Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

Incredulously, the dragon's head whipped around; Rudo was standing on the other side, holding Zanasha's sword in his hand. "Minor Deception," he admitted, slightly sheepishly. The dragon roared, summoning a swarm of glowing star-like missiles; but the old Innkeeper jinked and wove, scampered and ducked, and deftly evaded every one of the great beast's strikes. He's using the terrain, Topher realized, awed; the old man knew that any attack from the dragon meant death, so he was dodging with intent and purpose, transposing chunks of the shattered landscape between himself and each projectile so he could take shelter in the blast shadow of each strike. But he couldn't hold out forever, and with Zanasha disarmed, only Topher and Hana could attack; and a glance at Hana confirmed that she had no faith in her own ability to pierce the dragon's scales. Save us, her gaze implored.

Digging down in himself, Topher set his jaw; Lightning Bolt didn't work. What else? What do I have that's stronger than frickin' Lightning Bolt? There was one spell, he admitted to himself, that he hadn't tried yet; he'd technically unlocked Fleet Zephyr at Level 30. It was possible that its higher base required Level, when wand-boosted, would carry its Attack Power higher than anything else he could bring to bear. There was only one problem: he'd never cast it. Never even tried to cast it. Well, shit.

Summoning his Ledger, he shouted to the others, "Keep him busy!" then dove behind as much cover as he could find while he flipped with choking desperation through its pages. Protection from Heat, who cares, not gonna stop that kind of fire... Banish Dead, he'd forgotten about that one, probably would have come in handy against the Bone Fiends... Jesus Christ, where was it?

He nearly missed it, flipping to the page with Alter Self and its massive trove of cautions and warnings; his eyes glanced over its sigils and runes with the speed of panic. Moj Vum Koth, that wasn't too bad. Just had to be sure not to catch himself or any of his friends in the effect if he didn't want to see what a mishap looked like.

Banishing his Ledger and scrambling back out from cover, he choked in distress; Zanasha was in mid-air, leaping with hand outstretched to catch the sword Rudo had just thrown to her as he drifted, upside-down and hard-eyed, towards where the dragon's waiting claw was poised to tear him apart. Oh shit.

With no time to think, Topher acted. Whirling his Stylus decisively, he stepped forth and bit out the runes precisely; he leveled his Stylus at Vashyarl's tree-sized claw, visualizing a severe and razor-sharp plane intersecting the dragon's attack without touching any of the others. His clothes and beard whipped around him as though he were standing in the center of a gale, and the whssk sound of an impossibly fine cutting edge raced past his ear. For a moment, he couldn't see any effect, and choked with fear that he'd messed up the spell.

Then the dragon's claw exploded in luminous blood.

Vashyarl shrieked -- a sound to dwarf the cacophonies and explosions that had already half-deafened Topher -- and whirled away in pain, clutching his bleeding claw to himself with his other foreleg; Topher's heart rose triumphantly for a split second.

Then the dragon's whipping tail struck Rudo in mid-air.

The impact was vicious, brutal; Topher heard bones break and tendons snap with gruesome clarity as the old man was thrown with unbelievable violence through the air, crashing with an explosion of dust and rubble into a low hillock of cement and glass to Topher's left. As he stared in horror, Rudo's mangled and savaged body slumped out of the destruction; blood ran freely from his mouth, and all four of his limbs had twisted and shredded nearly to the point of dismemberment. One eye was a bloody ruin, while the other stared sightlessly at Topher.

Then, incredibly, the old man's remaining eye winked.

As Topher stared, transfixed, Rudo's mouth shifted; it bulged, twisted, and then the black and bloody lips parted to reveal the bottom half of a healing potion. "You sneaky fuck," Topher hissed as the Innkeeper drank the vibrant liquid greedily; in moments, Topher could see his shattered body already beginning to mend. "How many tricks do you have up your sleeves!?"

"Very few," Rudo gurgled as he slumped out of the dragon's line of sight to recover. "Most of them are in my shoes." He laughed -- an agonized, half-choked cackle -- before sobering. "You must strike now, Mister Bailey, before he reprioritizes his targets. We can only distract him for so long before we perish."

"Then fall back!" Topher hissed. "Don't you have a plan B?!"

