Chapter 8: Half a minute
Fire. Pain. Fury.
Fire. Suffering. Rage.
Fire.
Trapped in the endlessly repeating cycle, he contracted his chest and painted once more the world in burning crimson. The flames died immediately after, nothing they could hold onto existed under the influence of his spell.
He limped forward leaving a trail of blood behind him, surrounded by the unnatural silence he had created. He had taken massive damage, was covered in superficial wounds and poisoned. The foul thing had torn off his mandible and tongue while the feathered thing had pulverised one of his paws; and throughout the hunt, his others sustained heavy damage.
It didn't matter; he had trapped those two back into the flow of time and just needed a single spell to recover fully.
The pain was intense; every step was worse than being stabbed by a dozen spears, every breath like one of his brethren digging his claws in his throat. The wounds left in place of his torn jaw were exposed to his draconic flames, dragging him into a vortex of agony every time fire left what remained of his mouth.
It didn't matter; he had endured worse pain when suffering graver injuries, and so long as he wasn't weaving a spell while breathing fire, it wouldn't be an obstacle to the hunt.
But he had been humiliated. The prey that had escaped him half a moon back not only was still alive but wasn't cowering in a cave. It had come back with others as a predator and laid a trap for him; it had dared to turn him into a prey. Him! The Dragon Lord of Wilderness hunted down and almost trapped under the eyes of hundreds of… humans!
It didn't matter. It didn't; none of it did! By the time he was done there would be no one alive to tell the tale.
Throughout the centuries, far higher opponents had dared to challenge his rule. Those battles had proceeded uninterrupted for days, even weeks, reshaping the landscape further than the eye could see. Some among them, dragon lords whose power rose above the norm, had injured him even more severely, but it had mattered not. He defeated them all, feasted on their bodies and claimed their territories. He cared not what trickery his preys clung to, be it deception, treachery or numbers; he would erase them all through sheer power. That was how it had always been, and that was how it ought to be forever.
But then why, why… Why couldn't his immense power crush that cowardly thing?
Another sea of flames left his jaw and flooded the plaza, enveloping the immobile humans in a scorching inferno. Shortly after, the fire vanished from the unchanging world.
He had already defeated its pack; but no matter what he did, he couldn't even scrape that clump of darkness. In the past, he had hunted preys that fought unseen, but their deceptions had earned them mere minutes against his flames and overwhelming strength. He and his brethren had been vastly superior to any other race ever since the dawn of time. Still, now this oni, a tiny little humanoid without history that did nothing but hiding, was about to accomplish something no other prey had ever come close to achieving before. It was becoming a threat.
In the time it took him to subdue the other things, they had managed to struggle long enough to decrease his fighting prowess. Half of his unbreakable scales were now piles of dust on the ground, his injured paws and wings carried him slower than they ever had and his missing eye had left him partially blinded. His torn jaw no longer allowed him to control his flames adequately, and the poison was slowly eroding his body from the inside. Wounds of that level had never stopped him before, but the assassin was transforming a minor hassle into a significant issue.
Another wave of flames enveloped what stood before him and died immediately after, leaving behind no trace to prove it had ever happened.
So long as the assassin was close enough to hit him, its blades could break every spell he would cast; yet the oni wasn't the only obstacle to his magic.
His torn off jaw was proving to be the worst of his wounds. His flames would flow over his exposed flesh whenever he made use of them, having lost the ability to control his fiery breath properly. Due to his draconic resistance to fire, they barely harmed him, but the spikes of pain they caused would shatter his concentration if he were to be casting a spell.
In his current condition, healing or any other spell would be impossible to cast without the cowardly thing leaping from whatever hole it found and breaking the spell. The flames had cauterised his wounds, halting the blood loss before it could affect his power, but whenever he moved, they would open once more. The poison was also proving to be more than his body could handle.
He knew if the hunt went on like this, he would die. His prey knew it too, and it seemed content to outwait him.
Blinding flames once more spread through the surroundings with extraordinary power, fuelled by the dragon's fury.
The cowardly thing could be hiding in any shadow or behind any person around him, and in the frozen time, even a thin wall had become sturdy enough to resist his flames. He had made a grave mistake.
He had expended a non-negligible portion of his soul to replicate and strengthen a spell he did not fully comprehend, and the urgency to foil whatever strategy those things were trying to implement had thrown him in a disadvantageous battlefield of his design. Now he couldn't use his flames to erase everything around him and remove all cover as he had previously done; but if he were to dispel it now, all the defeated preys would rise again, and his efforts would be lost. He had to get rid of the oni while the spell still lasted.
If he could find a way to end the cowardly thing he could then use wild magic to execute all within the flow of time before the spell's hour was over; but before any of that, he had first to find a way to gauge its position.
The dragon studied the plaza he was in, his enchanted eye seeing through every illusion and figment with ease. It was a vast space by human standards, built centuries ago so that he could move in it without being inconvenienced by human constructions and demolish them.
The buildings, the debris, the frozen people; each of them was a potential cover for the assassin, and so were their shadows. After enchanting it with wild magic, his eye could see reality's original form exactly as it was; but he had never seen the oni throughout the fight until the moment it attacked. There was only one possible explanation; it wasn't merely hiding in the shadows, but merging with them.
If his eye couldn't tell them apart, it only meant he would need to move away from the shadows.
Raal carefully observed the Dragon Lord of Wilderness' movements as he quietly moved around him. After Azul's defeat, the only reliable source of damage against the dragon was the poison he had tricked him into eating.
Now that all of his allies were down, he had become the only target of the fire-breathing behemoth. His frequent attacks from when there was a tank to soak up all the damage were no longer an option. Losing the front-liners wouldn't have posed that much of a problem under different circumstances, but the beast's last eye could effortlessly see through all his illusions.
It was the second time he got forced into a battle of attrition. Raal vastly preferred short fights that presented his opponents as few opportunities as possible to hit him, but he had no way of finishing this quickly. Even if he were to envelop the battlefield in darkness to meet his advanced skills' requirements, he would run out of mana long before the dragon would draw his last breath. As for trapping him in the dark world, doing it to someone stronger than him was close to impossible without illusions.
However, the poison forced his opponent under a clock; the dragon sustained damage, while he remained away from danger. All Raal had to do until then was remain vigilant, counter all the dragon's spells with an attack and maintain the advantage.
If he was to win this fight, Raal could only count on his past experiences, nerves of steel and patience.
The Lord of Wilderness let loose another wave of fire while turning his head, making the cone of flames engulf the most extensive area possible.
Hidden in the monster's blind spot, Raal watched the flames draw closer. By the time they reached his position, he had already melded with the shadows and went to a safe location on the opposite side of the plaza.
Due to an ability from his [Shadow Assassin] class, he could instantly teleport between any two places so long as an uninterrupted shadow connected them. His [Dark World Assassin] class, on the other hand, allowed him to enter a lesser plane of existence and leave it using darkness as a medium to open the portal, further increasing his mobility through a vastly superior version of [Shadow step]. The combined use of these two skills gave him the highest degree of mobility attainable in the game, assuming there was enough darkness to use.
Raal had the worst defensive stats among all his guild-mates. While his HPs were somewhat decent, further helped by a racial regeneration trait, both defences were pretty embarrassing. They weren't so low that he would be defeated the moment he took damage, but with some bad luck, two or three hits were enough to end him; and the regeneration held no value when most of the attacks were fiery breaths. It was to make up for this vulnerability that he invested so much in his mobility and evasion, dodging and evading rather than blocking and parrying. He was a min-maxed glass cannon.
