Barlama would suffer untold damage, and countless lives would be lost. That was precisely what the empire’s saboteurs were hoping for. It was a terrorist plot using fiends in place of gunpowder.
“Master, this one’s already awake,” said Koko innocently, looking at the frozen earth dragon. As the Vildhjärta’s external terminal, she had access to the advanced sensor array of a Chasseur, the detection capabilities of which far outstripped those of any human. Using those, she was able to pick out the fiend’s heartbeat.
The beast was not sleeping. All that was needed was for the ice sealing it away to melt, and the earth dragon would be free to do as it pleased—with all the memories of its violent capture still fresh in its mind.
“How much longer will the aura crystals last?!” Ras roared. But Fiarca only gave a grave shake of the head.
“We’re already out of time, Ras. I watched the technique come to an end; that’s how I was able to decipher it.”
“How can you stay so bloody calm?!”
Ras watched as a large crack ran right through the thin crystalline layer, and the aura crystals began dissolving into motes of pure light. As if on cue, the ice beneath began to rumble and crack, and parts of it sheared away, revealing the scaly skin of the beast beneath.
“You’ve got to be joking!” cried Valdemar, ready to turn tail and flee. He hadn’t counted on facing down a dragon on a good day, let alone when he was wounded.
But apart from him, everyone else was strangely calm. Koko, Fiarca, Elmira, Kanalayka, and even Tishna all looked silently up at the awakened dragon with expressions of purest serenity.
Then, once the beast let out an earsplitting roar, Fiarca turned to Ras, a little disappointed, as if her time observing the fiend had come to an end.
“You’re up, Ras,” she said.
“Curse it all… How did I know this was coming?”
Ras sighed and drew his sword, a large blade almost one meter long. Against a ten-meter fiend, however, it was little more than a toothpick. Ras readied his stance, holding the blade parallel to the ground, and stared down his foe. His blade began glowing with the crimson light of aura energization, which drifted outward as particles on the air. Those particles reformed into a high-density Aura Edge in the shape of a spear. As the dragon lunged to attack, Ras thrust his spear with the force of a tightened crossbow.
Vajra—one of the fundamental techniques of the Black Arts. The tip moved faster than sound, making it more than enough to break through the repulsive field surrounding a fiend’s body, pierce the hardened scales making up its hide, and skewer the beast’s heart.
Nobody heard a thing until it was all over. Then the effects of Ras’s supersonic strike manifested all at once. A sonic boom rippled outward, rattling the stone-wrought building, with enough force that anyone outside would have suspected an earthquake struck long before imagining it to be the work of one man.
“A-an Over Art?!” cried Valdemar, aghast. “I’ve never seen anything so devastatingly powerful!”
Out of all the people standing there, his was the only reasonable reaction. Elmira glared coldly, unable to decide whether to be impressed or annoyed. Kanalayka watched the display of martial prowess with starry eyes, Koko danced for joy, singing her master’s praises, while Tishna merely blushed. Fiarca seemed almost completely unsurprised, and her only worry was for the damage suffered to the food stores caught in Ras’s blow.
Ras, meanwhile, looked at the dragon, heavily wounded but still standing, and cursed to himself.
“Looks like I’m still a long way from being able to end the fight in one blow like Fon can,” he muttered.
Dragons possessed staggering levels of endurance, and in some cases were even able to regenerate a missing heart. Ras’s Vajra hadn’t been able to finish the beast off. It glared at him once more, a burning desire to live visible deep in its eyes.
“No hard feelings,” said Ras, leaping into battle again, his sword raised.
The sweep came down like a guillotine blade, slicing clean through the dragon’s neck. It was the same technique he had used on the aquatic dragon at Gradage Canyon, only that time, Ras had been riding a Chasseur.
After Ras landed and confirmed the beast was dead, Tishna called out to him from behind.
“That was Pangu Blade, wasn’t it?” she said. “One of the forty-eight techniques of the Black Arts.”
“Yeah,” Ras replied. “But don’t get your hopes up. Even against Lesser Dragons like these, using it repeatedly is no easy task.”
Ras held up his ceramic blade to show Tishna. Instead of cracks, rifts of crimson light ran across the partially stabilized zirconia blade, like veins. It was incapable of withstanding the strain of Ras’s technique for long. This was the reason Fon Cigel usually fought bare-handed—the one weakness of the formidable Black Arts.
“Repeatedly?! How can you even do it once?! You just cut a dragon in half with one swing!!”
Valdemar gazed at the carcass of the beheaded dragon, unable to believe his eyes. Fiarca ignored him and turned to Elmira.
“Tell the Silver Fangs to go make some noise in the city,” she said. “I’ll leave the method to you. Use your imagination.”
“Some noise, you say?”
Elmira raised an inquisitive eyebrow. For all her time spent as Fiarca’s aide, even she couldn’t tell what the princess was planning sometimes. The reason, however, soon became clear.
“I’d like to ensure the city guard is roused to action as quickly as possible,” she said. “I know; put on a little fireworks show. Make it as loud and bright as you can.”
“At once, Your Highness.”
Elmira bowed and ran off immediately. Fiarca next turned to the imperial legate.
“Kanalayka, I want you to take command of our forces outside Barlama. Have all our Chasseurs ready for action before Registan makes their move, do you understand? Get in touch with Agarte and Darrol and apprise them of the situation as well.”
“As you wish.”
“And Val?” Fiarca shot him a cheerful smile. “Thank you for your service. You can go home and rest if you like.”
“How am I supposed to sleep with this thing haunting my nightmares?!” yelled Valdemar. After seeing the things he’d seen, and learning of the true threat to the city, there was no way he could crawl back under the covers and spend the next few hours unconscious.
“If you say so,” Fiarca said with a shrug. “In that case, please send a message to the king. Tell him everything we’ve just learned. If he doesn’t believe you, show him this sword; it bears the seal of a herald of the imperial family.”
“Couldn’t I have something partway between those two extremes?” Valdemar complained, taking the sword and sighing. If he’d known the alternative was presenting himself before the king of a foreign nation as a representative of his empire, Valdemar might have chosen to take the rest of the day off after all.
“And Ras, I believe you know what you have to do.”
“Yeah, with this one’s help.”
Ras looked back into Fiarca’s eyes and placed his hand on Koko’s head. The smile on his face said that while he knew what he had to do, he didn’t have to like it.
“That’s right,” Fiarca said with a smile. “Good luck out there, Koko.”
“Thanks! Now I get to play!”
The smile on Koko’s face, meanwhile, said that she didn’t understand what she had to do at all. So long as she followed Ras’s commands, though, it didn’t really matter.
Finally, Fiarca turned to one last person.
“That leaves us, Tishna. Shall we go?”
“Go? Go where?”
Tishna looked puzzled, as though she hadn’t expected to be part of the plan. She didn’t have the authority to mobilize the city guard, and it went without saying that she was no use in a fight, either.
However, Fiarca held out her hand and grinned behind her mask.
“We’re off to grant your wish, my love.”