Chapter 491: The Bond Between Ancient Enemies
Chapter 491: The Bond Between Ancient Enemies
Out on a vast, open stretch of wilderness, a great silvery-white dragon wheeled through the sky.
Layer upon layer of energy rippled outward from the dragon in all directions, like concentric rings on water, forming what seemed like countless overlapping shields.
A beam of silver light shot upward from the ground toward the dragon.
But the moment it made contact with those rippling energy layers, it simply stopped, frozen in place, suspended in midair. Only when the dragon had already swept past did the silver light resume its trajectory into the sky, by which point its original target was long gone.
Catherine lowered the longbow in her hands, genuinely impressed. "That's a remarkable temporal distortion effect. Naomi has come a long way."
The dragon circling overhead was, naturally, Naomi in her time dragon form.
The moment Ambrose had confirmed the Dragon Tyrant's likely revival, he'd begun preparing for the thousand-year-old menace.
In any kind of story, a tyrant who had unified the world under his rule would make for the ultimate villain. Dragons were the most archetypal villains in existence. And someone who commanded time itself was... well, with "tyrant," "dragon," and "time" all stacked together, Ambrose had no choice but to rank the Dragon Tyrant at the top of the most powerful opponents he'd ever faced.
More powerful than most gods, in fact.
The dragon's strength was unconstrained by divinity. Aion wasn't about to slap the Dragon Tyrant on Ambrose's behalf.
But Ambrose had lived his life in an era without time dragons, so even with centuries of experience behind him, he had little real understanding of what they were capable of.
This was why he needed Naomi to help him find out.
Naomi could shift into a time dragon for short periods, though she was still young and untested, and no one knew how much of a time dragon's true power she could actually channel. Ambrose therefore sought out the world's strongest fighters to help "test" her.
The arrow that the elven queen Catherine had just loosed was a magical arrow fitted with homing and armor-piercing properties, and even an anti-magic shaft. Yet the arrow was still affected by the temporal disruption surrounding Naomi's body.
Ambrose called out, "Stop going easy on her. That shot barely had any effort behind it."
Catherine shot him a sharp look. The lich had truly no consideration for anyone.
"Aren't you worried about hurting Naomi?"
Catherine had never approved of the contract Naomi and Ambrose had forged in the first place. Whoever heard of treating a druid like an animal companion? But Naomi herself had agreed to it, so Catherine couldn't do more than object. The elven queen had always quietly worried about how Naomi was faring under Ambrose's care. The lich was not known for going easy on anyone under his control.
"Hurting her how? We're in a dreamscape. It's not like you've never been here before."
Ambrose wasn't heartless enough to have Naomi defend against Catherine's arrows with her actual body.
But Catherine replied, "Even if her body isn't injured, her mind might be."
In an earlier dreamscape exercise, several elven commanders had wanted to experience a marine battle as foot soldiers. Their bodies hadn't ended up injured, but after being run through a few times by dreamscape fishfolk, they'd woken up with headaches that persisted for weeks before fully clearing.
And those were just spears through the body. If Catherine used her bow artifact at full power, she could very well leave Naomi with serious psychological trauma.
"Don't worry about it. Damage of that type acts on the soul, which happens to be my specialty. Besides, Naomi is currently in a druidic transformation. Wounds sustained in that form disappear when the transformation ends."
Ambrose understood the consequences perfectly well and had already made preparations accordingly.
No matter how much harm Naomi sustained in the dream, so long as her soul wasn't shattered outright, Ambrose could repair it.
And druids famously had more lives than most. Killing one was notoriously difficult, let alone leaving any permanent damage.
Catherine conceded the point and drew her bow as Ambrose had asked.
Even so, she couldn't quite bring herself to go all-out. She channeled only about half the artifact's power into the shot.
The arrow left the string like a shooting star, tracing a brilliant arc through the air and landing precisely on Naomi's wing.
Catherine had held back again. She didn't want to aim for anything vital, so she'd chosen a less critical spot.
The temporal barrier surrounding Naomi's body was still active, but this time, it could only slow the magic arrow rather than freeze it outright.
As the arrow resumed its course, the starlight-infused projectile scraped Naomi's wing, carving out a deep wound.