Thanks to Raal's niche style of defence, such an unnatural battlefield allowed him to endure for so long. The dragon doubly held the type advantage between flames and the light they produced, but the field was definitely on Raal's side. The frozen time meant any cover could shield him from the draconic flames, the monster couldn't remove the shadows by reshaping the environment and that no third party could give away his position. The human city further played to his advantage with all its small passages and structures projecting shadows.
If one logically thought about it, dragging on the fight had become their best strategy the moment time stopped. Raal's group should have done so in the first place instead of carelessly attacking the dragon, but Shen had to prove once more his inability to conceive plans longer than "Charge". Had they done so they could have employed delay tactics while watching each other's back.
No use wasting time thinking what could have been, now there was only him. To win he would have to wait for the poison to finish off the dragon, meaning he had to remain close enough to the monster to break whatever spell it might attempt to cast.
Raal's focus on mobility resulted in a complete lack of long-ranged attacks. He couldn't stay too far away from the dragon, or his attacks wouldn't reach him in time to disrupt the casting.
While it was true he could teleport and attack at any moment; it only remained true so long as shadows were available. The deer-like behemoth could quickly disperse darkness with his fiery breath or dissipate it entirely when weaving into existence his luminous orbs. Be it fire or the beast's unreasonably strong magic, Raal had to calculate his movement speed under the assumption that shadows could disappear at any moment.
Flames abruptly flooded out of the dragon's throat and spread through the plaza. Raal slipped away into the darkness and appeared immediately after inside a building on the other end of the plaza.
Assuming he couldn't count on a dark environment, Raal was confident he could cross up to one hundred fifty meters while still being able to react in time to dangers before the lord of wilderness could complete a spell. The good news was that after tearing off the dragon's jaw, the flames' estimated range fell somewhere below sixty meters; he could easily stay in a safe place and still be able to interrupt the casting of every spell… Or at least that was what he would have liked his plan to be.
This whole mess started because the dragon had managed to cast a spell way faster than what he had initially estimated. Going by math alone while trying to be as objective as possible, to break a quickened spell, he would need to remain within fifty meters from the dragon at the very most. No matter how much he turned the numbers in his head and how many times he recalculated it, the guarantee to cancel a spell required him to remain until the end of the fight within the attack range of a giant monster that the four of them together weren't able to defeat.
But there was still one thought, keeping his morale from plummeting.
His opponent wasn't a bunch of program lines mounted on a graphic texture in a virtual world, but a living being, bound by entropy like him. Even though there was a large gap between their powers, they were both following the same fundamental rules.
Yggdrasil's bosses often had unique overpowered abilities they could freely use with no actual repercussions, but here even his opponent couldn't use his most potent skills free of charge.
Since his arrival in this new world, Raal had seen the dragon lord use his magic a total of eight times, but he used a quickened spell only once. Since there was a "normal" to improve upon, the better version was not the standard. If quickened spells were more expensive for him as it was the case for players, the lord of wilderness would be reluctant to spam them; which also implied he too had a limit on how much magic he could use.
In the end, for this battle, Raal had divided in his head the area around the dragon in circles. Starting from the dragon to a range of fifty meters there was an area in which he could stop all spells but was within the flames' reach, from sixty meters to one hundred fifty he was outside the breath's reach but couldn't stop quickened spells. In comparison, everything beyond one hundred fifty meters wouldn't allow him to disrupt spellcasting if shadows were no longer available. Strategy and tactic clearly defined in his mind, Raal moved through the shadows once more to avoid the next fiery breath.
The dragon's last eye slowly moved as the fiery behemoth walked in circles, painstakingly studying every person, object or shadow in his search for the assassin. His movements had gotten slower, and the injuries were starting to affect him.
A bright flare appeared down the dragon lord's throat, and a cone of scorching flames erupted immediately after. Raal swiftly circled behind the monster as it drew a ring of fire in the ground. By the time the deer-like beast had returned to the starting position, the first flames to touch the terrain had already died; the stopped time robbing the fire of its fuel.
The deer-like behemoth, seeing the lack of results following his last attempt to smoke the rogue out, interrupted his head-on approach and searched the area once more.
He investigated every detail of what surrounded him with the same diligence a master painter would have in front of a majestic landscape. Still, while his pupil was following the edges of every shadow and inspecting every figure in the plaza, his pace was slowing down with every step.
After countless glances and several long stares, the Dragon Lord of Wilderness had gone still for the first time since the beginning of the fight.
Raal couldn't possibly take this as a good sign; any change of an advantageous situation could lead to a disadvantageous one. The rampaging behemoth whose life was being eaten continuously away by powerful poisons had stopped the aimless series of attacks maintained since the beginning of the battle and ceased all action. It could mean only one of two things: he had given up and was patiently awaiting his death, or the dragon was finally thinking.
Even though Raal was already concealing in shadows, he decided to err on the cautious side and expended some mana to coat his body in a layer of darkness. He glued his eyes on the lord of wilderness, both daggers ready in his hands.
For moments that felt like hours to him, the dragon kept still, pondering.
The thought of attacking him there and then crossed his mind, but from what he had been able to gather during his investigation, the dragon was at the very least four centuries old. When facing someone whose experience far surpass yours, it is best not to leave oneself open to attacks while keeping the guard up. Raal would remain vigilant and ready to counterspell while the poison continued doing its job.
After staying motionless for dozens of heartbeats, the dragon lord finally moved his head and looked around. Unlike before, the monster didn't seem to be looking for him, but rather something else; and Raal could easily imagine what it was.
He was studying the battlefield. Not just looking for his prey, but defining the space's characteristics, trying to gain an edge in the fight.
That was not good. An opponent who fought every battle with only sheer immense power was now contemplating strategy. When such disparity in strength and skill separated two sides, a few small steps in either direction was often all it took to tip the balance.
Raal followed the dragon's gaze and attempted to divine his train of thought.
Having most likely realised how vastly unfavourable their battlefield was for him, he could have been looking for a way to either turn it to his advantage or move the fight somewhere else.
Neither option seemed feasible. The whole city was human-sized; any place other than the plaza would hinder the dragon's movements even further, especially considering that the stopped time had turned everything indestructible. Even assuming he could move to another section of the city, it would hardly make a difference for Raal; he had learned its layout better than the very citizens living in it.
However, the lord of wilderness' next action was able to put a crack in Raal's absolute confidence in the battlefield.
The deer-like behemoth had raised his head, the gaze now at the sky. For a short moment, Raal subconsciously refused to understand what thought was passing through the firebreather's mind, but when the massive wings spread wide, the reasoning became painfully clear. There are no shadows in the sky.
A mighty gale spread through the plaza as the dragon slowly left the ground behind; even if significantly damaged, his wings were still strong enough to soar him in the skies. It was clear to see that every meter gained was earned through extreme pain and effort, but this exertion would soon bring him victory.
Raal looked at the wings pierced by Govan's rays of disintegration, ship's sails barely intact after a violent storm. His mind couldn't even fathom how a creature that big could sustain its weight, let alone fly. But if the Dragon Lord were to rise fifty meters over the highest shadow and cast a quickened spell, questioning physics would not be his top priority.
