Chapter 328: S-Rank Gold Eater

The Mana Leech had no name for what it was experiencing.

It had no language, no memory, and no sense of self beyond the immediate pull of hunger. But it was sapient enough to recognize a problem, and the problem was simple. Its host was nearly empty.

It had felt the mana drain begin suddenly, a torrent pulling outwards faster than it could counter. It had fought back the only way it knew how, feeding harder and faster, trying to claim what was left before it vanished entirely. But the drain had been stronger, and the Leech had lost.

All it had left was the little that remained inside Noah Webb, drawing slow, thin pulls of sustenance from a body that was barely sustaining itself.

The mana was almost gone, and what little life force still circulated was sluggish, barely moving through channels that had been pushed far beyond their limit.

The host was a breath away from death.

And then the Leech felt it.

Beyond the walls of flesh and bone it currently occupied, something vast and saturated with mana announced itself.

The Leech felt it immediately, drawn to it like a magnet to iron.

Pure draconic energy.

Not the diluted, merged, half-human thing it had been feeding on. This was something clean and old. Something with mana reserves so deep the Leech couldn’t find the bottom of them from where it sat.

It had never encountered this situation before, and it had no framework for what it was feeling except want.

Its current host still had untouched reserves. The mana channels were still undamaged, and most of the life force, deeper down, were still untouched. But that energy outside was more tempting than anything it had ever known.

The Leech made its decision the way it made all decisions. Without hesitation, and with pure instinct, following the strongest signal.

It took one long, final pull from Noah’s life force, filling itself before the journey.

Then, with a flash of movement too small and too fast to be seen by any eye in the world, it was gone.

***

The dragon stepped out into the open as if it owned the ground it walked on.

Every mage still standing took an involuntary step back. Some of them had faced dangerous creatures before. Some of them had cleared monoliths, had stood in front of beasts that wanted them dead, and had learned to hold their ground through training and necessity.

None of them had been this close to an S-rank dragon.

This was a Gold Eater Dragon, known for consuming gold to nourish its scales. And right now, it was not simply the size that made their hearts quiver, though the size alone was enough to make the stomach drop.

It was the intelligence in those red eyes, the way they moved across the gathered defenders with something that wasn’t hunger or rage but closer to assessment. It was taking stock of them, and deciding how much effort this would require.

Principal Kael had already made his own assessment.

He could not win this fight. He was an A-rank mage, one of the only three in the entire academy, and against an S-rank dragon, that was not enough. Even with the three of them, defeat was the most probable outcome.

What he could do was buy time. The palace had been contacted. S-rank mages existed in Camelot, and if even one of them arrived in the next few minutes, the equation would change.

He just had to keep the dragon contained until then.

He spread his hands and locked down the space around the dragon, spatial mana pressing inwards from every direction, trying to pin it in place the way you might press your palms against something trying to escape.

The dragon didn’t even look at him.

It simply strained, and the locked space cracked around it like glass, and then it was free.

“Contain it!” Kael shouted. “Don’t bother trying to kill it. Contain it!”

Oliver moved first. The combat instructor raised both arms and a chain erupted from the air before him, thick links of hardened light that lashed outwards and wrapped around the dragon’s body in three loops. The ends drove themselves into the cracked ground like stakes, pulling taut.

Faye and Cecilia added their own bindings, with fire, ice, and compressed force layering over Oliver’s chain.

The guards followed, barrier mages throwing up walls while the B-rank fighters among them added restraints of their own.

The captain of the guards, the second A-rank mage on the grounds, planted himself at the front and drove a pillar of compressed earth up through the dragon’s path, trying to anchor its legs.

The dragon looked down at the chains wrapped around its body.

Then it shook.

The chains snapped, the ice shattered, and the earth pillar crumbled. The restraints didn’t break so much as cease to matter, shedding from its scales the way water sheds from stone.

Then it inhaled.

“Scatter!” Kael roared.

The defenders broke apart in every direction and those who moved fast enough survived the next second. Those who didn’t were simply gone, the white-hot column of flame catching them before they had finished turning, their screams lasting less than a moment before there was nothing left to scream.

Kael’s portal opened directly in the path of the flame, swallowing it whole. He could feel the heat even through the contained edges of the portal, feeling it pressing against the structure he was holding, trying to overwhelm it.

His teeth locked together, and sweat broke across his face and ran freely down his neck from the strain, but he held it.

The dragon kept pouring fire into the portal for several long seconds. Kael’s arms began to shake.

Then it stopped.

And with that, Kael turned the portal.

The stored column of white flame erupted back outwards, not at the dragon’s body where the scales would absorb it, but at its neck and then immediately redirected to its wings.

The pillar of fire slammed into the junction of membrane and bone, and the dragon lurched sideways, a sound coming from it that was not quite a roar.

When the fire cleared, the damage was visible. The neck scales were cracked and blackened, the gold dulled to a scorched brown along a stretch as wide as a doorway.

The wings were worse. The thin membranes had caught and burned, and what remained was a ragged, holed mess of charred flesh pulling between intact bone struts. The dragon spread them instinctively, then pulled them back in.

It would not be flying for a while.

The dragon turned its head towards Kael.

Then, without inhaling, without warning, it opened its mouth and released a column of fire so wide and so bright that the night became midday for the half-second it took to cross the distance.

Kael was already gone.

He reappeared fifty feet to the left, breathing hard, and watched the pillar travel past where he had been standing. It kept going, crossing the debris field, crossing the open ground beyond, until it struck a building in the distance.

The building didn’t collapse.

It came apart, stone, timber, and glass liquefying in an instant, the whole structure folding inwards into a glowing pool of slag that spread slowly across the ground.

Kael stared at it.

He had taken the dragon’s flight. He had bought that much.

In exchange, he now had an S-rank dragon on the ground, uncontained, and angrier than it had been thirty seconds ago.

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