatly trimmed orange hair, and eyes… eyes that held no madness, only a deep, unsettling, sincere pleasure. A genuine, abominable smile stretched across his face as he tossed the mask aside.
"Much better, wouldn't you agree? Face to face, Great Vritra? A more… intimate dance."
I ignored the taunt, Realmheart dissecting his technique. His power wasn't Dicathian elemental manipulation. It was Alacryan rune mastery. A single, devastating spell. He wasn't casting fire; he was designating volumes of air for instantaneous, violent combustion.
Potent, terrifyingly flexible… but it had a critical weakness. The ignition point couldn't be too close to himself without risk. The combustion generated immense heat and concussive force—dangerously close range.
If I got inside his effective minimum range, his most devastating weapon became a liability.
Gritting my teeth, I pushed forward again, step by agonizing step. I layered ice over my body, not as armor, but as ablative shielding exactly like when I fought the Phoenix Wyrm back when I was adventuring with Tessia—thick, pristine plates forming over my limbs and torso, hissing and melting instantly under the radiant heat he projected, constantly reforming.
On Dawn's Ballad, I reversed the wind vortex, no longer suffocating flames ahead, but pulling oxygen towards the blade, creating a localized, howling gale behind the ice sheath.
It was a desperate gamble: using the wind to feed the combustion on my blade, controlled and directed, to counter the ambient heat radiating from Draneeve and the fires, buying me fractions of a second and centimeters of advance.
Sweat poured down my face beneath the ice, instantly freezing and melting again. My lungs burned from the superheated air and smoke. Every step was a battle against an inferno.
But realization hit me, if I let Draneeve escape there weren't people capable enough to stop him now that Cynthia was taken away. Unless the Lances arrived.
'PAPA!' Sylvie's mental cry, sharp with panic and frustration, ripped through my focus. 'I can't! The barrier… it's too strong! It hurts to touch! I can't get to Mama!'
Terror, colder than any ice, speared through me. Tessia. Trapped. What's happening inside the city? I demanded, forcing myself to keep advancing, deflecting another combustion blast aimed at a collapsing building where cries echoed.
'Bad people! Hooded! Killing elves! Killing dwarves! In the big open place! Making everyone watch!' Sylvie's thoughts were fragmented, images of horror flooding the bond—hooded figures, glinting blades, terrified crowds forced to witness executions in a plaza. Agony and fury warred within me.
Sylvie, come back. To me. Now. We have to capture him.
Killing him would be justice. A release. Watching Soulfire consume that smiling face would be deeply satisfying. But justice wouldn't free Corvis. Justice wouldn't stop the executions Sylvie saw.
Alive, Draneeve was a key fundamental to solve our problems. Proof. A bargaining chip the Council couldn't ignore. The coward kings who feared Agrona needed undeniable evidence of Alacryan orchestration to the wider public, even if it meant facing their own complicity. Draneeve alive could shatter the lies imprisoning my friend.
I was close enough now. Only two meters away from Draneeve. The heat radiating from his magic was intense enough to make the air shimmer violently. He saw my determination, his smile widening, utterly unafraid.
He raised a hand, not towards me, but towards a family huddled in a doorway across the street—a dwarf shielding his wife and two terrified children.
"Shall we raise the stakes, O Great Vritra?"
Now. I buried the searing pain in my legs, the screaming protest of my muscles and bones, deep beneath a mountain of sheer will. Burst Step. The technique Corvis explained to me with his usual frightening accuracy, brutal and unforgiving.
Mana detonated within the muscles of my legs, not enhancing, but violently propelling. It felt like my femurs shattered and reformed a thousand times in an instant. Agony, white-hot and blinding, exploded through my lower body. I screamed, but the sound was lost in the thunderclap of displaced air as I vanished from my position.
Time seemed to distort. One moment I was meters away, agony tearing through me. The next, I was inside Draneeve's guard, the stench of his sweat and the ozone of his power filling my nostrils.
Dawn's Ballad, a blur of teal streaked with Soulfire's chilling white, was already in motion—a low, horizontal slash aimed not to kill, but to cripple. To bisect him at the waist, severing his core and injuring his spine, leaving him alive but utterly broken.
A living testament. A bargaining chip. The wind vortex around the blade howled, feeding the controlled combustion on its edge, amplifying its cutting force. Ice shards flew from my body armor.
Thunderclap Impulse heightened every sensation, every micro-movement. I saw the genuine surprise finally register in Draneeve's eyes, the smile faltering for a fraction of a second. He started to turn, to bring a hand up, but he was too slow. Far too slow.
The teal blade, humming with lethal power, met resistance. Not the yielding flesh I expected. Not the brittle bone. It met… something else.
A fraction of an inch before contact, the air directly in front of Draneeve's torso rippled. Not with heat, but with a sudden, intense distortion, like peering through thick, warped glass.
The distortion solidified instantaneously into a hexagonal pane of pure, shimmering force—deep crimson, pulsing with intricate, alien runes that burned with inner light. It materialized with a sound like a colossal gong being struck.
SHOOOOOM!
The impact was cataclysmic. Dawn's Ballad struck the crimson pane with the force of a meteor. Soulfire flared violently, clawing at the shield, but the runes blazed brighter, absorbing, deflecting. The shockwave tore outwards, a visible ring of concussive force that shattered every remaining window for blocks, ripped tiles from roofs, and flung burning debris like deadly confetti.
The force traveled up the blade, a physical hammer blow that slammed into my arms, shoulders, and chest. Bones groaned. The ice armor on my torso exploded into vapor. I felt ribs crack, a hot spike of pain lancing through me. The Burst Step's agonizing recoil combined with the brutal rebound, overloading my nervous system.
I was thrown backward like a ragdoll, tumbling head over heels through the air. I crashed through the weakened wall of a burning bakery, landing amidst shattered timbers, flour sacks ruptured like clouds, and the sickening smell of burning bread.
Pain was a universe. My vision swam, dark spots dancing. Through the gaping hole I'd made, I saw Draneeve, untouched, standing within a fading nimbus of crimson light. The hexagonal shield shimmered and vanished. He looked down at where the shield had been, then back at me in the wreckage, his expression not angry, but… intrigued. Delighted.
What happened? I asked myself before I realized it. A Shield! An Alacryan mage specialized in a defensive spell.
"Ah!" Draneeve exclaimed, his voice carrying easily over the renewed roar of the fire now greedily consuming the bakery. "A surprise! Even for me! How… fascinating! It seems the Great Vritra possesses more gifts than even the High Sovereign Agrona anticipated!" He took a step towards the shattered wall, his smile returning, wider, hungrier.
"This dance just became infinitely more entertaining."
I pushed myself up on trembling arms, coughing blood onto the flour-dusted, burning floor. Dawn's Ballad lakd beside me, its teal light flickering erratically. Soulfire sputtered weakly on its edge. The trap was deeper than I had known. Draneeve wasn't just a pyromaniac with a rune. He was shielded by one of his Alacryan lackeys that escaped me and Cynthia.
Capturing him just became exponentially harder. The screams of the city, Sylvie's frightened presence winging back towards me, and the crackling approach of Draneeve through the flames coalesced into a single, desperate thought: survive. Capture him. Free Corvis. The cost had just skyrocketed, but the stakes hadn't changed.
Failure was not an option. Agony was just fuel. I reached for the Dawn's Ballad again. The plan was simple, I should be able to maintain Realmheart for another minute, in that time I had to kill the Shield and stop Draneeve.
That's perfectly doable.