By the time Raal mentally recovered from the shock, the dragon had already gained altitude. Back in the game, monsters followed the most optimal pattern for the situation selected from a limited list; they generally were quite efficient, but there was no such thing as thinking outside the box. Every player, given a chance, would exploit the AI's predictable nature, and without realising it, he had been doing the same even against an opponent capable of real thought.
The dragon had given up finding him and instead chose to potentially suffer considerable damage to switch the battlefield with another more favourable. He couldn't afford to let it happen.
Raal swiftly conjured a portal to the dark world at his feet and dived in. Dashing through the absolute darkness, he approached a gate close to the dragon and leapt out, daggers in hand, hellbent on destroying what remained of the tattered wings.
His blades penetrated the skin before the deer-like behemoth could even react. He pierced as deep as his weapons allowed, making the tips emerge on the opposite side. Keeping the daggers in, he moved upward to cause as much damage as possible; but before he was even close to severing the wing, the dragon lord of wilderness began to breathe fire while turning in an attempt to shake him off, enveloping both of them in a vortex of flames.
Feeling his conjured mantle of shadows burning away by the second, he retrieved his weapons and let go of the fire-breather, jumping back to the safety of darkness.
The damage he inflicted was nowhere close enough to arrest the monster's ascent; he had to do something before the Lord of Wilderness could fly too far away from his reach.
He shifted back in the dark world and immediately verified the highest shadow; on top of a building barely sixteen meters from the ground. He melded with the shadows and emerged at his destination; the dragon was already above him.
The Lord of Wilderness was perfectly aware he would now aim for the wings and using AOE attacks to defend specific portions of his body was well within his abilities. If he were to charge upward and got lucky, he could maybe take out one wing, but it was too risky of a bet to take.
The deer-like behemoth was currently over twenty meters above him; he had to think of something, and he had to do it fast.
The matchup was terrible for him. He would rely on illusions when he couldn't end a fight quickly, but it stopped being an option whenever his opponents had true sight. And as if that wasn't enough, his assassination techniques worked poorly against non-humanoid targets, significantly less when gargantuan or greater.
Even [Death Attack], his most lethal damaging skill, was of no use. If all the variables were in his favour, it would close most fights in a single attack, but among the most important ones, there was the number of lives he had taken from the victim's race. Since technically he had previously assassinated that very dragon lord, that variable amounted to one. Taking everything into consideration, especially the large amounts of poison the fire-breather ingested, he could one-shot the dragon lord only after the HPs went below one-tenth.
The dragon was now forty meters from him, and he still hadn't a good idea. If he couldn't think of something fast, his guild and he would lose all their progress and most likely die.
Now it wasn't the time to be saving trump cards for the time of need; he was in the very definition of time of need.
Raal didn't like to use trump cards; more accurately, there were excellent reasons to use his trump cards as rarely as possible. Every player had a few aces in the hole he didn't want other people to discover. Because everything powerful enough to be called a trump card was tough to obtain, and secrecy increases effectiveness, most players would go out of their way to keep quiet. No one wanted the inner workings of their strategies to become known, and that applied to rogue classes far more than to anyone else.
He had two skills fitting the description, and if someone discovered their inner workings, the drawbacks made them nearly unusable. He had kept them secret even from the guild.
He thought about using [One With Nothing] to close the distance and attack the wings, preventing the dragon from retaking the sky and causing falling damage. It was a wildly powerful stealth technique that made it completely impossible to detect its user for up to one hundred seconds, regardless of what senses, abilities or spells were in place. But while it guaranteed to bypass all forms of perception, it would break after performing the first attack and would be followed by a cool-down period of one hour per second used.
A well placed [One with nothing] could grant victory when all seemed lost, but guaranteed stealth gave neither the attack power nor the defence boost he desperately needed.
Raal gave another look at the dragon from his shadow; the beast had almost reached the distance where he could cast a quickened spell unhindered.
It appeared he had no other choices then. Since the cool-down period wasn't locking the skill like in their previous encounter, it was time for him to use [Midnight Call].
The ground was drawing further and further away, each beat of his wings increasing the distance between him and shadows of the human's nest. Soaring into the skies hadn't posed a challenge to him since the very day of his birth, but the injuries he had sustained were limiting his air mobility more than he had expected; regardless, he had to endure the pain and go forth.
He was acutely vigilant of his surroundings; the cowardly thing didn't seem to be making any other move after failing to inflict sufficient damage to his wings; it had just run back into hiding.
He had had only a single brief conversation with the prey, but the way it fought revealed more of its character than any number of words could. It wouldn't just give up and let him gain distance. It was far too insidious not to attempt one last petty trick.
He wouldn't give his prey a chance to break his spell, and he would remain alert of even the smallest movement. His gaze rapidly shifted from roof to roof, each speck of darkness a potential doorway from which the cowardly thing could appear.
He couldn't figure out what its limitations were, or if they even existed. It could appear out of any shadow, but there seemed to be no other limits beyond that. Proximity to all dark places was intrinsically dangerous. Since the frozen time prevented him from turning the city in a barren wasteland, the only other solution was to take the air and distance himself from all the shadows on the ground.
He kept gaining altitude, now over seventy meters from the tallest building. He knew not how much higher he would need to fly; the prey's elusive nature made it hard for him to gauge its speed.
Then, as he was inspecting the human nest beneath him, his magically enchanted eye revealed him something on top of the highest roof.
The edges of a shadow twisted unnaturally, no longer matching the shape of the chimney casting it. It grew darker, completely obscuring the ground beneath; it then rose, detaching itself from the roof and assuming physical form. It had taken the shape of a humanoid. Its only distinguishable trait was a featureless white mask, capping a mantle of pure darkness.
Unnatural and alien, made of shadows bleak enough to taint the surrounding world by its mere presence, it was a figure he would never forget.
There was no hesitation in him. A wave of fire engulfed the sky and raced toward the prey. It burned bright and powerful, mighty enough to turn into ashes within seconds anything that came into contact with it. Nothing had ever managed to resist the might of his flames, but the fire lost momentum and burned itself out mere meters away from the cowardly thing.
The little bastard had measured his flames' range and was standing right outside the edge.
For an instant, primal instinct flooded the dragon lord's mind. The drive to halt his wings just to return within striking range and burn the oni alive was as sweet a promise as purging the whole of the other invaders from the world in a single hunt, but he overcame his desire and kept flying.
He had to keep his priorities straight; the poison would kill long before the time returns to normal. There will be plenty more occasions to shred it to pieces when his body could once more move properly.
His full attention was now locked on the cowardly thing standing on the roof; he wouldn't let his eye move away from it for even a fraction of a second. Whatever scheme it was planning, the dragon would destroy any cheap trick with overwhelming might.
As he kept ascending further and further, the prey was simply observing him in silence, taking but a few steps forward to reach the edge of the roof.
He had no idea what it was trying to do, but keeping in mind how much that foul clump of shadows had made use of deception and underhanded tactics, this was most definitely some kind of trap.
Burning with anger at the thought of his prey seeing itself as a hunter, the lord of wilderness exerted himself to the point his tattered wings began bleeding, rapidly gaining several more meters of distance from the treacherous shadows beneath.
Driven by absolute determination, the dragon kept flying higher and higher. Gusts of wind fell in the plaza one after the other, scattering the smoking ashes that once were his body. He rose closer to the sky faster than he had ever done before; in the past, he had only ever flown to such altitudes when migrating through his territory while searching for prey, never during a hunt.