The older man met his gaze, and Topher saw a resolve he'd never known in the warm brown eyes. "You are my plan B. I have staked my life -- all our lives -- on the belief that you are clever and bold enough to allow us to defeat this creature, despite the overwhelming difference between us."

"Jesus Christ!" Topher howled. "Are you fucking crazy?!"

"It was this, or wait to die. We have one move; let us make it." The old man rolled onto one side, bringing a leg under him; with a crackle and snap of healing bones, it twisted back into place. Topher winced. "You may have a few more moments before the others perish; if you need more, I will buy you what time I can with my death." The old man winked at him again, then crawled away on a broken arm; Topher groaned and staggered back around the wreckage, out of cover.

Beyond, the battlefield was a holocaust; Zanasha was hacking and dodging, using Dash and Nether Strike to evade the dragon's increasingly furious attacks. But even at this distance, Topher could see that she was flagging; she'll be out of SP soon, he intuited, and he started forward to make another assay at the battle. But Hana, bursting out from cover to his left, drew the dragon's eye; and with a snarl of fury, it incanted another spell in her direction. "Let us see how you like it," it hissed. "Moj Vum Koth!" Topher shouted wordlessly in dismay as the dragon's claw swept towards the young Japanese woman, and without thinking, he leapt forward, pulling at her with his Attract Object Skill to yank her out of harm's way.

It worked; Hana collided with him painfully, but arrived whole, as the deadly wind scoured past them and bisected the fifty-foot wreckage of a bridge with an edge sharper than glass. Topher let out a sigh of relief and tried to hop backwards, but his leg didn't work for some reason and he fell heavily, dragging Hana down with him. "Damn. What did I --"

"Bailey-sama." Hana's horrified gaze stopped him short; looking down, he discovered why his leg hadn't held him up.

It wasn't attached to him anymore.

Oh. Oh, well. So much for that. Topher felt almost giddy; blood slicked the stone beneath them both, and a weird, relieved smile crept across his face all on its own. His vision began to dim immediately, and he knew without a doubt that this was no accident or mistake; the clean, sharp line which bisected his right thigh ended in a torrent of flowing red that definitely meant his femoral artery had been severed. He'd bleed out in about ten seconds, tops. Good run. I did pretty good.

Opposite him, Hana was searching with furious desperation in her hip pouch; tears were streaming from her eyes, but Topher ignored all that. "Pretty cool," he whispered. "You can finish up here, right?" His head lolled.

"Bailey-sama, you must survive," the young woman moaned. Finally producing a healing potion, she jammed it into his mouth and began desperately tearing strips from her T-shirt to bind the gushing stump of his leg. "I possess no combat Class. I cannot...!"

"You can, actually," Topher murmured. He squinted, trying to make her face out through the darkness closing in around him. "Anything you want. You're no different'n me." Dimly, he realized that what he was saying was true in a way he couldn't articulate; the answer had been right in front of him all along. It's not about magic. It's not about power.

"How?!" Hana despaired; her Flux Blade, forgotten in her desperation to save Topher, glimmered in the dirt next to his hand.

Topher, bemused, picked it up. "With this." He giggled, wiggling his fingers over it. "A-hooreppa deba zoot. Bahanum. Um. Ehn Ehf Zefekk Zoff Neifod. There you go." He handed it to her gently as light, a brighter light than anything either of them had ever seen, bloomed from the blade even as it settled in Hana's hand. Topher's vision washed out and faded away; his limbs felt cold and immobile, but he felt light and warm. His lips curled back from bloody teeth in a peaceful, satisfied smile. "You got this. Be y'rself. Tell 'nasha..." But his breath failed, and he let out a regretful sigh. Oh well. Probably for the best.

His unseeing eyes closed; sensation faded away from his body, and his consciousness drifted into the darkness. Probably all work out. The kids are all right.

She had one second.

She took a deep breath; held it.

But it was enough.

Topher, unconscious and clinging to life by the most gossamer of threads, did not see what happened next. But the others did.

Some sound, some hint that the context of the battle had changed, drew everyone's attention as Hana emerged from out of cover. The hunched, cautious posture that had been the hallmark of her combat stance was gone; her head was held high, her shoulders cast back, and her step sure.

She didn't know what she was doing.

And yet, she did; things were falling into place in her body and mind. She shed the wary, responsible tactical awareness that Zanasha's training had ingrained into her as if it were a light cloak; her step became, in an instant, less of a stride and more of a dance.

