Chapter 4
The Fight Continues
The world was reduced to fire, smoke, and the thunderous beat of death's wings. Kai ran, a gray phantom streaking through an inferno of his own making and the dragon's relentless fury. Every footfall kicked up showers of glowing embers.
Every breath seared his lungs, thick with ash and the stench of ozone from his gun and brimstone from the beast above. The concussive thwump of the white gun was a constant counterpoint to the dragon's earth-shaking roars and the deafening whumpf of its fireballs exploding around him.
He wasn't just running from it.
He was running through a gauntlet designed by a vengeful god. Trees exploded into torches to his left. The ground erupted in geysers of molten earth and superheated rock to his right. The dragon's shadow was a suffocating blanket, its molten gold eyes fixed on him with terrifying precision from its low, skimming flight just above the burning canopy. It had learned.
No more sustained torrents that gave him time to find cover. This was surgical annihilation precise, rapid-fire bursts forcing him into constant, desperate evasion. He felt the heat of near misses singe his hair; the concussive blasts buffet him like physical blows. His coat was tattered, smoldering in places.
Adrenaline and something deeper, something fueled by the lingering metallic tang in his mouth from the last teleport, was the only thing keeping his legs moving at inhuman speeds.
Thwump! Thwump! He fired upwards without breaking stride, the cold gun bucking in his grip. Two invisible hammers of compressed air slammed into the dragon's armored chest. Crack-screech! Scales spiderwebbed, a puff of soot and rock dust exploding outwards.
The beast bellowed, more annoyance than pain, but it jerked slightly, its next fireball going wide, obliterating a stand of pines Kai had already passed. A minor victory, bought with precious seconds.
He saw it ahead a giant Sentinel Pine, miraculously untouched amidst the carnage, its ancient trunk thicker than three men, its crown piercing the smoke-choked sky like a defiant spear. It was a risk, a beacon, but also potential salvation. High ground. Obstruction. Anything to break the dragon's relentless line of sight.
He poured on impossible speed, legs a blur, eating the distance to the massive tree. He sensed rather than saw the dragon's head tilt, tracking his trajectory, understanding his intent. A low, guttural growl vibrated through the air, a sound of predatory anticipation. Go for the tree, little spark. See what good it does you.
Kai reached the base and didn't slow. He leaped, boots finding purchase on the rough bark. He ran up the sheer trunk, gravity defied by raw, conjurer fueled momentum and desperation. Bark splintered under his boots as he ascended, a human spider scaling a burning world.
Above, the dragon reacted. It wasn't fooled. It saw the escape route. With a powerful downstroke that flattened the burning undergrowth for yards, it gained a few crucial feet of altitude. Its massive head lowered, jaws gaping wide. The furnace deep within its throat ignited, not for a fireball, but for a sustained, vertical inferno designed to engulf the entire towering pine and the human clinging to it in one cataclysmic breath.
Kai felt the surge of impossible heat building above him, saw the light intensify, turning the smoke above the tree a hellish orange. He was twenty feet up the trunk, exposed, a fly on a wall about to be blasted by a blowtorch. Time stretched thin, brittle. He needs to do something now.
His left hand, gripping the white gun, pressed flat against the bark for balance. His right hand, clutching the cool metal dagger, snapped outwards. Not to throw it. To conjure.
Fire erupted from his palm and the dagger's hilt simultaneously. Not a weapon, but matter. Crimson light flared, intense and brief. From the fiery nexus, links forged themselves not solid metal, but chains of pure, solidified flame. They hissed and spat, radiating intense heat yet holding their shape with magical rigidity.
They extended rapidly six feet of blazing, molten links. One end fused seamlessly with the dagger's pommel, the other ended in a heavy, hooked weight, also forged of white hot flame. A Kusarigama, born of fire and will, materialized in his grip.
He didn't pause. Even as the dragon's breath gathered into an unbearable point of light above, Kai whipped the fiery chain. The hooked end lashed out, not towards the dragon, but around the thick trunk of the Sentinel Pine, several feet above his head. Clink hiss.
The blazing hook bit deep into the wood, anchoring itself. Kai yanked hard, the chain pulling taut, the heat searing his palm even through the protective energy he channeled. It became a lifeline, an anchor point.
Using the anchored chain for leverage, he pushed off the trunk with his feet and ran horizontally, perpendicular to gravity, along the side of the massive tree, putting distance between himself and the point where the dragon's breath would strike. He was a gray comet trailing a leash of fire, sprinting sideways up a vertical surface as the world prepared to end above him.
The dragon unleashed its breath.
A column of pure, white-hot destruction roared down, wider than the ancient tree itself. It wasn't fire; it was stellar plasma. It struck the crown of the Sentinel Pine.
In that instant, as the tree's upper half simply ceased to be, vaporized in a microsecond, as the shockwave of superheated air began its devastating radial expansion, Kai's eyes changed.