Once his distance was over two hundred meters, and the cowardly thing still hadn't left the roof, he decided it was time to act.
He flexed his diaphragm to let loose a wave of flames, erecting a massive wall of fire floating between the two of them. Luminous flames burned below, the sun shone above, and no shadows existed between the two.
He tapped into the source of his supernatural power and brought forth countless orbs of light around him. Exhausted after conjuring them at such speed, he willed them to circle him as they formed the healing pattern.
The wall of flames below him had just burned itself out. His prey was still where he left it, having done nothing but crossing its arms since he had invoked his powers.
As the memory of his previous hunt resurfaced in his mind, the possibility of what he saw being an illusion crept in his conscious thoughts; but he dismissed it immediately. The enchantment he weaved on his eyes, or at least the remaining one, allowed him to see the proper form of reality; no illusion, not even figments created by other dragon lords could ever deceive him for even a moment.
The cowardly thing was still hundreds of meters away, and the spell was almost complete. Victory belonged to the dragon.
Then, as he was already tasting his triumph, the dragon looked behind him. He had no idea why he chose to do it before the healing spell could fully cover him, there wasn't any reason to do so, but something akin to instinct told him to look back, and thus he chose to take his eye away from his prey to look at the empty sky behind him.
Maybe he had felt confident enough in his victory that he could stop looking at his prey. Perhaps continuously knowing the clump of shadows' location after only ever catching short glimpses just felt wrong. Or maybe it was just his instinct telling him something didn't add up.
No matter the reason, his gaze went at his back.
There, he found the invader charging at him.
He had no idea what was happening; he had just taken his eye away from the prey only to find it once more. He almost refused to believe what had happened was real, but nothing could deceive his eye. The cowardly thing was almost onto him.
A bright flare formed down his throat, but reason overcame instinct faster than the flames could leave his body. His fiery breath would disrupt the unfinished spell now that he no longer had his jaw. A hit from the cowardly thing would interrupt his healing, the same would happen if he were to use his flames. There were few options left.
The dragon halted his wings and let his body fall toward the human nest. He had to maintain the distance for the last few moments, no matter the cost.
The clump of shadows immediately changed trajectory to pursue him, flying faster than he could fall.
He watched it chasing; the cowardly thing was aiming for his eye.
As he was plummeting an old manoeuvre resurfaced in his mind, something one of his brethren did while being hunted.
He spread his two pairs of tattered wings wide open to slow down the fall; the sudden impact was so violent he almost feared it would rip his skin away from the wings, but the sudden decrease in speed allowed him to catch his pursuer off guard. He lashed with his tail, swinging it with all of his might; it was easy for him to intercept an attack if he knew its aim, and he acted too quickly for it to dodge in time.
He felt something hard colliding with his tail, then saw the cowardly thing tossed away from him, uncontrollably falling toward the ground with its limbs bent at unnatural angles.
Still shifting his weight to balance his flight and regain proper control, he almost struggled to believe what had just happened. He had done it; he had endured all the attacks long enough to create an opening that he then exploited. His prey was agile and elusive, but that was because it was too weak to survive a direct hit.
He watched through his all-revealing eye the cowardly thing fall, still holding onto its tiny blades. The darkness wrapped around it was quickly fading away, and as it hit the ground, he could finally see his prey for the first time. Its shape wasn't dissimilar to that of any other human, though the mask and clothes made it impossible for him to see if it had horns or any other prominent feature.
The lights kept covering his body. The healing would soon commence, and then he could devour them all and finish the hunt.
The victory was his; he had no doubt in his heart about it. His superior heritage, combined with his abilities gave him the absolute power to trample over all the lesser races.
This hunt had taken longer than the others, but the result was still the same. He found a prey, stalked it out and then killed it. It might have come back for him with the rest of the pack, but that hardly changed anything. In the end, all were defeated and rendered helpless. The four in the human's nest, the three in the plaza and now the one melting away under his eye; when he decided to take to the sky it could do nothing but helplessly despair atop the...
The dragon Lord of Wilderness had known fear only three times in his life. About half a millennia back, the first was when a dragon lord invaded his territory for the first time; he eventually defeated him and took his title. The second was less than a decade later when the Dragon Emperor came to judge whether he was worthy of being among the pinnacle of all species; after receiving his approval, he thought nothing else could ever pose a threat to him. Several centuries later, the last was right that very moment, when he looked upon the human nest's highest tower and saw the prey, standing unharmed.
It was an illusion! That thought instantly shattered as the dragon realised true sight was enhancing in his eye.
He looked back at where the prey fell. It was still there, melting away with the darkness. No, wait, did it even belong to a race the melts away upon death? It claimed to be an oni, but he had never even heard of such a race. Could it be that the one on the ground slipped back to the tower? But he had never taken his eye off it during the fall.
When the cowardly thing atop the tower began moving, the dragon immediately checked the healing spell; with relief, he saw it was almost over. His prey couldn't reach him in time to disrupt it from down there. He turned his attention back at it, cautiously trying to understand what it was doing.
It didn't move a step. From the shadow it was standing in, the clump of darkness just raised a hand, and while showing the palm, it waved it side to side. The Lord of Wilderness had never bothered learning the customs of the lesser races, but in his territory humanoids such as humans and giants were widespread enough that he involuntarily picked up some of the most frequently used signs. It appeared to be giving him some kind of salute.
It then used the same hand to point at him with a finger, which then pointed at the ground beneath him. The healing shell nearly complete, he looked at where the prey was pointing in an attempt to figure out what delusional thought was passing through its mind, but there seemed to be nothing there. Had it gone insane?
Suddenly, something spread throughout the entirety of his body in less than a heartbeat; it was pain. The ground he was observing beneath started to get closer and closer at an exponential speed. Feeling the healing shell fracturing around him, he looked at the cowardly thing atop the tower. It was still there, unmoving, pointing toward the buildings where he was about to fall.
He tried to use his wings to balance the fall, land on his extended paws and soften the impact as much as he could, but he couldn't get any control over his descent. Seconds away from an uncontrolled impact with the time-frozen ground, he looked above him to see the shattered pieces of his broken healing spell. Beside them, he also saw his severed wings gliding away, as well as two amalgamations of darkness utterly identical to the cowardly thing.
Raal couldn't help but smile underneath his mask when the monster crashed into the houses. The impact was much more violent in the frozen time than it could have ever been in any other condition; even landing on a flat metal surface would have made for a softer fall. Somewhere deep inside of him, he wished dragons knew the meaning of poetic justice, or at the very least irony.
The furious lamentations of the beast followed the landing's thunderous roar. The fact the dragon still lived after taking that kind of damage erased all signs of joy from his face.
He retreated further into the belltower's shadow, shifting his being through the dark world in another area of the city from where he could spy the monster.
The beast's weak spots were far more numerous than before; it wasn't [life essence], but it was the most accurate method he had to evaluate the damage. The dragon sustained damage, severe damage; he'd guess he had to be somewhere between a fourth and a fifth of his total health. The wings were wholly severed; there would be no more attempts to relocate the fight in the sky. Judging by the horns' reduced size, whatever resource the dragon was using to fuel his magic was also quite depleted. The situation forced him into using his best trump card, and in return, he had gained three considerable advantages. It was an excellent trade, but not enough.
The dragon roared in rage and breathed fire once more, slowly circling in an attempt to form a ring of flames. Raal melded with the shadows to teleport in a safe area.
