Responding to Leon’s invitation, Nyra immediately wrinkled her nose and said, “I don’t want to. We can fight here!”
Without waiting for him to reply, she launched herself at him, her cracked shin apparently fully healed by the power of her healing spell. Still, she came at him with her fists this time, each sparkling with white-gold lightning.
Miffed at his invitation so brusquely denied, Leon caught her leading fist, hardly flinching as her sixth-tier power did its level best to ravage his body.
“Like the bite of a fly,” he said as he squeezed her fist hard. She cried out in pain and loosened her fist, allowing her to momentarily escape, but Leon reached out and grabbed her arm, lifting her quite easily into the air. She was strong for her age, and quite fit, but she wasn’t even close to being too heavy for him to lift.
As she blasted him at her full power with white-gold lightning, Leon, still holding onto her, turned to her escorts. “We can continue this further inside. I’m fine with sparring and giving you hospitality, but we will not be disturbing my people as they try to work. Shall we?”
Blows rained upon him like hammers, but he was unfazed. The source of those blows shouted and kicked and punched with her one free hand, all to no avail. “No!” she shouted. “We! Fight! Here!”
One of the eleventh-tier Gold Dragons stepped forward, amusement pulling at the corners of his lips. “We will accept your offer, Despot Leon. Especially if it includes those behind you; we haven’t tested ourselves against normal Storm Lords in a long time, and it would be… refreshing to remind them of where they stand…”
Leon detected a note of antipathy winding through the auras of his friends behind him, but he was happy they accepted, especially since Nyra finally calmed down once her escort said his piece.
“Hey!” she shouted. “Old man! Let me down!”
For a moment, Leon wasn’t sure she was talking to him, but after an insistent kick to his upper thigh, she repeated herself, her golden eyes glaring at him like he was the cause of all her problems.
“Promise me you’ll be an honorable guest?” he pressed, no small amount of mirth in his tone.
“Sure! Just put me down!”
Leon shared a look with the Gold Dragon who’d spoken for the escorts and saw his exasperation mirrored there, if considerably less obvious. He shrugged and let the Princess of the Great Gold Dragon Clan go.
The moment her feet hit the hangar floor, he almost expected her to attack him again. He was pleasantly surprised when she merely glowered at him and fell in at the front of her party.
Several minutes later, Leon found himself in Storm Herald’s largest training room—which wasn’t saying much since the ark, while large, was still limited in terms of internal compartments. His wives hadn’t beaten him there, but he’d sent word to them about what was happening, so he assumed they’d arrive shortly.
“Here?” Nyra asked as she darted out into the open space, the safety enchantments locking in around them, ensuring that unless a thirteenth-tier or higher mage held nothing back here, the ark would be unaffected by their spar. In fact, the magic they’d perform would dissipate into the air, and the training room was designed to harvest that magic and add it to the ark’s magic reservoirs. It wasn’t efficient enough to make it completely self-sustaining, but it came close.
“This is fine,” Leon said as he nonchalantly walked out into the center of the room, switching out his casual attire for training clothes as he went. Before he even stopped, Nyra was after him again, eschewing any semblance of subtlety before she even started by summoning her white-gold lightning that Leon didn’t even need magic senses to notice, despite his back being turned.
But with his potent magic senses, he easily waited until she was just about on him before ducking and darting out of the way.
“Hold still!” Nyra shouted as she let loose with a blast of lightning.
Leon smiled as he let it wash over him, doing no damage at all, not even singeing his clothes. “Are all Gold Dragons so aggressive?” he asked, his voice lacking any judgment. Lightning as a magical element held little direct defensive value, and with its speed and explosive power, sheer aggression was almost baked into the foundation of all fighting styles utilizing it.
“Are all Thunderbirds so cowardly?” she shot back. “Stop running! I don’t want my victory over you to be having to hunt you down!”
“Who says you’re going to beat me?” Leon asked, still deftly evading her attacks even as he vaguely registered the other members of her party splitting off to spar against Archelaus, Gwarim, Realiz, and Alix, the latter of whom had only just arrived and looked a little perplexed by what she’d found. Daryun, too, who entered the training room in that very moment, found himself dragged into combat with a ninth-tier Gold Dragon.
“If you don’t fight back, I’ll wear you down eventually!” she insisted as she kicked out, her leg missing his face by inches—inches he’d allowed as he immediately stepped forward, and in her surprise, she crashed into him. He stood firm while she went sprawling across the floor.
“Sixth-tier against twelfth-tier…” said Leon cheerfully. “A doomed scenario you face, but it’s admirable that you’ve taken it on.” As she darted back to her feet and assumed an aggressive stance, he continued, “I’d caution you against trying it against someone you’ve never met before. You lucked out with me as I don’t intend you or your Clan any harm, but… how many can say that?”
