Chapter 65

Rumble! Crack!

A blinding flash erupted from the crystalline cocoon. The sudden siphon of its hoarded mana tore the unborn titan from its slumber. Deep within the shell, a massive body slammed against the translucent walls, sending concussive shockwaves rippling through the bedrock and straining the very boundaries of the pocket dimension.

Lucoa ripped her short sword from its sheath, her knuckles whitening as her blade trembled against the gale. “Oh shit! Oh shit! Oh shit! We need to get out of here!”

“And go where?!” Hertrude shoved Hertrauda behind her armored frame, her crimson eyes locked onto the fractures spreading across the shell. “It would take hours to scramble back up the cliffs!”

Roxanne’s tail puffed out into a bristling brush. “The teleportation circle!”

“The beast is sitting right on top of it!” Angelica shouted back over the din.

My fiancées were growing more frantic with each subterranean shudder. Before panic could scatter them into the path of falling debris, I reached out with telekinesis, pulling them toward my flank in a smooth arc. The steady hum of my presence grounded them, soothing their racing pulses as their discipline returned.

To my right, Fenris bared her fangs, saliva dripping from her jaws and hissing against the hot stone as her eyes flashed amber.

“I have to apologize, Leon. I thought you were exaggerating about these Elder Dragons. If an unborn whelp radiates this much pressure, this battle will be magnificent.”

Solaris drove his claws deep into the stone, his clubbed tail flicking with mechanical anticipation.

<Rawr!>

My partner was just as bloodthirsty as the wolf goddess. As for the newcomers sprawled across the rocky floor…

“EEK!” Mirage pointed toward the towering, fractured egg with wide, horrified eyes. “What the fuck is that thing?! Where did that light take us?!”

“Silence, woman.” Emma Frost rose with languid grace, the ambient light catching the diamond sheen coating her skin as she leveled a glacial glare at the panicking human. “Screaming like a frightened child achieves nothing beyond an intolerable headache. Keep your mouth shut and let the adults handle this predicament.”

The titan’s oppressive aura ripped the seven women from unconsciousness, driving them to assess the surreal landscape on raw survival instinct. Storm, Emma Frost, and Gwen Tennyson locked onto the chrysalis, shifting their weight into combat stances. Further back, Black Cat, Mystique, and Mirage retreated toward the canyon wall, recognizing that sidearms, grappling lines, and unarmored flesh offered zero protection against a beast of that magnitude. Nearby, Squirrel Girl clutched her bushy tail to her chest, her jaw slack as her eyes darted between a six-foot mechanical raptor and a snarling Asgardian goddess.

“You, over there!” Storm raised a hand, wind whipping around her silver hair as her white cape snapped in the gale. “Where are we, and what manner of creature is that?!”

“I am a descendant of Doctor Doom and the one who summoned you to this world.” The segmented titanium faceplate of Doom’s former helm slid forward, locking over my features with a sharp, pressurized hiss. When I spoke again, the mask projected my words with heavy metallic resonance. “We are standing inside a fantasy dungeon, facing the birth of an Elder Dragon. Explanations will follow once this beast is brought to heel.”

“I will hold you to that promise.” Gwen Tennyson’s human features dissolved into translucent magenta radiance as pure Anodite energy crackled along her form. “You called it an Elder Dragon. What separates it from an ordinary drake?”

Crack!

Before the answer could leave my lips, the bedrock beneath our boots liquefied. Superheated bio-energy surged through the stone, converting solid sandstone and shale into a bubbling sea of incandescent slag that threatened to swallow the terrace whole.

I swept my arm across the expanse, seizing all eighteen companions in my telekinetic grip a fraction of a second before the stone dissolved. With a sharp upward heave, I hauled our party onto an elevated shale shelf overhead. Black Cat, Mirage, and Yunyun tumbled onto their backsides, boots skidding across the warming stone as they gasped at the blistering heat radiating from the now-molten canyon floor.

“Olivia, raise a barrier now!”

My mortal frame expanded, bones and muscle surging upward until the towering, fourteen-foot silver majesty of my Primarch form cast its long shadow across the shale shelf.

I stepped to the precipice of the ledge, drawing the Sword of Dawnlight in a smooth arc as Aeldari runes flared cerulean along the spine. The blade hummed against the blistering updrafts, casting pale light across my surroundings.

“Fenris, Solaris—get ready to mobilize. Everyone else, do what you can to support us or stay close to Olivia. If that barrier collapses, the ambient heat will turn you to ash.”

“You are going to fight a dragon in close-quarters combat? Are you completely mad?!” Emma crossed her arms, staring at my armored frame with undisguised disbelief.

“Unlike you, the three of us are more than capable of surviving this environment.”

