The Duke’s Reborn Daughter Sometimes Chooses Violence.

The dragon’s eye found me. Even in that brief instant, I could tell. This thing was no ordinary animal.

For one heart beat, everything stopped. Nobody moved or whispered or breathed. Even the black blood pooling beneath its body seemed to pause in its slow crawl down the slope. Then the dragon moved. The beast shifted and the mountain almost groaned under its weight. One of its forelimbs pressed flat against the crater floor and theblue scales along its shoulder cracked and wept fresh black blood as it pushed itself upward. It was trying to stand.

Count Vance did not hesitate. He touched Lieutenant Simone’s shoulder. Then Marsh’s. Two green triangles shone on their shoulders. Count Vance’s Gift was subtle -anyone with those marks could hear him clearly, no matter the distance or the noise. It was how we had routed those Shallows so thoroughly. It was the perfect Gift for one in his position.

The two Lieutenants moved to either side of the wide column. “Formation! Crescent line, fifty paces back!” Count Vance shouted.

The column erupted into motion. The men and women moved fast, shaking out of the stupor that had come over them as if it had never been there. Within seconds, the expedition had split into a crescent formation around the front of the crater, archers and ranged Gift users were in the center, melee fighters were towards the flanks.

Vance turned to me. “Stay back, My Lady. On that shelf looks safe to me.” He pointed to a raised ledge of stone to the right, high enough to overlook the crater.

I nodded, already moving. The shelf would have me just a few feet behind behind Count Vance. That worked just fine. Sere was beside me. Violet was on my other side, warhammer in both hands. She took one step toward the crater. I caught her wrist.

She turned and looked at me. There was a snarl on her face, one that almost, somehow, resembled a smile. I had not seen that expression in some time. It seemed that even facing a Dragon, Violet Indri could not wait to try her luck. “Please,” I said.

Violet’s jaw worked. She looked at the expedition. Then at the dragon, then back at me. She stayed. We were always supposed to hang back. She knew that, but it seemed she’d just forgotten in the moment. Violet positioned herself between me and the battle, her warhammer now resting across her back. Her eyes tracked everything. Sere settled on my other side with her notepad out.

“I-I think I’ll just…stay here too.” Dorothy said, gasping as she fell to her knees behind us. A lone adventurer set her Scrylens up in front of her. Sere moved two steps back to join her.

Damian should have been here with us but he was already gone. I saw him moving forward with the earth-Gift users without being asked, and without looking back. He knelt and pressed his hands to the stone, and the ground beneath a small group of archers in front of us raised, giving them a clear view of the dragon. Another platform went up as another expeditioner did the same. I wanted to stop him, and yet I knew I couldn’t. He didn’t look back at me.

Click. Click.

I layered my Gift with Mana Sight. I wanted to be able to see everything. The battlefield changed, the entire world taking on a blue hue.

The first volley was beautiful. Twelve archers loosed simultaneously. Every arrow was imbued. Fire trailed behind three of them in bright orange lines while two crackled with blue-white lightning. The rest were wrapped in dense currents of wind. They struck the dragon’s wounded wing in a tight cluster.

The beast screamed. The sound was so loud that several men staggered. The wing spasmed, spraying black blood in a wide arc across the snow. The men let out a cheer. It sounded small against the snow, against the beast in front of us. I heard it anyway.

“Second volley! Target the eye!” Vance shouted, though he didn’t need to. I saw Simone bark the same orders from his side of the line.

Another twelve arrows fired. These were aimed for the caked, crusted eye on the dragon’s left side. Nine struck true. The crusted blood shattered, and the yellow eye beneath flinched shut. The dragon lurched sideways, slamming its bulk into the crater wall. The weight was enough to make rock shear away in sheets. The earth-Gift users held their hands to the ground. I watched Damian work alongside the others The two archer platforms shook, but they steadied even as I watched.

Then Estovan moved. I had seen him fight before, both while sparring, and then at the warehouse. I had never gotten the chance to watch him closely. He closed the distance to the dragon in three bounds. His rapier was already drawn.

The first thrust punched into the soft tissue beneath the dragon’s jaw. As it landed, two phantom blows followed -purple reflections of the same strike, each hitting a hand’s width away from the original. He’d made three wounds from a single thrust. The dragon’s flesh parted in three neat punctures, each weeping black. That was Estovan’s Gift. Well, one application of it, at any rate. It was the first time I was seeing it so clearly.

Estovan kept moving. He pivoted beneath a claw swipe that would have torn him in half and drove his rapier into the joint where the dragon’s forelimb met its chest. One strike made three holes. The dragon’s leg buckled.

The archers fired immediately. Fire-imbued arrows found the puncture wounds Estovan had opened. Where they struck, the black blood ignited with a hiss that sent smoke spiraling upward.

Mana was pooling in the dragon’s chest. A dark blue denser than the rest of its body. The mana was building, and fast. In another body, one smaller and with less mana, it would have been hard to see. On this beast, it was almost too obvious.

“It’s doing something!” I shouted. “Towards the center! Some kind of breath attack! Towards the center!”

Vance shouted the orders. The expedition made changes almost before I’d finished my own sentence. The center line scattered. The blue breath raked across empty ground, turning stone white where it struck. Nobody died. They had listened to me, and nobody had died.

