Soul of the Warrior

The Dragon didn’t take the provocation well. It roared once more, but since it hadn’t had time to build up its power, there wasn’t the Magical aspect infused into it. It was just an angry response from the Dragon.

The Hero didn’t back down, either. He flew through the air and once more collided with the Dragon, battering it more than slashing it with his greatsword. The collision created a shockwave, but the Dragon was barely repulsed from his position in the sky.

It took a swipe at the Hero. Despite the Dragon being hundreds of times the size of the Hero, it moved too quickly for the man to dodge the strike. He blocked it with his greatsword, and he was thrown back in the air. He only flew for half a second before stopping himself, but he was knocked back over a hundred yards in that flash of time.

Gulley couldn’t spare any more thoughts to the fight in the sky. Orders were being called to the platoons and they were maneuvering on the battlefield. The dragonlings were located in a singular position, and there were no reinforcements on their way as far as Gulley could tell. If there was another Dragon with a similar horde of dragonlings on its back, it would be well outside the scope of a Tier 4 Dungeon.

The difficulty and the things being done inside this Dungeon already stretched incredulity. Gulley was quite experienced when it came to Dungeons, and he had never heard of anything nearly as difficult as what he had already seen. Even the vast majority of Hard Modes couldn’t compare.

The first platoon of shadow-soldiers engaged the dragonlings as the battle in the sky continued. While the dragonlings were falling to the ground, they didn’t seem anything special, but now that Gulley could see them next to the humans, he could see that they towered over everyone else on the field.

They were at minimum twice the height of the tallest human in the army, and some of them were nearing three times the size. They didn’t carry any fancy gear or weapons. Their scales and claws were natural armor and weapons, better even than the Tier 4 gear the shadow-military sported.

The shadow-soldiers tossed their spears like javelins at the charging dragonlings. Most of them hit the scales at bad angles and slid off, ineffectually. Some, though, pierced some spaces between the scales. Even with the spears sticking out of the bodies of the dragonlings, they didn’t slow their charge.

The shadow-soldiers in the front lines drew their swords and assumed a shield wall. The dragonlings charged in throwing large, sweeping strikes with their claws. The force of their blows knocked shields aside, their razor-sharp claws lacerating the Tier 4 metal. They wouldn’t hold up for an extended clash.

The shadow-soldiers didn’t stand still, though. Even while they were being knocked around in the first row, they maneuvered their shields and swung their swords, preventing the dragonlings from doing any critical damage in a short period of time. The back rows, like most modern military organizations, used their spears to stab forward through the gaps between the front-row soldiers.

I wonder if the originals of these remnants developed this tactic or if they adapted it from even further back in history, Gulley idly thought as he followed his own platoon as they flanked around the enemy. There’s no telling how far back in history this event took place. As far as I know, though I’m no expert, the capital city of Wispan was founded when the cliff and river already ran through this area.

Gulley and his squad steadily marched with their shadow-platoon around the dragonlings. The platoon that had stood in front of them between the new vanguard and the dragonlings marched ahead to completely circle the monsters while the platoons behind them stayed in place to act as reserve troops.

The Hero and the Dragon continued to fly about in the air all over the place, exchanging blows and Magical attacks. The Dragon could cast Spells, strike with its claws, swipe with its tail, and spew Dragon Breath all at the same time while also actively dodging and parrying the attacks from the Hero.

Despite how dangerous the Dragon appeared in the sky, it actually only served to amplify just how amazing the Hero was. With all of that going on, the Hero was completely unfazed while simultaneously covering any stray magic or Breath attacks toward the army below. There wasn’t even a hint of wind from the shockwaves reaching the troops below.

Gulley made note of the fact but didn’t dwell on it for too long. His platoon was in position to engage the dragonlings on the flank. They were in the back row so it would be some time before his squad would make its way up to the front to personally participate, but there could always be an anomaly with the situation. Things tended to get out of control in the heat of fierce battle.

The dragonlings were vastly outnumbered, yet they were holding their own. Gulley tried to imagine the scenario being set up here for the Dungeon Party. It wouldn’t make any sense to have them go through all of this just for the shadow-soldiers to slay all the dragonlings, and by the looks of it, the shadow-soldiers were slightly more superior individually than his average subordinate.

What’s the trick, here? Gulley thought. No matter how he analyzed the situation, he just wasn’t figuring out what was going on, exactly. Sure, he understood the core concept. It was right in front of his face: A Giant Dragon with their brood was fighting an army of humans.

