The blue dragon was not in the best shape. In addition to the multitude of wounds marring his scales, he’d obviously spent a good deal of his ethera. Elijah could feel his enemy’s guttering core. One of his wings was broken as well, though his expression showed nothing but anger and hate.

  He paced back and forth like a caged animal, his long, thin tail whipping back and forth. A subtle growl – almost a hiss – filled the air before he spat, “Traitor. You think you can escape?”

  For his part, Elijah crouched low, feeling incredibly small in the Shape of the Master. He held his scythe loosely, ready to spring into action the second the blue dragon acted. But the previous statement caught him unaware.

  There was no reason for the creature to mention escape. After all, Elijah’s exit wasn’t available to anyone but him. The denizens of the Primal Realm shouldn’t have even known about it.

  Unless they were more aware of the nature of their reality than he’d been led to believe.

  “You know?” he asked, a tendril of smoke drifting up from the corner of his mouth. His salamander-esque skin danced with subtle heat as flames swirled within his body. That aspect of the form had become more pronounced when he’d upgraded his core – just one change among many he’d not had a chance to catalogue.

  “That this is a Primal Realm? Of course. I am no fool.”

  “Then why are you doing this?” Elijah asked. “You know it doesn’t matter. You know it will all reset when I’m gone.”

  “So, I should simply lie down and let you pass?” the blue dragon asked in an incredulous tone. “You truly do not understand your people, do you? You have no idea how any of this works.”

  “Never claimed otherwise,” Elijah said, riding another earthquake. He couldn’t take the time to look back, but he suspected that very little of the Broken Crown remained. It had all broken free of the Red Tyrant’s chains.

  Only the single landmass was left.

  And that wouldn’t last much longer, based on the increasing severity of the earthquakes. Time ran short. Elijah needed to act sooner rather than later, lest he miss his opportunity to escape.

  But he was also curious.

  “Any dragon who would back down is no true dragon,” the enemy stated evenly. “Even if I do not remember my past self, I know that I submitted to this for a reason. The better I perform here, the more my true self will benefit. Killing you may be the difference between a breakthrough and falling off my path. I will not sell this opportunity short.”

  “Even if you’re required to kill someone with whom you have no true quarrel?” Elijah asked.

  “But I do have a quarrel with you,” the blue dragon responded. “Traitor.”

  Elijah never had a chance to ask for the dragon to elaborate, because an instant later, his foe attacked. He took a step back, though he halted his retreat before he took another. Behind him was a cleverly concealed spatial distortion sharp enough to sever limbs.

  He ducked beneath it, adding a charge to Heart of Fire, then extended his Mantle of Authority. The tear in space rippled, but it did not dissipate.

  By then, the blue dragon was upon him.

  Elijah leaped, blocking a tail swipe that sent him tumbling backward. He used Cloud Step, springing back into battle. Space ruptured before him, sending a spiderweb of razor-thin cracks spreading in every direction.

  Elijah contorted himself, twisting and tucking his limbs close. He narrowly avoided being cut into a hundred pieces, then landed only a few feet from the blue dragon. Claws arced out. Sheathed in spatial energy, they posed a grave danger to his comparatively soft flesh. Only through the serpentine malleability of his body and his vastly enhanced reaction speed, Elijah managed to avoid being ripped apart by the spatial fluctuations.

  He flipped backward, twisting and turning, until he was a dozen feet away. Then, he threw himself back into the fight. His scythe cut through the air before the blade slashed through the blue dragon’s snout. Blood and scales flew, but the enemy didn’t even flinch.

  Elijah felt a familiar surge of ethera and dove beneath the dragon. A moment later, an implosion of force announced that the enemy had attempted to relocate him. He raked his blade against the dragon’s underbelly, scattering more viscera across the ground. But the cut was shallow.

  The dragon had already proven himself a cut above the rest, and his powerful body matched that impression. Another earthquake tore through the area, and Elijah felt the ground open up. He dodged to the side as a gaping hole opened beneath him. The dragon went in the other direction, flapping one ineffectual wing.

