Chương 46: 46 loop 1, Part 26

For half a second, I thought that was it. Flag was gone. The battery was a dud. My whole stupid-ass plan had accomplished nothing except feeding one of my favorite people? Rocks? Souls? to a dragon. Historically speaking, that was not how my plans should've gone.. I closed my eyes so I wouldn't see it happen, but [Wideview] was extremely committed to showing me the consequences of my own decisions from every available angle. And then Frost did something even crazier.

A sane person would have gotten under the thickest piece of cover available and made themselves as small as possible. And we had a lot of cover. Instead, Frost left the turtle shell, pointed her wand at the dragon, and shouted, " [Redirect]." The shell came apart over our heads. Every plate moved at once. I could feel the late morning sun land on the back of my neck. The dome sailed forward in pieces, plate sliding against plate.

It stacked and tightened as it went, like a deck of cards being squared back into the box. She brought the turtle shell down over Eirkedross. The plates locked together, edge to edge, with no gaps. In about three seconds, the most dangerous thing we had ever seen was sitting inside the dome, with Flag somewhere in the middle of it. And then I remembered something important—which was pretty rude of my brain, because remembering things was how panic got its hooks in. Flag was still in there. He hadn't run.

He hadn't dodged. He had been exactly where I'd sent him, because apparently loyal rocks were even worse for my emotional stability than loyal roommates. Flag? I reached through the tether. There was an awful pause, and my heart sank. Then Flag answered, faint and delighted. Lazlo? I think I'm in the dragon. Did you set off the bomb? No, not yet. Okay. Good. Or bad. Mostly bad. But the tether was still there, and Flag was still answering. I felt terrible.

I had the hope that he'd be okay, but fuck, why were there no good choices? I was shocked at Frost's quick thinking. Twice in one day, someone had surprised me by doing something I'd never expected them to. With the dragon trapped like this, the explosion would do a lot more damage than it could in an open field. Set it off now! Inside the box, the light started. I had expected a loud sound—either a crack, or a boom, or something—to mark the moment the bomb went off. But there wasn't one.

Instead, the shield became light. One second, I could see the dragon's shadow dark behind the glass. The next, I couldn't see the glass at all, because every plate in Frost's dome had gone a solid, blinding white. The turtle shell bucked, as if the light inside was trying to break out. But still, no sound or light escaped. I had seen light hit Eirkedross before, back in my uncle's battle with it.

Out in the open, the dragon's shadow had swallowed the spell, spread around it, and made the damage look smaller than it should have been. But this was different. Frost had trapped the explosion in a box barely larger than the dragon itself. There was nowhere for the shadow to spread. Nowhere for the light to thin out. It was a battery's worth of stored mana turned into brightness and forced to stay exactly where Eirkedross was. The explosion lasted almost fifteen seconds. And then it dimmed at the edges.

I could barely make out the dragon's outline. It had shrunken somehow. Smaller than it should have been. I hoped that was a good sign. To my left, Finn ran straight at it. And started casting. Because of course he did. Almost out of mana, and he'd put himself in the way of danger to help others. Because two times in a row, Finn had decided the best place for him was right in the dragon's path.

A flat sheet of gold-white snapped up around the glass of the turtle shell, adding a second protective layer I felt was overkill. But then it wasn't enough as the dragon roared and started striking the plates. The bomb hadn't worked. I had failed. Fuck. And to make matters worse, it seemed like the protective shell was about to break. The plates had been drinking in shadowfire since Frost cast them. And now, due to the explosion, they were holding more mana than they should have been able to manage.

To top it all off, the dragon had torn several plates away with its claws. We were fucked. The plates weren't holding anymore. Light leaked through the cracks like water through a sieve. Except water was supposed to come through sieves. Mana trapped inside enchanted glass was not supposed to do that. That felt like the kind of detail a textbook would describe in a warning box right before the phrase "catastrophic failure."

"Professor," Finn said, his wand shaking in front of him.

"Those plates aren't going to hold much longer. We should run. Don't look back, our most—""I know what I'm doing," Frost said.

"They don't need to last much longer." She lifted her wand and said, " [Holy Shatter]." The whole dome came apart. Every plate let go of its mana in the same instant and shattered. Each broken piece of glass flared gold as it fell, a hundred little points of holy fire scattering across the dragon. It was the same kind of light Auroka had wrapped her magic arm in. Frost had just been banking mana in those plates. She had been sitting on a way to turn the whole dome into the one element that could hurt the dragon.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. It only lasted a few seconds, and then it stopped. I couldn't see the dragon anymore. Was it over? Had it worked? Frost's arm dropped, and then the rest of her followed suit as she collapsed face-first to the ground with a heavy thump. Finn rushed toward her with a look of fear on his face. His ward was still up. The flat gold sheet he'd thrown across the turtle shell still maintained its form.

I was glad I had been wrong about it being overkill. With Frost gone, if the dragon somehow came back… well, there was nothing else we could do. I stared at the others, their dumbfounded faces a mix of shock and awe. But they weren't moving. Even if the dragon was dead, it didn't feel right standing around. I had to do something or they'd die.

