Doyle
***
Of course, everyone was either eager or anxious to see the prodigious great-grandson of the infamous Necro King in action.
If he was anything like his progenitors, he had the power to end the match in an instant. But if I knew enough about him, I knew that he wouldn't. He would give everyone a show that would remain in their nightmares or dreams for years to come.
That's what he had been doing thus far after all.
Still, I never thought it would come to this. Fifty of the Nonus' strongest guilds posed on the edges of their seats to watch a fifteen-year-old half-drow read a slip of paper until that familiar smirk came across his face. A sign he came to a complete understanding of his task and thought it was either exciting or amusing.
Or both.
He muttered something too low for the scrying to pick up and without him even moving, the relatively small shadow cast below him darkened and expanded to rise in a cloud of thick umbral smoke. Concealing him entirely.
"According to his file, Amun fights as if he were undead." Zeff began explaining before the ensuing queries grew to a state of worry or panic. "Even during his encounters, he's been stabbed and cut. Had his bones broken and has lost immense volumes of blood. Yet, he remained fighting until he either needed to heal or found himself victorious."
There was a slight pause. Almost like a memory played back in Zeff's mind to affirm what he was to say next. "That gave us the implication that he was trained by the Necro King to fight in such a way, but he does in fact feel pain. In other words, he feigns undeath to strike fear into his opponents.
"To counter that." He continued. "Our decision was to pair him against a Minotaur. The scent of blood and the sound of cracking bone or tearing flesh sends them into an enraged bloodlust. That rage increases their physical aspects and their innate healing factor, making them extremely hard to kill. And their acute sense of smell paired with an inability to get lost makes evading them almost impossible.
"A sufficiently enraged minotaur will hunt you to the end of the Plane, they say." He let out a light chuckle that was admittedly well-received. "However, minotaurs are at a disadvantage in the face of Amun's magic. So, in a way, the Bairn is a perfect opponent for him."
"Then why does he dress as if he's to take a walk through a garden?" A face from Orion's Army spat.
For whatever reason, I'd been averting my eyes from the cloud of darkness surrounding Amun and instead have been absently shifting my eyes between the various parties at play in the room. I noticed nothing then, aside from their various placements throughout the room. Me and the other first-year teachers accompanied the Class Instructors. Minus Titus of course, who was scowling alongside Raymond Polaris and the rest of Stellaris Garrison on the far side of the room.
Now though, I noticed the wide eyes and the mouths left ajar. I heard the subtle whispers and saw the pointing. And my eyes followed.
They saw Amun, standing proud and shirtless with a smokeleaf cigar dangling from his lips. Wearing nothing but a pair of flowing trousers tucked into thin boots that were a shade blacker than the pants; which themselves had been tied off by a sash made of gilded silk. His hair, usually left to drape atop his shoulders, was tied off at the top by a golden hairpin that resembled a large leafless tree sitting before the sun.
Just like the one on his chest.
It only came into view when he turn to lift himself off the ground. An impossibly black line traced a half-circle that started from his left hip and rose along the line of his ribs to the apex below his sternum before it arced down to his other hip. And a great tree. Leafless and dying it appeared, with a great trunk that sprouted at his navel, grew to his sternum, and branched across his pectorals in a spectacular web of branches.
"Is that… his mark?"
My inquiry was one of many. Dozens, hundreds probably. But there were no answers. Those who potentially had an idea said nothing. They only watched Amun approach the storage crystal to retrieve his ornate pair of daggers and tuck them into his sash with an almost palpable intensity. They stared as he withdrew his spear to casually tossed it aside and it fell, dropped into his shadow without pause or resistance. They studied his every movement as he paused to fashion the brooch onto his sash. Then a wave of relief washed over them.
It was a peculiar piece. Worn by the second and third-year students for the sake of the staff knowing their whereabouts and health conditions during their journey's down south and abroad. It could also envelop the students in a healing cocoon should the need arise. But it couldn't scry. It couldn't listen.
