The six armed being crested the ridge first, and even from a distance too far for Hoju’s eyes to properly resolve detail, the shape of it burned itself into his memory instantly.
One eye, set wide in the center of a scarred face, six arms spread in a fan behind it, each one carrying a different weapon, a curved blade in one, a war hammer in another, a spear, a chain whip, a jagged axe, and a weapon Hoju had no name for at all.
It was already moving at a speed that made no sense, closing distance across open ground in a handful of strides that should have taken twenty.
The second shape rose to meet it a heartbeat later, and Hoju’s stomach dropped the moment he saw it clearly.
A dragon, but wrong in every proportion a dragon should have had, black armored scales layered thick enough to look more like plate than hide, wings folded tight against a body built for close combat rather than flight, and eyes that glowed the same burning color as the stars overhead.
Hoju did not know their names yet.
He would learn them both before the night was over, one from the being’s own mouth and one carved permanently into a promise he had no idea he was about to make.
The six armed being struck first, a horizontal sweep of the curved blade aimed low, and the dragon twisted its entire body sideways in a motion too fluid for something wearing that much armor, letting the blade pass a hand’s width from black scale before answering with a burst of flame from its jaws that lit the entire ridge orange.
The being did not dodge the flame.
It simply raised the war hammer in its second arm and swung through the fire, meeting it head on, and the impact when hammer met dragon skull sent a shockwave rolling across the battlefield that Hoju felt in his teeth from a distance he had thought was safe.
It wasn’t.
Nothing about that distance was safe.
He understood that now, with his ears ringing and dust raining down around him from cracks that had not existed in the ground a second earlier.
The dragon staggered, caught itself, and lashed out with its tail in a wide arc that the being met with the chain whip, wrapping the length of it around the tail’s tip and using the dragon’s own momentum to swing itself bodily over the strike and land a spear thrust down through the gap between two armored scales along the dragon’s shoulder.
Black blood, if it could be called blood, sprayed in an arc that hissed where it landed, eating small craters into the stone.
The dragon roared, a sound that Hoju felt more than heard, a pressure wave that flattened him against the ground he was already crouched against, and countered with a full body slam that the being barely managed to sidestep, close enough that the edge of one black wing clipped the being’s shoulder and sent it skidding across the ridge in a shower of sparks.
It rose again immediately, all six arms already repositioning, the jagged axe and the unnamed weapon coming up in a crossed guard as the dragon bore down a second time.
Hoju understood, watching from a distance he was quickly realizing was not nearly far enough, that he was witnessing something his body had no framework to process.
Every clash sent tremors through ground that should have been solid rock.
Every exchange happened faster than his eyes could fully track, blurs of motion resolving only in the aftermath, a spray of blood here, a scorch mark there, evidence of violence his mind had to reconstruct after the fact because it could not keep pace with it as it happened.
He tried to move.
His legs would not obey him at first, some deep animal part of his brain having correctly identified that movement, any movement, might be the difference between being ignored and being noticed by something operating on an entirely different plane of existence than he did.
He forced himself to crawl backward anyway, away from the ridge, toward wherever the gate might have deposited him, except there was no gate here, no landmark, nothing but scorched black ground stretching in every direction under a burning sky.
The fight was moving.
Not away from him.
Toward him, the two combatants trading ground in a wide arc that was slowly, inevitably, closing the distance between their violence and his hiding place.
He found a shallow depression in the rock, barely enough to lower his profile, and pressed himself into it, watching through the gap between his forearms as the dragon unleashed something new, a wide beam of condensed flame that tore across the battlefield in a line that the six armed being only barely cleared by launching itself vertically, twisting mid air to bring the war hammer down in a strike that caught the dragon across the base of one wing.
The impact was enormous.
The dragon’s roar this time carried something different in it, pain layered under fury, and it broke off, wings beating hard enough to kick up a storm of loose rock and ash as it gained altitude.
The six armed being pursued, launching itself skyward in pursuit, and for a moment the fight left the ground entirely, the two shapes trading blows somewhere among the burning stars themselves, too high and too fast for Hoju to make out anything beyond flashes of light where weapon met scale.
Then the dragon unleashed something enormous.
Hoju saw the light before he understood what it meant, a bloom of white fire expanding outward from where the two combatants had been fighting, growing faster than anything falling should grow, and some final animal instinct screamed at him to run, except there was nowhere to run to and no time left to do it in.
The edge of the blast caught him.
He did not feel pain, not really, not in any way he could later describe with precision.
He felt heat, and pressure, and the specific sensation of being lifted entirely off the ground and thrown a distance his mind refused to calculate, and then nothing at all.
When Hoju woke, the first thing he registered was silence.
Total, absolute silence, the kind that felt wrong after everything that had come before it, and for several long seconds he lay perfectly still, unsure whether he was actually conscious or simply imagining the sensation of being conscious.
His head throbbed with a dull, fuzzy pain that made focusing difficult.
He pushed himself upright slowly, wincing, and found himself lying near the base of a crater that had not existed in the terrain before, wide and deep enough that its edges rose several feet above his head in every direction.
He climbed out of it on unsteady legs, his ears still ringing faintly, and looked out across a battlefield that no longer had anything moving on it.
The burning sky remained the same, indifferent stars drifting slow and silent overhead.
The scorched ground stretched on in every direction, cracked and blackened worse than before, evidence of violence written into the stone itself in ways Hoju suspected would never fully heal.
He walked, unsteady and cautious, toward the place he thought the fighting had ended, following a trail of destruction that grew worse the closer he got, craters overlapping craters, scorch marks layered over scorch marks, until he crested a low rise and finally saw them both.
The dragon stood at a distance, wings mantled, black armored scales scored with fresh wounds along one shoulder and the base of one wing where the war hammer had connected.
It was speaking, low and measured, in a voice that carried across the silence like the ground itself was amplifying it.
“My life force is spent for now,” it said.
“I will retreat.
But understand this.
The next time we meet, you die.
There will not be a third.”
Then, without waiting for any response, the dragon’s form folded in on itself and vanished entirely, leaving no trace behind except the wounded ground it had fought across.
That left the other one.
Hoju’s breath caught in his throat as his eyes finally settled on the six armed being, and understood, with a cold drop of horror, exactly why the dragon had chosen that moment to leave rather than press its advantage.
The being was lying propped against a shattered outcrop of black stone, and its lower body was gone entirely, severed clean somewhere below the waist, the wound cauterized black at the edges by whatever final exchange had ended the fight.
Only one of its six weapons remained intact, the curved blade, still gripped loosely in one of its remaining hands.
Hoju froze, half hidden behind a jagged spur of rock, staring at something that should have already been dead and clearly, impossibly, was not.
Then its single eye turned, slow and deliberate, directly toward the rock he was hiding behind.
“Who’s there,” it said, voice carrying an authority that settled over the battlefield like a physical weight.
“Show yourself.”
Hoju felt his legs move before his mind gave the order, stepping out from behind the stone and into the being’s line of sight, and understood only after his body had already obeyed that the words had carried more than simple volume behind them.
Something in that command had reached inside him and pulled, the way a puppet’s strings pull without asking permission, and level one, with nothing built into him yet capable of resisting it, had never stood a chance of staying hidden at all.