Adrien moved fast and moved carefully, which turned out to be two things that did not sit together well.
Absolute Mana Sense had not shut off since the road. It was not something he could switch away from any more, and everything it fed him told him the same thing, so he took one precaution before he went any further.
He put his bag down in the dirt.
Then he reached for the item he had won off Léon Arquenay.
Umbral Root came together in his palm out of nothing, the specks folding inward the way Garrick’s sword had, and the weight of it arrived a moment after the shape did. Dark polished wood running up into a silver setting, the pale crystal held between curved arms, cool against his skin and humming faintly.
It fit his hand like it had been made for it.
That was a relief, because there had been no time to get used to carrying a staff and he had been quietly dreading the first hour of it.
He knew this was a bad idea. He had known it on the road and he knew it now, and he kept walking anyway, because whatever was bleeding out there did not register to his talent as a threat.
It registered as honey. The presence came through sweet, warm, and enormous, and every part of him that had ever wanted to understand a thing was being pulled toward it by the collar.
The first hundred paces of forest were untouched. Ordinary pine, ordinary undergrowth, a bird somewhere being wrong about the time of day.
Further in, the trees started coming apart.
Trunks snapped at chest height. A stand of six leaning against each other where they had fallen together. And past those, ones that had been torn whole out of the earth and put back down the wrong way up, root systems standing where the crowns should have been, dirt still hanging off them in clods.
Every step closer, his talent read the presence more clearly, and it was nothing he had felt before.
If Adrien had to give it one word, he would have gone with grandeur.
That was what the energy felt like. Not weight, not pressure, not the flat heaviness that came off the strongest people in that ballroom.
There was blood as well. Not a little. It got worse the deeper he went, sprayed along broken wood at first, in long streaks through the leaf litter further on, and in pools where the ground dipped.
Something about the pools took him somewhere else entirely.
A concrete floor. Men who moved without wasting anything. His own blood going drop by drop off his fingertips into a spreading circle under a desk, while the number on the screen climbed and he ran his mouth to buy the last of it.
’A bunker that nobody was supposed to find. Turned out to be worth exactly nothing.’
He put it away and kept moving.
Whatever was ahead of him had lost more blood than a human body contained, several times over, and it had not finished losing it.
The trees ended and Adrien came out into what was left of a clearing.
He saw the wing first, because the wing took up most of the sky on that side. It had been torn through in a dozen places, membrane hanging in strips off the bone, holes in it wide enough to walk through.
The body under it came next. One flank had been opened from shoulder to hip, deep, and everything that had happened to that forest was written along the ground behind it in a two hundred pace furrow.
Four legs. A head bigger than the carriage he had climbed out of.
Scales the colour of obsidian, and eyes so full of blood that the red had drowned whatever colour they used to be.
Adrien was standing in front of a dragon.
It was getting up.
The whole clearing moved as it did it, and it got its legs under itself and tried to put the wing out, and the wing went halfway and stopped and came back down. The sound it made about that was not a sound a person forgets.
And it had felt him at the same moment he felt it.
The head came round, and it fixed on him from forty paces, and the voice arrived along the ground rather than through the air.
"You."
Adrien did not move.
"What is that in your body?"
Whatever came off it when it said that was not a spell.
The air went solid. Adrien’s chest stopped taking anything in and his knees folded most of the way, and the one reason he stayed off the ground was the staff going down in front of him with all his weight on it.
He kept his eyes up the whole time. Somewhere in the back of his skull, the part of him that never stopped doing arithmetic noted that a creature dying of blood loss had almost put him on the ground by being annoyed.
Because it was angry. That much came through without any translation at all.
And angry meant it was about to do something.
A Frost Lance formed at the tip of Umbral Root before he had finished deciding to make one. A window opened somewhere at the edge of his vision about how much better he had got at that, and he ignored it entirely.
He threw.
The lance crossed the clearing and hit the shoulder square, and it came apart on the scale like a stone thrown at a wall.
Nothing. Not a mark, not a chip. The thing did not even register that it had been hit.
’Right. So that’s where we are.’
He was a One Star mage standing in a hole in the woods with a One Star spell, in front of something that could kill him by exhaling in his direction, and his best attack had made about as much impression as weather.
Absolute Mana Sense opened all the way up.
He had used it on people. Rank, shape, roughly how much they had. He had never turned it on properly against something that was actively trying to make his heart stop.
It went out, it went through, and it gave him everything.
The scales were not simply hard. They were saturated, every plate carrying its own mana, layered over each other so that the whole hide worked as one structure. There was no gap in it anywhere along the head, the legs, the back.
And on the left flank, where the wound was, the structure ended.
Mana was pouring out of that opening in a thick steady stream that had been running since before it fell out of the sky, and behind it, down in the chest, he could see the thing producing it.
Its core.
Torn, working badly, and unshielded on that one side by anything except meat.
’Everything on this creature is armoured except the hole somebody already made.’
The dragon dragged itself around to face him fully, and Adrien understood with total clarity that he had perhaps four seconds left of being a person who had options.
’I can’t hurt it anywhere. So I don’t try to do just that. I just need to hit one exact spot, and I need to do it more times than it can afford to bleed.’
’And I have exactly one thing that makes that possible.’
He set his feet in the churned dirt, took both hands to the staff, and reached for the spell he had spent two days and most of his blood taking apart in a moving carriage.
[Winter’s Reach]
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AN: Add the novel to collections and send (power stones and golden tickets) support if like it ;)