That was the job of several combined guilds. Bombyx Grove, the White Wisps, Agnes Arcanum, Rex Magica and The Cowl, and several more. All working together for the first time in history to judge a fifteen-year-old half-drow and devil.
Thus was the world we lived in.
Regardless, what they came up with was effective. With it, we knew the dragon's location, and the scrying could follow Amun's movements and could even playback his voice. It could see in clarities the Bodhi Tree's enchantments could only dream of and in mana too. So long as Amun didn't produce any more magical darkness or travel too far from the scrying orbs at least, but I was certain he would.
He emerged facing upright but still levitating as he looked around a grassy field for the target and hardly seemed to concentrate as a thick veil of mana shrouded his skin and condensed into a crystalline material. He continued turning and suddenly stopped as if he saw it, the hurricane of crescent streaks and spirals of fiery mana swarming amidst an otherwise peaceful field.
The mana of a red dragon. Similar, yet opposite to Amun's, in a way. They both had arcana. But where the dragon's was like a calamity manifest, Amun's was a plague in waiting. The former was searing with rage, the latter was cold with indifference. Opened in small bursts that had the power to encompass counties.
With a wave of his hand, Amun released one such burst. A wave of dark purple mana that expanded and grew and kept growing until it blew past the scope of our scrying.
Suddenly, he fell to a gentle landing and the torrent of burning mana responded. A horrendous roar pierced the air. Guttural and shrieking and packed with mana, it released a wave of energy that bent the grasses in the distance flat before they ignited without warning. And then another. And another. Gust after concussive gust, wave after beating wave, the grassland was flattened and ignited before Amun's eyes.
But he just sat there. Beaming wide like a young master in a weapons shop.
"Why does he not react!?" Someone screamed.
"Because he knows not the gravity of his situation." Dende's radiant voice silenced most of the room in an instant.
I, however, could hardly hold back from laughing at the inadvertent pun, but I also wasn't worried about Amun's lack of reaction. He was a master of doing a lot with a little. But I wasn't going to tell them that.
I wasn't going to spill my student's secrets.
It swept through the grass at low speed, its maw open wide to spit out a 30-meter wide cone as it strafed over Amun, covering him in flames and setting the grasslands ablaze while it wheeled around to come to a landing.
Suddenly, Amun blinked and when the screen refocused on him, I knew.
No new dragon slayer would be born on this day.
It was the birth of something much worse. But something I would accept all the same.
Amun was standing at its side, still beaming in admiration while the dragon screamed, releasing another burst of heat before it slammed its wing down. Cracking the ground beneath it and igniting more fields of grass around it.
But Amun blinked again. He appeared a few meters away from its hind leg and the dragon spun around at blinding speed and its tail followed. Arcing right through the dark wisps of Amun's incorporeal Wraith Form to send out a wave of superheated mana that ignited a four hundred meter stretch of grasslands behind Amun.
But he was just floating there. The widest smile I'd ever seen plastered across his face as he beamed. "Fascinating!"
It wheeled around to swipe at Amun with its claws but Amun just blinked out the way again, smiling to himself while he gave broad strokes to its ego.
"I find myself humbled in the presence of your magnificence." He beamed.
The beast roared and flapped its wings to take off. Amun casually flicked his hand to release a domain of silvery-white mana that stopped at the edge of the dragon's snout before he spawned a globule of the purple gravity mana to give chase.
"He's… studying it!" The Life Blood' Guildmaster cried. "Why, I've had the same look many times over the years. Though… my subjects were usually. Well, deceased."
Suddenly, everything went dark and pandemonium ensued. Bombyx and the White Wisps scrambled to reconnect the link as quickly as possible while screams and shouts and cries rose through the room. Titus began scowling. Eiriol was laughing.
Emperor Morningstar was watching with intent silence. Waiting for the screens to shift perspectives and reveal the young red dragon standing on the ground, its head tilted in an almost inquisitive manner while it stared at the half-elf standing with his arms spread to his sides, his mouth moving with noiseless words.
"What happened?"