The pain broke Naomi's concentration and her ability to sustain her flight. She began to fall toward the ground.
Ambrose tossed Naomi a Featherfall spell almost as an afterthought, then turned to the other observer. "Arthur, did the Dragon Tyrant use a similar form of defense back then? The effectiveness seems a bit lacking, doesn't it?"
Arthur Lyon, standing at Ambrose's side, shook his head. "Not exactly like this. I don't understand the mechanics of how time dragons channel their power, but the Dragon Tyrant didn't deploy time this way. He was more sensitive and far more attuned. Any hostile intention directed at him would register the moment it formed, and time would be altered before the attack was ever launched. For instance, if I decided right now to swing a sword at the dragon, the moment I formed that intention, my swing might be sped up or slowed down—not frozen at the point of impact, but tampered with before the motion even began."
The power of time could theoretically control the flow of time itself, accelerating, freezing, and even reversing it. Using it on different objects carried vastly different costs.
Take a strongman lifting stones as an example. The man himself might be extraordinarily powerful, but lifting a one-kilogram dumbbell and lifting a hundred-ton boulder wouldn't take the same speed or the same effort.
This was fundamentally different from Ambrose's own Loom of Fate.
The Loom of Fate worked like a chain of falling dominoes. Even if the final domino weighed a thousand tons, and the first weighed a hundred grams, so long as the chain in between was long enough, the initial force Ambrose needed to apply was the same regardless.
Whether Ambrose was weaving a fate where someone tripped while walking or where that someone died, he would pay the same price. The only difference was when that fate would take effect: the former could happen immediately, while the latter took time to build up, perhaps a year, perhaps ten, perhaps a century, depending on the target.
For a time dragon, the energy cost had to be paid on the spot, or there would be no effect.
Naomi was still stuck in a clumsy mode of operation in which she braced herself mentally, then deployed the time energy the moment an attack arrived in order to block it.
But the Dragon Tyrant Arthur Lyon had faced was operating at a level far beyond Naomi's current capability. It could disrupt its foes' timing from the moment they established their intent, making them carry out the motion before they'd even committed to it. Not only was this far less energy-intensive, it left enemies with a disorienting loss of spatial and temporal rhythm. After a few rounds of that, their instincts and sense of timing would simply evaporate.
Ambrose felt a chill settle into his bones as he heard Arthur Lyon's description. The Dragon Tyrant was completely absurd.
On a battlefield, even the most skilled warriors would be unable to perform anywhere near their true ability once their sense of rhythm was disrupted.
The same went for spellcasters. Miss consistently and they'd start second-guessing their timing. Anyone with worse nerves might start fumbling the spell itself.
"How did you actually manage to beat this dragon back then?" Ambrose couldn't help asking.
Arthur Lyon sighed. "I honestly don't know. I was sealed by that point."
Ambrose was equally exasperated. In the final battle, Arthur Lyon and the heroes of every race, fighting together, had defeated the dragons. At the end, hoping to avoid any meaningless sacrifices, Arthur Lyon had chosen a one-on-one duel with the Dragon Tyrant.
But no one knew the details of what happened in that duel. Even the old elven king had only heard fragments. Everyone knew Arthur Lyon had won, but no one knew how. Looking back now, it seemed Arthur Lyon had already been under the influence of the dragonblood curse at that point, which was probably why he'd unconsciously suppressed any knowledge of the dragon's weaknesses.
But the problem still needed to be solved.
Ambrose didn't give up easily. He began adjusting the dreamscape's parameters, significantly boosting Naomi's temporal output.
Naomi was young. She hadn't developed the instinct to sense all hostile intent and counter it automatically, but the dreamscape could do that for her.
After a round of adjustments, Naomi took to the air again. This time, there were no visible ripples of temporal disturbance around her body.
Ambrose tried lobbing three Fireballs at her. What should have flown in a straight line veered off at strange angles instead, as if Ambrose himself had stuttered the moment he cast them. All three Fireballs sailed off into empty sky, nowhere near Naomi.
He kept trying, adjusting his approach every time, but no matter how he varied his technique, every targeted spell simply failed to affect Naomi. Only magic that blanketed a massive area had any chance of landing at all.
