Chapter 587: The Dragon of Thorn

Maggie was gone.

The white spark of her habit had vanished into the absolute blackness of the chasm thousands of miles below, swallowed by the sheer, crushing distance of the Precipice.

On the shattered basalt shelf, the silence lasted exactly half a heartbeat.

Then the Dragon of Thorns lunged.

The titan pulled its violet-grey wings tight against its ribs and drove all three fang-lined heads straight at me in one sky-splitting blur. The air in front of its jaws compressed into a visible shockwave, whistling through the chasm like a dying shriek.

’Okay. Five minutes. I just have to buy five minutes until she gets back.’

I didn’t have time to panic. I didn’t have time to check if my legs were still shaking. I threw my hands out and burned through my spirit reserves with ruthless, mechanical speed.

[Bear Their Burden]

The attribute fired instantly. A heavy, sickening weight slammed into my shoulders as the damage from Light’s crushed ribs and Ilse’s internal burns transferred straight into my own flesh. I choked back a mouthful of hot blood, and my knees buckled under three bodies’ worth of agony packed into one.

Without breaking stride, I flicked both wrists and unspooled my iron chains through the dark.

The heavy links whipped out like lightning. They wrapped around Light’s chest and Ilse’s waist and dragged them backward off the crumbling edge of the shelf, just as the titan’s jaws slammed into the spot where they had been standing.

The basalt exploded into a million jagged shards of grey gravel.

I dumped them hard onto a safer ledge deeper in the rock face, coughing up a dark string of rust-flecked blood as the feedback from Bear Their Burden scraped along my ribs.

The beast didn’t give me a second to breathe. The upper right head whipped around, its cluster of red eyes locking onto me, and spat a torrent of black, venomous mire across the stone.

I leaped sideways and rolled across the sharp gravel. Behind me, the acid ate through the basalt down to the bedrock with a loud, wet hiss.

’Alright. Let’s see what this board looks like.’

I forced Tactical Omniscience wide open and spread the mental grid across the entire cavern. The chaotic, roaring fight flattened into precise red vectors. I saw the path of every incoming tail-quill, the exact timing of each muscle contraction under the titan’s hide, and the weak points glowing like thin seams in glass along its charcoal-and-crimson scale.

I didn’t hesitate. I threw everything I had into the gaps.

[Fallen Divinity]

I fired the basic-tier attribute straight into the beast’s chest plate and turned its frantic self-regeneration inside out. The raw crimson meat that had been knitting itself back together stopped, blackened, and split open under the reversal. The titan screeched, and for the first time it sounded confused.

’Yeah. Not so fun when it works backwards, huh?’

At the same time, I stamped three glowing runes onto the air above its heads.

[Heretical Pursuit]

Three streaks of white-and-black fire shot from my fingers and buried themselves in the foreheads of all three heads. The holy flame locked onto their movement and hunted them through the open air above the ledge, tearing away thin sheets of scale and flesh every time a head tried to swing back toward me.

I whipped my iron chains outward and drove the tips deep into the basalt walls behind the beast.

I hooked them tight, anchoring myself against the pressure of its wings. However, a thing this mutilated, this ancient and rusted by the Precipice, already lived in permanent agony. The pain-aspect of the chains barely registered on its nerves. It didn’t flinch from the torment at all. It only felt the pull, and it strained against the iron like a dog at the end of its leash.

’It doesn’t even notice. How long do you have to hurt before pain stops counting...’

I twisted toward the crags above me, sucked in a lungful of grit, and screamed over the roar of the chasm:

"Light! Wren!"

Light was already moving. His burned black arm hung uselessly at his side, but his right hand held his longsword with terrifying steadiness. He leaped off a projecting crag with his eyes fixed on the structural grain of the titan’s left-hand neck.

I pushed the alignment straight through our mental link and into the steel of my sword.

Wren’s mind-speech flashed across my consciousness, sharp and dry as broken slate.

I have it. Open the vein, Cade.

I thrust my hand forward and flooded Wren’s blade with a concentrated surge of white-and-black fire. Light brought his steel down along the grain of the beast’s neck scales, and at the exact same moment, I drove Wren through the same microscopic seam.

The blade slid through the charcoal armor as if it were warm wax.

A geyser of dark, foul-smelling blood erupted from the neck and splashed across the rock. The beast let out a deafening howl that cracked the stalactites hanging from the cavern ceiling.

It was bleeding. Real, lasting blood that wasn’t instantly regenerated.

The titan went wild. All three heads thrashed blindly while its wings beat a hurricane draft that tore my anchor chains straight out of the walls. I tumbled backward across the gravel and slammed into the inner wall, the breath knocked clean out of my lungs.