The room he stepped into was somewhat cramped, a modest abode for a small family. It only contained a single bed, a table with stools, a shutterless cupboard and a crib. The motionless mother had comforted her immobile child while the father had rushed to shut close the window, pure panic on his face.
Raal went behind him and looked outside. The man had been looking in the plaza where the dragon first arrived, coincidentally, that also happened to be where his wings fell after he cut them. On the other end of the same street, the dragon persisted in his attempt to create a ring of fire around him, evidently still failing to grasp the concept of frozen time.
Distancing himself from the window, he latched onto the mental link uniting him to his summons and called them to him.
Less than a heartbeat later, the shadows in the room began to twist unnaturally. Four pitch black hands crawled from underneath the crib, while a pillar of darkness rose from Raal's shadow and three cloaked figures stepped out of the father's shadow. By the time light had reclaimed its shape, Raal was looking at seven exact replicas of himself.
Well, calling them replicas of him wasn't technically correct, one could argue that it was the other way around. [Midnight call] was his ultimate trump card, an ability of the [Dark world assassin] job class he had stumbled upon almost by accident and around which he later reworked much of his character.
Like a few other skills in the game, it allowed him to summon copies of himself to fight and misdirect. The simulacra were unable to use mana or activated abilities, limited to passive abilities like shadow meld and the triggered ones like his death attacks. Having a single HP each made them more fragile than glass, a single hit of any kind would destroy them. Regardless, two factors drove him to respec his character to make the most of it: the speed and offensive capabilities were equal to the original, and the skill could summon an additional copy for each other assassin class reaching max level.
Considering his character was almost entirely based on physical attacks, speed and dodging, rather than summoning a weaker copy [Midnight call] would summon up to seven, practically as powerful as himself.
He looked at them. They were constructs of solid shadows drawn from the dark realm; it usually was pretty easy to tell them apart from a player, which is why he customised his own equipment's appearance to look indistinguishable from them. Since no one else knew he had this ability, he had managed to make even the most observant of players lose track of him; even when sparring with his guildmates in PvP, he had managed to use it without them ever figuring it out. And honestly, he was glad he had changed his appearance without using magic; now even the dragon couldn't tell him apart from them.
But only six copies shared the room with him; he had to sacrifice the seventh to distract the dragon long enough to allow the others to sever the wings. He had performed experiments with this ability in the past weeks to see how easily he could control the copies. Even though the telepathic link between them was surprisingly easy to use, he had still felt uneasy about hinging his survival on the summons' ability to coordinate an attack.
Regardless, now that he could see the results, he felt a little more at ease. Once [Midnight call] was activated, a cooldown on the following midnight would start; depending on when used, one could have to wait anywhere between twenty-four and forty-eight hours to use it again. He was glad it was already producing results, but he had initially planned on using it to flee if the situation got dire back in the guild base.
A cone of flames enveloped a house forty feet away from him, only to then shift in an attempt to carbonise him while heading in the wrong direction. The dragon's moves were becoming more predictable, his actions slower. It wouldn't be too long before Raal could deal a final blow.
The beast insisted in his continuous failing attempts at turning their surroundings in a smoking pile of ash. It moved slowly, the damage from the fight severely hindering his movements. Raal kept his distance, letting slip one chance after another to land grievous attacks in favour of remaining patient and letting the poison do his work for him.
With every passing minute, the attack became less frequent and the roars less powerful, until at long last, the dragon leaned his gargantuan body on a nearby building and stopped moving.
Raal almost jumped out of his shelter to land the final blow, but rationality prevailed. The Lord of Wilderness had nearly reached the point where he could take him down in a single coordinated assault, but not quite there yet.
The dragon was neither giving up nor taking time to rest; instead, he appeared to be strategising.
Raal looked at his copies and weighted the benefits of making an all-out assault. He could picture it clearly in his mind; all the clones would attack simultaneously from opposite directions. The dragon wouldn't be able to hit them all with the flaming breath, at least two or three would find their mark and the battle would be over; or the dragon would aim the cone of flames at his feet, setting himself on fire and killing all the copies before they could deal any damage. No, he had to be patient for just a little bit longer. A single mistake would result in his death, and the copies were far too fragile and valuable to use them without the guarantee they would impact the flow of battle.
The Lord of Wilderness began to move in his direction, but he wasn't coming for him. His gaze had never even gotten anywhere close to his hideout, and not a single tongue of fire was escaping his jaw; he was aiming for something else.
Raal followed his gaze and attempted to glimpse the beast's purpose. The destination was most likely the only prominent urban feature in that direction, the city plaza where he first landed when they began the battle. But why would he want to return there? It was a highly unfavourable position for him, so much so that he had tried to fly away. What reason would push the dragon lord to return there? Nothing had changed from before, and it would be no different from anywhere else in the city.
No.
Raal could almost feel the blood freezing in his veins for the dread brought by the realisation.
Something had changed.
Only the lesser races give value to time. They divide years into seasons, seasons into moons and moons into days. Those whose lives would end without twice seeing the same comets would invent meaningless ways to divide time further; how far the sun had moved within a day, how much sand could pass through a tiny hole, how many times a heart would beat.
A mate he had over a century ago, the mother of his seventeenth brood, once told him the less there is of something, the more valuable it becomes. Time became progressively less important the longer someone lived. For a moon-old hatchling, a day would be a considerable portion of his life. A year-old cub would feel the passage of moons and seasons strongly, but those same moons and seasons would feel shorter and shorter when the youngling entered his fourth or fifth decade.
He hadn't given any value to time since his third brood left the nest. When most of the preys in an area were in his belly or had fled, he would give them time to replenish their numbers and come back when they could feed him. When a cold season came, and his preys were too scared to come out, he would fall dormant until the warmth would wake him. When he was hungry, he would hunt down something and devour it.
He knew he was about six centuries old, but that had no more meaning to him than knowing how much water passed through a river; it was enough, and there would be more.
The less time you have, the more valuable it becomes. When the dragon first froze the world through wild magic, her words echoed through his mind. Where was she now? Could she have seen him, would she had said time to be completely worthless now that he could get as much as he wanted?
And if she could see him right now, slowly dragging his bloodied body through a strange cage of his own making, closer to death than he had ever been before, what would she have said? How much worth does a single heartbeat have?
His gaze locked on his destination, he was counting how much closer he got with every step, every breath, every heartbeat. It wasn't much.
He steadily dragged his body toward the clearing the humans had made for him, leaving behind an extensive trail of blood. Stones, humans, animals, everything he was coming in contact with was another obstacle he couldn't wipe away. His titanic body, the physical manifestation of his superiority and source of his might, was now an obstacle that made moving forward a slow and painful process.
All his hunts had always been the same. He would find a prey, follow it, attack it and then feast on it; his keen sight and smell regularly leading him to the next meal, while his powerful body and stone melting flames slew every quarry. He had followed the same process over and over since as far back as his memory could reach, he was proud of it. Other dragon lords would use their wild magic to design elaborate strategies to counter their opponents; he laughed at them.
The real strength wasn't bending to others but forcing others to bend to you.
He had only used wild magic to face other dragon lords, and only to cure his wounds once the battle was over. Casting spells in a fight to gain an edge on your enemy was admitting to being weaker than him. He had lived by this ideal all his life, until the day those things appeared.