Solaris ignited his rear thrusters with a thunderous sonic crack, launching into the canyon sky in a streak of ionic energy. To my right, Fenris’s humanoid frame expanded into the towering, black-furred silhouette of her true beast form. Bounding down from the ledge with a feral howl of delight, her massive paws shattered brittle rock into powder beneath her weight.

A faint, intrusive tingle brushed against my psychic periphery as invisible psionic tendrils probed outward toward my companions. I flared my mental shields in response, snapping a frigid, adamantine fortress wall into place that shattered the intrusion on contact and sent a sharp jolt of cognitive static rebounding straight into the telepath.

“I recommend not poking around the minds of my loved ones, Miss Frost. Your future assistance would be greatly appreciated, but if you are going to be a problem, I will not hesitate to crush you.”

Without waiting for her retort, I rose into the air on a surging column of telekinetic force, my cape snapping against the superheated gale.

Behind us, Olivia drove the butt of her staff into the shale. A translucent golden dome expanded outward with a sharp, harmonic chime, locking around the group and sealing the blistering heat and toxic gases outside.

Stress fractures splintered across the crystalline cocoon before the structure failed entirely. In a blinding burst of bio-energy, the lateral wall blew outward, and the infant titan crashed into the sea of molten rock. As searing white flames vented from the ruptured shell, the dragonling rose onto its hind legs, spreading its veil-like wings and unleashing an earsplitting roar that shook the canyon walls.

“Holy crap, it really is a dragon!” Squirrel Girl stared at the luminous, semi-translucent beast with wide eyes. “Is there a chance we can reason with it instead of slaying it? It is just so badass!”

The assembly remaining on the shale shelf turned to stare at her in flat disbelief. Out of every conceivable reaction to an apocalyptic titan emerging from a sea of boiling slag, not a single soul among them could fathom how her mind had arrived at negotiation.

“Do I have something on my face?” Squirrel Girl rubbed her cheeks with the back of her hands, blinking at the women with a blank expression.

“No… that is not it…” Deirdre pinched the bridge of her nose, tearing her gaze away from the girl and locking onto the thrashing dragonling below. “Forget it! Focus all fire on supporting the vanguard!”

Discarding the absurd suggestion, the rearguard opened fire from behind the safety of the golden ward. High-caliber gunfire from Mystique and Mirage cracked across the chasm alongside Yunyun’s chanting, sending streaks of crimson flame and spinning magenta mana discs slamming into the infant titan’s iridescent hide.

The infant titan bellowed in primal agony as our bombardment shredded the air around it. Seizing the opening, Solaris, Fenris, and I closed in from three distinct angles.

Solaris streaked across the canyon floor at near-supersonic speed, tucking his wings and rotating mid-flight to drive his spiked, clubbed tail upward into the beast’s lower jaw. The concussive impact snapped the dragon’s head back with a violent crack, exposing the pale, unarmored expanse of its throat.

Fenris lunged. Her colossal lupine jaws clamped shut across the soft tissue, driving sword-length fangs through the translucent hide. A muted, strangled hiss escaped the beast as her bite crushed its windpipe, venting pressurized sparks of cerulean bio-energy across her black fur. Terrified and choking, the infant titan thrashed violently in the molten slag, only tearing the wound wider against her unyielding grip.

As the dragonling staggered back, reeling on its hind legs, I lunged forward to deliver a decisive blow.

With a violent surge of telekinetic thrust and raw mana into my flight, the cavern smeared into an unrecognizable streak of heat and shadow. There was no sensation of travel—only a sudden, jarring displacement as space compressed around my body.

For a moment, Fenris and the infant titan lost track of Leon’s presence. One second, the Primarch was levitating a few hundred feet away; the next, he was gone. An instant later, he reappeared below them, already mid-swing.

The Sword of Dawnlight swooped upward in a sweeping vertical arc, cleaving through flesh and embryonic scale from belly to snout. Volatile bio-energy sprayed outward from the gaping fissure, hissing violently as the radiant discharge further sapped the beast’s waning strength.

“Keep it up! We have it on the ropes now!” Emma collected immense reserves of psionic power to deliver a crippling psychic strike.

“That is easier said than done…” Mystique slammed her last magazine into the base of her pistol with a crisp mechanical snap. Her gaze drifted down to the brittle shale beneath their boots. “We are about to lose this shelf. Does anyone have a plan to get us higher up?”

Lucoa scanned the perimeter for another viable outcrop, finding nothing but sheer, vertical rock faces radiating blistering heat. With no natural alternative available, she glanced hesitantly toward Olivia.

“Do not suppose your barrier will hold up against a direct drop into magma, will it?”

Olivia shook her head, forcing her answer through gritted teeth as she channeled mana through her staff. “No. It is barely holding back the convection heat and toxic fumes. If we slide into the molten rock, we are dead.”

