Teskin fell flat on his ass the moment he realized Oxana was looking at him. The footwork drills were certainly helping, but it seemed the moment the danger passed, he turned back into his usual clumsy self.
I didn’t have time to be amused, but Oxana ran to him and began helping him to his feet.
I turned back to the battlefield. We were actually quite a long way from the thick of the fighting. There were trolls and goblins nearby, but they had all squared off against individual soldiers in small battles, leaving the wagons mostly uncontested.
I glanced back to Reid and found him with his bow still pointed toward the sky, waiting for a chance to shoot the dragon down. Not a moment later, I watched him let the arrow fly.
I turned just in time to catch the arrow slamming into the dragon just before it dropped out of the cloud line. His talent must’ve let him see through them!
Again, the dragon jerked as if hit by a hammer, but again it righted itself with little trouble, and continued circling, preparing for another descent.
Soldiers rose to meet it slowly chipping away at its scales. The woman somehow seemed unaffected. The more I thought about it, the more insane she seemed. She could fall off that dragon at any moment! A stray bolt of lightning or burst of fire could hit her and she’d be dead before she ever hit the ground. What had possessed her to attack like this?
“Reid!” I shouted as I turned my horse back toward him and the wagon while Tesken and Oxana followed on foot. “Did you use the paste!?”
“I did, but I missed its head!”
That hit was a miss? I’d thought he was just aiming for the body and hoping the paste would affect the dragon by sheer proximity.
It had been enough to make the dragon pause, though. The bow and Reid’s ridiculous archery stat and talent drew the ire of the dragon once again, but Reid didn’t lose momentum.
He let loose another arrow, and this time it flew true. The dragon’s head was wrenched to the side, and the monster shrieked in fury. Any other creature would’ve likely been mutilated by a hit to the skull like that, but the dragon’s long neck simply slammed to the side, hard enough that it smacked into the creature’s own wing.
This time, the effect was noticeable, though. Instead of just shaking off the hit, the dragon began to flail like an out-of-control water hose. Its wings kept flapping, instinctually keeping it aloft, but it kept shaking its head and using its feet to claw desperately at its eyes and nose.
“Fuck yes!” Reid shouted.
Soldiers took full advantage, leaping into the air with swords and lances drawn. Blades fell on the dragon like a storm as more and more soldiers hacked at the beast's hard scales.
The woman grimaced, losing her steadiness for only a moment as her dragon thrashed and bucked. She’d looked slightly alarmed before, but still wasn’t panicking. Was the woman made of stone?
The fight on the ground was going well too. Trolls and goblins were being beaten back. These men and women were experts in fighting them. They did it every day and the numbers that had spilled out from the woods and the plains were not enough to overwhelm the defenders.
The dragon roared, and dove, its flailing growing wildly out of control as more and more of the jumping army managed to scour pieces out of the dragon’s hide.
That was when the woman lifted off the dragon and… and floated in midair.
Green light flickered around her, creating a barely visible translucent shine in a circle around her entire body. The dragon continued flailing, but the woman ignored it all.
“She’s a wind mage…” I thought, awed and horrified. Wind magic was equally revered and feared in Tacuria. Wind magic users didn’t really have a solid counter. Flight put them outside the reach of most traditional magic, and they had a frustrating habit of blowing fire magic back in their users’ faces. Absolutely awful for a nation like Tacuria that specialized in fire.
Worst of all, she was glaring straight at Reid.
“Uhh… Reid? Run!”
The woman barely gave him the time to move as she aimed her scepter downward.
I screamed as what felt like razor-sharp knives began to cut into my clothes and flesh, but I was only hit by the outskirts of her attack. The very air became a nest of blades, cutting and slicing at everything in every direction.
Reid screamed and jumped over the side of the wagon to hide as best he could. The wagon’s mule had been unhitched at some point, and I was thankful for that as the barrels in the open wagon began to scar and scratch as if thousands of tiny claws were scraping at them. One of the lids flew right off, and paste began to fly everywhere as the barrels toppled and wobbled inside their restraints.
The woman was near the front lines, and a long way away from either of us. I was never more thankful for that fact than I was the moment I saw my uncle leap into the air. I recognized him immediately, high bannerman insignia flairing as he leapt up and over the woman before falling down on her. Strapped around his arm was a gorget that made no sense there, but it appeared he was no longer affected by the confusing powder.
The woman turned and batted my uncle away with barely a backward glance, but the attack had given Reid the time to run and take cover behind a rocky boulder.
I trembled, staring up at the woman and the dragon who already seemed to be recovering from the pepper paste attack. I was looking right at her as she opened her mouth.
“Enough.”
