The wind howled like a wounded beast, and the stone beneath Arviel's feet threatened to crumble with every breath the creature took.
It loomed in front of him a headless dragon, a walking paradox, a mass of charred bones fused with sinew and molten glass.
Black flame bled from its exposed neck stump, hissing as it met the cold, cracked ground of Svaergard. Where its head should have been, a pillar of shadow flickered and pulsed, beating like a heart, like something still alive and dreaming of rage.
Arviel did not dream.
He dodged right, barely.
A claw, wider than a gatehouse door, raked through where he had stood a heartbeat earlier. Its impact shattered a marble column into dust.
Arviel's coat fluttered from the force. He slid across the uneven floor, boots grinding sparks into the stone. No time to breathe. No time to think.
The beast came again.
It moved with a horrible, fluid momentum, an unnatural grace that defied its size. Arviel leapt upward, blade reversing in his grip, and brought it down in a sharp arc toward the creature's spine.
CLANG.
Sparks. No blood.
The impact jarred his entire arm. It felt like striking iron with a twig.
He twisted mid-air, landed hard on one knee, then rolled to avoid the tail that whipped across like a battering ram. Rubble followed in its wake. One chunk of stone missed his head by inches.
He clicked his tongue, rising slowly. "Still no weak points."
Not that he expected one.
This wasn't a beast. It was a curse that had grown teeth.
The black fire spilled again, pouring like liquid tar from the dragon's neck and claw-gouged flanks. But it did not bleed. It did not roar. It only existed, furious, silent, endless.
Arviel adjusted his grip on the blade.
"You shouldn't even be here," he muttered under his breath. "You're a ghost. A fable. What did they do to this city...?"
His voice vanished into the wind.
The dragon charged again, full force. The ground quaked. Arviel rushed forward to meet it, leaping at the last second, vaulting high, flipping mid-air, blade poised to plunge into the churning mass of its upper back.
But mid-arc, the creature vanished.
No, not vanished, it slid sideways, as if pulled by unseen strings. A trick of dimensions. Arviel's instincts screamed too late.
The tail struck him mid-air.
He spun violently, a blur of fabric and steel, before crashing into a broken archway. Pain sang through his ribs. His vision dimmed, but only for a moment. He forced himself to move, roll, rise.
He coughed once. Blood touched his glove.
Still he stood.
From a distance, a low, rumbling vibration echoed through the plaza. The dragon had stopped moving, for now. It stood still, motionless, fire dimming to embers as if waiting again.
Mocking him.
Arviel took slow steps forward, his breath sharp in his throat.
He tried to clear his mind. Focus. Calculate. Adapt.
But something... lingered.
A pair of faces. Voices.
That girl... the one with a very loud scream. Lirasette? Laysoda? And that arrogant boy. Alto-something. Alder-who-cares.
He clenched his jaw.
"They were supposed to follow the tunnel. Away from danger. Away from this."
But of course they didn't.
Why would they? They weren't soldiers. They weren't tacticians. They were... distractions. No, worse, they were people.
And people made things messy.
He cursed softly under his breath, tightening the strap of his wrist guard.
"Should've left them in the ruins..."
But as much as he told himself he didn't care, the distraction had taken root. He kept hearing their names wrong in his head, which only made it worse. Why couldn't he stop thinking about them? Were they safe? Did they even know what they were doing?
No. They didn't.
And that's what worried him.
A sudden flare of black fire brought him back to reality. The dragon was moving again.
This time, it wasn't charging.
It was circling him.
Stalking.
Arviel's blade glowed faintly, pulsing with suppressed energy. He lowered into a stance, feet wide, breath steady, sword angled like a mirror toward the beast.
He couldn't keep this up much longer. Not without backup. Not without something changing.
But he would not fall here.
If he had to, he would carve the sky open himself.
The headless dragon lunged again this time, faster, more erratic.
Its movements were wrong, delayed by no weight or thought, as though it had already lived this battle before. The air warped with the heat from its exposed innards, and with every motion, its talons dug deeper scars into the city floor of Svaergard.
Arviel was no stranger to impossible fights.
He ducked, rolled, retaliated, his blade catching the edge of the beast's front leg, sending out a burst of steam where muscle should have been. It screamed without sound. The shadow-fire pulsed in rhythmic bursts like a heartbeat gone mad.
The rhythm of the battle was on the verge of turning.
And then-
"Why didn't you tell me you can't aim properly?!"
"I was aiming! The thing moved!"
Arviel's eyes snapped sideways.
Somewhere near the edges of the broken plaza, those two were arguing again, Altherion and Liesette, ducked behind a collapsed archway as chunks of the ruined building continued to fall around them. Apparently, they had decided now was the perfect time to exchange complaints.
Liesette pointed accusingly at a scorch mark on the wall above her. Altherion threw his arms in the air. Neither of them were whispering.
Arviel gritted his teeth. "Are they seriously?"
He twisted just in time.
The dragon's tail came sweeping through the smoke like a massive blade.