Immediately, Angelica, Clarice, Deirdre, and Yunyun ceased their offensive volleys, snapping their attention to the liquefying floor. Coordinating their efforts, the four sorceresses pivoted to rapidly cooling the stone with Ice and Water magic. Frantic frost sigils flared across the rock face, sending boiling plumes of superheated steam hissing into the air as water flash-vaporized against the slag. None of them possessed an innate affinity for cooling elements, forcing them to burn through their mana reserves at an alarming, unsustainable rate.

“Stop what you are doing immediately!” Storm glanced back at them, sweat beading down her face from overexerting her mutant powers. “You are going to cook us alive in here!”

“We either put up with a bit of steam, or wait for our shelf to slide into the molten stone below us!” Angelica shot her a frustrated look. The Duchess was not enjoying the steam bath any more than she was. “If you have a better suggestion, I am all ears!”

As the heat rapidly mounted within the barrier, Solaris descended from high above the titan, once again driving his spiked tail into its skull. The concussive impact tore Fenris free from the beast’s throat, ripping away a massive chunk of flesh in her jaws. As Fenris bounded away across floating boulders to reset her footing, the infant titan’s head slammed violently into the molten floor, spraying boiling slag across the canyon.

Solaris banked sharply, darting past me and gesturing his snout toward the shale shelf. I glanced back through the haze; our companions were on the verge of collapse from heat exhaustion and oxygen deprivation.

‘I have to end this immediately. Here is hoping its mind is developed enough to comprehend my speech.’

Channeling an unfathomable amount of psychic energy through my body, I drove a telepathic spear through its fractured mental barriers, forcefully seizing its consciousness. For a few frantic seconds, its feral instincts lashed out against my Sigillite-tempered fortress. Running on pure biological exhaustion, its resistance quickly splintered and ceased altogether.

“Please… spare me… I do not want to die here!”

The chaotic mindscape quelled, leaving only a calm, white expanse. A few feet from me, a small, translucent lizard looked up with petrified eyes—the psychic manifestation of the infant titan.

“Calm yourself. Slaying you is the last thing I wish to do.” I eased the crushing pressure off its consciousness. “Heed me, Elder Dragonling. I wish to establish a familiar contract with you. You are a majestic, sentient entity. What I seek is an equal partnership, not to reduce you to a menial beast of burden. What say you?”

It stared into my eyes, searching my face for any trace of falsehood or deceit. Satisfied by what it found, it lifted its small head with regal dignity.

“What terms do you propose?”

“Before we negotiate, I request you stifle the roaring inferno outside. While the Asgardian wolf goddess, my biomechanical raptor, and I can endure the heat, the rest of my companions cannot.”

Its amber eyes flashed for an instant, settling back to a calm glow. “It is done. Let us discuss the terms and conditions of your proposed contract.”

With that, I laid everything out plainly. If we were to fight alongside one another, it deserved to understand the full scope of the ongoing conflict and the forces aligned against us. It asked several sharp, discerning questions, seeking to gauge the magnitude of the coming war. Once it held a firm grasp on the situation, it met my gaze once more.

“Tell me this: while you may adhere to the terms of our pact, how can I be certain your allies will do the same? Long ago, my ancestors forged contracts with humanity. Yet when their descendants no longer needed our strength, they turned the very gifts we bestowed upon them against us. I will not repeat their folly.”

<Child, this is no mere human. He is a demigod, forged by the Master of Mankind.>

Starweaver materialized from within my soul, his imposing astral form coiling around the perimeter of the mindscape. The infant titan stared up at the Aeldari deity with wide eyes, overcome with awe and reverence. While an Elder Dragon was an elemental force of nature, it bowed before the presence of a living god.

“My… my sincerest apologies, sacred ancestor!” The Elder Dragon lowered its snout to the floor in absolute reverence.

I glanced up at my soul-bound companion. “Sacred ancestor?”

<My father, Dromlach, existed long before the Aeldari came into being. He was adopted into the Aeldari pantheon because of his invaluable aid to their kind after the Old Ones fell. In the eyes of dragons, Dromlach is the Father of Dragons, and I, his eldest son, hold great sway over them.>

I exhaled a long breath, rubbing the bridge of my nose beneath my visor.

“That would have been nice to know before we nearly tore the cavern apart.”

<You did not ask.>

We stared at each other in silence for a beat before breaking into dry laughter.

“Fair enough.” I turned back to the dragonling. “I assume this lineage is sufficient proof for you?”

It nodded eagerly, extending a small foreleg toward me. As we clasped hand to claw, a luminous magic circle flared across the back of my gauntlet and its scales. With the pact sealed, I withdrew from the psychic expanse to mend its shattered flesh while the cavern air settled.

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