He had never seen one with his own eyes, but those things had killed several of his offspring. Dragons that had been alive since before forests had grown were now carcasses feeding those very same trees. Before those things retreated into their human lair, they had polluted the very fabric of the world and taken from him many he cherished. Now he had a chance to do what the dragons should have done a century back.
He caught yet another glimpse of the cowardly thing, but ignored it and kept advancing. Ever since he started to head for the clearing, it repeatedly showed itself; it was trying to distract him and bait him to abandon his plan. Despite the pain, he managed to feel satisfaction; he was once more in control of the situation.
Plan, wild magic… Back when he first saw it flying over his territory, he wouldn't have ever imagined such concepts to work their ways into his hunts. He always had…
No. Focus. Why was he thinking so much about the past? The dying ponders what was. He would live and triumph, and to do that he needed to focus on the present.
At long last, he finally managed to reach the clearing. The things that attacked him were still there, together with their arrow frozen in mid-air and all the humans fleeing away from where he first was. Everything was still as he had left it, with the single exception of the one thing that motivated his return to that cursed place.
His severed wings had glided back there; one fell on a pack of humans while the other getting impaled on the top of a stone nest. They were the keys to his victory.
The things that distorted his world fought in unpredictable ways. They used a far inferior version of wild magic, but it seemed as though they could use it as much as they wanted. Other dragons had informed him they would eventually get tired, but they could replenish their magic in less than a day.
He knew very little of the cowardly thing. It was fast, and its attacks had incredible power for something that small, though its illusions couldn't deceive him it could hide from his true sight and somehow had multiple bodies.
Most of those weren't a problem by themselves, even together they didn't make it more threatening than any other dragon lord he had defeated in the past. Even having access to multiple bodies was something he had already overcome before, fighting with the dragon lord of reflections. The cowardly thing's bodies were so inferior that they would immediately turn in dark mist with a single hit.
The two things that had prevented him from winning when this all began were its ability to hide from both his true sight and keen smell, and its power to appear from the shadows. He couldn't hit it, while it could attack him from any direction and run away before he could retaliate.
He had no idea if there was any limit behind those powers, it had been using them without pause since the beginning of the hunt, and it never slowed down. But whether tied to a resource or not, there still was an explicit requirement, it needed shadows to both teleport and hide.
At first, he thought it would be easy to find a place with no shadows; he had been very wrong. Tightly packed human nests with hollow structures filled with entrances and holes surrounded him, the myriad of humans inhabiting the area each projected a shadow; since he had halted the flow of time, he couldn't erase any of them.
Flying to the skies to distance himself from the shadows had gone poorly, but his severed wings would change things.
He attempted to grasp the one which fell on the pack of humans with his fangs, only to realise his lower jaw was still missing. Suppressing the anger, he grabbed it with his claws instead and, after dragging it to the platform the humans made for him when they started to offer him tribute, he began to rip it to shreds. He caught a few glimpses of the cowardly thing baiting him to attack him, but he kept going until he turned his once beautiful wing in a pile of bloodied leather.
The dragon lord then pushed bits of the pile at the few humans' feet which had been too slow to run away before he froze the world. It was hard and painful to work and keep his balance with his limbs severely damaged and poison corroding him from the inside, but he quickly managed to put a bit of bloodied leather at the feet of everything within his close surroundings.
After deeming the outcome acceptable, he initiated his final strategy.
A scorching heat he knew very well rose through his throat and left his body in the form of a cone of fire that enveloped everything in front of him in flames. The flames were much more potent than they had been before, but it still wasn't enough.
The Dragon Lord fueled the fire with everything he had to the point of hurting himself in the process. Then, he drew a circle of fire around him like he had done so many times before.
The cowardly thing was too elusive to catch in such an attack, and everything frozen in time couldn't be set on fire. The outcome was the same as it had been so many times before, with one difference.
When the dragon stopped breathing flames, the piles of wing shreds had caught on fire. Each was burning brightly enough to cancel the shadows of the humans above them.
At long last, he had finally managed to position himself in the centre of a large area with no darkness.
He studied the surroundings; his eye was painstakingly going over every feature of that damned stony nest. There were hundreds of places where the cowardly thing could have been hiding; but now, none of them was closer than the reach of his breath. The clump of darkness now would have to come out in the open if it wanted to stop him, and he would be ready.
Even if his body felt heavy under the strain of poison and wounds, his head felt light. He had lost plenty of blood, and his continuous use of magic had diminished significantly.
He weighted the strain magic had on his being. He had still to heal himself and execute the preys trapped in the flow of time; that would be at the very least another eight spells. Any lesser Dragon Lord would have died after weaving into existence so many spells in so brief a time.
The Lord of Wilderness took a deep breath, the air cooling his lungs and calming his mind.
He had invested too much in this hunt to take half measures now; he needed to be utterly sure victory would be his, at any cost.
The dragon's horns began to shine, and hundreds of luminous orbs suddenly appeared around him. While feeling exhausted by conjuring them at such speed, the lights started to dance around him and cover his body. He could feel a pleasant touch wherever they rested on him; they would soon be restoring him.
By the time he saw the shadows coming, they were already halfway through the plaza. Three of them were flying just above the ground close to each other, heading toward him at astonishing speed from his blinded side. The cowardly thing had gotten predictable.
The Lord of Wilderness knew better than using his flaming breath; while it was the perfect way to terminate an infestation, completing the healing spell was his top priority.
He endured the agony in his body and turned, showing his side to the trio of shadows. His jaws were useless, and the tail had far greater reach than his damaged paws.
The dark invaders flowed around his whip-like tail and continued their assault like bugs seeking the light.
He used what was left of his balancing wings to blow a weak gust of wind at the cowards while trying to twist his tail to attempt a second attack. Destabilised by the air pushing against them, one of the three bodies could not dodge his tail and time and fell on the floor, severed in half.
The last two were almost upon him. There was nothing he could do to prevent them from breaking his spell; so he shattered it himself.
The flames built up in his body surged up his throat and enveloped everything before him. The acute agony that shattered his spell was well worth the outcome of the attack. None of their blades reached him, and now their corpses were at his feet; burning while dissolving into a dark mist, still holding onto their pathetic weapons.
The Lord of Wilderness had lost a portion of his being to fail his restoration spell; in return, he had broken three bodies. Was that a worthwhile trade? How valuable were those bodies to the cowardly thing?
It hadn't used them throughout their previous encounter or while fighting alongside its pack, only bringing them forth when he removed the darkness from the hunting ground. Unlike the jumps between shadows, the bodies appeared to be far more costly.
But were they more valuable to the invader than the restoration was to him?
He repositioned himself in the middle of the plaza and tapped into his essence. Dragons were superior to all other races; if he had to burn through his being to ash the oni, then that was what he would do.
The broken bodies had vanished into a shadowy mist, nothing of them remained. The shining spheres slowly appeared around the dragon, each a manifestation of his bloodline extending back since the birth of life. They began to dance around him as if carried by a hidden wind.
He expected the prey to jump out of its hole the moment it saw the casting, but apparently, it was able to notice the difference between a regular spell and one he would exert himself to weave faster. It didn't matter; the outcome would be the same.
He turned his head to look at his blindside. As expected, he saw three pale masks emerging from the shadows of the nest.
The clumps of darkness weren't moving; they just remained at the edge of the plaza and observed him, just outside the reach of his fire.