Below me, the expedition repositioned. A woman named Tessa -whose Gift let her inscribe explosive runes on any surface- had already laid a ring of them across the crater’s edge. When the dragon tried to drag itself toward the left flank, three golden runes detonated beneath its belly in quick succession. The dragon roared as it was forced back towards the center.

It started firing out shards of ice from its mouth, each larger than a man. It’s mana barely shifted. I could not track this. They slammed into the line of men, throwing up plumes of snow and stone where they hit.

Alira, the expedition’s main healer, moved behind the line. She was a small and dark haired woman, whose face was completely passive. Wherever a man took a cut from flying stone, she was already there, her hands glowing.

“The old man moves fast,” Violet muttered beside me. She was watching Estovan. “Guess he really was just playing with me.” She shook her head. “But if I was down there-”

“You’re not.” I looked at her. “You’re where I want you to be. Next to me.” That made whatever she’d been about to say die in her throat. Her face turned red as she looked away from me, pointedly folded her arms. “Besides, it might be over soon.”

The dragon was bleeding from a dozen wounds. Pinned in its own crater. Unable to fly. Unable to crawl out. Unable to do much of anything. I allowed myself the briefest moment of something like hope. I felt Vaelin’s weight shift in my mind. The Godblade had been surprisingly quite. The dragon went still.

The change was subtle at first. The dragon’s next breath didn’t aim at the fighters. It swept low across the ground beneath the earth-Gift users. I saw it happen through my Gift.

The frost went deep below the surface. Five feet, ten and then further. It spread out, reaching beneath one of the two platforms. The platform swayed. One of the Earth users hastily slammed his hands slammed flat against the other side of the pillar. I saw his mana move. The platform kept swaying anyway as his mana did nothing. “It’s not working!” He screamed.

The dragon’s mana began to swirl and then condense. It was gathering a lot of it again. It was staring at the sky. “It’s charging again!” I told Count Vance. “Can’t tell where!”

The dragon’s head swung down and it let out another breath. This one swept laterally over the men, not aimed at any one person or section. A wall of ice erupted across the middle of the formation. It was two dozen feet tall, opaque, and thick enough that the men on the right side simply vanished from sight. The left flank could no longer support the right. Vance’s mark still worked. The shouted orders still came, but the archers doubtless couldn’t see anything.

The dragon shot out more shards of ice, all of them aimed towards the men on the right. There were screams and shouts as men died. Other men tried their hand at breaking the ice from our side. They were succeeding, but too slow.

“Damn it.” Violet growled.

It’s thinking. I realized distantly. That was not the attack of a mindless creature.

The dragon targeted the next earth-Gift user. A hooded woman tried to raise a stone barrier to support the first swaying platform from below, keeping herself behind it even as she did. The dragon spit out a small shard of ice. It hit the base of her construct before it was half-formed. She screamed even as the shard of ice tore through her center, ripping her in half.

It happened so fast, and with my Gift, I could see it all. The woman’s face looked confused as it fell away from her body, as if she herself couldn’t believe her Gift had been torn apart so easily.

Alira was moving before the woman hit the ground. Light flared across her hands -it would do nothing. The woman was already dead.

The archer platform collapsed. Men screamed as they fell to the ground. As they did, the dragon inhaled. Air flowed towards its mouth, so thick I could see the flow. Several of the archers’ bodies lurched, fell into the crater and rolled down. The dragon snarled, charged its breath. I saw it, but knew there was nothing I could do. It breathed out. The men crystallized, their bodies encased in ice. A second later, the blocks of ice shattered, the men inside shattering with it.

Violet was practically shaking in front of me. She was shaking with the desire to rush in. I put a hand on her shoulder. She paused, slowly relaxed, though her fists remained clenched.

The dragon paused for a breath. Mana condensed around its mouth. “It’s building up again!”

Count Vance shouted the order. It wasn’t enough. The dragon was faster and it put up another ice wall. This one bisected the right flank again, cutting off ten fighters from the rest. Tessa tried to lay runes on the ice itself. They detonated, cracking the surface but not breaking through.

The expedition adapted. Simone led four fighters around the ice wall at a run. Two fire-Gift users began melting corridors through the wall. Their progress was slow, but I thought the wall was melting. Estovan was still moving, still puncturing the beast. The dragon almost ignored him as it focused almost entirely on the men and women outside the crater.

Archers from the remaining platform continued to fire. Their imbued arrows hit true. The dragon screamed again, more black blood pouring from it in half a dozen wounds. Damian was the one maintaining that platform. He hid behind it, hands permanently pressed against the stone. I prayed that would be safe enough.

Vance’s voice never stopped. The line in front of me constantly moved and shifted as the dragon pelted it with missiles of ice. I saw mana building in the dragon’s chest again. It was aiming for the cente againr. I could see its eyes focus, even as its mana darkened. I called it and Vance relayed the orders. The men moved away from the center.

It turned its head at the last moment, attacking the left flank instead. The frost raked across a cluster of men who had repositioned. Their bodies shattered before the dragon had even stopped breathing.

Men screamed and looked at their fallen brothers. Count Vance shouted more orders, but this time, the men were slow to move. The dragon fired more of those ice missiles. They tore through three men before they’d had a chance to step back.

I felt something cold settle in my stomach. A cold deeper than the frost. It had predicted the warning.

You might give a command you think is obvious and helpful, only for it to be anything but. Those words echoed in my mind. Those words were louder almost than the battle in front of me.

It had all happened so fast. Something inside of the dragon swirled then, and it was not the dark blue of mana. This was just black.