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I had just enough time to let out an inward curse before all hell broke loose.

The dragon’s eyes snapped open, its body tensing up.

At the same time, Koise’s arrow was loosed from across the room at such speed that the dragon started roaring in pain at the same time that the sound of exploding wood, what I assumed to be Koise’s bow, reached me from the other side of the room.

From what I saw through echo sight, it was as if the dragon’s head was perfectly intact one moment, and then there was a fine hole through the side of its skull the next.

Echo sight also registered a new hole in the wall just behind the dragon’s head, where the arrow had continued unhindered straight through the stone surface and out into the world beyond.

Then, before the dragon could register anything other than the pain piercing its head, Lein, who had ruined the ambush with his muffled sneeze, somewhat redeemed himself by enforcing our plan B.

—Ensuring that the dragon couldn’t just fly away from us, at least.

While the dragon roared in pain and unfurled its wings wide as an instinctive response…

Boom!

Whatever ability he had used, it looked like he started with his trump card, as the biggest explosion I had seen him muster shook the tower, sending up ash and dust through the room as thick smoke.

Crack!

The sound of snapping bone filled the air, and the dragon’s left wing bent backward at an awkward angle about a third of the way down.

The dragon roared again, setting its eyes straight ahead where Lein would have been against the room’s opposite wall, though I still couldn’t sense him at all.

It was my turn to make a move.

I pushed myself up and the melted armor slid off of my back and clattered to the floor.

If the dragon sensed my presence, it gave no indication.

Instead, the dragon pushed itself onto its haunches and a rippling heatwave visibly surged through its scales.

Klink!

An arrow pierced through the smoke and bounced off of the scales protecting the dragon’s head ineffectually.

The dragon’s back was massive ahead of me, and I needed to do something to stop it from incinerating us all, as I wasn’t confident in my ability to manipulate heat.

[[«Strike»]]

I surged the energy of the earth through my body and out through my feet even while I used «Strike» to launch myself at an angle upward toward the dragon’s head.

Launched through the air at lightning speed, I barely had time to react while the world blurred around me and the dragon extended its head forward, surging the built-up flame from within its body and down its throat.

[[«Redirection»]]

At such a speed that would have normally reduced my brain to a pulp from the massive G forces when changing direction at that velocity, I instantly change directions while maintaining the same speed…

Straight at the back of the dragon’s head.

I tried to surge the earth energy through me again to blast another eruption with my attack.

[[«Strike»]]

[[Mana: 25/100]]

Like that, I was instantly reduced to a single ability use.

The earth’s energy surged in my body for a moment, but all I managed to do with it with such little time and at such speed was form a rough earth gauntlet around my hand and shift it forward as my «Strike»-empowered hand slammed into the hard scales of the dragon’s skill with my full velocity behind it.

—Crack!

A surging pain went through my arm.

The earth evaporated from my hand from the force of the impact, and my skin was shredded before the recoil from the blow surged through my arm, fracturing the bones in multiple places and roughly dislocating my right shoulder.

The dragon’s scale, the size of a dinner plate, located over the center of its head actually bent inward with the force of the blow, and the dragon’s partly-opened mouth slammed shut as its head shot downward into the tower’s stone floor.

The shockwave from the blow shattered the beautiful mosaic window outward, letting in the frigid cold all at once and blasting the dust and ash that was still swirling around the room out of the hole in the roof and the gaping hole where the window had been like a train spouting out gouts of steam.

Still, the dragon survived.

It had to have at least been concussed, right?

I fell through the air, shock freezing my body from the pain permeating through my arm, and thudded into the dragon’s head while it was regaining its bearings.

—ROOOOAAARRR!

I gripped the bent scale on its head with my good arm, my broken arm flopping uselessly at my side, and held on for dear life as one of Koise’s thrown arrows pierced the dragon’s eye and the creature whipped its head around the air while letting out another cry of pain.

From where I was on the dragon’s head, I could see black blood oozing from the hole in the back of the dragon’s head where the special arrow had gone straight through.