Instinctively, he felt the need to step back. It was a trap, and he needed to put as much distance as possible from them; but what if there was something else behind him?
He felt the need to turn his head and check what was behind him, but that would mean looking away from the things in the shadows. They would attack him the very moment he turned his head, but if there were another body behind him, he would have no way of knowing.
If he looked, they would attack from the front; if he didn't, an attack might come from the back. If that were his choice, he would pick the known over the unknown.
The Lord of WIlderness turned his head and looked. Behind him, there was nothing but rocks, no movement to be seen.
He shifted his attention back to the front; the cowardly things were charging at him.
Their assault was the same as their previous one; he knew how they would move and how he should act.
He lifted his upper body away from the ground and pushed forward as much air as his balancing wings could move; the wind they produced was far weaker than if he had had his flight wings as well, but it was still powerful enough to hinder the shadows' advance.
The dragon then moved away from them while turning to the side, placing his tail between him and the invaders.
The clumps of darkness all went past his tail, but that was precisely the situation he wanted to create. He twisted his muscles to turn the tail's end like a whip, striking at the furthest prey from its back.
The attack was weak but abrupt enough to find its mark on a leg. He expected it only to hinder the shadow's mobility, but to his surprise, the clump of darkness fell as if he had chopped off its head.
While the corpse was still rolling in the dirt and turning into dark mist, the dragon brought down his claws on the remaining attackers. His attacks were balanced, prioritising speed over strength; any strike would have shattered the false bodies.
His first swing hit nothing but air, as the cowardly things danced between his lights in their charge. His second strike aimed for the one closest to him; it had changed direction to dodge, and he had kept track of its trajectory. When he cut it in half, its blades were almost in his eye.
The dragon had shattered two attackers, but the third would reach him long after the spell could restore him. He threw himself back, sacrificing his balance to gain just that little bit of distance needed for one more attack.
As his gaze went to the sky and his back to the floor, the last invader was within striking range. He swung his claw, and the attack found its mark.
He pierced into the assaulter's body, and to his astonishment, it kept charging at him, aiming for his eye.
He had the original right in front of him.
An ocean of searing flames escaped his body and painted the plaza in blinding crimson, but he sacrificed his spell for nothing. The invader had already made its way past his snout and moved outside the breath's area.
Ironically, as he saw the dagger come toward his last eye, the world appeared to stop once more. In that fragment of a second, he hadn't the time to think or even feel; all that could exist within it was instinct.
Staring at the original, the dragon turned his head downward with a speed that could match the invader. The toll of using magic had reduced the size of his horns; no longer the beautiful tree-like antlers they had been for centuries, they made his head faster to move and were still sharp.
At the very edge of his vision, he saw the oni colliding with his horn. The impact was brutal, they were both moving at incredible velocity, and the only thing his prey could do was raise his arms to soften the blow.
The impact was so hard he almost felt his horns break.
The cowardly thing fell at his back, spinning without control; then, the dragon's fall concluded as well.
Before even rising from the ground, he looked at where the filthy invader landed. It was less than a stride away from him, stunned on all four.
The Lord of Wilderness slid his forearm toward it, locking it in his claws and squeezing with all his strength. The piercing pain in his palm was horrible, but he tightened his grasp as much as his mutilated body allowed him; now that he had a hold on the cowardly thing, he would turn it into a paste.
The gargantuan monster pulled to squash the invader with his entire body, but it remained locked in place.
His mind was confused and tired, and an idea crept its way into his thoughts, something so absurd he wouldn't accept it.
While keeping a firm grip on his prey, he stood back up and moved his head closer. He inhaled deeply, to the point his head began to spin, and torrents of raging fire erupted toward the restrained invader.
He kept his grip even as his scales caught fire and began to melt, letting go only when the pain had grown too great to endure. The clump of shadows was still on the floor, bathing in draconic flames without moving. The Lord of Wilderness kept breathing fire until his vision had gone dark, and his lungs begged for air; only then he took a step back, recomposed himself, and assessed the situation.
The prey was unburnt and unmoving. It hadn't changed position since the impact and was giving no signs to be reacting to anything.
Taking a closer look through his true sight, it wasn't even on the ground; it was floating about half a foot above it with a hand extended in front of it, trying to grab a curved blade.
The Lord of Wilderness looked at it in silence, the exhaustion of the fight assailing him all at once. He breathed fire a few more times, targeting the surrounding plaza, but mostly the frozen enemy.
It took a while before he could process the thought in its entirety.
The last of the eight invaders was back in the flow of time; he had won.
He couldn't give shape to any other thought. The absolute silence of the timeless world had gotten deafening.
Then, something finally came to him, something he hadn't felt in centuries; joy.
Heartfelt laughs echoed in the plaza, and he kept laughing even as his wounds ached and screamed. For centuries he had annihilated everything that stood in his path with no effort, and in what could be considered his first real battle in a century he had still come out on top.
He had slain eight invaders; he would go to the human nest in the south and exterminate the six that polluted the world a century back. Because of him, dragons would return to be the undisputed masters of the world.
But as the Lord of Wilderness was envisioning the bright future of his species, the poison in his veins gave him a painful reminder of his priorities.
The first thing he ought to do was cure his body, but there was something else he wanted to do first.
His antlers shone in a gentle turquoise light, and he manifested a small sphere in front of him. It wasn't as much of a spectacle as the restoration spell, but it had a much more gratifying use.
He pointed it at the frozen oni and flew through it, leaving a hole the size of a human head in its chest. He executed first the most deserving of the vermins; the others would have to wait.
Feeling the poison carrying death through his veins, the Dragon Lord of Wilderness conjured the luminous orbs that would restore his body to greatness.
Unfortunately, his beautiful antlers would take years to return to their former splendour while he regained the essence spent in the hunt, but he had millennia in front of him, and all the time he could ever want.
The orbs began to dance around him, assuming the pattern which would heal him.
Dragon Lord of Wilderness was no longer a fitting name now that he thought about it. The Dragon Emperor was the mightiest of the dragons, but the power to stop time made him just as strong, if not more. The Time Dragon Lord? The Executioner Dragon Lord? Those titles were much more appropriate to his might.
As the dancing lights laid on his body, he almost felt a fresh and soothing sensation. The healing would commence soon; then, he would execute the other vermins and claim their treasure. He would set the city on fire so that no survivors could tell what happened, rebuild his strength for a few years, and then he would execute the last invaders and have other dragon lords bend to him.
Wait. That was it — the Western Dragon Emperor.
Or even better, the only Dragon Emperor.
As the last remaining orbs placed themselves upon his body, he felt something cold on the side of his neck. The ground turned sideways, and everything quietly went dark.
Raal was sitting on top of the dragon's carcass, holding the most incredible soul he had ever seen.
He had to wait one hundred hours to use [One With Nothing] again, but it had been worth it.
[Midnight Call] was also expended, but each of the seven copies had been invaluable.
The first died to distract the dragon when he tried to flee from the city. Another three died when he went back in the plaza; it was kind of a waste to send that many to stop a single spell, but any less might not have accomplished the task, and he managed to imprint an idea in the dragon's mind; the three attackers are copies.
Fifth and sixth were to cover his approach; the dragon thought it was the same as before, so he held back on his attacks and let him slip in striking range.
