Chapter 113: Seizing The Challenge

Logan had about one second, and he spent a quarter of it deciding.

He could not block that lance. Momentum Ascendant had been stacking since the first charge, and whatever number was riding on the tip of it now was not a number he wanted to test.

He could not outrace it either. Rakhan was already falling.

’So do not fight the lance.’ Sword Intent opened across his vision, and the whole sky filled with threads. ’Fight what is feeding it.’

There it was.

Every scrap of momentum Rakhan had gathered ran back through him in a single bright line. It connected the man to every meter he had traveled, all of it stored and waiting.

It was not part of his body. It was attached to him.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride ]

```

Logan blinked into the descent path, forty meters above the shelf, directly in front of a falling Oniniad moving fast enough to break the sky.

Rakhan saw him coming and did not flinch. He adjusted the lance to take Logan through the chest instead.

Logan did not aim at the lance. He did not aim at Rakhan either.

```

[ Broken Chain ]

```

He cut the line.

The blade passed through empty air about half a meter from Rakhan’s shoulder, and it severed the thing nobody but Logan could see.

Every meter of stored momentum came off him at once.

Rakhan Vurel went from a falling star to a man falling. The glow along his lance died in an instant.

He still hit the dragon. He hit it hard, because he was heavy and he was armored and he had two hundred meters of ordinary gravity behind him.

He did not hit it hard enough.

```

[ Skyrend Tempest Wyrm: 8% HP remaining. ]

```

Rakhan bounced off the dragon’s shoulder and caught himself in the air, and for one second he simply hung there and stared at Logan.

"What," he said, "did you just do to me?"

Logan landed on the shelf in a crouch and stood up.

"Cut the leash," he said.

---

The dragon did not appreciate being hit by anything.

It came apart into fury. Whatever restraint it had shown while it was merely angry went away, and what was left underneath was much worse.

```

[ Skyrend Tempest Wyrm has entered Rampage. ]

[ Attack and Speed increased. All damage taken reduced by 20%. ]

```

"Oh, that is not fair." Alice was already backpedaling. "It gets a second phase at eight percent?"

"It is called Furious Dragon’s Rampage." Logan set his feet. "The name was doing us a favor."

It went after Idresh first, which made sense, because Idresh had spent the whole fight standing under its chest, letting it hit him.

The Pale Thunder Behemoth took a full bite across the shoulder and screamed. Idresh did not move it an inch.

Then he swung.

```

[ Weight of Ages: Full Release ]

```

The hammer came around slowly, and it landed like a mountain deciding to sit down.

The dragon’s entire foreleg buckled. Something inside it broke with a sound Logan felt in his back teeth.

```

[ Skyrend Tempest Wyrm: 5% HP remaining. ]

```

’Five percent.’ Logan’s mind went very quiet and very fast. ’That was his whole stack. He is empty now.’

Idresh knew it too. Logan watched the Oniniad look at his hammer, then at the dragon, then at his brother in the sky.

"Rakhan!" His voice carried across the shelf. "I have nothing left! Finish it!"

"I have nothing either!" Rakhan was still hanging in the air where Logan had left him. "He took it! He took all of it!"

Alice’s head snapped around.

"They are both empty," she said.

"Yes." Logan was already moving. "Cadence."

"Way ahead of you."

---

She had been building the whole time.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 340 stacks. ]

```

Every arrow she had landed on that dragon since the fight started was still counted, because she had never once let ten seconds pass without landing another.

Now she stopped worrying about damage and started worrying about speed.

Alice put six arrows into the dragon’s ruined wing in under two seconds. Every one of them hit. Every one of them stacked.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 420 stacks. ]

```

The dragon turned toward her.

It was faster now. It crossed the shelf in one movement, and there was no version of Comet Step that got her clear of that.

Sonic got her clear instead.

```

[ Overcharge Dash ]

```

He hit Alice in the ribs at full speed and took her thirty meters sideways, and the dragon’s jaws closed on the rock where she had been standing.

They landed hard. Sonic came up bleeding from somewhere.

"Keep shooting," he said. "I will keep it looking at me."

He did. Chain Current went up the dragon’s flank and the head whipped around after him, and Sonic ran.

Alice got back on her feet and got back to work.

```

[ Starfall Cadence: 560 stacks. ]

```

---

Logan had one job now and he knew exactly what it was.

Death Star only tripled damage on a fatal point. Alice could find a fatal point on most things by herself.

She could not find one on a dragon whose scales were still holding and whose damage reduction had just gone up twenty percent.

So he was going to make one.

’Where.’ He ran along the flank with Reaper’s Stride carrying him faster than the dragon could track. ’Where does all of it come together?’

There was a knot of threads under the base of the skull, right where the neck met the body. Everything the dragon was ran through that spot.

His eyes saught something to cut, and Sword Intent answered.

It was also covered by six overlapping plates of scale, each one about as thick as a door.

```

[ Reaper’s Stride: 1,600 stacks. Speed +11,200%. ]

```

Logan went up the tail, along the spine, and planted both feet on the back of the dragon’s neck.

It felt him land. Of course it did. The head came around, and one enormous eye rolled back to look at him.

He had maybe a second and a half.

```

[ Grimspire Lance ]

```

The blade drew out to eleven feet and thinned to a needle.

’Not through the plates. Between them.’

He drove it down into the seam Sword Intent had shown him, angled along the line where two plates overlapped instead of straight through either one.

The lance went in almost to the hilt.

The dragon convulsed. Logan lost his footing entirely and got thrown clear, and he hit the rock shelf hard enough to bounce.

But the plates were open now. He had levered them apart with eleven feet of Grimspire Lance and left the seam gaping.

’ALICE!’

’I SEE IT!’

---

She had six hundred and ten stacks.

Alice drew, and Arrow Intent came up around the shaft in a corkscrew of silver light, and Puncture told her exactly how little the remaining scale mattered.

’Fatal point,’ she thought. ’Right there. Under the skull. Where he opened it.’

```

[ Starflow Arts: Death Star ]

```