Chapter 585: The Dragon Skins Itself

The giant beast refused to come near us.

After Maggie’s holy flame had turned a patch of its scales to grey ash, all three of its writhing heads pulled back into the dark. It didn’t retreat, and it certainly didn’t leave. Instead, it hung thirty paces off the basalt shelf with its torn, pale wings beating against the draft, and drove its tail straight down into the stone.

The tail frayed into ragged quills at the end, and every one of them went into the rock.

A wet crack echoed through the chasm.

The floor under our boots began to shake, a deep grinding shudder that rattled my teeth. Long black fissures split open across the shelf, and dark spines pushed up out of them like shoots of jagged iron. Then they kept going. They twisted and swelled, and they grew legs, until each one was a small, mangled copy of the titan hanging above us.

Thorn-spawn. Each one was the size of a wolf, with charcoal scale laid over raw crimson meat and bone-white fangs running down their flanks like mouths split open lengthwise. Hundreds of them crawled out of the rock with clusters of red eyes glowing in the gloom, and every one of them turned toward our ledge.

The moment the swarm surged forward, something clicked in my head.

The whole mess of the battlefield flattened into a board in my mind’s eye, three-dimensional and perfectly still. Every advancing spawn had a red line running out in front of it. I could see their angles, their exact speeds and the paths they would take to reach us. I could even see the timers on the cracks they were crawling out of, counting down to the next batch.

All that clutter simply turned into geometry.

’Oh. Oh, that’s... easy?’

I didn’t think. I just moved. I reached for the frost attributes I’d taken from Brunhilde and blew one sharp, freezing breath across the stone.

[Call of Ice]

A sheet of pale cyan frost swept over the basalt and caught five thorn-seeds just as they were splitting the rock. The cold froze them solid before they could sprout, and their shells cracked apart like cheap glass.

At the same time, three spawn leaped for my throat. I thrust out my right hand and caught the lead one by its split jaw.

[Necrotic Touch]

Black decay flooded out of my palm and into its body. The rot raced through its veins and aged it from the inside out, until its organs turned to sludge and it slid out of my grip as a heap of foul grease.

I snapped my left wrist and stamped a sigil of white-and-black light onto a spawn on the far left.

[Heretical Pursuit]

The sigil flared. A streak of my white-and-black fire shot from my fingers, slammed into the marked spawn and immediately jumped to the four nearest beasts, hunting them through the crowd like a pack of starving dogs.

Behind me, Light stepped into the swarm.

He didn’t have his wyvern anymore. He didn’t have his armor either, and his left arm was burned coal-black from the elbow down, held uselessly against his ribs. But his right hand still held his longsword, and his swordsmanship had reached a cold, frightening level of efficiency that made no sense to me.

He didn’t hack. He didn’t throw broad, heavy swings. He simply walked forward, and his blade moved through the spawn in short, effortless flicks.

The steel passed through charcoal scale and back-thorns without a sound. He cut them so cleanly that the beasts didn’t seem to realise they were dead until their bodies slid apart along seams too thin to see.

I watched him take three of them in a single breath without once hurrying. He was reading something on them that I couldn’t see, some weakness built into the way their flesh was put together.

I cleared a path with my chains and shouted over the screeching.

"Light! How are you cutting them like that?"

Light didn’t turn his head. He flicked his wrist and took the head off a spawn without looking at it, then stepped over the two halves with his eyes cold and flat.

"Every bone has a direction. Cut where it wants to open."

’Right. The grain.’

I drew Wren and reached out through our link, pushing what I had just watched straight into the blade in my hand.

’Wren. Do you see that?’

I can feel it. It feels like snapping dry slate. Stop pointing and let me cut.

I pivoted and drove her edge into the flank of an oncoming spawn. The moment the blade touched scale, I felt exactly what Light had described. There was no resistance at all. The steel slid along the natural grain of the thorns and split the beast lengthwise, and my arm barely felt it.

Meanwhile, Light had turned himself into a wall on the right flank. Nothing that reached him got past.

Ilse was another story.

She was visibly reaching her limit. Her clothes were scorched to rags, her skin was red and blistered, and her Drakonir fire had dimmed to a weak ember around her knuckles. She wasn’t fighting up close anymore. She was stepping back and counting her paces under her breath, eyes on the ground, mapping where the next thorn-seeds were going to break through.

She was still useful, and still precise, and as flat as ever. But she was running on empty, and a single bad hit would finish her.

Across the shelf, Maggie moved.

She walked to the edge of the shelf and stepped off it into empty air, and her silver chain coiled twice around her right forearm before it snapped out into the dark.

The chain threaded through the chasm and kept on going, as if it had no end at all, its links humming like a drawn bowstring. It didn’t touch the swarm below. It shot straight for the titan’s lower chest, where the small third head hung with its tongue lolling out.

The links wrapped around that head’s snout with a loud, metallic clatter and bound its jaws shut. Maggie didn’t pull. She rode the chain’s momentum through the air instead, rolling through the dark like a scrap of torn black cloth, and slammed her left boot into the creature’s chest.

She raised her right palm and pressed it flat against the pinned head’s split throat.

White fire poured out of her hand and straight into the creature’s neck. It didn’t scorch anything. Scale, muscle and bone simply came apart on contact and fell away in sheets of grey ash.

The beast screeched through its bound jaws. Even muffled by the chain, the sound was loud enough to shake the chasm walls.

It was the first real wound anyone had landed on the main body.

Then the dragon did something horrifying.

Instead of letting the holy fire sit there and eat its way down to the bone, the giant beast twisted its long necks around. The upper right head lunged down, drove its fang-lined jaws straight into the low head’s burned throat, and tore the dying flesh clean off its own body.

A huge chunk of grey, ash-covered meat came away and dropped into the abyss.

Underneath the wound it had made on itself, raw red meat was already knitting back together, fast enough to watch. Maggie’s fire stopped burned things from getting back up. So the titan had simply ripped out the burned part before the fire could take hold.

I watched the discarded meat crumble to ash as it fell. By the time it was gone, new scale had already crusted over the low head’s throat.

’It’s cutting off its own skin to keep from dying.’

Maggie landed heavily back on our stone shelf. Her veil snapped in the draft, and she stared flatly at the giant beast with those dead crimson eyes as it spread its violet-grey wings wide again.

The titan leaned forward. All three heads opened wide, the fang-lined seams down its necks splitting open with them, and it let out a roar that shattered the last of the rocks around us.