Chapter 329: Hold The Line!

There was a bloom of light in the bunker and Cecilia stepped out of the teleport, setting Arlo down on the nearest bed.

Even as he laid there unconscious, his face was still scrunched in pain. Cecilia sighed. The mage had given everything he had and it still hadn’t been enough.

She didn’t let herself think about that. She pulled the blanket up to his chest, checking that his breathing was steady.

The bunker was filling fast. Students poured in through the far entrance, some in nightclothes, some clutching each other, all of them wide-eyed and moving quickly under the direction of the staff who had been stationed to manage them.

Cecilia didn’t wait for them to spot her before teleporting away.

She appeared at the edge of the debris field just in time to see the dragon open its mouth.

The pillar of fire it released was nearly blinding, a column of compressed white heat that crossed the open ground in less than a second.

Kael was already gone, reappearing above the dragon, thirty feet up, hands moving before he’d fully materialized.

Four portals opened beneath the dragon simultaneously, one under each limb. The dragon’s legs sank into them up to the knee, the portal edges locking around them like stocks.

The dragon turned its head skyward and fired again, and Kael teleported a second time, the flame passing through empty air.

Cecilia was already moving.

Faye hit the ground with one foot, and ice erupted outwards from the point of impact, racing along the broken stone in branching lines until it found the portals and crawled inside, wrapping around the dragon’s trapped legs and climbing.

The dragon strained, and the ice cracked into pieces, but it had already served its purpose. Buying Oliver time.

Oliver’s chains were already in the air, the links of hardened light spiraling outwards and wrapping the dragon’s body in three loops, then five, then seven, pulling taut as the anchors drove themselves into the rubble below.

Cecilia teleported directly above the dragon.

The spell formation materialized above her palm in an instant, and she poured mana into it without holding back.

Two enormous hands condensed from fire and force, each one large enough to palm the dragon’s entire body, and she brought them down hard.

The impact slammed into the dragon, driving it down to its belly with a concussive force that cracked the ground beneath it.

The chains pulled tight immediately as Oliver locked them into the earth. Faye’s ice surged over the pinned body, climbing scales and filling gaps, spreading towards the neck and tail.

Kael’s portals held the legs. The chains held the body. The ice held everything else.

For a moment, it was working.

Cecilia landed, breathing hard, watching the dragon struggle against the combined weight of everything they’d thrown at it. Around her, the remaining guards straightened. Someone laughed, a short, disbelieving sound. Someone else shouted that they had it.

The dragon raised its head.

And roared.

The sound went up and out and didn’t stop, rising past pain into something else, something with purpose and direction. Cecilia’s instincts fired before her mind caught up.

She turned.

They came out of the monolith’s opening one after another, wings snapping wide as they cleared the threshold, seven of them, each one the size of a large horse, their gold scales brighter and unmarked.

A-rank Gold Eater Dragons. Young, by dragon standards, but the fire in their mouths as they opened them was not young at all.

Three angled towards their mother, while the other four split apart and went in different directions.

The blue fire came in missiles, streaking through the air with a sound like whistles.

They hit the ice in a chain of explosions that sent frozen shrapnel spinning out in every direction. The chains shattered next, the links dissolving under the heat. The portals destabilized as Kael’s concentration broke under the pressure of redirecting three separate streams of incoming fire.

The adult dragon was on its feet before the smoke cleared.

It spread its damaged wings, the burned membranes catching the air badly, unable to generate real lift. But it didn’t need to fly. It pulled itself upwards, shook the last of the ice from its scales, and roared again, this time in pure defiance.

Kael landed beside Cecilia, his expression worried.

“Oliver. Faye. Captain.” His voice wasn’t particularly loud, but it found its way to the right ears. “Split with a team of your own. Take one dragon each. Hold them off the students and the bunker entrances.”

He didn’t need to protect the buildings. They didn’t matter as long as the students were safe.

Besides, the captain was also A-rank, so he should be able to kill one or two of the young dragons with the help of his team before reinforcements arrived.

They moved without argument, already pulling guards and battle-capable staff into groups, each of them heading towards one of the rampaging A-rank dragons now tearing through the academy grounds.

Cecilia watched a section of the eastern dormitory wall come apart under a sustained blast of blue fire and looked away.

“Stay close,” Kael said, not looking at her. “I need your output.”

Cecilia nodded once.

She raised her hand.

A large portion of her remaining mana peeled away in a single draw, more than she would have spent on anything else tonight, and the fire that answered it was different from her usual work.

It built slowly, coalescing rather than erupting, the shape of it emerging from within the light rather than being imposed from outside.

The phoenix stood seven feet tall when it finished forming. Its feathers were individual jets of controlled flame, each one burning a slightly different shade.

Its beak opened, and the cry it released was not loud so much as pure, a single sustained note that moved through the air like a current moving through water.

Every mage it touched straightened slightly. Wounds that had been bleeding slowed. The exhaustion behind the eyes didn’t disappear, but it pulled back enough to matter.

The phoenix beat its wings and rose, heading for the nearest A-rank dragon still in the air. They met above the academy grounds in a collision of fire and scale, tearing at each other, and Cecilia kept part of her attention on it as she followed Kael into the sky.

The S-rank dragon saw them coming.

They worked in tandem, Kael opening portals to redirect the worst of the flame, and Cecilia hammering at the dragon’s burned neck and damaged wings with everything she could compress into a single strike.

The dragon turned from one to the other, somehow moving even faster, as if it had unlocked another tier of strength.

Around them, the academy was burning in patches. She could see mages dropping in the corners of her vision, hit by blasts they couldn’t dodge, falling in ones and twos across the broken grounds.

She kept moving, and she kept firing.

There was nothing else to do.

***

A mile away from the academy.

Lady in Dark watched the excitement from the top of a low rise, her cloak moving in the wind coming off the hills.

Behind her, thirty figures stood quietly in loose formation, each of them radiating the kind of mana density that came from the hybrid potion the organization had spent considerable resources developing.

She could feel it from here. The absence where the wards had been. The open sky above the academy, bare and undefended for the first time since it had been created.

Noah Webb had surprised her.

She wouldn’t tell him that. But he had.

She turned to face her Reunifiers, looking across thirty faces that were ready and waiting, and smiled beneath her hood.

“It’s time,” she said. “Let’s go say hello.”

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