As Zack and the vanguard continued their work, Nils and Ellen rushed into position, ready to see to their own duties.
“Ellen, you take the front legs, I’ll take the hind legs!” said Nils.
“Got it. Be careful!” she replied.
“You too.”
Nils jumped on Violid, while Ellen remained safe in Kai’s grasp. The two pairs took off. When Nils reached the hind legs, he put a hand to his mouth and gagged slightly as he jumped off Violid. The rough ride on the way up and to the legs had given him motion sickness, and the unpredictable movements of the dragon’s body were doing nothing to improve things. Violid, who reached to keep Nils upright with his nose, growled for the herbalist to keep it together.
Nils longed to down a potion to ease his nausea, but he did not have the luxury of time. The dragon was frighteningly powerful, its energy seemingly limitless, and at any moment it might go wild, breaking the magical binds that currently held it down. His alraune familiar, itself a precious store of herbs, passed him a leaf with strong medicinal properties.
“Yes, this’ll work,” muttered Nils gratefully, kneeling down to inspect the dragon’s hide. “Let’s hope we find what we’re looking for.”
He knew they were working with an unproven hypothesis, but the sutures he and Ellen were looking for would have happened after a transplant operation undertaken centuries ago. Even if their hypothesis was right, there was no guarantee they’d be able to easily locate scars from so long ago. The knights had said that the dragon’s hide looked like it was different colors where the limbs would have been sewn on, but up this close, it all looked the same.
“I wish I’d studied more about treating beasts,” Nils muttered.
This was not something he’d have ever uttered in front of a patient, but it was just him and the familiars right now.
“I’m guessing...” he continued, “...that they wouldn’t have done a very neat job, given when the operation took place. The scars should stand out. And if the transplant happened above the joint, then it should be right around here... Whoa!”
The ground shook. But it was not really the ground shaking, in fact—it was the dragon upon which Nils stood. The beast was beginning to recover from the barrage, and with each shake of its body, it was interrupting Nils’s examination.
“Ah! Hurk! Ugh, damn it all!” spat the herbalist, revealing a side of himself that went largely unseen by others.
Nils’s mind raced. According to the knights’ reports, the hind legs were similar to those of a basilisk. This matched Shiori’s prior conclusion that they were earth-aspected, but basilisks were closely related to dragons, and their hides were similar in composition. Noticing the difference would not necessarily be easy...and then he gasped as it hit him.
“Ah, yes,” he uttered. “Search magic.”
Shiori’s search magic was not only useful for locating threats. She had demonstrated this herself, earlier, when she’d scanned the dragon from a distance. She’d also expressly advised everyone at her lecture to be open to coming up with new uses for old spells.
“Yes!”
Nils steadied himself upon the shaking dragon’s back, then placed a hand on it. This was not a spell he was especially used to, and on top of that, Nils did not have much in the way of magical reserves, just like Shiori. Casting search magic here would result in a significant drain on his reserves, but he had no other choice. He circled his hand gently as if rubbing ointment on a wound and sent his magical energy through the dragon’s scales.
I don’t have to go deep; I just have to be thorough near the surface of the skin...
Sure enough, the hind legs did bring to mind the earth element. But then, in an instant, that sensation was cut off. It changed.
“There!” Nils exclaimed.
Just like Shiori had said, it gave off a feeling like different materials had been patched together. Nils settled his gaze around where the feeling had hit him, and saw a slight, near-imperceptible pale discoloration. The scales in that area, too, flowed in a slightly unnatural way. It was very subtle, but the scar was there, and this proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the dragon’s parts had been transplanted.
Nils looked over at Ellen. She was on her hands and knees, supported by Kai, and her eyes met his own. “I’ve found it,” her gaze said.
“Zack!” Nils shouted. “We found the scars! These legs were sewn on!”
After such a massive transplant operation, scars would always remain. Even if the wounds closed, they would never heal completely. And where the transplant had taken place, the tissue would be weaker to shock and impact.
The nearby adventurers who heard Nils shouted triumphantly.
One of the dragon’s wings had been rendered useless, and now its tail was gone. This cut the magical beast’s mobility by at least half. All that remained was to get through the legs and lock its movement down completely, at which point they could launch a final all-in assault.
Victory was in sight.
But as the tension in the air lifted ever so slightly...it happened.
For Alec, it felt as if his vision blurred. It lasted for a brief second, and was followed by a strange feeling, not unlike floating. At first he thought it was a dizzy spell, but then the air itself began to waver. He knew at that moment that this was the sign that dragons gave off before a huge expulsion of magical energy, and his shout boomed across the battlefield before he could even stop to think.
“Magical shock wave incoming!”
“Magical barriers!” shouted Nadia, who noticed the signs herself an instant later.
“Defensive postures, all of you!” barked Zack.
Then came the sound of something fracturing. It grew into a roar as the ground shook violently. The earth around the dragon began to furl, then crack as chunks of rock and clumps of earth burst upwards. Humans were especially helpless when it came to attacks from beneath them; similarly, this was the greatest weakness of barrier spells. Rock and earth burst upwards from people’s feet before returning like a heavy rain, pummeling the adventurers’ bodies.
Those caught directly underneath the exploding earth were sent flying, the breath knocked out of them as they slammed back down to earth. Those who had stayed low were pelted in the eyes with dirt and dust, or otherwise took what felt like hard punches from stray rocks. The rain of earth magic lasted less than a minute, but felt like an eternity to those caught in the middle of it.
Ellen, Kai, Nils, and the familiars were unharmed thanks to being directly on top of the dragon. Linus and Julia, who had happened to be near Rurii and Bla, were fortunate in that they were sheltered by the slimes’ squishy forms.
However, Shiori had almost found herself struck with a chunk of rock as big as herself, and had only been saved because Alec had leapt—without a thought for himself—and carried her out of danger. Unfortunately, the movement led him to fall awkwardly on his left side, and though nothing was broken, pain shot through his arm at the slightest movement, and it would not respond to his commands.
Zack had knelt low and shielded himself behind his sword, avoiding any major damage. A stray chunk of rock had cut open his forehead, however, and blood streamed down his face. But the three were among those who had gotten off lightly. A majority of the adventurers had been hit much, much harder. In an instant, the adventurers had lost their hard-fought advantage.
The dragon remained still—likely due to the huge amount of energy it had just expelled—but it seemed to understand instinctively that the tables had turned. It let loose a roar that only served to further stress those who were writhing on the floor in pain—it was like a dark phantom, sliding into the already weakened adventurers’ hearts with ease, sapping at their will to fight.
The void-like gaze of the dragon twisted slightly, and Alec got the strong impression that the beast’s glare was showering them all in contempt.