The True Dragon felt pain for the first time since it had come into existence.
There were minds within its mind. These minds tried to think but struggled to achieve anything close to coherency. The minds of the four dragonkin that had become the True Dragon had been shattered during the transformation. What survived were merely remnants that had yet to be fully consumed into the vastness of the S Grade’s brain.
There wasn’t much left of them.
The True Dragon itself, though it bore one of the most powerful minds in the universe it inhabited, didn’t have much use for thought. It was a creature controlled by its base instincts. In fact, though its brain was powerful, and though it would surely be considered a Denizen by the System and not a beast, the parts of its brain that controlled higher thought, its centre for executive function, was less developed than the rest of its brain.
The strongest part of the True Dragon’s brain was the hindbrain that connected to its spinal cord. This part of most beings’ brains acts as their autopilot. It is home to pure, primal instincts along with trained instincts. The True Dragon, despite coming from four distinct minds, had no trained instincts, merely pure ones. A dragon, in its purest form, was a predator.
And everything around this dragon was prey.
The pain that ripped through the True Dragon tore at its consciousness. Who could cause a being so powerful to feel pain?
When it had been formed, the strongest thought that had survived was the thought of destroying another being—one by the name of Xavier Collins. That thought persisted, driving its actions just as much as its instinct. He knew what this “Xavier Collins” looked like, and he knew of the cheap imitations that kept popping up around it.
Feeling pain did not make the True Dragon think of itself as prey. No. It could never think of itself as prey. It merely pushed its instincts into overdrive.
The weapon that had caused it pain was incredibly small. The True Dragon’s mind identified it as an arrow. More, it identified the strangeness within it. Instinct drove defensive energy from its Deep Core outward to stop the attack from doing it harm, but the defensive energy hadn’t been powerful enough.
Destructive energy, more powerful than should have fit inside such a small weapon, burst to life, ripping through the dragon’s defences as easily as the dragon’s claws ripped through skin. A hole at least two feet wide opened up where the arrow impacted. The dragon’s scales were no good at defending against this type of damage, not after it so easily broke through its defensive energy.
Blue blood seeped from the open wound.
Rage filled the True Dragon’s mind, but it could not respond to the attack. The spatial distortion that had enveloped it for a fraction of a second, long enough for it to feel the pain of the inflicted wound, disappeared as rapidly as it had come.
But even after the spatial distortion had retreated, the True Dragon could perceive some of what was happening inside that spatial distortion it was excluded from. Its mind, pure and powerful, was pushed to its limits as it identified the threat, following the arrow, tracking its origin through its memories.
As the True Dragon suspected, the arrow did not come from the weak imitation of Xavier Collins—the drone—that hovered nearby. It came from somewhere else. Somewhere higher. The True Dragon used its perception abilities to pinpoint the exact location of the source of that arrow. He found a man, a dragonkin, hovering high above the world, outside its atmosphere.
Xavier Collins.
Rage burned even brighter within the True Dragon as it set sights on the real Xavier Collins, rather than one of the dragonkin’s cheap imitations.
True Dragons did not often attack dragonkin. That was something the dragon knew, one of its pure instincts. Part of its instincts tugged at it, saying he needed to protect all dragonkin. And Xavier Collins was dragonkin. But the thoughts of the four dragonkin that had created it—while their minds were now suppressed and almost completely broken—when the True Dragon had been formed were more powerful than those instincts.
And even if they weren’t, Xavier Collins had attacked the dragon. There would be no stopping it from ripping the little dragonkin limb from limb then cooking him with its flames until he was crispy enough to eat.
Though the True Dragon was not fast enough to move, and its mind only moved sluggishly compared to anyone inside the spatial distortion, there were certain tools at its disposal. The dragon pulled energy from its Deep Core. This energy moved more rapidly than the dragon’s body ever could. The Deep Core wasn’t housed within the dragon, it was housed within another phase of reality.
It was less a traditional core than it was a type of pocket space.
An incredibly sophisticated pocket space with the power to transform Celestial Energy into Deep Energy, a from of energy that had been used since long before the System came into being. For the True Dragon, though it had only been born on this planet what was essentially mere moments ago, was still an ancient being from a time long forgotten.
Deep Energy flooded through its energy channels, moving at incredibly speeds. Deep Energy wasn’t only defensive energy. It could be repurposed in several different ways. It was more flexible than the energy from the Denizen cores the True Dragon possessed.
That Deep Energy, as it seeped from the S Grade’s scales, began to interact with the fundamental building blocks of reality. Through the True Dragon’s senses, the Deep Energy could feel the power of the nearest spatial distortion. And it could match, and copy, that power. Slowly but inevitably, the space around the True Dragon was being altered.
Time was being altered.
The playing field was about to be changed.
~
Xavier tilted his chin up. A grin split his lips. He flapped his wings harder than necessary and tensed his fists, punching one into the air. A small celebration for the small victory he’d achieved.