None of that mattered. They weren’t fighting a giant Dragon with their brood. They were just standing around watching. Gulley was pretty sure he hadn’t selected the Spectator Mode at the beginning.

He focused his attention further on the action. There was something strange about it. It took him an embarrassingly long amount of time, a full three minutes, to spot what was wrong.

Aside from the occasional scale getting shorn off, spear stabbed into a crevasse, and slash-marks on the shields and armor, there was no damage being done to either side. It looked like a pantomime of a battle.

Gulley furrowed his brow as he got more and more confused. The auras and Mana were all real. His senses weren’t lying to him, and he could tell that they weren’t an illusion.

Just what is going on?!

Suddenly, everything seemed to freeze for just a moment. It was like there was a hiccup in reality. It was so quick that if Gulley didn’t have over a thousand Intelligence, his mind wouldn’t have been able to process it.

Gulley realized that the blip perfectly aligned with the last shadow-soldier reaching their destination on the battlefield. The flankers hadn’t yet engaged in combat, and Gulley had been anticipating some sort of assault command any second now - I know I would have given the command ages ago - but the shift spoke of something different happening.

The Dragon let out another ferocious roar. It’s wings spread out and reality-defying amounts of Mana swirled around the Dragon and helped propel it thousands of meters into the atmosphere in a matter of seconds.

It hung in the air for a brief moment, gathering even more Mana to itself. It gazed down at the battlefield, pure hatred in its reptilian eyes. Its maw opened and another breath attack was overcharged.

It suddenly flipped upside down, tucking its wings as close into its body as it could, as it made a nose-dive to the ground. The overcharging breath accumulated like an energy-ball in front of its mouth, and the Mana it gathered coalesced into intricate, high-Tier Magic Spells. It summoned over a dozen Spells on either side.

The Spells weren’t just attack Magic, either. They were tied together in an intricate web of Mana Threads and Weaves. It further empowered not only the overcharging Breath Attack, but it somehow empowered itself and the body of the Dragon all at once.

The Breath Attack was the first assault to be released. It lashed out like a light-beam across the plateau. It hadn’t aimed at any of the soldiers, instead a long line of plasma now stretched from one end of visibility to the other.

The shape of the line caused a foreboding within Gulley that he didn’t understand right away.

There was no time to analyze it. The Dragon hadn’t stopped its plummet. The Spells surrounding it exploded outward, giving more thrust and shock to the inherent power of the Dragon’s Body.

Time once more seemed to freeze for a moment of eternity. This time, it wasn’t an external source, but Gulley’s mind putting all the pieces of the puzzle together.

The Hero was still chasing after the Dragon, but Gulley’s mind seemed to pierce the golden halo of light surrounding him, and he glimpsed the grim expression of the Hero. It was an expression of grief, rage, sorrow, and determination, all rolled into one. Gulley had never seen such an expressive statement on someone’s face before, and he had a hunch it was more System shenanigans for those who had the Perception and Intelligence to notice.

The Hero had been silently accumulating some sort of power that Gulley didn’t recognize since even before the arrival of the Dragon, and the look on the man’s face told him he wasn’t going to complete the build-up before whatever the Dragon planned on doing was done.

The characteristics of the Hero was only one thing his mind roped into the pattern. The line of plasma created by the Dragon, the explosion of the Spells, the speed and trajectory of the Dragon, and the obvious intent of the Dragon all composed the clues necessary to figure it out.

Gulley remembered too late that the battle was taking place on a plateau peak that didn’t exist in the modern world.

The Dragon crashed into the ground, and it shattered.

More than half of the Plateau disintegrated upon impact, and the melted ground acted as the fault-line. The ground beneath Gulleys feet was no more, and he felt himself falling. The entire army, including the dragonlings, were suddenly free-falling thousands of feet to the earth floor down below.

The Hero’s Party wasn’t spared, either. Gulley was worried about Teilon, so he snuck a glance in that direction. He saw despair on the faces of the Hero’s Companions; however, it was coupled with determination and hope.

It was a strange thing. They were clearly aware that they were likely not going to survive the fall, yet they seemed to still be anticipating victory somehow.

The answer came another fraction of a second after the Dragon forever altered the landscape of the plateau.

A bellow of defiance, empowered by the strange golden-halo surroundinging the Hero, shocked the people falling through the sky. He executed a Skill that resembled a Coss-Slash, though there was so much more to it than any kind of Cross-Slash Gulley had witnessed before.

