One of the six serpents that had extended from my aura slapped the blade away. The weapon flew out of the dragon’s grip and took two of his fingers with it. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his bleeding hand.
“You can’t defeat us all,” he screamed at me.
He opened his jaws wide to unleash a gout of red flame. I saw the flames churn in his throat like a burning thunderhead.
I reversed the grip on my weapon and smashed its hilt up into the dragon’s jaw. His mouth clicked shut and shards of splintered teeth burst from between his bloodied lips along with a puff of fire and smoke. The dragon’s eyes rolled up into their sockets, and he fell to the ground.
One down.
“Jace!” Hope danced in Clem’s eyes when she saw me striding toward her corner of the battlefield. My team and the remnants of Tochi’s force cheered, and new energy stiffened their spines. They lashed out at the Bright Lodge warriors nearest them, and the horned attackers backed away with their weapons in defensive postures.
“Kill him!” Trulissinangoth shouted at Aesgir. “My dragons will finish the rest.”
Four of the horn-helmed warriors immediately spun to face me, their spears forming a defensive hedge. Their team leader stood behind them with an enormous jinsei maul resting on his shoulder. He threw back his head and howled, unleashing streams of sacred energy that flowed around his allies. The spearmen answered his howl in eerie unison, and all five members of the Bright Lodge fixed me with electric blue stares. Aesgir’s technique had transformed his team. They were no longer individual warriors, but a pack bound to their leader.
Trulissinangoth sidled away from her people, forming the third point of a triangle between the Bright Lodge and me. She twirled her fusion blade lazily, dismissively. Her aura was alive with golden flames, and her scales had grown to cover most of her face and the bare skin of her arms and armored plates. Her core burned with sacred energy, and I sensed it would not be long before she advanced to disciple level.
“This is how you die, fool,” the dragon said. “Winning the Empyrean Gauntlet changes nothing. You will die here today, and no one will ever know what really happened. I’ll be crowned the champion by Elushinithoc, the Inquisition will agree, and dragons will once again rule this world while humans grovel at our feet.”
Though I hated to admit it, the dragon was probably right. The deal her people had made with the priests of the Inquisition all but assured dragons would be ascendant when this was all said and done. Calling the Gauntlet had been a formality, and they certainly would have liked to have the Flame’s blessing for their plans. Now that the unexpected had happened, and I had won, though, they’d just bury the truth under a mountain of lies. The dragons would still come out on top, and the Inquisition would still betray us all for their own selfish ends.
It made me wonder how much of the rest of our history was a convenient fiction made up to justify the whims of the powerful.
“No,” I said. “That isn’t going to happen. The lies end today.”
Trulissinangoth charged, a bestial roar exploding from her lungs. The fire that surrounded her took on a life of its own and tongues of flame stabbed from it like scorpions’ tails. It was a dazzling flood of attacks that nearly overwhelmed me with precise strikes that sought any weakness in my defenses.
An hour ago, that would have been enough to destroy me, despite the differences in our cores’ strengths.
At that moment, though, I was no longer wounded. I was at the peak of my strength, and the chaos core had given me abilities I was only beginning to understand.
Like the way my serpents clicked into position with mechanical precision. They intercepted the striking flames and turned them away from me in the blink of an eye. I activated my Thief’s Shield with a thought, and robbed the attacks of their fire aspects, which I fed back into my serpents to wreathe them in deadly flames.
Uncertainty flashed across Trulissinangoth’s eyes. She’d expected the fight to end when she’d unleashed her full power. But it hadn’t, and now she faced a foe she couldn’t fully comprehend.
The dragon roared again and drove her spear at my heart, fast as an arrow’s flight.
I was faster.
A single step moved me out of her attack’s path. As the fusion blade shot past me, I slammed my weapon into its haft. My powerful blow twisted Trulissinangoth off balance and knocked her weapon far out of position to defend. Before the dragon recovered, my serpents darted toward her exposed flank. They stopped a fraction of an inch away from her skin and filled her aura with a rush of pain and fear aspects that I’d harvested from the battlefield.
Trulissinangoth shouted in surprise and let the momentum of her missed thrust spin her around to face me. She’d abandoned her offense and twirled her blade in front of her like a blurred shield. She thought her defense was impenetrable.
She was wrong.
There was a flaw in Trulissinangoth’s technique that left a gap in her protection. A single, perfectly timed strike would slip through her defenses and pierce her heart.
Killing her would have taken no more than the blink of an eye. I hesitated to take the shot, though. She’d done what her elders had demanded. She’d even tried to warn me away from the competition to avoid this very moment.
The dragon didn’t deserve to die.
The Bright Lodge fighters howled from my right side, activating a deadly technique and giving me a split-second warning of their impending attack. I vaulted into the air to dodge a flurry of stabs from the spearmen. Their blades were thrust forward with perfect precision,
