Three sets of jaws lunged at me, snapping shut, and I tensed my knees, guiding my broom to shoot upward and out of the dog’s reach. As soon as I did, it opened its mouths and three four-color streams of poison erupted from the looming figure. I wove between them as best I could, conjuring a shield as I very nearly clipped into one of the beams. The shield was broken in a tenth of a second, but it was just enough for me to duck, and the beam of poison missed me by a hair’s breadth.

  As soon as I had the clearance, I slapped my broom with a windshield and levitation spell, then exploded up into the air at an incredible speed. The dog launched itself at me, its stinger tails stabbing in from different directions as its mouths snapped shut. My eyes widened as one of the tails slammed down, and I slapped my bracer. Instantly, smooth crystal formed a sphere around me and my broom.

  The tail’s stinger was stopped cold, and it continued to float around me even as I rose into the air, the crystalline sphere vanishing from around me. The dog, though it had an impressive leaping ability, couldn’t fly. As it fell to the ground, landing with surprising grace, I took a deep breath… and paused. I set aside the impossibility of using a poison bloodline to create a clone for a moment, since that was a mystery that I could investigate later. In the short term, I was more focused on what I had smelled from the corrupted poison hound.

  It hadn’t lost any power, not in the qualitative sense. The potency of its bloodline was incredible, and on par with Gerhard’s.

  But in a quantitative sense?

  The hound’s cloning trick hadn’t quadrupled the amount of power that it had to draw on. It had split the amount of bloodline present within each of the clones, perfectly evenly. It had an incredible amount of power, but it was limited in how much it could use that power. In a way, the cloned beast I was fighting was in a similar situation to me. Its power was intense, but could only be used for a short time.

  The dog was launching another three-part beam of poisoned power at me, but with my greater height, I had far more time to move before they got to my point, and was more easily able to dodge, so I used the time to focus on my summons.

  Orla was with Salem at the moment, using her barks to keep him defended. She was willing to join me if I wanted, but I told her to stay with Salem. Better to keep him protected.

  My summoned elementals were in rougher shape. My lightning ermines were fine, so I called them to me, and they flashed in on trails of lightning, slamming into the sides of the alpha. Even so empowered, they barely left scratches, before flashing away to dodge the toxic drops of blood that sprayed out. But where they were fine, nearly all of the earth elementals had been instantly banished to their home plane when the alpha had released the wave of poison into the earth. I didn’t even think it was intentional, just incidental destruction. The air elementals were better off, and I split them into three groups. One flew to assist Yushin, one to Salem, and one to me.

  I didn’t send a group to assist Jackson. I didn’t need to. Despite his weakened connection to his god, he was wearing armor that seemed to be forged from plates of amber colored light, wielding his sword of shimmering gold in one hand, and unleashing massive infernos of flame with his other hand. The dog’s poisons were simply dissolving into smoke the instant they touched the armor, and as flames and gold closed in from ten directions at once, he left the monster with burns and cuts.

  That was all the attention I could spare, though. The dog’s multiple sets of limbs were bunching again, and it was preparing for another leap, this one intended to carry it as high as I currently was. It erupted upwards, and I flashed down, pulling into a nose dive. The beast flew past me, and I barely had the time to raise my wand and unleash a single spell into its gut. The greenish blue light of my cursed dessicate spell reduced one of its countless pustules to nothing, a chunk of flesh with it. Its bloodline surged, replenishing the poison on its skin, and I grinned. I didn’t need to outmuscle the opponent, after all. I just needed to outlast its split bloodline, then kill it.

  As I was pulling up from the nose dive I had taken, the dog did another thing I didn’t think it should be able to do, though this was at least a bit more reasonable. It bit its own tail, and with a blast of poison, somehow managed to turn in mid-air, before unleashing a rain of poison on me. Each drop was tiny compared to the massive dog, though still easily the size of an apple, and there were hundreds of them. They covered too large of an area, and I frantically chanted, lifting my wand, but I was too slow. The instant before the poisons hit me, I slapped my bracer, and the sphere of crystal formed around me, stopping the rain of poison.

  The dog began to fall, and this time, its heads were facing me. Its tails extended forward, their sharp, scorpion-like tips glimmering in the sunlight, and it grinned savagely, seeming almost intelligent for a moment. My wind elementals were straining, trying to alter the trajectory of its fall, even as I bolted across the ground, using every bit of speed that I could to outpace the falling monster. It was just barely enough, but the tails lashed around, moving like serpents as they reached for me, and I managed to finish the incantation for one of my newest spells.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Papers erupted from my locker, reinforced with arcane force, and interposed themselves between me and the monstrous tails that moved with such impossible speed.

