Chương 109: B2 Chapter 51: Strength of a Guardian

Carlos froze in utter shock. Did– did that dragon just talk? A-and say Sandaras!? I suppose some stories do have dragons be sapient, and Amber did mention that Sandaras has a reputation of being feared by dragons, but still. Amber, meanwhile, ignored the dragon's speech and just continued her assault. With her first Force Bubble broken, she cast the same spell again—twice.

Mana and essence gathered in two concentric shells centered on the dragon; one shell just a few feet larger than the dragon, and the other another dozen feet beyond that. The dragon responded with angry brute physicality, lashing out with a whip-like crack of its tail. The supersonic flick of the tail's tip, imbued with a condensed blade of essence, sliced through the inner Force Bubble while the spell was still forming, but the outer spell was beyond its immediate reach and snapped into existence an instant later.

The dragon growled at the new sphere of magic enclosing it, then beat its wings a single time and darted forward at incredible speed, far beyond anything reasonable for the visibly apparent effort. Mana empowered the dragon's sudden aerial charge and fortified its head and neck as the dragon smashed jaw-first into the barrier. For a bare instant, the unstoppable might of the charging dragon contested with the immovable wall of pure force, before the wall shattered.

The dragon smashed through the barrier with sheer strength, its shoulders and wings splintering the shards of the broken spell further in the wake of its head. Its aim already set on its target before it had even started to move, the dragon flew straight at Amber a thousand feet up, zooming through the air far faster than made sense for how little its wings had moved. The dragon struck with titanic fury, jaws filled with gleaming sharp teeth slamming shut, but Amber was no longer there.

In the brief moment the distance and her Force Bubble had bought her, she had teleported 1000 feet behind the dragon. Simultaneously, her extra minds busily filled the air around the dragon with a hundred Force Blades, casting as fast as she could move her mana. Her voice suddenly sounded in Carlos's mind. [Are you going to help? Why are you just standing there? This was supposed to be a team battle!] Carlos blinked, then closed his gaping mouth. [Did you not hear it talk? It mentioned Sandaras!] [Wait, what!?] Amber's spells continued their onslaught unabated, but she tore her eyes away from the dragon for a moment to look at Carlos with wide-eyed shock. [I thought it was just roaring, I didn't even pay attention to that.]"The mana-aether of this place is MINE!" The dragon proclaimed its dominance and reached out with an implacable grip of intangible power to impose its will on the environment. Carlos felt the pressure of its powerful presence intensify for a moment, though he was only on the fringe of the effect.

Then the dragon's efforts crashed headlong into Purple's established domain, and the pressure bounced back and weakened. Vast webs of hair-thin essence collided and clashed in showers of mana-sparks to Carlos's mana sense. The two webs struggled for a moment, then the dragon's newly-imposed web withdrew in tatters, rebuffed by Purple's entrenched and anchored web.

"What? A dungeon? Ah, so that is how… No matter. You are still too weak!" Amber joined Carlos in watching, stunned, as the dragon flexed its magical power again to push back Purple's domain. The dragon firmed up its web, thickened the strands, and pushed more power into it, forcibly holding it together through the course of a renewed clash with Purple.

The dragon's Level 59 essence eroded Purple's merely Level 49 essence on contact, and in a few seconds the dragon seized control of the aether in a 100-foot sphere around itself. At the dragon's command, the aether of the environment, along with the dragon's own essence web, ground away at any magical structure in the area that did not belong to the dragon.

The spell-wrought blades flying into it from all sides, which had been skittering off of the dragon's armored scales, started dissolving before they even reached it. The spells still hit, but any edge they might have had was dulled to irrelevance. Then a wave of dungeon essence poured forth from the ground, held with an iron grip, and Purple's domain slammed back into full effect.