"Run, you fools! Get to the library!" Thankfully, that shocked people out of their stupor, and the gathered crowd finally started moving. Sadly, because I wasn't heading toward the library, my four floating friends were still behind me. Fuck. I turned around and commanded my three remaining golems to take them to the library. They'd be too slow, but it was better than having them stick with me. Finn had reached Frost in the seconds it took me to yell at everyone else. Because of course he did.

If there was a wounded person within sprinting distance, Finn's brain stopped working, and instead of doing the smart thing, he did the saving-people thing. He dropped to his knees beside her and pressed two fingers against her throat. The light gathered in his palm, thin and shaken. He was almost out of mana.

"Get away," he said to me.

"I need more room." His voice came out sharp, almost angry.

"We need to go, Finn. What if it's not dead?"

"She's still warm." He didn't look at me. His eyes were fixed on Frost's face. They moved too quickly, like if he found the right injury, the world would become reasonable again.

"I can save her."

"Finn. She burned her mana channels." His jaw tightened. The healing light flickered, then came back weaker.

"She's going to die," I said.

"I can still save her."

"No. No, you can't. We need to get out of here."

"I can still feel her mana." His voice cracked, but his spell kept trying.

"I can keep her breathing. I can fix this."" Finn." I grabbed his sleeve and pulled. Not hard enough.

"We have to go." But he didn't move. I wasn't sure he even heard me. Despite his mana being lower than mine, he kept casting spells, trying to figure out if there was anything he could do to save Professor Frost. I could tell from her eyes and the pale glow of her skin that Frost had burned her channels to cast it. She'd spent every drop she had and the container it came in. The gold light in Finn's palm guttered again. Frost didn't move.

Behind us, the survivors were still running, feet tearing through the grass toward the library, but something still felt wrong. I looked closer through [Wideview]. The dome was gone. The dust was settling. And somewhere inside all of that, the tether in my chest gave one small, stubborn pulse. That stopped me cold. Flag? I reached through the tether again. Are you still with me? Oh, I'm here, he said. That was very loud. And weird. I can't feel my legs anymore. I felt relieved that Flag was... alive?

I didn't really know what to refer to it as. That's good, buddy. I'm glad you're okay. Did it work? Is the dragon gone? And as if those were the magic words, that was when everything got fucked. Where the dome had been, there was a shape in the settling dust. Hunched, and low, and a lot smaller than the thing that had been ripping professors in half. Frost's spell had worked where my bomb had failed. Whole sections of Eirkedross were just missing. Scales had been burned off in patches.

Shadow seeped away, like smoke from a flame. It looked like another hit would clear it forever. And then I saw what was underneath the scales. The Lich's Orb. It was radiating purple energy. Then the shadow that the bomb and holy fire had scoured off came flooding back, pouring into the burned-out sections from somewhere deeper inside. Filling the hollow chest. The pale gray patches darkened over, scales that had been burned away knitting back in long, dark threads.

It was just like in the Crucible, when my uncle sheared a wing off and the thing just grew a new one. It didn't heal all the way, though. It was still smaller than it had been. Thin in places, like the shadow was trying too hard to stretch over too big a frame. But the orb kept pulsing, and where it was thin, it became thick. It had mattered. That was the worst part. The bomb had mattered. Frost had mattered. Auroka had mattered. Flag had mattered.

All that effort, all that pain, all that impossible work had carved pieces out of the thing and left it smaller, thinner, closer to dead than it had ever been. And it still wasn't enough. There was nothing like the existential dread of my philosophy proving itself time and again. The harder you try, the faster you die. The small, assembled group was still running, but at the rate it was going, the dragon would get them. It would get us, it would get them, and it would all be for naught.

I backed away because I had to. Because Finn wasn't listening, Frost wasn't moving, and the rest of the survivors were still too slow. My golems were behind me, waiting for orders. Flag was somewhere in the dust. The library doors were ahead, open and impossibly far away. I took three steps backward, then four, hating every one of them. Then Eirkedross reared back. I knew immediately what was going to happen.

I saw the sequence of events: the head pulling up, the jaw cracking open, the dark fire pooling thick and slow behind its teeth. Just like when it had killed Finn. And Finn was right where he'd been the whole time—crouched over Frost, not looking at Eirkedross, not ready to save himself. I saw his empty, gray face, blankly looking up at the sky. I didn't have a plan. I didn't have anything that could save him or stop myself from what I knew was coming. There weren't any spells I could cast.

There wasn't some get-out-of-detention-free card I could play. There was nothing I could do that could solve the situation in front of me the way I'd prefer it be solved. Because if I didn't do anything, then I'd watch Finn die from every angle for the second time. And once was enough. So I ran back toward Finn—which meant running toward the dragon, which every survival instinct in my body screamed against. My legs hurt, my chest hurt, my eyes hurt, my mana hurt. But none of it mattered.

Finn was still crouched over Frost, his back to the breath, and I hit him from behind with everything I had left. Just shoulder and weight. He went sideways off the dying professor, sprawled into the grass, out of the line. And then I looked up, and the breath came down.