—Vwoom

Energy surged through the dragon’s body again, and the heat rising from its scales was so hot that it burned my skin dry where I was in contact with the monster’s scales.

It was getting ready to breathe fire again…

I let go of the dragon’s head, as it was too difficult to concentrate while being whipped around and burned.

Falling through the heat-shimmering air to the dragon’s nest, I shut my eyes again and delved into my mind, tuning out my other senses one by one.

The first to go was sight, gone the moment I shut my eyes—the dragon’s towering form, the ruined surroundings of the tower, and the glitter of the falling snow through the gap in the roof all replaced by expansive darkness.

Next was hearing, fully submerging my mind within my heat sense, my two most obvious and distracting senses sacrificed first. The hum of the dragon’s body as it created more dragon fire deep within itself, the plink-ing of arrows ineffectually bouncing off of the dragon’s scales, miniature explosions that were about as effective as the arrows were that went off all over the dragon’s body, and finally, the low whistling of the wind around the tower.

With hearing and sight gone, my sense of smell went next. Away went the stench of old iron, the sulfur-like rotten egg smell of the dragon, the odor of wet parchment and rotting wood.

I dully registered landing against something hard, a distant pain going through my back that I ignored while my tongue went numb and the iron taste of blood that mixed with the sooty taste of the ash swirling through the air that had gotten into my mouth faded to nothing.

Finally, my sense of touch, which had slowly been fading the entire time, went completely numb.

There was no pain, no sensation of the clothing against my skin, of the cold nipping through my garments, of anything at all.

It was as if I were floating within a deprivation tank, free from all of the worries of the world.

Time was a dream-like thing, where each second could be an hour, or each hour could be a second.

My heat sense blossomed within that dark space, and I distinctly felt that I was watching the inside of the tower from an omnipresent perspective, not that I was looking at things from a limited view as I would have been if I opened my eyes with normal vision.

It was different from echo sight, which was similar to radar and made me aware of everything down to the smallest details within a certain radius of me depending on how well sound bounced around wherever I was.

Instead, it was more like I was the heat sense. There was no distinct sense of being at the center of the sense.

From that perspective, I saw the lingering heat from our breaths in the air, the shape of Lein’s body as he took cover behind the crumpling desk.

I felt the increased heat of Koise’s body—did he have some skill that enhanced his survivability in harsh environments?

The lengths of metal that ran vertically over each corner of the room were suffused with a sputtering, weak heat, still trying to do the job their long-dead creators had enchanted them for.

And the wide-spread heat of the dragon, suffusing a huge area around it with a steady, orange glow.

The dragon itself emitted such heat that it was impossible to miss—a bright, red suffusion staining the landscape, bathing everything around it in such heat that it looked like a supernova was going off through my senses.

Then I felt the dragon flame itself spouting out of the dragon’s wide-opened mouth in slow motion.

Likely due to my entire concentration being focused within my mind at the expense of every other sense, the world really did look to be moving slower—my brain’s speed and thought processes had increased to the point that I was able to think at a significantly faster pace than the world moved.

The flame bursting from the dragon’s mouth was a thick, dark, almost liquid-like substance.

I felt every micrometer of it flowing through the air, blindingly hot.

Then I reached out and grasped it with my mind.

Rather than any sort of effort or searing pain that I had been expecting, the flames felt a bit like wet clay, and I could move and shape them at my will.

It stood to reason that a dragon’s scales made it immune to its own fire, and it wasn’t like redirecting the flames back into the dragon’s mouth would have much of an effect if that was where the dragon had initially created the flames to begin with.

My first thought was, of course, to just redirect the flames out of one of the gaping holes in the tower’s structure, but then we would still likely just be killed by the dragon, as Koise was without a bow, Lein had started the fight with his trump card, and my mana was to the point where I only had a single ability usage left.

Instead, I recalled the opening that Koise had created in the dragon’s defenses…

And curved the dragon’s flames around in a loop, funneling the dragon’s fire straight through its skull.