“No one would dare harm a member of the Great Dragon Clans!” Nyra insisted haughtily, the white-gold lightning that arced over her body vanishing, only to be immediately replaced with golden fire concentrated around her fists. “Especially not when we’re all here!”
She launched herself at him again, clearly expecting him to be unable to answer her fire. But again, he caught her leading fist, and when the fire exploded around him, he didn’t flinch. He felt the heat, tasted the flames as they raked over him, and smiled.
When Nyra pulled back on her fire and Leon was revealed unscathed, she stared at him in shock, and her fist went limp. Leon didn’t press his advantage as she took a few steps back, her power retracting with every step.
“You’re weird,” she said after a long pause.
“I… get that a lot,” Leon replied. “Usually phrased differently, but still…”
The Gold Dragon Princess seemed to relax, her insistence on fighting apparently dying down as she made white-gold fire whirl around her fingers.
Jumping in to fill the silence, Leon said, “You never answered my question, you know. Are all Gold Dragons like you?” He cast a tactful glance at the other members of her entourage, who by this point were getting more and more into their own fights, though those who were yet unengaged kept an eye on the two of them.
Frowning, Nyra answered, “Dragons are whatever we want to be.”
“And you want to be a battle maniac, challenging complete strangers to fights despite hopeless odds?”
With a pronounced pout, she argued, “A Dragon can win any fight! No enemy can stop us!”
Leon smiled, but as he was about to respond, he felt attention from his soul realm from a source he wouldn’t in a million years have expected. The Great Black Dragon didn’t say anything, but he felt his soul realm shudder as the old monster chuckled deeply.
“W-Well,” he said, fighting to regain his composure, “what is it that you want to be?”
It didn’t seem like she understood the question because she immediately asked, “Can you teach me to use space magic like you? Or whatever you did to the cow in that fight?”
“Uuh, probably not,” he truthfully answered. “The bow I used is something I made myself, but it came from the branch of a special tree in the Storm Lands, one that bestowed the branch upon me. The power of the bow is harnessed from the power of that tree.”
“Where’s the tree?” she demanded.
“Why should I tell you?” he countered.
“… Because I’m a Princess of the Great Gold Dragon Clan! You should offer up the tree’s location as a matter of courtesy, old man!”
The corners of Leon’s eyes and lips tightened, but this was a unique opportunity, and he didn’t want to squander it due to a bruised ego.
“Power at your age seems to have made you quite arrogant,” he said. “You can’t make me give you anything, not with the power you’ve displayed. But… I’m always open to sharing information with friends.”
“Creepy old man,” she whispered.
Exasperation mounting, Leon clenched his jaw to keep from losing his cool.
[Foolish boy,] the rumbling voice of the Great Black Dragon said, blasting through his mind like a firestorm through a drought-affected forest. [You are both Dragons. Do not ask; demand!]
Leon argued with himself for another second, and Nyra backed away, her arms crossing again as she visibly started losing interest. When Leon fixed her in his burning golden gaze, however, she froze.
“If you want to know where that tree is,” he growled and assumed a bare-handed fighting stance, “you’ll have to beat me.”
She grinned and launched herself against him, alternating between fire and lightning with every blow. No more words were shared; they weren’t needed when their fists and power could do all the talking for them…
---
Exhausted, Nyra almost collapsed into a chair in a quiet corner. Some of the spars were still ongoing, and after several hours, her escorts had stopped paying them so much attention, especially once Leon’s wives, remaining Paladins, and accompanying elders arrived and engaged the remaining members of her escort party in either talk or battle. For the moment, they had some degree of privacy.
“You fight well,” Leon said. “Almost as good as I was at your age.”
She’d looked ready to preen at his compliment, but his addendum elicited a guttural growl instead.
“No Thunderbird can compare himself to a Dragon!” she insisted, though her vitriol was tempered by her exhaustion. She’d used almost all of her readily available power and hadn’t managed to land a meaningful blow on Leon even once. She’d been frustrated for a while, but as the thrill and challenge of the spar sank in, that emotion was left behind for the sheer thrill of battle.
“Back that up when you can land a hit on me, kid,” Leon retorted.
Crossing her arms over her chest, she harrumphed and looked away, scowling.
“You have a lot of talent,” Leon continued. “Are all Dragons so skilled, or just you?”
The appeal to her pride had the intended effect as she immediately grinned and said, “I’m a prodigy! My father said so! All my other Clanmates took years longer to get as good as me at my age!”
“All of them? Wow…” Leon said, a trickle of sarcasm winding through his tone.
“Er… yeah,” she said. “Except maybe Serana, but no one can measure up to her!”
