Free Web NovelChapter 25: HeadMaster Versus the Dragon
The headmaster stood as every student was rushed back to the camp with a special call crystal that signaled everyone to retreat.
He looked in the direction of the cave. He could sense this was far from over.
"He is coming," he muttered in a low tone. He could already sense the presence of Ren headed their way.
"To think I would have to go against a dragon at this stage of my life. Lucky for me, it’s still a child." As he said those words, he summoned a staff. It was sleek and black, with a semi-circle curve at the top and a purple crystal suspended in between.
"Headmaster, are you really going to fight it with a divine armament?" Selene came forward and asked.
"Lady Selene, focus on having the students leave. Normally, I would not bat an eye at an infant dragon. I have fought my fair share of the lizards in the past.
But this one, this one fights with a purpose, one that drives it to push past its limits. After it shattered my gravity spell, I knew that it was no normal dragon, and so I’ll have to take it seriously."
As he was speaking, he spotted the shadow in the sky headed for them fast. He knew that that was Ren.
Without speaking anymore, he gripped the staff with both hands and muttered something under his breath. A purple magic circle formed under his feet, causing him to fly into the air in seconds.
He floated there with his gaze locked on Ren, who had come into full view.
Ren stopped. His rage was not as hot as it was before, but he was still burning with the desire to rid the world of this man. Maybe it was the primordial bloodline or something else. He did not know and also did not want to find out.
"You’ve taken three of my teachers. Is that not enough compensation for you?" the headmaster asked.
"The fact that you view your teachers as compensation for my rage tells me a lot about you. Their lives meant nothing to you," Ren said.
The headmaster frowned. His mana surged. "I will not have a lizard tell me the value of life, you prideful vermin," the headmaster declared and then lifted his staff.
Purple spheres of energy formed in the air, more than twenty in total.
Ren looked at the spheres. He knew that things were about to get serious. He was there for it.
He flapped his wings and shot through the air fast. The headmaster unleashed all the blasts at the same time.
The spheres came all at once.
Twenty-three of them, dense and humming, spaced across the sky in a formation that left no obvious gap, no clean line through the middle, no angle that didn’t have at least two blasts covering it simultaneously.
Ren didn’t slow down.
He dropped his left wing and banked hard, the first three spheres detonating in the space he’d occupied a half second earlier, the concussive force washing across his scales and rattling his teeth. He pulled up fast, angling steeply, threading between two more that crossed paths and exploded against each other in a blinding purple flash.
The shockwave caught him sideways and sent him into a roll he had to fight through with his wings, pulling himself level just in time to see four more spheres curving to track him, adjusting their trajectory mid-air.
’Homing,’ he noted.
He opened his jaws and fired a concentrated stream of Ember Breath directly into the cluster. Three of them detonated on contact, the resulting explosion enormous enough to light the entire treeline below in orange for a full second, the fourth spinning off course from the blast and disappearing into the forest somewhere far to his left.
He felt the heat of his own attack wash back against his face and kept moving through it, eyes already locked on the remaining spheres still chasing him through the smoke.
He dropped sharply, almost vertical, letting two streak past overhead with inches to spare, close enough that their purple light painted his scales as they went. He twisted, pulled hard left, cut through the gap between the last two converging from either side, and heard them collide behind him in a detonation that punched the air from his lungs even through the distance.
The sky cleared.
The headmaster was exactly where he’d been, staff raised, expression unmoved, watching Ren emerge from the smoke with eyes that had the particular stillness of someone who was genuinely recalculating.
Ren didn’t give him time to finish the thought.
He pointed his jaws down and fired.
The Ember Breath came out in a sustained column, tight and direct, straight at the headmaster’s chest with everything behind it.
The headmaster brought his free hand up, and a dome of purple light bloomed around him, curved and dense, the flames hitting it and spreading across the surface in every direction, lighting the sky around him in a violent corona of orange and purple that would have been beautiful if it wasn’t trying to kill someone.
The dome held.
The headmaster lowered his hand.
Then he raised the staff, gripped it near the base, and drew it through the air in a single sharp motion.
The lightning that came from it wasn’t a bolt. It was a whip, a long crackling tendril of white electricity that carved through the air with a sound like tearing fabric, fast and precise, slashing toward Ren in a wide sweeping arc.
Ren pulled up hard, the whip passing beneath him close enough that the static discharge made every scale on his underbelly stand on end. He banked right, another slash coming immediately, and dropped low to let it crack through empty air above his spine.
The headmaster’s wrist moved again, the whip reversing direction mid-arc with a control that shouldn’t have been possible, and this time Ren had to fold his wings entirely and drop ten feet in a fraction of a second to avoid it.
’He’s good,’ Ren thought, ’genuinely. He’s not just strong, he knows exactly what he’s doing with this.’
He circled wide, gaining altitude, his eyes tracking the staff and the wrist behind it, looking for the pattern, looking for the moment where the rhythm broke, where the whip’s arc committed to a direction just a half second too long.
There.
The headmaster drew back for a wide horizontal slash, the kind that covered maximum range, and in the moment his arm extended fully, Ren tucked his wings and dove, coming in from the high angle, claw extended, Claw Strike activated and blazing along the length of his forearm.
The headmaster sensed it. His body was already moving to the side before Ren arrived, faster than a man his age had any right to move, the staff coming up in a partial block.
Not partial enough.
The claw connected with his hand, the one gripping the staff, and tore across it cleanly, blood misting into the cold air between them as the headmaster’s grip faltered for a single involuntary second.
He didn’t drop the staff.
He gripped it harder with both hands instead, jaw set, blood running freely down his wrist and dripping from his fingers, and looked at Ren across the narrow gap between them with an expression that had shed the last of its academic composure entirely.
The lightning in the staff changed.
It didn’t crackle anymore. It didn’t arc. It gathered, pulling itself inward, tightening around the crystal at the staff’s head until the light of it was almost too bright to look at directly, and then it began to rotate, slow at first, then faster, building into something that twisted the air around it like a second gravity had formed right there between the headmaster’s hands.
A vortex.
He leveled it at Ren.
The blast that came out was not a whip and not a bolt. It was everything at once, a roaring column of compressed lightning that consumed the air it moved through and left nothing behind it, boring through the sky toward Ren with a sound like the world splitting open.
Ren threw himself sideways into a hard banking curve, wings snapping to full extension, pulling every bit of speed he had into the turn.
The blast grazed him.
Not a direct hit. Not enough to stop him. But the edge of it washed across his front, the lightning crawling across his scales in blue-white tendrils for one terrible, burning second before he pulled clear of it, smoke rising from his chest, every nerve in his body screaming at once.