Taking a calculated hit to fall out of view had been much more complicated than he expected, but he managed to have the dragon look behind him and count how quickly he could do that when he and his copies just waited at the edges of the plaza. Knowing his margin of error, he pretended to lose control of his flight and perfectly masked his presence through [One with Nothing]. He hid the seventh and last copy in his own shadow with its passive [Shadow Meld] and brought it out as he erased his presence from existence; then he just had to remove the [Will of Chronos] copy from its hand to freeze it in time.
Honestly, he wasn't expecting the dragon to waste so much time before healing. It was good that he was just letting the poison consume him, it made his [death attack] far more effective, but any longer and he would have run out of absolute stealth.
Regardless of the route, the destination was the same. Raal had won, the greatest threat of this strange new world laid dead beneath him, and there was nothing else for several miles that could be considered a threat.
The only dealbreaker was that he had been sitting on the dragon's corpse for about ten minutes, and the time had yet to resume. He likely couldn't die of thirst, starvation and old age; his regeneration had already cured his wounds, but an eternity in the most boring place imaginable held no appeal. Still, the dragon consumed a resource to stop time; it had to restart, eventually.
He took another look around the plaza. The dragon's wings had all caught fire while he was hiding and were now piles of cinder; a shame considering all their crafting uses.
Of the onlookers that began running away when the dragon ingested the poison, only a few dozens were out of the plaza; most had barely the time to process what was happening while others couldn't physically leave in time.
Lastly, there was the arrow they had shot when all this started. It was floating in the air, aimed at a building and still carrying the guild's combined attack boosts. When time restarted, it would most definitely level at least half a dozen buildings. It would be a shame to waste a dark crystal arrow on a missed attack, but maybe he could do something about that; just to have a safety net until his skills recharged.
She immensely enjoyed being in mourning; it was like celebrating her husband's death with silence. Kneeling in the crypt by his body, she had let go of the deep resentment she felt by whispering him all she thought about their marriage. The one sour note of the entire situation was that she couldn't smile while the servants were around.
His death suddenly occurred, the healers said he caught the same mysterious sickness as the Nehim heir. Either the pig had bought them all into silence, or they were just that incompetent, neither option being ideal. Any idiot could have figured out he had poisoned the child, and he left so many trails leading directly back to him that she wasted an entire evening tying the loose ends.
She had married him because he was rich, powerful and spineless; he needed only a stern look and a moment of silence to remember his place. But had she known he was this incompetent, she would have just picked someone better and made him the lord governor instead.
He was killed by his poison, an excellent way to waste money. If she closed her eyes, she could almost see him get his hands all over the vial without a care in the world. But as excellent a waste of money that was, it paled in comparison to buying that single slave that vanished in the night.
She already put her agents to work, but she had yet to hear anything about her. Usually, her network could find people on the run within eleven hours, so she had to clear some time in the evening to ensure that the death looked like an accident. The girl might be valuable, but evidence showed she had seen the poison; she had to go.
She concealed her smile the moment she heard the steps on the other side of the door. The pace was faster than usual, but she still recognised them as a maid's.
Three knocks came from the door.
"Lady Ancool."
She took a deep breath and looked at the agonised expression of the corpse. She needed to focus on happy thoughts when talking to idiots.
"Come in."
The girl barged into the room without following the protocol. Blonde, short hair, brown eyes, a face that looks like a bird; it was maid Abigail, the one stealing silverware and hiding it in stuffed animals, afraid of dogs and wanted to marry the florist of the middle ring.
"Lady Ancool. Outside, eight… The tribute..."
She wasn't making any sense, but it was clear something went wrong at the tribute offering. That dumb beast wouldn't usually care who was stuffing his face with food, so lord Nehim must have done something stupid. He had been unstable since his son got better, but he must be in that animal's stomach by now. A shame, he was competent enough to justify his existence.
"Be calm. Take a deep breath."
Talking to idiots was hard. She had to pick simple words and wait for them to catch up.
"What happened? Is the Lord of Wilderness displeased?"
The crypt was underground. Lady Ancool couldn't hear what was happening on the surface, but she would have felt if the beast had been rampaging through the city. The damage was likely localised to the offering participants; two thousand casualties or more, of which only seven or eight mattered.
"No." Her panicked face was inviting her to punch it. Just how much time could she possibly waste to answer a question?
"He is dead."
She put a surprised expression on her face to avoid wasting more time with the maid. She had plans in case that dumb animal died, but she wasn't expecting it to happen within her lifetime. Dragons don't die of natural causes, and nobody in the city was powerful enough to do the deed, so only another dragon lord or a god from the south could have done it.
"How did it happen?"
Depending on which dragon did it, she would have to either have someone thank him for liberating them or put up a good show of fear. If it were the last of the six gods, she would have to make monetary offerings and accept the faith publicly.
"They killed him."
Yes, but who?
"He was accepting the tribute, then shouted in anger and suddenly collapsed. Eight monsters then appeared and said the city was under their protection."
Eight monsters, not six but eight, not dragons but monsters; that was a bad sign.
The Theocracy only had a single god left, but they had access to several other monsters and mighty individuals. They might have sent eight to assassinate the dragon, but everyone that could have defeated the beast was employed far away from there. And dragons would never work in such large numbers; Abigail wouldn't have called them monsters had they been dragons.
All leading to a single conclusion; a new faction had appeared, apparently out of thin air, capable of executing a dragon lord with ease.
"Find Verat. Tell him he is to come to the crypt with haste."
As lady Ancool watched the maid leaving the room, ignoring the procedure, she kept thinking about that number.
Eight.
Eight.
Eight. It was familiar. There was something to it.
Eight monsters appear and kill the dragon, which had come to the city to eat his tribute. She is absent because her husband died; Lord Nehim took his place during the ceremony, the same lord Nehim that had acted unstable since his son recovered.
What was the first report she read about his unstable behaviour? He had drawn something with white chalk on a door. Eight crosses.
Was it a coincidence? It would explain how the cleric vanished from the most heavily guarded building of the city, and it would answer how the Nehim child recovered from the poison.
Those eight were going to be a problem, a problem she would have to solve.
Thankfully, there were several. Had it been a single powerful individual strong enough to kill the dragon it would have taken beyond her lifetime; but if it was multiple individuals working together, turning them against each other was feasible within the year.
Thank you
Thank you for reading the Legend of the eight kings. This is the conclusion of the story.
Initially, I had planned this massive scale narrative; a story divided into three arcs: the arrival of the kings, their fights against several Dragon Lords, and lastly their fall to infighting. Then, Uni happened, followed by work and everything else.
Whenever I wanted to write something, I'd think "Do you remember that word file you left halfway through for over a year? You should finish that before writing something else." Which kind of resulted in me dropping writing.
Well, I love to write, and I finally had some time at hand. Now you have a conclusion to the story, and I'm free to write something else.
I learned a lot from this. First, English. As you probably imagined while reading the early chapters, English isn't my mother language. The Overlord light novels were the first books I read in English, so it kind of made sense they would also be the first thing I write in it.
Second, length. It will be some time before I write another story meant to last past chapter six. More manageable for me to write, more likely for you to have a complete story.
Third, technical writing stuff I won't force you to go through one by one. Suffice to say; if you liked this story and had the patience to read up to here, there's a good chance you'll enjoy the next thing I upload.
To conclude, I wanted to thank everybody for reading the story this far, favouring and commenting. Seeing an email of someone favouring or leaving a review would turn the day brighter.
P.s. By the time I publish my next story, I'll have changed my name to LichDaor.