For a second that lasted all of time, from the moment the universe was created to its final gasping breath, Leon’s brain shut down, nothing going through it aside from echoes of Nyra saying his mother’s name. Fortunately, it seemed she didn’t notice.
“She’s the best of all of our Clans!” Nyra gushed. “She reached the sixth-tier at only twelve! And was tenth-tier before she was fifty! She hunted down a Tyrant Wolf for her awakening at only eight!”
“T-That’s impressive,” Leon sputtered. “You sound like… you admire her a lot…”
Nyra’s eyes glittered as she slid down in her chair. She almost started laughing as she said, “She’s everything I want to be! Strong, beautiful, confident! If she were here, she’d beat your face in for even looking at her!”
“Really?” Leon said as he reasserted as much control over himself as he could. “And you’d just watch, I imagine?”
“No!” she insisted. “I’d beat you up, too!”
“That would be quite the feat, given you didn’t land a single blow,” he teased, though he silently cursed himself for shifting the subject.
Nyra suddenly shot to her feet, her hands flying to her hips as she did her best to look threatening. She was still just a fifteen-year-old girl, however, and she was almost physically incapable of looking all that intimidating at her size.
“Just you wait, old man!” she said. “I’ll get my revenge on you! And then I’ll get you to tell me where that tree is!”
“You’re not going to get Serana to do it for you?” he asked with an accusing glare.
“I would never bother her with something like this!” the young Gold Dragon insisted. “She’s too busy training and fighting off all the poor suitors who come to her Clan! Stupid boys can’t recognize that they’re trying to court a goddess…”
“Serana sounds interesting,” Leon said. “I kind of want to meet her now. I don’t suppose you could pass on a challenge?”
Like she thought he was crazy, Nyra stared at him with her jaw falling open. “W… What? You… you want to challenge a Black Dragon? Are you stupid, old man? Do you want to die that badly? You can’t die! Not until you tell me where that tree is!”
“You’re fixating on that tree,” Leon responded.
“Because that bow is cool! And I want one!” Nyra shouted.
“I could be tempted to tell you where to find the tree,” Leon said, “but I have a favor to ask of you for it. No fighting needed. The favor is actually pretty easy…”
Again, Nyra scrunched her face up as if she’d swallowed a lemon and said, “Creepy old man. I’m not marrying you!”
“Good,” Leon viciously replied. “I was hoping you’d pass on a message to Serana for me. Tell her my name, and that—”
“No,” Nyra immediately said before Leon even finished. “Goddess Serana has more important matters to deal with than to field another marriage proposal, and I will not be used to deliver one!”
“You are making a lot of assumptions,” said Leon, his patience under strain. “It’s not a marriage proposal I’m asking you to relay… Only my name, and to tell her that I received her message.”
Nyra’s disbelief couldn’t have been more obvious if it had been written across her face in large, bold runes. “Her… message…? Why would she be messaging you?”
“Pass on that message,” Leon demanded, his patience slipping away—much, he was sure, to the Great Black Dragon’s delight. He took a breath as she took a step back from the forcefulness of his demand, and in a lower tone, he added, “I’ve heard the Great Dragon Clans are brother Clans, supporting each other in everything. Is that true?”
“Yes, but—” she tried to say, but he immediately cut her off.
“Then support me!” Punctuating his sentence, he lifted a hand and inscribed a quick rune in the air to keep his magic from leaking out—he wanted to control the spread of this information as much as he could, even if he knew that Nyra could say anything at all she wanted the moment she was off his ark—and summoned a flame, dark and chaotic, in his hand. With his back to the rest of the room and the hand holding the flame kept close, he ensured that no one else could physically see or sense his fire.
No one, that is, save for Nyra, who stared at it as if he held incontrovertible proof in his hand that the sky was actually green with purple stripes, that planes were actually round, and that everything she’d ever learned in her short life was a lie. Nothing so far in their short acquaintance had stunned her so completely as seeing that roiling black flame in his hand, with a small core of red barely visible within the black.
Doomfire, unmistakably. The power of the Great Black Dragons, in his hand.
He raised his other hand, which Nyra hardly seemed to notice as her golden eyes were fixated wholly on the fire he held. In his other hand, he summoned the memory slate that Fain had given him. It held the message Serana had made for him and his father, but aside from that, the slate served as a kind of ID, which he showcased as he brought the slate up to the black flame. Once he was sure that Nyra had seen it—the poor girl looked on the verge of passing out from shock—he allowed his power to sink into the slate, turning the black stone completely transparent. He stopped before the message within it played, but held it long enough to make it clear that he was who he was silently claiming to be.
“Can you do this for me?” Leon asked. “Pass on my message? Serana, you see… is my mother…”
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