Arviel had only a second to react. He ducked, barely. The tail skimmed his back, shredding the stone beneath his feet. The concussive force sent him sliding several meters across the ground, coat flaring behind him like dark wings. Sparks flew as his boots scraped hard.
He caught himself on one hand, panting.
That was too close. He thought.
He stood slowly, vision flickering from the rush of near-death adrenaline. The dragon hissed, black flame wreathing its massive body. It had paused for a moment, as if amused it almost hit its target.
Arviel, however, was anything but amused.
"Unbelievable," he muttered, straightening. "I told them to stay down. I told them to stay away."
The scent of burning stone filled his lungs. His knuckles tightened around the hilt of his sword.
And yet, in spite of the anger that boiled behind his eyes, his focus refused to lock back onto the dragon.
Some corner of his mind, stupid and soft kept circling back to them. To whether they were hurt. To why they were yelling. To why Liesette looked like she was about to cry and throw a rock at Altherion's face.
"No. Not now. Not in the middle of this."
But there it was again. That crack in concentration.
The dragon surged forward.
This time, Arviel was too slow.
The creature's claw slammed downward with the force of a falling building. Arviel barely managed to twist his body away just barely and the impact gouged a crater where he'd stood, sending up a shockwave of broken stone.
He stumbled, caught himself on a broken pillar.
Dust and sparks stung his eyes.
A cut bloomed on his arm, thin and hot.
Across the plaza, Altherion blinked. For a moment, the blur of the battlefield cleared enough for him to catch sight of Arviel panting, scraped, slightly bleeding.
And for some reason… stunned.
"What's wrong with him?" Altherion muttered under his breath, rising slightly from cover.
He squinted past the flames and fog, watching as Arviel repositioned his stance. His sword still gleamed, his posture was steady, but something was different.
That razor-sharp, surgical precision that Arviel fought with was… off. Hesitating.
"Is he distracted?"
Liesette, brushing rubble from her shoulders, followed his gaze. Her expression shifted from annoyed to concerned.
But Altherion stayed still, eyes narrowing.
No, he thought, not distracted. Hesitating.
He looked again at Arviel, then back at the black fire dragon that coiled around him like a phantom.
The roar came not from a throat, but from the air itself.
The headless dragon reared its body, exposing a maw of writhing black flame where its head should have been. The sound it emitted bent reality, a distortion of fury, as if the world itself protested the thing's existence.
Cracks spread across the ground like spiderwebs. The buildings trembled.
Arviel could barely hear his own breath through the crushing noise.
"It's not weakening." He staggered back another step. "If anything… it's getting stronger."
The dragon's sinewy frame rippled with volatile heat. Its movements, once slightly sluggish due to its massive size, now bore a terrifying grace.
Black flame poured from its missing head, forming brief shapes in the air, skulls, jaws, screaming faces that melted as quickly as they appeared.
Then it pounced.
Arviel spun to the side, narrowly avoiding the strike. The force of it collapsed a nearby clocktower, sending stone debris raining down in a deadly cascade.
His shoulder slammed into the pavement as he rolled, and he hissed at the sting that followed, blood seeping through his coat from the earlier graze.
"Damn it… this isn't just a beast, it's evolving."
He rose to one knee just in time to block a claw strike with the flat of his sword. The impact rattled up his arms and into his spine. He skidded backward, boots grinding through rubble.
It was no longer just about strength or skill. The dragon was learning him, reading his patterns, reacting faster. Every time Arviel adapted, so did it.
And worse, it was feeding off something.
Despair?
Heat?
Memory?
Arviel wasn't sure, but he could feel it, a steady draw, like the monster was siphoning the very tension in the air, converting it into raw, burning power.
The entire plaza was turning into a crucible.
His muscles ached. His breaths came shorter.
But the worst part wasn't the pain.
It was the thought, the humiliating, treacherous thought that maybe he wouldn't win this alone.
No.
He bit down on the instinct.
He was Arviel-
No. Not anymore.
That name no longer mattered. That life was ash.
He growled and slashed upward, sending a wave of crimson energy into the dragon's core. The blast struck true, there was an explosion of smoke, bone, and twisted flame. The creature stumbled.
But it did not fall.
Instead, the black fire that made up its missing head pulsed violently, reshaping itself into a grotesque crown of burning horns.
Then, without warning it vanished.
Arviel's eyes widened. "What-"
A second later, the dragon reappeared above him.
He barely raised his blade before the tail struck down like a falling meteor.
BOOM.
A crater erupted around Arviel's position. The shockwave sent clouds of dust spiraling skyward. For a moment, the world vanished beneath waves of rubble and smoke.
Liesette covered her mouth with both hands. "Arviel…!"
Altherion narrowed his eyes, standing slowly.
Within the cloud, a figure rose.
Arviel, coughing, bleeding but still alive.
His eyes locked with the dragon's.
Then briefly irritatedly, they flicked to the distant figures of Altherion and Liesette.