  I hadn’t used all of my prepared spellglyphs for this fight, or even most of them. If things got ugly with Yushin’s clan, then I’d need every drop of power I could get. But I did use some of the ones that I’d made throughout the year, the ones that would be useful here. After all, the Erudite was watching us at almost a hundred times speed, and had warned us that he might not be able to teleport us out in time.

  Four spellglyphs that I’d prepared specifically for this fight yesterday, with the help of Jackson and siphon vitality, all activated at once. Suffering curses that would speed the rate at which its four poison glands depleted sank into the monster with a touch Normally, it wasn’t possible to target so directly with a spellglyph, but used in conjunction with paper swarm, touch-based curses were on the table.

  Webs exploded over the area as I set off six different versions of the create web spell, and with the mass of tails, it was enough to tangle them in a truly terrible mess of white string, buying me crucial seconds to evade the now-tangled tails. Even as the strands began to fray, a single fire elemental appeared within the mass, and the webbing exploded.

  I normally wasn’t much of a fire mage, but if I’d had the time, even I would have had to admire the sheer size of the fireball that engulfed the massive monster. Seren blazed brightly from his perch on my shoulder, his bloodline surging, and the flames began to glow brighter as he commanded both the flame and the summoned non-sapient fire elemental within. Their powers joined, the fire spread out, covering the entire body of the diseased poison dog in a massive inferno. Seren drew on my own bloodline for power, and I fed it to him gladly, the flames turning blue as they burnt hotter and hotter. I spun my wand, composing a suffering curse to worsen the flames, even as I flew from place to place, dodging the stabbing motions of the tails, flying out of the way of the beams of poison, and activating what few paper spellglyphs I had with fire magic in them.

  Then I felt one of my curses break. For a moment, I thought Seren might have killed the clone, but it was no such luck. The curse that made expending its ether-killing poison had broken, and…

  My eyes went wide and I slammed my hand down on the crystal bracelet. A third shell of crystal appeared around me, barely enough to protect me as a massive explosion of poison erupted around the dog, rushing out in all directions. It quashed the flames and banished the nonsapient elemental, not because the poison had properties to counter Seren’s fire elemental and my draconic bloodline flames, but because it was a non-flammable liquid in such quantities that it could simply smother the fire. It was a flagrant waste of power, but if the dog thought it was going to die, it might have been worth it.

  As the explosion of poison faded, I took a breath. The bloodline was low, very low. Still potent and dangerous, but I was close. I just needed to get it to burn out the last bits of power, and I could kill it.

  I weighed my options as more paper erupted from my locker, spinning to leave long slashes along the hide of the monster, and the one remaining lightning ermine closed in, slamming into it with lightning before darting away. When had I gotten down to one? I wasn’t even sure. If I used more glyphs, I’d be safer, but there was every chance that I’d just be killed later by Yushin’s relatives when – or rather, if – they betrayed us.

  A tail launched right at my face, and I made my choice. Death now, or possible death later? I’d take possible death later.

  Nine spellglyphs erupted from my locker, forming shields just barely long enough to let me shoot to the side, and a baker’s dozen spellglyphs poured out around me. I’d used almost my entire summoned arsenal when I’d been delving into the library, but it had been an entire semester since then. I had restocked.

  In an instant, four lytemoths, four gadhar, and four wadjetktt appeared, swarming in to defend me as the thirteenth glyph shot forward, slipping between the blasts of poison, light, sunvenom, and blue barks.A single leap banished half my army, and forced me to slide out of the way, but my spell landed on the nose of the dog, and a cursed dessicate spell caused its flesh to warp and curdle.

  The tails swept down, and the rest of the summons were gone. I raised my wand, frantically chanting, as it staggered forward. It was starting to break into wisps of smoke now, but it exploded forward with one final burst of speed.

  And it used a familiar technique. I occasionally compressed my bloodline for a single instant to sharpen a single attack. It was inefficient in terms of power expenditure, but sometimes power in one second was what was needed. This last burst drained everything it had left as it compressed the final drops of poison into a bite. I compressed my own bloodline, and launched myself off my broom into the air with an explosive leap. Even then, I barely cleared the snapping jaws.

  My broom didn’t. I tried to call it up to me, but the teeth shattered my first real imbued artifact into nothing but splinters.

  The last word of my spell chant finished, and a portal to the depths of Etherius tore open. Long tentacles of aberrant magic reached out, enveloping the giant dog monster. With no bloodline power left to shield itself, the dog vanished into nothing but smoke, the clone destroyed. The spell snapped shut, and I was falling out of the air.

  Patreon Here!

  Discord Here!