The arrow he’d loosed had punched a hole straight through the True Dragon’s damned defensive energy, then straight through its scales.
Should have known the beast would bleed blue.
Roln, hovering nearby, turned his head toward Xavier and raised an eyebrow. “You don’t seriously think that’s going to be enough, do you?”
Xavier sighed as he looked over at the mental construct, wondering why the dead Wanderer had to spoil this moment. Begrudgingly, after taking a moment to examine just how much damage he’d done, he had to admit it wasn’t as… significant as he’d hoped.
While Xavier couldn’t read his enemy’s health with any of the spells at his disposal—the power difference between him and the True Dragon was too much for that to be possible—using his Immortal Soul lens, he was able to get a good idea of just how much health the bastard beast had remaining.
The attack had dealt roughly 3 percent of damage, meaning the True Dragon had 97 percent health remaining. Xavier could only do what he’d just done twenty-eight more times, which would bring the True Dragon down to 13 percent health.
That was, of course, assuming Xavier only dealt 3 percent of damage every time he hit the True Dragon with one of these arrows. It was possible he could inflict more damage than that. For instance, as he’d only been testing the attack, he’d struck for the dragon’s side. If he next struck for one of its eyes and then struck that same place again… there was a good chance he could keep striking the same spot until that wound tunnels straight toward the dragon’s brain.
“And what if the True Dragon is able to heal its wounds faster than you can inflict them? The moment you envelope it with a time dilation field again to hit it a second time, it’s going to have a chance to use its power to heal itself. Do you have any idea how fast an S Grade can heal? Because you’re about to find out.”
Xavier shook his head. It doesn’t matter, he responded to the mental construct with a thought. I won’t give it a chance to recover. Either way, there’s no harm in testing that theory, is there?
Not only that, but with the power of the time dilation field on his side, there was every chance that he would be able to replenish the energy he’d taken from the people of this world. It would take time—they would all need to cultivate and refill their cores—but time was something he had in abundance. He could even use some of the power they’d gifted him to help expand his time dilation field around the entire planet. Pushing the field that hard might cause a bit of Universal Pressure, but he would make sure to keep that under control.
Something flashed in his spiritual sense. His Immortal Soul lens had been pointed at the True Dragon since he’d come to engage it. The True Dragon was trapped outside both his time dilation field and the time dilation field of his drone, yet energy was moving inside it, coming from that strange, hidden core Xavier hadn’t been able to locate.
“What… the hell…” Xavier trailed off, narrowing his focus. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
Xavier double, triple, and quadruple checked—even though he already knew—that there was no spatial distortion around the True Dragon. For an instant he’d worried that if one of the dragonkin who’d transformed into the S Grade True Dragon had been a time mage, maybe it was casting a Time Alteration spell of its own.
But that wasn’t what was happening.
That strange energy coming from its hidden core—and this energy felt slightly different to the defensive energy he’d felt before, being closer to Speed Energy than Toughness Energy—was simply moving faster than he could comprehend. Even as he watched, safe inside his time dilation field, it moved at a tremendously fast rate. It appeared to be moving through the True Dragon’s channels toward its scales. Xavier shuddered, wondering what the hell would happen when it reached them.
A type of Speed Energy, and if it’s as powerful as the defensive energy the beast used to rebuff all my initial attacks…
The energy, though moving incredibly fast, would still take at least an hour of Xaiver’s time to reach the dragon’s scales.
An hour…
Xavier created another bone arrow, but he didn’t filter the energy he’d been gifted by those back on the planet into it. He twirled the arrow between his fingers, stuck in thought, stuck in inaction.
Channelling destructive energy into the arrow would damage his channels, a lot, to the point where he would have to take several hours to heal from that damage—just as he had the last two times he’d used the gifted energy.
The Combat Assistance Overlay had given him more refinements to the neural pathways that controlled this energy usage flowing through his channels, but he doubted those adaptions would make a big enough difference. If that strange type of Speed Energy made what he was afraid would happen happen… then the last thing Xavier needed was to be in a vulnerable place when that came to pass.
“Well, that isn’t good,” Roln muttered.
Xavier cursed him for the absolute understatement. The fear he’d been feeling not so long ago returned full force, and he realised he’d never really banished that fear, only put it out of his thoughts.
He needed to think outside the box. Needed to come up with a different plan. If that strange Speed Energy didn’t do what he thought, then he would have worried for nothing. But if it did?
Better be prepared…
Xavier retreated back into the mental space where he could think far faster than time passed. He sketched plan after plan. Roln was there, and though the mental construct wanted nothing more than for Xavier to get the hell off this rock and return to his own universe, the dead Wanderer also knew Xavier wasn’t going to do that unless he exhausted every damned possible option at his disposal.
When Xavier finally came out of that mental space, he knew exactly what he would do.
The problem was, he didn’t know if it would work.