Before the dragon could reach them, however, archers fired countless magically charged arrows at it, which pierced the fleshy inside of the monster’s mouth. Some of the missiles hit the tongue itself, while others lodged themselves in the beast’s gums. But for all their effort, the arrows appeared useless when the dragon chomped them into bits. It opened its jaws once more, but Sigurd scratched it across the tip of the nose, allowing Kai to dash along the dragon’s back and launch a powerful and magically boosted kick right at the base of its neck. Shock and pain pulsed through the beast, and it let out a shriek. Nils saw an opportunity, and pulled forth a treasured new medicine from his pouch.
“Linus!” he shouted. “Put this down the dragon’s throat!”
“Okay! I got you!”
Linus quickly tied the potion to an arrow, and in the next instant he’d landed a direct hit. The dragon chomped the arrow down, then let loose an ear-piercing screech as the transparent liquid burned its throat.
“Hey, Nils! What did I just fire?” asked Linus.
“Undiluted brain-sucker repellent!”
“The heck! Are you for real?!” shouted Linus, suddenly serious. “You’re as ruthless as they come, Nils!”
For all intents and purposes, the tale of Shiori mercilessly showering the rare magical beast in spicy oil was now a story carved into the history books. Joel couldn’t help but also let out a scream at the herbalist’s terrifying work, resulting in a slight error in his spell incantation.
However, having practiced hard to improve and expand his skills since Shiori’s lecture, Joel’s general accuracy level was still incredibly high. Even with a slight error, his ice blades flew through the air, slicing off dragon scales as they went. And the scales that weren’t cut off still flipped upwards, revealing an opening of flesh for others to take advantage of.
“Amazing stuff!” remarked Yksel.
Yksel was the same age as Joel but a rank higher, and his unfiltered praise made Joel puff up a little.
“Now we can shave off the scales that swords can’t reach!”
“Then get to it!”
“You got it, future archmage!”
All of Joel’s fellow adventurers knew that he was a man who thrived when praised. With his morale as high as it could get, the dragon’s scales were sent upwards and out. The attacks that followed came down on unprotected flesh. Nadia, in particular, was incredible; she honed her powerful fire magic into a single point and sent it piercing straight into the dragon’s body...or at least, it looked like that for a moment.
However, the dragon responded by expanding and expelling magical energy. Nadia’s fire spell wavered, then dissipated as little more than sparks.
“Just when things were looking up! How annoying!” said Nadia, her lips curling into a snarl.
“We can’t let this go on much longer,” said Alec, his face stern.
The longer the battle went, the more the dragon learned. As a species, dragons lived long lives and were incredibly tenacious. Even now, after the adventurers and knights had kept up the attack, the beast was still capable of holding its own. The longer things dragged on, the more the battle would begin to turn in favor of the dragon. To make matters worse, it still had all four of its legs.
In terms of size, the dragon of the lake was second only to a full-grown ice dragon. It was all too clear to Alec now just how difficult an enemy it was to slay, and he gritted his teeth—what would have already killed almost anything else had been little more than a flesh wound to this monster.
“It’s no good!” shouted Yksel. “Our boiling water and mincing spells are useless!”
“It’s pushing everything back with its own magical energy!” exclaimed Joel.
The mages had tried to attack the dragon’s innards with Shiori’s housekeeping magic, but the dragon’s enormous magical reserves were blocking their every attempt—the damage was surface level at best.
Shiori had not gotten in touch with the core of the creature with her search magic, and it was that very magic that knocked back the powerful mage’s spells.
“I wish it had some definitive weak point! Some way for us to lock it down securely!”
But did such a weak point exist? Everyone knew that it was pointless to wish for the moon, but the yearning for such a thing spilled from the adventurers’ lips all the same. The dragon roared as if it were laughing at their pitiful struggles, though its voice was noticeably less forceful, perhaps due to its burned throat. Even then, however, this sound was enough to summon countless spirits, and wandering, low-level ghosts that had lost all sense of who they had once been began to spread across the battlefield.
“And now it’s summoning ghosts...?!” someone exclaimed.
The dragon was, of course, a living, breathing creature, but in its heart and mind it seemed more like a spirit of the dead. Because of this, it had the rare ability to summon ghosts. It now called upon frost ghosts—that which might have been called “icekin.” They made a sound like the tolling of a bell as they floated through the air, like fireflies of pure white. As the ringing echoed and layered upon itself, a powerfully chilly wind followed in the spirits’ wakes.
“Hrngh...!” grunted one adventurer, as others coughed nearby.
The air was so cold and dry that it prickled at the skin, impeding the natural working of the throat and the lungs. Breathing was possible, yes, but after thirty minutes of being locked in battle, the adventurers craved oxygen, and this sudden change in the environment put enormous strain on them.
The frost spirits emerged one after the other from the frozen lake, seeming to cackle at the adventurers who were suffocating before them. It was right then, however, that the air wavered, and on it came a gentle, warm breeze.
Shiori’s magic.
Her air-conditioning magic was useless against the dragon, but the spring warmth of her magic—a climate that fit her natural disposition to the letter—melted the wandering spirits and wrapped itself like a blanket around those on the battlefield.
“Wow...”
“So this is what they’re always talking about...”
Shiori had made no gestures and spoken no incantations. She’d cast her combined magic in an instant, and while the knights reacted with a mixture of surprise and awe, they were also quick to take action. Just as with powerful spells, a large-scale summoning consumed huge amounts of magical energy in an instant, which left the caster vulnerable. The knights knew this from their training, and were not about to let the opening go to waste. With the dragon momentarily frozen as it recovered, they swarmed in and took to shearing the monster’s scales and plunging their weapons into the flesh beneath.
Alec and the adventurers, too, were on the move, hacking away at the dragon’s transplant scars. Blood gushed from its wounds as the joint connecting one leg to the body was revealed.
“Let’s have at it!”
But just as Alec raised his sword to chop the dragon’s leg off, the beast let loose a fireball. Pushed along by fierce winds, some were sent hurtling through the sky, unable to defend themselves or evade in time. The advantage thus swung like a pendulum between the two sides, and the battle began to look like it would be drawn out longer still.