  Elijah saw that as an opening and quickly pivoted before summoning another Cloud Step. He leaped across the newly opened chasm and buried his scythe in the dragon’s remaining wing. The membranous flesh parted easily, spurting a rooster tail of blood in the blade’s wake.

  This time, the dragon let out a roar of pain and anger. He hit the ground in a roll meant to dislodge Elijah, but by then, he was already gone. He landed lightly, then slipped to the side in an effort to avoid another implosion.

  Over the next few moments, a dozen such spells rocked the space all around him. He dipped and ducked, dodging them deftly as his Heart of Fire continuously built charges. Compounding the danger – and the opportunity – was a storm of spatial tears that had fractured the atmosphere.

  Elijah had no idea if they were the result of actual spells or if they were the mere consequence of toying with space. One way or another, Elijah found himself pushed to the absolute limit of his capabilities, both in flexibility and his reaction speed.

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  But he managed to maintain his charges of Heart of Fire. They built quickly, passing the fifty-charge mark in the space of a couple of seconds. Then seventy-five. When Elijah hit a hundred, he repositioned himself by rolling sideways and orienting his mouth toward the blue dragon.

  He didn’t hesitate to let loose with Incinerate.

  Fire billowed from his mouth in a massive wave. It roiled forth, barely constrained by Elijah’s ability. Heat backwashed, blistering his resistant skin. Though he wasn’t concerned with that. Instead, the entirety of his mind remained fixated on the singular task of focusing the flames into a smaller, denser stream.

  It felt like wrestling a python.

  But over the next second or two, Elijah managed to harness it into a condensed pillar of flame only a few feet across – all of it aimed at the blue dragon. He kept it up for a few seconds before, at last, his Heart of Fire was spent. By that point, the ground beneath that pillar had turned to molten glass, and the air temperature had more than doubled.

  But when the smoke cleared, the blue dragon was still standing.

  The air shimmered before the enemy, and it only took Elijah a second to realize what had happened. The spatial mage had opened two rifts in space. One was positioned before the dragon, while the other was behind. The result was that the flames never touched their target, instead skipping over him.

  It wasn’t perfect, though, as evidenced by the charred scales marring the dragon’s body. Clearly, the defensive spell he’d used to displace the flames had been a touch late.

  But it had done its job.

  Seeing that, Elijah knew there was no reason to remain in the Shape of the Master. He shifted, taking on his more natural form. Not as a human, but as a dragon himself. His body sang with power as he spread his branch-like wings.

  The blue dragon was a little bigger than him, but not by much. Elijah knew the other dragon was more powerful, though. He could feel that with more certainty than he’d ever before experienced.

  He crouched low, already swirling the ethera in his core. It begged for release, but he held it inside. In the meantime, he darted forward like a striking snake, crashing into the still-stunned blue dragon with as much force as he could manage. As he cast one spell, holding it within, he used Lightning Domain. At the same time, he scratched and clawed and bit for all he was worth.

  Mostly, his natural weapons skipped off the other dragon’s durable scales, but more than once, his attacks bit deep. Of course, Elijah didn’t do so entirely unscathed. The blue dragon fought with just as much fury, adding spatial tears to the equation. Elijah’s wounds accumulated, and he even lost one of his feet to a sudden storm of spatial tears.

  But he kept going until, at last, he opened his mouth and released his latest spell.

  Millions of blue dragonflies erupted from his maw, immediately coating the other dragon. He countered by teleporting a few away, but he couldn’t deal with the entire swarm.

  Elijah kept up the stream for four long seconds, bathing the dragon in stinging dragonflies. They immediately went to work, inflicting their afflictions upon him. In the meantime, Elijah cast Blessing of the Grove and Wild Resurgence, filling himself with vitality before once again transforming.

  This time, he took on the Shape of Spores, activating Throne of Spores and Mycelial Regrowth. His foot grew back, and the blue dragon soon found himself trapped by hundreds of thick fungal tendrils. Elijah used his massive regeneration to go on the offensive. Without needing to worry about his own safety, he attacked with reckless abandon. All the while, he continuously filled the blue dragon with Nature’s Claim.

