Chapter 112: Intense Battle

"Two players," Alice said quietly. "Mounted. Mythic mounts."

"Both of them are running dual Mythic." Logan did not know how he knew, but he knew. It was in how they held themselves. "Class and Talent. Both."

Sonic shifted.

The Stormrunner Wraith folded down out of the shape he traveled in and came up on two legs. He was lean and grey, with lightning crawling along both arms.

"Then it is three against two," he said. "I like our numbers."

"They have Mythic mounts," Alice pointed out.

"I like our numbers less."

The horse rider did not shout a challenge or announce himself. He lowered his lance and came.

---

Rakhan Vurel crossed three hundred meters in under two seconds.

Logan got Blade Veil Counter up in time. The lance hit the veil and skidded off it, and the shockwave still threw him back four meters across the rock.

’That was one charge.’ His arms were numb to the elbow. ’From a standing start.’

Rakhan did not stop. He wheeled the Courser wide over the water and came around for a second pass, and the second pass was noticeably faster than the first.

The third was faster than the second.

```

[ Momentum Ascendant ]

```

"His talent!" Alice shouted it while backpedaling. "He is not slowing down between passes! Every meter he covers makes the next hit harder!"

’Same shape as Reaper’s Stride.’ Logan set his feet. ’No ceiling on it. He just has to keep moving.’

Then the elephant arrived, and the ground stopped being a safe place to stand.

Idresh Kaan brought the Pale Thunder Behemoth down on the shelf from directly above. The impact cracked the rock in a spiderweb thirty meters across.

Alice got clear on Comet Step. Sonic got clear because Sonic was Sonic. Logan took most of it.

He came up spitting blood and found Idresh already swinging a hammer the size of a door.

He blocked it. The block worked. The force behind it still drove him down onto one knee.

```

[ Weight of Ages ]

```

’That is a stacking talent too.’ Logan rolled clear of the follow-up. ’Everything he absorbs makes him heavier. Every hit I land makes his next swing worse for me.’

That was a genuinely unpleasant thing to work out in the middle of a fight.

Alice solved it the only way available. She stopped shooting at Idresh entirely and put everything into Rakhan instead.

Her first arrow caught the Courser across the flank and it screamed. Her second put Stun Star into the rider’s shoulder.

Rakhan’s charge came apart in mid-air.

"Six seconds!" Alice yelled. "Take him!"

Sonic took him.

```

[ Galebound Strike ]

```

The Stormrunner Wraith crossed the gap in a line of white lightning and drove a fist through Rakhan’s guard. The Oniniad came off the horse entirely.

He caught himself in mid-air about ten meters down. He did not fall.

’Of course he does not fall.’ Logan was already moving. ’Sky Marshal. He does not need the horse to stay up.’

Then the dragon woke up.

---

It did not wake slowly.

One second it was a sleeping shape along the shelf. The next it was upright, and the roar it let out flattened the water for two hundred meters in every direction.

Everybody stopped fighting each other.

```

[ Challenge Detected ]

[ Furious Dragon’s Rampage ]

[ A Furious Dragon has been awakened. ]

[ The player who lands the killing blow receives the full reward. ]

[ All present players are participants. ]

```

Logan read that and felt his priorities rearrange themselves.

’Full reward. To one killer.’ He looked across the shelf at Rakhan, who was reading the exact same panel. ’And there are four of us standing here.’

```

[ Skyrend Tempest Wyrm ]

Mythic | Level 40

HP: 3,800,000 / 3,800,000

Attack: 2,900

Speed: 2,100

Constitution: 2,700

Arcane: 2,500

```

Alice read the stat block out loud and her voice went flat.

"Its Constitution is higher than my Attack by a number I do not want to say out loud."

"Then we do not tank it." Logan drew Grimspire Lance out to full extension. "We cut it."

The dragon came at both parties at once. It did not appear to care which of them had woken it.

The first tail sweep took out forty meters of the rock shelf. Logan got under it. Idresh did not, and the Behemoth took the hit for him and dropped ten meters before it recovered.

The breath came next.

It was not fire. It was a compressed line of storm, white and screaming, and it went through the spot where Rakhan had been floating half a second earlier.

Then the dragon flexed its wings, and the wind that came off them knocked everyone on the shelf flat.

---

The fight settled into something ugly and even.

The dragon was faster than all four of them and tougher than all four of them. Its scales turned aside anything that was not delivered exactly right.

Logan found the seams with Sword Intent. That was the only reason he was doing damage at all.

Alice found the same seams with Arrow Intent, and her Cadence began to climb.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 180 stacks. ]

```

Across the shelf, the two Oniniads were solving the same problem from the opposite direction.

Rakhan had gone back to the Courser and started running long loops around the dragon. Every loop made his lance hit harder than the last one.

Idresh had planted the Behemoth directly under the dragon’s chest and was letting it claw at him. Every strike he ate made his hammer heavier.

’They are both building.’ Logan cut a seam open along the dragon’s foreleg and blinked clear of the counterattack. ’So am I. So is Alice. This comes down to who peaks first.’

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 900 stacks. Speed +6,300%. ]

```

He let it climb. He watched the number and did not stop it.

The dragon caught Sonic across the chest with a wing and put him through a rock formation. He got up. He was slower afterward.

Alice punched an arrow through the membrane of that same wing. The dragon shrieked and turned toward her, and Logan cut the tendon in its ankle to turn it back.

They were doing damage. All four of them were doing damage.

The HP bar was moving, and it was moving fast now, and everybody on that shelf was watching it for exactly the same reason.

```

[ Skyrend Tempest Wyrm: 12% HP remaining. ]

```

Logan saw the number and started running.

Because across the shelf, Rakhan Vurel had pulled the Courser into a climb that went two hundred meters straight up, and he was turning at the top of it.

’That is not another pass.’ Everything in Logan went cold and sharp at once. ’That is the finisher. He has been stacking momentum this entire fight for exactly this one drop.’

The lance in Rakhan’s hands had started to glow along its whole length.

```

[ Momentum Ascendant: Terminal Descent ]

```

He came down.

The air tore open around him. The dragon lifted its head toward the sound, far too slow, one wing ruined and its HP bar sitting at twelve percent.

That lance was going to land. It was going to land in about one second, it was going to end the challenge, and the reward was going to belong to somebody else.

Logan looked at the distance. He looked at his stacks. He looked at Grimlord’s Blade.

’Not a chance.’

He moved.