"…Are they just going to stand there," he muttered, voice hoarse, "or are those two, Sir All-Wrong and Lady Screams-a-Lot actually planning to help?"
He spat blood.
"You know what? Fine..."
His sword glowed faintly, blood dripping from the edge.
"I'll burn this thing down myself."
The dragon lunged again.
And Arviel met it with a defiant roar of his own.
***
The clash of metal and corrupted scale echoed like thunder in a deep chasm. Blasts of superheated air rolled through the ruin-laced battlefield, each breath from the headless dragon warping the air like a furnace exhaling its rage.
Arviel darted between shattered columns, blade slashing at angles too sharp for ordinary men to follow. But his opponent was anything but ordinary.
The dragon, taller than any fortress gate, blackened scales etched with ancient symbols, veins glowing with ethereal light moved with impossible intuition. Even without eyes, even without a head, it saw.
And it learned.
Each of Arviel's strikes that had found purchase minutes ago now met hardened scale, or worse, empty air.
"Tch!" Arviel cursed as he narrowly avoided a tail sweep that cracked the earth like a whip. Dust exploded upward, veiling the monster in a temporary fog.
"Stupid, ugly, blind flame cow. You think I need your cooperation?" he snarled under his breath. His shoulder was already bleeding from a glancing blow. His breathing grew uneven. His stance loosened.
And through it all, one question kept circling his mind like a vulture:
Where are those two?
Why aren't they following orders?
What are they even doing! having a picnic!?
But unknown to Arviel, Altherion Valecrest was watching.
Calculating.
Beneath the broken overpass of blackened stone, Altherion observed the creature not with a warrior's instincts, but a researcher's discipline.
One knee on the ground, he tapped something on his wrist: a cracked brass dial embedded into a circular bracer. The screen flickered, and a tiny projection glowed in the air, blue lines forming a crude 3D grid of the dragon's movement history.
He whispered to himself.
"Quadruped. Three primary phases of attack. Reactive, not proactive. No eyes, but always turns to intercept movement, doesn't respond to ambient sound. That's… that's not a reflex arc."
Liesette crouched behind him, pale and panting. "Altherion, are you... what are you doing?"
He didn't answer right away. He adjusted a small vial of mercury-like liquid into the back slot of his gauntlet. The device let out a soft whirr.
"Stimulus-Response-Adaptation loop. It's not predicting our actions. It's recording patterns, and making extrapolations based on motion vectors."
"Plain words, please?" she asked, eyes wide.
"It's not a beast, it's a machine with a memory buffer."
He stood.
Then, without warning he stepped out into the open and raised both hands.
A glowing orb of unstable plasma surged into existence between his palms, rotating on a multi-axis gyroscopic frame he conjured through intricate finger gestures.
Liesette gasped. "Are you?!"
But Altherion wasn't listening. He threw the orb with a seemingly lazy arc. It wasn't fast. It wasn't meant to hit.
The dragon twitched. Even through the dust, it turned.
Exactly as he predicted.
It saw the vector. Not the threat.
In the moment the dragon shifted, Altherion sprinted behind another column and jotted something down on a thin panel that blinked with arithmetical symbols.
"It reacted at a forty-degree offset. Pattern holds. It's not sensing magic. It's mapping motion through thermal disruption. Meaning..."
He turned to Liesette, eyes sharp as glass.
"we can feed it false data."
With a twist of his wrist, he released a dozen small capsules. They hovered mid-air, clicking softly before each burst into a glowing projection of random elemental signatures, flickering flames, surges of current, frozen vapor.
The dragon twitched again. It tried to read them. Anticipate their vectors.
But there were too many.
It turned. Shifted. Stumbled.
For the first time since the fight began, the beast hesitated.
From the other side, Arviel narrowed his eyes. "What the?"
Altherion's voice echoed through the din.
"Now! Hit the third thoracic junction on its left flank. Just below the exposed light-veins!"
Arviel blinked.
"How do you even know what that means?!"
But even as he asked, his body moved. Trusting instinct. He dove forward, blade humming, and struck.
The dragon reeled.
Not in pain, but in confusion.
Its pattern had been broken.
Altherion stepped forward calmly, raising a second orb, but this time, it wasn't elemental. It was vibrating, pulsing erratically with calculated wavelengths.
"This is sonic inversion tuned to destabilize its predictive lattice."
He fired it toward the beast's side.
The orb exploded, not in flame, but in sound. A subsonic boom disrupted the terrain, sending shimmering pulses through the creature's body.
For a moment, just a second the light running through its veins dimmed.
"That's it, there's a lag between processing input and behavioral output."
He looked at Liesette. "It's not invincible. It's just… optimized. But if you overload its computation process…"
"You stall it," she breathed.
Altherion nodded.
Then he looked back toward the field toward Arviel, who was watching him now, mouth slightly open.
Even through the chaos, their eyes met.
Altherion smirked. "You can't brute-force a creature built on logic. You have to outthink it."