  Thick patches of yellow mushrooms erupted from the enemy’s back, and he slowed considerably. Elijah ripped into him, using his massive strength to tear through scales and flesh alike.

  But it was not enough.

  An expected turn of events. The dragon was full of massive vitality, and it would take hours for the relatively low-damage spells to kill it. Thankfully, that had never been Elijah’s goal. Shape of Spores was great at taking damage and restricting enemies, but it was never really meant as a high-damage option.

  But where it lacked, Shape of the Scourge more than excelled.

  The second Mycelial Regrowth ran its course, Elijah shifted into the much nimbler shape and went to work with his talons. His scorpion-like tail lashed out as well, stinging the blue dragon dozens of times with every passing second. He also summoned Lurking Swarm, with the resultant phase spiders leaping upon the dragon and inflicting their own toxins upon him.

  Elijah piled on, ripping the creature to tatters. Every attack came with six others – courtesy of Phantom Shift – and together, they piled on the damage. Of course, the blue dragon never stopped fighting back. Implosions of spatial energies followed Elijah every step of the way, and he was forced to fight through more than one spatial field that neatly sliced through his scales like they were nothing.

  But the wounds were almost all superficial, and the more serious among them were soon countered by Elijah’s ongoing Wild Resurgence.

  He never stopped moving. He often switched back and forth between various forms. And in doing so, he found a rhythm he’d never before experienced. Shifting from Shape of the Scourge to Shape of Spores, then back into his human form before looping back around to his scourgedrake form – it all blended together into a singular fighting style that overwhelmed the blue dragon.

  Despite that, the creature refused to give up. Even riddled with afflictions that simultaneously tore through his body with rot and venom, he fought on. His ethera continuously surged, twisting space into razor-sharp attacks. But Elijah stayed ahead of him every step of the way.

  However, the dragon managed to hang on right up until the landmass truly began to break apart. The shield holding the abyss at bay faltered, and corruption raced in. Suddenly, Elijah could see the Red Tyrant, valiantly fighting hundreds of abyssals far above.

  And then, the Crimson Dragon fled.

  Meanwhile, the blue dragon, who could barely remain on his feet, laughed. “You lose,” he said as the abyss closed in.

  Only then did Elijah realize what had happened. The blue dragon had long since resigned himself to defeat and had resolved to take Elijah down with him.

  Elijah shifted back into his dragon form, then extended the boughs of his soul. The abyss crashed into his Mantle of Authority. His soul held, though he could feel it being dissolved with every passing second.

  It was a good thing that Elijah didn’t intend to stick around for much longer.

  With more ferocity than he’d ever summoned, Elijah pounced on the other dragon. Suddenly, he felt himself sync with his new body, and to a point where his weakened enemy could no longer keep pace.

  His teeth clamped down on the blue dragon’s neck. He tried to fight back. He scraped and clawed at Elijah, summoning one spatial field after another. But the combination of the Mantle of Authority and Elijah’s durable body meant that they couldn’t cut deep enough to matter. Meanwhile, Elijah’s jaws flexed.

  And the blue dragon’s throat ruptured.

  He gurgled something unintelligible, but Elijah had neither the time nor the interest in interpreting it. He ripped the other dragon’s throat out and barely paused to watch him die.

  Blood dripping from his mouth and the abyss closing in, Elijah whipped around to see a scene of pure devastation. The landmass had broken into a hundred pieces. But fortunately, the exit – a simple arch shimmering with power – was close. Only a few dozen yards away on another hunk of rock.

  Elijah raced forward, then threw himself across the gap. His wings flapped, and his Mantle of Authority strained to keep the abyss at bay. His inertia took him across the intervening distance, and he slammed into the rocky surface.

  Before crossing the portal, Elijah looked back to see a host of monsters crossing the abyss in his direction. Tentacles and a multitude of arms and legs waved in hunger as they surged with power.

  Elijah watched for only a moment before crossing the threshold and leaving the Broken Crown behind.

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