I screamed. The voice seemed to burn my ears, and I dropped to my knees as the words ripped through me like commandments.
As one, the army fell. I couldn’t hear my own screams as I scrabbled, desperately covering my ears to protect myself from damage already dealt. The pain faded rapidly, but a sort of existential dread took over me as I couldn’t tell if I could still hear or not.
I’d thought the dragon had been the biggest threat. Who was this woman?
There were stories of people with Masterful or Legendary talents growing powerful enough to challenge entire armies, but I’d always thought they were just that! Stories! The Ill-Lit King and Geofram the Lucky both supposedly destroyed hundreds or thousands of men on the battlefield. It was one thing to hear about it in a comedy. It was another entirely to feel it.
There were tears in my eyes, but I rolled onto my back, fearful of losing sight of this woman who tamed dragons and commanded wind and sound.
There was a Rechin general who supposedly had a Masterful talent, and there were also rumors that Eschal’s Chemist had been Masterful, but the last Legendary talent had been so long ago that people often joked that they weren’t real.
If this woman didn’t have one, I’d eat my boots.
If this was what our armies were facing, then I wasn’t sure any number of soldiers could stand against her.
Arrows began to fly up at her, from veterans who’d recovered faster than me. Each of them were deflicted by her nearly invisible wind barrier. Fire magic rose up toward her, but didn’t even reach her position thirty feet in the air before dissipating. Crossbow bolts had no stronger effect.
Soldiers took to the air, their free points well invested as they closed the gap to attack her, only to be sheared by invisible blades before they could ever reach her, leaving bloody bodies to fall back harmlessly to the earth.
She had to have at least three hundred points in wind magic, and maybe sound as well? Was it possible that she could attack with just a high enough public speaking skill or was sound a type of magic one could learn? I’d never heard of anything like the way her voice had struck everyone at once. She had to have a ridiculous amount of points invested in some sort of balance skill to remain so steady when she’d been riding atop the dragon, too.
I hadn’t gained anything close to this, and my talent was Legendary! Had I been wasting my time? I earned over two hundred free points in less than a month, but in the face of this woman’s power, that felt so very slow. I gazed up at her in terror and realized, with the help of my hundred and eleven points in networking, that grovelling would likely endear me to her.
Gods, damn it all.
Without warning, a sonic boom pierced the air, and something smashed into the woman’s wind barrier, shattering it with a sound like breaking glass.
She screamed and dropped several feet before catching herself. An arrow had pierced her leg, and blood poured down the limb.
I rolled my eyes back toward the wagon. Reid had crouched behind it. His clothes had been torn to ribbons, and bloody cuts covered his whole body. He looked like he’d been thrown in a pit of angry cats, and his eyes and face were covered in phlegm from the paste the witch’s attck had drenched him with. But he was blessedly alive.
Even the wind witch appeared to only be so powerful when using magic from a distance, and even three hundred points of wind magic was apparently no match for his bow. No one else’s got through, but Reid’s did.
He was already drawing another arrow.
All over the battlefield, men and women were rising back to their feet. The woman’s attack had been a double-edged sword. I suddenly realized that the trolls and goblins were also screaming in abandon, clutching their ears! They were slower to recover than humans, allowing the vast majority of the army to focus on the woman and the dragon, or on killing them they were disabled.
Fresh goblins and trolls were still coming, though, while we were now all deaf.
“This is over.”
I winced as her voice struck like knives stabbing my eardrums. I was already bleeding out of my ears, though, and the words were muffled and dim, as if heard through water. The sonic attack didn’t bite quite so hard as it had before, and I managed to get back to my feet.
I watched her draw out another packet and winced as she smashed it open with the scepter she carried. At first, I thought she might’ve been caught up in her own poison, but I’d been able to circumvent the poison by merely adding forty points to the Chemical Resistance skill. There was no way this woman would be affected by her own weapons.
Instead, the powder fell, but this time it didn’t just drop to the ground. It lifted and began to disperse, thinning to near invisibility as the woman summoned a vortex of wind.
She was going to use her wind magic to deliver poison to the entire army!
Just before the powder was caught by the wind, it ignited. There had been no gathering flame. One moment, there was powder falling into a gale, and the next, a malestrom of burning poison lit the air before only its ashes were left.
A momentary burning tornado.
The woman frowned.
Suddenly, a light formed ahead. A strange, burning arc of flame lit up and began circling around another woman with dark red hair. She stood proud and defiant as if unaffected by the dragon rider’s voice.
Two tiny flames like flickering candles danced around her, eerily reminiscent of the wind barrier around the blonde woman in the sky. I stared at her back as she flipped open a book and held it in her left hand.
In her right she held a rapier. I would know her anywhere.
“M-mom?”