Then Arthur Lyon added, "And that's not all. For wide-area spells like Storm of Revenge, the Dragon Tyrant could sense them coming and simply skip forward in time to after the spell had landed."
With Arthur Lyon's help, Ambrose added that parameter to the dreamscape's settings. When Naomi took to the air again, both Ambrose and Catherine attacked in earnest.
Arrow storms, spells augmented by the Golden Throne—Ambrose and Catherine threw everything they had. None of it touched so much as a single scale on Naomi.
Naomi, meanwhile, was positively exhilarated. "This is incredible. I feel like a god!"
Even Catherine was shaken. "If the Dragon Tyrant truly has this kind of power, who among us could possibly stop him?"
Right now, Naomi was only on the defensive. She wasn't even hitting back. The moment she chose to strike, a single breath could age Catherine instantly, or reduce her to bare bones on the spot.
That was no exaggeration. Catherine had plenty of artifacts on her, but not one of them could shield against the influence of time.
Time stood on the same tier as Ambrose's Loom of Fate. Mortals had almost no way to resist either.
Ambrose stroked his jaw and turned to Arthur Lyon. "How exactly did you fight the Dragon Tyrant back then? You faced him more than once. Was there really no attack that could land on him at all?"
"The power of holy light, of course! How else do you think I could have won? Push Sacred Slash to its absolute limit, and the holy light it releases is beyond time's influence. Like so!"
Arthur Lyon drew his sword toward Naomi overhead and swung with a single, unremarkable motion.
A light thin as the first ray of dawn shot out—no, shot wasn't the right word. The light had always already been there; Arthur Lyon's swing had simply... lit it up.
That faint light settled on Naomi like a veil of silk.
It was beautiful and harmless.
Arthur Lyon was simply demonstrating how to break through time's influence, not actually attacking, so he had infused no damaging intent into the light.
Ambrose watched with undisguised fascination. "The speed of light is unchanged in any inertial reference frame. Is that it? That's surprisingly... scientific."
Ambrose had studied ordinary engineering in his mortal life and only knew the broad strokes of advanced physics. Special relativity was something he'd heard of without really understanding. What he muttered was all he knew—he didn't understand the specifics.
Still, it made sense that this was why Arthur Lyon had been the one to lead the rebellion in the first place.
No one's holy light was purer than Arthur Lyon's, and it was apparently the only thing that could actually harm the Dragon Tyrant.
No wonder Arthur Lyon had ended up in a one-on-one duel. Greater numbers would have made no difference. No one else's attacks could reach the dragon. They'd have been nothing but cannon fodder, slowly grinding away at his reserves.
Arthur Lyon had no desire for victory built on his companions' corpses, so he had chosen to face the Dragon Tyrant alone.
"Arthur..." Ambrose reached over and placed a hand on the holy king's shoulder. Whatever he'd meant to say next simply wouldn't come. No words felt sufficient.
Arthur Lyon looked genuinely puzzled at Ambrose's sudden wistfulness. The lich was hardly sentimental at the best of times.
"Master Megaman, my suggestion would be to leave the Dragon Tyrant to me."
As it had been a thousand years ago, so it would be again.
Only he could deal with the dragon. Arthur Lyon's fate and the Dragon Tyrant's had been bound together since a millennium past. This was simply the continuation of that ancient conflict.
Arthur Lyon believed he could win against the dragon again.
Ambrose didn't see it that way. Putting all his eggs in one basket was something he did when you had no other choice, but he wasn't short on options or on gods willing to lend him a hand at the moment. Given all the different ways in which he'd grown, did he really still have to stake everything on Arthur Lyon and hope for the best?
A "bond" between ancient enemies was nonsense.
What if Arthur Lyon were to lose?
Ambrose didn't doubt Arthur's greatness, but neither did he care to gamble on something like this.
As a diviner, he understood better than anyone that waiting for fate to hand him a favorable outcome was the stupidest thing he could do.
Fate didn't favor the passive. The more he simply waited, the worse his result. That was hard-won wisdom from his own life experience.
So what was there that could actually deal with a time dragon's fundamentally unreasonable mastery over time?
Was there truly nothing that could break through it, short of divine power?