As Rudo and Zanasha watched, awed, Hana Shirakane cast away the fears and bitterness that had defined her since early childhood; she let go of her regret, her shame that had defined the childhood of a girl who had been too afraid to tell cute boys that she, too, played Genshin Impact. The shyness of a girl that had stealthily watched her older brothers' anime from behind the couch and dreamed of someday being kissed by a boy as cool and pretty as Gojo Satoru; that had looked up to the sky and wished, with every ounce of passion in a maiden heart, that she could ever have the bravery to punish evil on behalf of the moon.

Vashyarl, no fool, sensed its peril; instantly, it unleashed a storm of spells, lightning and arcane bolts and killing winds. But Hana's graceful approach flowed over, around, and under them with no hesitation; instinctively, she understood that the fear that had kept her safe had also been holding her back. Over and over, she stepped blindly and confidently around an attack, trusting in Elegant Step to prevent a loss of balance or footing; and over and over, it did so, carrying her on the strength of her inner grace with a power and might she'd never dared to dream. In her hands, her Flux Blade was shimmering and glowing, shifting and unfolding into shapes she didn't understand; now a fan, now a trowel, now a long needle...

With a shriek, Vashyarl reared up and unleashed its killing breath; but Hana merely gestured, and her Flux Blade unfolded into its true shape. An impossibly long ribbon, coiling and uncoiling forever, snaked out and touched the earth before her; and, with a frightening detonation of chaotic power, the ground between them exploded. Tiny stones and chunks of concrete flew upwards, stealing the momentum and forward rush of Vashyarl's breath even as they formed a mid-air staircase for the briefest of half-instants; and up the steps Hana danced, her hair flowing behind her like a black thundercloud. Up, forward, and over, rising like a pure tone even as a silent symphony of power carried her up into the air, the barest whisper of a touch of a toe upon a flying chunk of debris moving her further forward and up. Each moment, an impossibly fragile chance amongst a thousand certainties of failure; together, a bright and shining thread pointing directly towards victory.

"Impossible," the dragon protested feebly, its sibilant speech breathless with disbelief. "You are a peasant. A servant."

"I might be a servant," the young woman returned, with the most charming of smiles, "but you're the one about to get served."

And then she struck.

Her Flux Blade gathered itself, like a coiling snake, into a new shape; and in her hand formed a long, bright sword, slender and impossibly sharp, that bespoke a purity of spirit and intent straight from her unbreakable will. Into the space of a held breath, Hana swung it easily, almost gently; the stroke reverberated, crossing the thirty-foot distance between her and the dragon with a crescent-shaped emission of power and light that hung for a long instant.

Topher, had he been awake and able to view the Metaphrastic realm, would have seen the truth of what happened; would have seen Hana's supple, slender thread of fragile and flexible power weave and dance its way through myriad impossibly small gaps in the secret, hidden protections of hundreds and hundreds of layers of magical power that constituted Vashyarl's puissance and might. But what Rudo and Zanasha saw was a strike -- a single, triumphant strike worthy of legend -- which parted the dragon's gargantuan head from its massive serpentine neck in a way that reminded one, somehow, of a rose's head being pruned.

With an astonished and disbelieving expression, Vashyarl's head fell to earth; its body followed a moment later with yet another of the cataclysmic crashes that had quite lost their dramatic import over the last few minutes. For a minute or two, everything was still.

Then, remembering herself, Hana cried out and turned back, scrambling up the rubble and scree back to where she had left Topher's body; Rudo and Zanasha dashed after her, but could not remotely match her pace. When she found him still alive, breathing breaths so shallow that they were almost imaginary, she nearly wept with relief; but quick discussion revealed that neither she nor Rudo had any more healing potions.

But, before anyone could really get any wind into the sails of their incipient panic, the situation changed one more time.

What began near the ceiling as a small glimmer of golden light erupted, with almost no preamble, into a giant golden lance of power; when the light cleared away, an elf wearing golden robes and a long-suffering expression was standing beneath a large hole that extended upwards, burrowing through rock and room the entire height of the dungeon. "Topher Bailey," Kelfir moaned, raising his weary eyes to the scene before him, "in the name of the All-Forest, what have you done now?!"

END OF VOLUME 4