Chapter 11: Fire is Coming

They weren’t dead.

For a heartbeat after I hit the stone, I stood there swaying. One hand clamped over the gash in my abdomen, the other still gripping my sword’s hilt.

Some of the soldiers lay sprawled where they’d fallen, armor clanging as they twitched and tried to remember how to breathe. One mage rolled onto his side and retched onto the stone, shoulders heaving like he was trying to vomit up the terror itself. Another sat upright with wide eyes and shook so hard his teeth clicked audibly.

The smell hit me next.

Urine.

Fear, made physical. For a grim second I felt almost grateful for it.

It meant they were alive enough to feel something.

Others recovered faster. Their bodies snapping back into action, muscle memory overriding panic. A handful of soldiers surged upright, scooping up the staves they’d dropped when they were lifted. Their gauntlets tightened on wood and metal, and the crystals atop the staves flared to life.

Spells were cast almost immediately.

Bolts of light snapped through the air. A shard of ice the size of a spearhead condensed in midair and launched forward like an arrow. A sheet of flame roared outward, not wild like the wyverns’ breath, controlled.

Even the Six-Circle mage found his footing.

He staggered once, hand briefly going to his throat as if still feeling the invisible grip, then straightened with a fury that made his face look carved from stone. Six rings ignited around his forearm. He didn’t waste time shouting orders or performing for his audience anymore.

He simply cast.

One spell after another, each launched with bliding speed. Trying to erase his humiliation with power.

Lightning, ice, fire. Everything slammed into the three red-scaled wyverns.

For a moment, just a moment, it looked like it might work.

Ice spears shattered scales on impact and burst into glittering clouds. Lightning wrapped around massive bodies in branching veins of light. Flames washed over red armor and turned the smoke golden.

I felt hope surge in my chest.

Maybe this was the point where the loop finally broke. Maybe freeing them had mattered more than anything I’d done before. Maybe this was what I’d been missing, the moment the people with power actually fought.

Still, the wyverns responded. Not like beasts, like war veterans.

One of the red wyverns tilted its head as an ice lance streaked toward its eye. It didn’t flinch. It exhaled a short, precise burst of fire. The ice met flame and vanished in a violent hiss of steam.

Another wyvern took a lightning strike full across the chest. The bolt spiderwebbed over its scales, crawling along the ridges.

The creature didn’t scream.

Its scales held.

A third spell. A concentrated beam, bright enough to make my eyes water, cut toward the wyvern’s throat. The red-scaled monster moved with casual economy. It shifted its shoulder, bringing a forelimb up at the last instant, and the beam struck scale and slid aside as if deflected by steel.

Every attack met an answer.

If ice came, fire met it.

If lightning came, scales endured it.

If flame came, the wyvern’s own heat swallowed it, turning the air into a rippling mirage without leaving a mark.

When spells couldn’t be countered, they were simply ignored.

The difference in power became obvious.

It was the worst possible outcome for me.

I could feel the blood still running, getting colder as it soaked deeper into my robe and clung to my skin. My vision had started to soften, as if the world were being rubbed away with an invisible thumb.

If I passed out here, I would die. Trampled, burned, eaten. Pick one.

Or worse… I might not die quickly. I might survive, wake later, and find that whatever chance I had of reaching one of these draconic creatures while it was still alive had already been erased by the battle’s outcome.

Yet, this battlefield was far beyond anything I could influence.

It felt like a war between gods, and I was nothing but an ant trying not to be crushed under someone else’s foot.

Still… even an ant can bite.

It just needs to bite the right place.

I tightened my hand over the wound, feeling blood slip between my fingers, and forced myself to stay upright. My sword was still in my other hand. I scanned frantically for an opening, any moment where I could do something small that mattered.

“V formation!”

Every spellcaster’s attention snapped toward the Six-Circle mage.

For a heartbeat, I felt something dangerously close to relief.

At least he hasn’t broken, I thought bitterly. At least he’s still fighting.

The mages around him shifted immediately, forming a wedge. Two lines angling back from the central point like a spear tip aimed at the three red wyverns. Each mage raised their hands in a different posture, each gathering a different kind of power, but all of it directed forward into the same killing space.

The Six-Circle mage barked another order.

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“Forget elemental spells. Full focus on physical power.”

I saw the strategy change in real time.

The clean, beautiful displays of fire and lightning fell away. In their place came heavier magic, uglier magic, force and mass and impact.

Boulders tore free from the cavern floor as if the stone itself had been ripped open. Jagged slabs of metal formed in midair and launched forward like thrown axes. Dense projectiles hammered into the red-scaled bodies with the sound of a siege engine striking a wall.

“Soldiers around the formation,” the mage commanded. “Create blocks. Barriers.”

The soldiers, at least those who hadn’t frozen in terror, moved. They slammed their staves onto the ground and the stone responded.

Walls rose in grinding bursts. Thick slabs of earth and rock pushing upward between the wyverns and the casters, trying to buy distance, trying to carve the battlefield into manageable lanes.

“Humans… this is why you stand on the verge of extinction.”

The voice returned inside my skull.

Extinction?

The concept was too large to fit into my mind. I’d been thinking about surviving the next ten seconds, the next loop, the next gate opening. This creature spoke as if humanity itself was already a fading species.

The voice continued, carrying the calm arrogance of something that had watched empires rise and rot.

“For seven hundred years you’ve had access to magic, and still you wield it so crudely. So barbarically.”

I watched the “physical” spells slam against red scales and do almost nothing. Watched the wyverns answer with tiny, efficient counters, a shift of wing that deflected a metal spear, scales that simply endured their impact.

The voice almost seemed amused.

“You abandoned your little bits of metal to cling to magic, and yet you barely understand the reality you live in.”

I looked at the three red wyverns and felt the difference in them the way you feel the difference between a candle and a furnace.

They weren’t fighting like animals or soldiers.

They were simply judging us. Our spells, our formations, our frantic improvisation. It was as if we were children swinging sticks and calling it war.

The worst part was the expression in the other two wyverns’ eyes.

Something between pity and disgust.

Like we weren’t enemies worth hating.

The moment the voice in my head fell silent, the wyvern’s tail moved.

I didn’t see it. One heartbeat it was coiled behind the red-scaled monster, the next it was a blur that cracked through the air like a whip. The sound arrived a fraction of a second later. A violent boom that punched my ears and rattled the stone under my boots.

The walls the soldiers had raised simply ceased to exist. They exploded into a storm of shattered rock, fragments spraying outward in a cloud of dust and grit.