The dragon huffed, a small burst of fire erupting from its mouth, then it spun in the air and shot toward Amber again, ignoring the Force Blades she was trying to cut it with. Reflected sunlight flashed from the dragon's metallic scales as it flew, then the brilliance of a beam of white-hot fire outshone it. The dragon flew at a speed Carlos could hardly believe, and its fiery breath preceded it even faster, but Amber still reacted barely in time to teleport again.

The dragon's head whipped around on the end of its snake-like neck to glare at her new position, but the flames it had breathed at her did not follow the movement. The fire didn't fade out, either, despite lacking fuel. The flames gathered into a raging sphere of mana-powered heat, and the persistent ball of fire followed the dragon like an orbiting satellite as it streaked through the air toward Amber once more.

The dragon breathed fire once more as it flew, but this time the searing flood of heat and light split into several streams. One stream speared forward as before, but five others flowed into new flaming spheres, joining the first to make an even half-dozen balls of fire orbiting the dragon in a wide circle. Carlos belatedly set aside his desire to take stock and investigate the mystery of the dragon's reference, and started casting spells of his own to join the fight.

He chose the spells he wanted to cast, identified them to his soul structures, and impressed his intent upon them. Preparing each casting of each spell in advance was no longer needed; his spell IDE superstructure had compiled records of every spell he had ever learned or created, and his spellcasting superstructure handled the entire process of assembling the desired structure and empowering it with mana.

The core of it was what had once been a simple mana manipulator, but its functionality was so greatly expanded now that it made casting a spell from scratch as simple and quick as executing a program on a computer. Faster, even, since the user interface was just a direct application of intent and will. Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site. Completed structures of essence sprang into existence in a blink, mana flowed through them, and magic leaped to his command.

Trusting Amber to see to her own defense—he knew her capabilities had not truly been stressed yet—Carlos tried a new form of attack against the dragon. The temperature plummeted in the region in front of him, and he almost shivered despite none of the cold actually reaching him. Lances of ice formed by the dozen, floating thin and translucent but deadly sharp in the air, awaiting his command to streak forward.

Carlos was dimly aware of a part of his mind envisioning exaggerated scenarios of absurd toughness, sharpness, and coldness to make the spell's specified parameters take effect properly, but that was now merely a background effort, almost subconscious, handled automatically by his soul structures. He set a spell to continue creating more Ice Lances for a continuous bombardment, then unleashed his rain of terror.

He absently shook his head as he thought to himself, That was a terrible pun, and not even really accurate. Where's the "terror" aspect of it? While Carlos readied his attack, the dragon continued its assault on Amber unabated. Its breath of fire spearheaded its charge again, blindingly bright to both eyes and mana senses, and Carlos caught a flash of reasoning through their bond as Amber hastily cast another spell in addition to her Teleport—[I bet that's blinding to the dragon too!] The dragon's jaws snapped shut on Amber's just-abandoned location, and this time, its jaws found something for it to bite down on. The dragon closed its jaws on a ball of spell-wrought needle-sharp Force Spikes, and just as its mouth closed, the first of Carlos's Ice Lances slammed point-first into its metallic scales. Where Amber's Force Blades had skittered off with scratches at best, the Ice Lances sizzled… and pierced. The dragon screamed in pain. Carlos flinched at the mana-imbued sound.

It felt like the dragon was trying to drive a spike through his brain via his ears. He shook off the effect easily enough, but in that brief moment of distraction, the dragon's own surprise attack hit. Three of the white-hot fiery spheres in the dragon's orbit had suddenly shot outward an instant before it tried to bite Amber, and they changed direction when she cast her Teleport.

Two of them streaked through the sky, homing on the spell's destination even while the spell was still taking form, while the third and another from the dragon's orbit flew in the opposite direction. Amber teleported again when she saw the first two about to hit her, only to find the second pair waiting for her at her near-instinctive choice of her next position. Two spheres of fire, shining like miniature suns, slammed into her before she could react.