[Voice of Authority]

I didn’t have a choice. I gathered every drop of authority left in my bruised core, fixed my gaze on the central head as it lunged for my chest, and shouted a single word into the draft:

"Be Still."

The command hit the titan like an invisible mountain. For one frozen second, the massive beast locked up completely in mid-air. Its wings stopped beating. Its jaws hung half-open, and its red eyes glazed over in staggering shock.

It worked. But the cost was catastrophic. My well emptied as if someone had pulled a plug at the bottom of my soul.

My nose burst open, and a thick stream of dark blood poured down over my lip. White static crawled across the edges of my sight as the weight of the command pressed against the inside of my skull.

The second ended.

The titan broke free with a violent, bone-snapping shudder, twice as furious as before.

It swung its massive, quill-covered tail in a vicious arc and smashed it into the ledge where I stood. The stone shelf shattered beneath my boots. I dropped into the dark, my fingers scraping uselessly against crumbling rock as I fell toward the endless abyss below.

’Ah, damn...’

Halfway down, the temptation came.

The dark ink lines across my collarbone began to burn with a fierce, alluring heat. Deep in my core, the Dark Essence stirred, vibrating with the corrupting residue of the Precipice, and called up to the beast above. It offered me a shortcut. An endless ocean of raw, unspent ruin that would let me rip the titan apart with my bare hands.

The Dragon of Thorns stopped mid-air. Its snouts dipped toward me, nostrils flaring, as it caught the rich scent of rust in my blood. It wanted to feed on its own kind.

I clenched my teeth and dug my fingernails into my palms until the skin split.

’Nope. Nope. Not feeding the damned thing.’

I forced the dark fire down and locked the rust away behind Maggie’s golden stigmata seals with a sharp mental wrench, letting the easy power go even as the ground rushed up to meet me.

Deep inside the Soul Sanctum, behind the heavy iron doors, a sudden spike of crimson energy flared.

A bond-speech line rang clear through my consciousness, carrying the unmistakable fury of the Crimson Tyrant.

’Let me out, Cade. Let me finish the dog.’

’Not yet, Kassie... Trust me a little... besides, Maggie’s closer.’

Even through the link, I could feel her blistering irritation. But she didn’t force the door. She held back, deciding to trust me.

I hit the lower shelf hard. My shoulder took the impact with a sickening crunch, and my collarbone snapped. I lay flat on my back in the grey dust while the cavern spun above me, my well down to a sputtering trickle.

The low chest-head uncoiled from the titan’s body. Its split, fang-lined jaws opened wide as it slithered down the rock toward my face, its thick tongue dragging through the gravel.

I couldn’t move my arms. My essence was spent. My body was broken again.

’That’s five minutes, right? Please tell me that was five minutes...’

Then a shadow fell across my face.

Ilse dropped out of the smoke and rubble from the ledge above.

She was a ruin. Her clothes had burned to charred rags, dark blisters covered her skin, and her Drakonir fire had shrunk to a dying ember around her knuckles. She planted herself directly between my broken body and the descending jaws, and her amber eyes burned with a light I had never seen in them.

A loud snap echoed through the stone as Ilse’s shoulders wrenched backward. Obsidian horns burst through her matted blonde hair and curled back like a crown of jagged iron. Thick crimson scales erupted across her forearms and neck in dense, armored plates, and her fingernails stretched into razor-sharp talons that dripped white-hot Drakonir fire.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t count her paces. She simply let out a low, guttural roar that shook the cavern walls.

The Dragon of Thorns froze.

The colossal beast stopped its advance three feet from Ilse’s horns. All three heads pulled back, and their red eyes stared down at the small, transformed woman with something close to ancient, confused recognition.

The Drakonir called themselves the Heirs of Dragons. Down here in the dark, staring up at the corrupted firstborn of their ancient mother, the blood remembered.

The beast hesitated for one precious, impossible second.

Then a streak of brilliant white light tore through the black chasm overhead.

It came down like a falling star from thousands of miles above, cutting through the dark with the speed and merciless glare of a divine spear.

The light slammed into the basalt between Ilse and the titan, and a shockwave of holy fire rippled across the cavern.

When it faded, a small, immaculate figure in a nun’s habit stood on the scorched gravel. Her silver veil fluttered in the draft, and her silver chain hummed with an oppressive, holy weight.

Maggie raised her right hand without any hurry, her crimson eyes resting flat on the giant beast:

"There you are, miscreant."

Then she opened her aura and let the full, terrifying brim of her power flood the cavern, until the stones themselves began to weep white fire.