NOVEL NEXT Book 5, Chapter 12
There was power, in the Mantle of The Dragon; despite my tenuous grasp on that mantle, it still flooded my limbs with strength, and dumped raw power into my veins. But there was more to it than simply "I'm a dragon and dragons are powerful"; there was a story to it.
"I will have my revenge!" Karthrynax yelled, bringing her sword down in a woodsplitter's overhead chop.
"No," I said, before releasing my fiery breath all at once, in an explosive burst that blasted the sword out of her hands and sent her tumbling into a well-placed kick in the guts. "You will not."
In the Hikaano literary tradition, dragons were mainly antagonists, and almost never protagonists. And ordinarily, taking on the role of the antagonist while drawing on the Occult was a terrible idea. However, dragons were special, and were often the antagonists of tragedies.
See, it was this whole tropey formula: the hero has some motivation or other, which could be anything, really, as long as it compels them to set about trying to slay a dragon. However, the formula is for morality plays and the like; therefore, the hero cannot prevail unless their heart slash motivation is pure, by the author's standards of moral purity. What qualified as pure-hearted varied from author to author, but one thing that was pretty consistent?
Revenge was not a pure-hearted motivation. A hero who comes to a dragon seeking revenge either learns that they are really seeking justice, or they simply die by the claws of the dragon.
"This foolishness ends here," I continued, slamming my horned, bony-ridged forehead into her own. "Your ambition of slaying this dragon will die with you, here and now; if you harbor any delusions of your heart being broken, I will thoroughly disabuse you of those as I instruct you on the true nature of being broken."
She caught my next strike with both hands, and I realized something had gone wrong.
"You," she ground out, "are no dragon!"
And just like that, she shattered my mantle, and went on the offensive.
"You're just a fucking kid who keeps getting lucky, and yet is invincibly convinced that you're always the smartest, strongest, and correct-est person in the room!" Karthrynax continued, hammering me with blow after blow, driving me back. "You're the idiot who couldn't even stop Paimon's summoning, and had to catch Paimon at his weakest with cheap tricks to stop him! You're no dragon, you're no hero- you're a punk-ass kid from Redwater who is the fucking embodiment of narcissistic arrogance!"
Shit. This was... This was bad. It wasn't that she was hurting my feelings- I could not give less of a fuck what this bitch thought of me- but that she had put me on the rhetorical and martial back foot.
"A wanna-be Mage-Knight who has to use a fucking enchanted bicycle because he can't even find a horse, let alone a real unicorn. A sexually-gluttonous degenerate who surrounds herself with beautiful women for her own base gratification, and who's too stupid to realize your busty little sex pets could be used to help you fight me. Despite everything, you chose to fight me by yourself, because whether you're fighting or fucking someone, you have never once respected anyone who isn't yourself."
Right, which didn't have anything to do with the army of demons she'd unleashed on the Wood Elves and needed to be-
Fuck it, I'm done arguing with her.
"Just shut the fuck up," I said, before pouring magicka through one of my spell rings and slugging her square in the sternum, launching her back through the air in a less-than-graceful tumbling arc. "I don't care. I never cared. I'm fucking sick of you. Kill me or don't- just shut up."
Karthrynax wordlessly climbed to her feet, and picked up her sword that I'd so carelessly thrown away, ready to start seriously trying to kill me again.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Fuck.
She came at me again, and this time, I just didn't have enough juice in the tank to defend properly. I was slowing down, running out of magicka and stamina, and picking up nicks and bruises as she got through my defenses. I managed to parry an attempted stab, but she simply stepped within the range of my sword and punched me in the throat.
That was what did it; I lost my footing, falling backward onto the forest floor, and Karthrynax came with me, pounding me with her bare hands like I'd beaten Paimon. Still, just as I was alone, so too was she- I was able to get my arms up to protect my head, and she just went for body blows instead, peppering in a few headshots whenever an arm involuntarily jerked out of place to try to defend my torso and thus stopped protecting my head.
After a particularly spirited blow to the chest made me cough up blood, Karthrynax pulled back, satisfied I'd been beaten, and picked up her discarded sword before standing.
"This is for Paimon," Karthrynax said, raising her sword like a woodsman's axe.
Dimly, I gazed up at the vicious gleam of her sword. She'd killed me before, after all. Twice, if you wanted to be generous with how you counted it. It made sense she'd be able to do it again, if she really put her back into it. I didn't like it, but... well. I'd already argued with it as much as I could. And I'd lost.
"I shall avenge you..." Karthrynax continued. "My king."
"NO!" Volex screamed, manifesting with a sword in her hand as she blocked the swing that would've killed me.
"You dare interrupt me, Sister?" Karthrynax hissed.
"I will make you pay for what you've done to my Master!" Volex shouted, before going at Karthrynax in earnest with her sword.
Even now, with pain addling my brain, I could see the beautiful elegance of Volex's move, here. Now she was a claimant to the Mantle of Revenge, and sufficiently similar and closely-related to Karthrynax that she could stop Karthrynax's apotheosis in its tracks.
And, considering the two hundred years she spent with the Ironheart family before the War of the Roses, she had ample time in which to actually spend time learning how to fight under the tutelage of Artorias and any of his children who'd grown up to be Mage-Knights as well, as well as a rock-solid foundation for retroactively becoming a blademaster through Occult magic.
"Oh? Your Master?" Karthrynax asked, her tone almost... petty. Like she was arguing with a relative, rather than a traitor who she hadn't seen in half a millennium. "Now that's a bold lie."
"Don't you fucking dare!" Volex snapped- she wasn't having any of this familial bickering. "Don't you- she's earned my loyalty, dammit! Do not try to claim I'm a liar! My loyalty is real- my love is real, my devotion is real! Catherine Ironheart is the best thing to happen to me in my entire life, and if you draw so much as one more drop of her blood, I will make you regret being born!"
I breathed raggedly, vital essence trickling in slowly- it all hurt so much, I could barely focus, barely breathe... but I knew what I had to do. I reached into the pocket where I kept Volex's reliquary- her old reliquary, and now, her new one as well- and clumsily grabbed for the chain. I found the MacGuffin, somehow- hadn't I put that in a different pocket?- and before I could let go of it to grab for the reliquary instead, Karthrynax got past Volex and stabbed her sword straight down through that pocket, barely missing my fingers, and instead smashing Volex's old reliquary in half before going right into my thigh.
I grit my teeth, my vision flashing white as the sword was ripped out- Volex was still fighting Karthrynax, and trying to keep her away from me, but it just wasn't enough, she was going to get killed, her soul sent back to Hell, and trying to summon her back was just-
I pulled the MacGuffin out of my pocket, and decided what it really was, then and there. It was a reliquary binder- something that could bind a loose succubus' soul to a reliquary in an instant. I opened my hand to show it to Karthrynax, snarling a vicious and bloody-toothed grin, and then triggered the spell within the binder by crushing it into purple smoke.
Volex's soul was bound to a reliquary once more; not just any reliquary, though, but this reliquary, made of a little over seven tons of the densest power crystal ever conjured, and already pre-charged with an unreasonable amount of my own magicka- there were benefits to being a time-traveling half-dragon archmage, if you really knew where to look.
Karthrynax rammed the tip of her sword through my chest, splintering ribs and piercing my heart once more- always with the heart, this girl, I swear- but it didn't matter, anymore. Volex was riding her coattails with enough weight to pin her mantle to the floor, and my death was no longer the full coup de grace she'd thought.
"Better luck next time," I said, telepathically, before I finally bled to death.