"I hear nothing!"
"What's he saying?"
As the seconds ticked by, the dragon's posture relaxed further and the tension in the room drew tighter. It replied, noiselessly in the same way Amun had spoken. Then the seconds passed to minutes. More questions were thrown out and people began to shift as if they were preparing to move until lights flashed and a horrendous scratching sound filled the air.
All eyes snapped to the screens to bear witness to a sphere of distorted space forming around Amun and the dragon. In swirls of reds and blacks and golds like black oil standing on top of water, the space mixed and churned and roiled before dark clouds bloomed from within to consume the entirety of the shell.
It grew and the scrying point distanced itself in turn. But still, it grew. It condensed. Fantastic bolts of seafoam green and gray-black lightning streaked out from within the sphere as it expanded and darkened into the impossible darkness that was the void.
And then it burst.
We had no need for the scrying orbs at that point, not that we could still use them in the first place, but we could see it clearly through the windows. A blank spot on reality, rising through the clouds like a colossal tower.
Like a plague, it infected the scattered clouds and made many more in turn as it breached them, morphed them into ashen gray storm clouds that flashed in the same seafoam-green radiance as before. Then, it began slowing. Halting as it reached the same elevation of the acorn in which we occupied before it splayed like a great hand.
Or like the great tentacles of a Kraken, the tendrils of void scattered apart and began raging. Lashing out with wild abandon to unearth plates of material from the ground far below and to delete swaths of air from the skies high above.
The skies howled in protest, ripping leaf and branch and trunk from the ground to mix into the toiling clouds of earth the tendrils had rent and were rending still as it whipped and thrashed and flicked its arms in mindless controlled fury. Bending in unnatural angles to spare the landmasses floating between it and the ever-expanding landscape it was so intent on rending.
Eventually, the tendrils began to slow and the chaos ceased immediately. The arms then rose and froze in a picturesque fashion to give the image of a colossal tree that towered to the heavens. Dark as the abyss it was, like a willow tree placed before the morning sun. Still. Unmoving like the Bodhi Tree itself, even as the air and boulders and floating trees swarmed around it like a hive of enraged wasps.
In the face of such a sight, the room was forced into a silence that threatened to last into eternity. Then, a blur of motion served to unpause time. The Void Tree was now moving again. Twitching. Reaching a single tendril up and out in our direction.
And then a flash of light served kicked my lungs off of break time. I felt myself gasping loudly, cold sweat covering my shaking body, turning with nary an acknowledgment to Eiriol's snickering to find Emperor Morningstar missing from his seat. Titus was storming out the door and Olga was urging me out of my seat as she rose from hers.
"We have to go!"
She disappeared at once. Up the wall and out the window she jumped to be carried to Amun as quickly as possible. But I couldn't move. I could only watch the tendril keep reaching. Looming. Descending and slowing to a halt at the edge of Cooke Party's courtyard like the finger of a god descending to bless a single blade of grass in the form of a divine flash of emptiness.
Like the universe itself had blinked, the darkness appeared and disappeared in an instant. The Void Tree was gone. As were the dark clouds and deathly lightning and the rocks and the trees and the charred grass and dirt that was storming within them.
All of it was gone. Even the reaching branch of nothing. Standing in its place was Amun, grinning like a prince who'd just been crowned king.
Or he was, up until a flash of light appeared before him. When that happened, all his joy and pride and amiability and excitement melted away at once, setting off a wave of mixed reactions from the crowd around me. Zeff was trying to back further into his seat as if to hide from the coming tide. Eiriol was now the one to be on the edge of her seat, though she was stiff with laughter. Every guild from Polaris was indignant and soured in the face.
And I was doing everything in my power to get off my ass. But a part of me knew my appearance would be meaningless and thus tied me down mercilessly.
So instead, I turned to Eiriol, Corym, and Indra with the weakest, 'I guess you were right' smile I could muster. "I guess he decided to do it first."
"Yes." Eiriol rose with an amused sigh. "So let us see what that means for ourselves, shall we?"