The attack used the power the Hero had been accumulating, and the lashing out with his greatsword created huge sword beams that chased after the Dragon. The Dragon had let its guard down for just a moment with the success of its plan. The greatsword beams composed of the unfamiliar energy sliced right through the wings of the Dragon.

Even though Dragons are able to fly via Magical means, that Magic apparently resides within their wings. It might be a System imposed limitation. It would look very strange to see a Dragon lose its wings and still dark about in the Sky as if nothing had happened. If nothing else, the wings gave it improved maneuverability in the sky.

The Dragon screamed in pain as the severed wings fell from its body. They disintegrated in mid-air as they fell, leaving nothing behind but a smattering of dust.

That was the last clear image Gulley had of the scene, as the dust that used to be the wings met a rising dust cloud from the ground. Gulley and the others were quickly enveloped in the cloud, and their visibility was reduced to almost nothing immediately.

Suddenly, their bodies jolted as they impacted the surface. The force of the impact was not nearly as heavy as Gulley had expected. He didn’t take any damage from the fall, even though he had already fallen long and far enough that it should have taken a decent toll on his Health Pool.

He scrambled to his feet and looked around. He couldn’t really see anything in the low-visibility, but the rising dust cloud quickly began to dissipate.

The first thing Gulley noticed as the dust cleared away was his entire squad equally unharmed. Their training had kicked in, too, and they had actively sought each other out in order to watch each others’ backs.

There was no sign of any of the shadow-soldiers, though. They had completely disappeared. Gulley wasn’t entirely surprised, though. The System had already shown that it was unusually invested in this Dungeon with a lot of strange occurrences already taking place at every corner.

“Form up!” Gulley commanded the squad. “We don’t know what’s going to emerge out of this dust.”

The squad quickly obeyed, assuming their individual positions. Gulley took his position at the head of the squad and examined the lingering dust in all directions. He used all of his sense and his Skills and Mana to investigate.

A trio of shadows slowly emerged from the dust cloud. They moved at a slow pace, but they were undeniably getting closer to their position. The height and width of the shadows gave away that they were anything but human.

The image of the three dragonlings slowly revealed itself. Gulley weighed his options, but he opted to wait for the enemy to come to them. He doubted they would be able to surprise the enemy, and he had other doubts in his mind to support the hypothesis. He would find out later if he was right or not, but he believed his decision was the right one.

“Launch Spears!” Gulley commanded. They didn’t have any backup squads to support them, so they would need to immediately form a shield wall. They could do it while wielding the spears, but it was considerably more awkward than with a sword in hand. It wouldn’t have given them an advantage, either, because of the way Gulley had seen the dragonlings fight. They didn’t use their superior reach, opting instead to wade into as close quarters combat as they could.

High pitched screeches inundated Gulley’s ears in response to his spoken command, and the three dragonlings finally stopped waddling and broke into a charge towards their squad.

Gulley empowered himself with his Mana and launched his spear as hard as he could. The dragonlings either had contempt for the puny spears, or they were overconfident in their own natural scale armor. Either way, it was a fatal first mistake.

Gulley’s spear flew true and pierced into the right-side dragonling’s hip. It was right at the intersection where the creature’s leg met it’s torso, but it was far enough on the outside not to be considered the groin.

His position in the squad placed him on the extreme right, so there was no reason for him to target either of the other dragonlings. The other squad members had it covered.

Only a single spear, including Gulley’s, pierced each individual dragonling. The other two spears weren’t in as favorable a position, though. One was in the left shoulder, and the other was in the upper chest. Gulley’s spear would at least affect the speed and maneuverability of one of the dragonlings, but that would be enough to give them a significant advantage.

They would hopefully be able to overpower one of them much quicker than the others, and that would free up more squad members to engage the other two.

Without instruction from Gulley, the squad naturally split up into four mercenaries fighting against a single dragonling each. Every squad had twelve members, but the squad leader made for a thirteenth.

Gulley joined the group of four handling the right-most dragonling.

The creatures finally reached striking distance, and they were much more intimidating up close. Gulley was unable to focus on the fights of the other eight squad members as the dragonling he had injured was still capable enough to put pressure on all five of the mercenaries.