A powerful Force Bubble flickered into existence automatically just before the fires could hit, and the barrier shook as the flames smashed into it with tremendous force. One on her left and one on her right, the sustained fireballs rang Amber's protective shell like a bell, then split their elements and pushed their heat through it. What remained of the aspect of force in the dragon's fires then converted into more heat to fuel the pure burning blaze that no barrier of pure force could ever be suited to block.

The immaterial flames touched Amber's skin, and she screamed. Even as dragonfire threatened to torch Amber, the dragon had its own problems to deal with. Carlos's barrage of Ice Lances struck a dozen small holes into its metallic scales, and blood dripped from its open mouth as it withdrew from the trap Amber had laid for its bite. Carlos started directing his barrage to aim for the dragon's mouth, but changed his mind when a new blast of fire erupted to melt every Ice Lance in its path.

Carlos adjusted his focus back to bombarding the dragon's sides, and started conjuring Ice Lances behind it as well. For a hundred yards in every direction, the air sparkled with refractions from countless pieces of ice, and cold fog started to blur it all into an indistinct glow. Then the two remaining balls of fire in the dragon's orbit flared and expanded. The flames flattened and spread, then brightened as more mana flowed into them.

Their edges merged, first with the new flames fountaining forth from the dragon's mouth, and then with each other, forming a full shell of fire covering the dragon entirely. Carlos continued for a moment longer, but every Ice Lance that hit the fire shield lost cohesion. Some managed to remain solid, and even hit, but their sharpness and penetrating power was gone, and even the best strike just bounced uselessly off of the dragon's scales.

Carlos flicked an anxious glance toward Amber, but he felt only determination, resolve, and focus from her through their bond. She was occupied channeling mana into what would ordinarily be an excessively overpowered cooling spell, but she was handling it. The moment of distraction made him miss the dragon's sudden change of direction, as it charged through the air at him instead of Amber. The dragon slashed a claw at him, holding its head back warily and keeping its flames surrounding itself.

Almost before he could even register the attack, Carlos found himself somewhere else. A dormant spell detected the danger and activated on its own. A tight web of essence enclosed him in an instant and whisked him away, teleporting him a random distance in a random direction—but with a safety check to ensure it wouldn't try to send him into solid ground, or anything similarly catastrophic. Mana senses guided his reorientation, and Carlos quickly looked up at the dragon over a hundred feet above him.

The dragon roared in anger.

"You think you're clever?" Mana surged, the dragon beat its wings once, and it darted down to him even faster than before. Another Contingent Teleport triggered, but the dragon extended an intangible claw of essence lightning-fast and snagged the teleport's web as it formed. A quick flick sent the web to encompass the dragon as well, and Carlos and the dragon teleported together.

The dragon reached for Carlos with both of its front claws, slashing with lightning speed, but another, different, contingent spell triggered before either claw could land. A Force Bubble appeared around him to block the attacks. The dragon tried to snatch and twist the form of this spell too, but this time the spell rebuffed its interference. The dragon's ethereal extra claw slid off of the spell's structure like it had been greased, and the spell sprang back into its proper shape the instant it passed.

The protective barrier formed as designed, and the dragon's physical claws slammed to a halt as they collided with it.

"Right back at you. That won't work on me again." Carlos's words came out as a series of guttural snarls and roars, augmented by an almost instinctive spell for the parts of the sounds that his voice couldn't naturally form. The dragon froze for a moment, and Carlos manually cast another Teleport to get some distance. [Screw it, the drain is only temporary. I'm ending this.] The inscrutable message from Amber echoed in Carlos's head for just a moment before a familiar feeling of wrongness suddenly made it make sense. Another Force Bubble appeared around the dragon, starting with plenty of distance to avoid any chance of the dragon disrupting it, then shrank rapidly. The spell reeked of something horribly wrong to Carlos's senses, and he had to hold himself back from instinctively trying to counter it. The dragon's head whipped around to stare at Amber, and it roared once more.

"STOP! I YIELD! HOW DID YOU LEARN THAT SPELL?"