His pupils, wide with adrenaline and focus, didn't just dilate; they transformed. The deep black vanished, replaced by rings of incandescent, burning gold. It wasn't a glow; it was his irises becoming molten metal, ancient and terrifying. The transformation lasted less than a heartbeat, a flash of cosmic power.
And Kai vanished.
He didn't leap free. He simply ceased to exist on the side of the burning, disintegrating tree. The dragon's breath consumed the space he had occupied a microsecond before, vaporizing the trunk where he'd been running, severing the fiery chain that anchored him. The chain's severed end flared and died as its connection to the conjurer was lost.
The dragon hovered, the roar of its breath dying abruptly. It surveyed the devastation. The mighty Sentinel Pine was gone from the midpoint up, replaced by a towering column of superheated steam and ash, the lower half a shattered, burning stump. Its molten eyes scanned the expanding blast zone, the rain of vaporized wood and molten sap. Satisfaction warred with irritation. The spark was extinguished. Annihilated. Utterly.
Then, a flicker of movement. Above.
Instinct, older than mountains, screamed a warning. The dragon's massive head snapped upwards, neck craning back.
Kai hung in the smoke-choked air, fifty feet above the dragon's hovering bulk. He hadn't fallen; he'd appeared. His eyes were black again, but blood streamed freely from both nostrils now, tracing crimson paths down his ash-streaked face. His chest heaved, wracked with the agony of consecutive spatial violations. But his grip was iron.
In his right hand, the fire-chain Kusarigama was whole again, reforged in the instant of his reappearance. The dagger glowed white-hot at one end, the heavy hook a smoldering ember at the other, the chain of solid flame a hissing, six-foot arc of destruction between them. He wasn't just holding it; he was spinning it.
Whipped by his conjurer's strength and will, the fiery chain became a blazing halo around him. The dagger and hook traced scorching circles in the air, faster and faster, building centrifugal force, creating a vortex of heat and light against the dark, smoky backdrop. The chain hissed like an angry serpent, spitting sparks.
The dragon's molten eyes widened infinitesimally. Not fear, but profound, incandescent rage. The spark wasn't dead. It was above it. Taunting it. Defying the natural order. A guttural snarl ripped from its throat, the precursor to another world-ending breath aimed straight up.
Kai didn't give it the chance.
At the zenith of the chain's spin, when the force was maximum, when the dagger was a molten streak trailing fire, Kai released. Not the chain, but the dagger itself. He didn't throw it; he unleashed the built momentum.
With a sound like a tearing sheet of metal, the white-hot dagger, propelled by the whirling chain and Kai's focused intent, became a meteor. It streaked downwards, not merely falling, but aimed, guided by the remnants of Kai's will channeled through the fiery chain he still gripped.
It became a hypersonic lance of solidified flame, screaming through the short distance separating man and beast, aimed with deadly precision not for the dragon's armored back, but for the vulnerable spot where the base of its skull met the top of its spine a nexus point hinted at by the overlapping scales.
Time seemed to slow. The dagger, a line of incandescent death. The dragon, its massive head still tilted back, jaws opening, the furnace within gathering. The chain, taut as a bowstring, still gripped in Kai hands, anchoring the attack.
Impact.
The white-hot dagger struck true.
A sound like a mountain cracking echoed through the burning forest. Not the crack-screech of concussive blasts on scales, but a deeper, more resonant CRUNCH SHUNK, accompanied by a shower of superheated scale fragments and a gout of dark, steaming ichor.
The dragon's roar choked off into a strangled, gurgling shriek of agony unlike anything Kai had ever heard. It wasn't the bellow of rage, but the raw sound of violated flesh, of nerve endings screaming.
The gathering fire in its throat sputtered and died. Its massive body convulsed, a spasm that ran from the point of impact down its sinuous neck and through its torso. Its wings faltered, the powerful beats becoming erratic, spasmodic flaps.
Kai felt the jolt through the chain, a violent tug that almost wrenched his arm from its socket. He held on, gritting his teeth against the pain flaring in his shoulder and the disorientation threatening to pull him under.
He hung suspended for a moment, connected to the wounded behemoth by a tether of pure fire, watching as the dagger, buried deep, pulsed with the heat of his fury and the dragon's lifeblood.
The dragon's molten eyes, wide with shock and blinding pain, rolled upwards, meeting Kai's gaze. The predator was wounded. Deeply. The spark hadn't just stung; it had struck a nerve, literally. Rage, cold and absolute, flooded its gaze, mixing with the agony. This wasn't over. It would never be over. It would burn the world to cinders to erase this insult.
With a final, agonized wrench of its massive neck, the dragon tried to dislodge the burning dagger. Kai, seeing the movement, knew he couldn't hold on. With a grunt of effort, he released his mental grip on the fiery chain. It instantly dissipated, the links flaring brightly before vanishing into smoke and sparks.