It charged forward, attempting to ignore the pain and obstacle of the spear sticking out of its hip, and slashed across the front of the five mercenaries with its huge arms. The being towered over the humans, and Gulley could see powerful muscles expanding and contracting beneath the . heavy dragon scales protecting it.

Just like he had seen with the shadow-army above, the dragonling’s attacks managed to knock shields aside and rend the metal itself. Their shields were good enough quality that they wouldn’t be destroyed right away, though. They would be able to use them to defend themselves for several minutes.

But that was all. A protracted engagement was not a viable option.

Gulley suspected the dragonlings could use powerful Magic, but it seemed all of their Mana was contained within their bodies.

It’s some sort of extreme physical-enhancement Magic, probably, Gulley idly thought. It won’t be enough to protect you!

Gulley actively engaged with the monster, but he held back just a bit to let the other four mercenaries take the lead. They were doing an outstanding job of working together to keep the attention of the beast and slow whittle it down.

Gulley bided his time until an opportunity finally was exposed.

The dragonling, a creature that was obviously obsessed with close-quarters-fighting, over-extended itself. Several targets of opportunity presented themselves to Gulley, and he decisively struck with his sword at the most fatal one.

The blade of his sword bit deep into the neck of the dragonling, slashing straight through the tiny gap between scales The feat of precision spoke of an extremely high Swords Skill.

Gulley put his entire body into the blow, and when he sensed resistance, he pumped his blade full of Mana. He wasn’t an expert in infusing his weapons with Mana, so he just did it in the crudest way possible: brute force.

The resistance gave way before his blade, and the draonling’s spine was severed. The body collapsed like a ragdoll, all four limbs incapable of movement. It continued to screech at them with hatred, but the other four mercenaries quickly leapt forward and drove their swords into vital points of the dragonling, killing it.

Finishing off the other two happened quickly after they were able to completely surround them. The dragonlings never faltered or changed tactics to the new threat, which made it much easier to deal with them. They seemed to be under some sort of compulsion that only allowed them to advance and strike at what was directly in front of them in a frenzy.

Their unprotected flanks and sides spelled their doom.

After the fight was over and the squad members heaved for breath, Gulley finally looked around to more closely inspect their surroundings.

They were near the top of a pile of rubble. The shape of the rubble closely matched what Gulley knew of the layout of the island the capital city of Wispan was located on. In the distance, the sword beams had dug deep channels into earth, reminiscent of where the modern-day rivers flowed.

Gulley could imagine the sword beams had been so powerful that they had created grooves long enough to connect to some sort of water source far into the distance.

He looked around more and noticed a grizzly sight. Among the rubble, broken bodies of shadow-soldiers and dragonlings covered a huge swathe of the land. It seemed that Gulley and his squad were the only survivors.

Off in the distance, he spied the corpse of the giant Dragon. He had mistaken it for a large hill at first, but upon closer inspection, the features of the Dragon became obvious. Not only that, but there was subtle movement that drew his eye.

The Hero, no longer clad in a golden halo, stood next to his greatsword that was pierced into the eye of the beast. Although the difference in size between the greatsword and the Dragon was akin to a tiny splinter, the Hero’s abilities would have allowed for the killing blow to cause far more damage than appeared on the surface.

The Hero stood with his hands on the pommel, his head bowed. The movement had been cloth pieces of his attire and his long hair flapping in the wind.

The corpses of the Hero’s companions were among those strewn about the battlefield nearby. Of his Party, only the Hero himself had survived.

A nagging feeling poked at Gulley’s subconscious, and he quickly glanced all around him. Finally, he spotted Teilon sitting on top of a small boulder in the distance, watching them. As soon as Gulley made eye contact with the other man, Teilon gave him a thumbs-up with a grin.

Gulley started to make his way over to Teilon, but after only a dozen steps, he ran into an invisible wall that indicated the edge of the Dungeon. He looked up at Teilon with a sharp, confused expression only to see the other man just shrug it away.

They were apparently in separate zones they couldn’t access from their side.

When no other threats made themselves apparent, Gulley turned to face his squad.

“I guess that’s it?” He said. “Apparently, the actual encounter of this Dungeon was just those three dragonlings…

“Now we need to find a way out of here.”

There was no obvious exit. The portal to the surface was thousands of feet above them on top of the intact portion of the plateau.

As Gulley continued to scan the environment for some way to get back to the portal, another System Message intruded into his vision.

3…

2…

1…

Congratulations! You Survived!

Teleporting…

The world faded away in a swirl of colors and Mana motes.