Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

In any case, Princess was like an eight-headed train that didn’t need train tracks to get around. Her great speed and bulk meant that she could simply barrel through the undead horde with minimal resistance, trampling smaller corpses without slowing down and knocking the bigger stuff aside to continue forward.

Then Alanic and his fellow mages finished their spell and summoned a fiery twister inside the heart of the undead horde, where it began to suck in the undead towards the center and got increasingly bigger and stronger the more undead it consumed.

Zorian had seen that spell before, and now he even knew what the secret behind it was. The fire twister was actually trapping the souls of the undead it consumed and used them to power itself, which was why it seemingly never ran out of mana and only got stronger as it killed more and more undead. It was a rather dark piece of magic by church standards, almost necromantic in the way it functioned, but fighting fire with fire and all that. The fire twister would release the souls it had gathered when the spell eventually ended, letting them move on to the afterlife.

Before Zorian could celebrate too much, hundreds of red figures poured out of the mansion, flying into the sky. Zorian squinted at the sight, finding the enemies in front of his unfamiliar. They looked almost like bats, but with disturbingly humanoid bodies and faces, and a snake-like tail trailing behind them. The tail had a toothy mouth at the end, Zorian eventually realized, and the tails moved around like they had a mind of their own.

[Demons,] Alanic sent to him through their telepathic link.

[Minor or major?] Zorian asked.

[There is no such thing as a minor demon,] Alanic answered him. [But I suppose these would count as minor .]

Zorian clacked his tongue. Sadly, due to the way the time loop functioned, he had no experience at all in how to fight something like this. All he knew was that demons were an incredibly diverse bunch, with many strange powers that sometimes varied from individual to individual, never mind different species. Fighting them was almost as bad as fighting a human mage. You never really knew what to expect.

[Let us handle them,] another voice demanded over the telepathic link.

Zorian didn’t argue, he gave his permission and a swarm of sulrothum suddenly rose into the sky with a terrible buzzing sound and flew off to intercept the demon bets.

For a while, Zorian busied himself with guiding several severing discs and decapitating war trolls and winter wolves while Princess trampled everything in her path, but gradually things began to bother him. Things were going pretty good, but he couldn’t help but feel that this was because the mansion defenders weren’t really giving it their all to stop them. They were just sending disposable troops to buy themselves more time for… something.

The fact Oganj and his two students were just sitting there on the mansion roof and watching the battle with seemingly no intention to get involved was especially bothering him. Why were the freaking dragons not attacking!?

Hell, they hadn’t even sent the skeletal dragon into the fray!

He nervously fingered the cube given to him by the angel he summoned, wondering if he should–

No. No, this wasn’t the right time. Using it now would be a mistake. Something in the back of his mind insisted that this was true.

He put the cube back into his jacket pocket and made a quick conversation with Zach, Alanic, and everyone else.

Soon, an absolutely massive creature rose into the air in the distance before rapidly approaching. It was the Sulrothum holy beast, the massive sandworm that had given them so much trouble when they had tried to fight it. Now it was on their side. Flying on hundreds of translucent butterfly-like wings, the worm made a beeline for the three dragons.

At the same time, the others also made their own moves. Zorian projected a blast of repelling force in front of Princess, knocking aside some troublesome opponents that had halted her advance and ordered her to head straight for the mansion and its guardian dragons, damn everything else. Meanwhile, a milky white orb suddenly rose in the air, carrying Zach, Xvim, Alanic, and Daimen towards the dragons with incredible speed and agility.

The dragons immediately realized they were being targeted, and rose into the air as one. Oganj bellowed out something to his two students and they each picked their own opponent – the left one went to intercept Zorian and Princess, the right one flew off to engage the massive sandworm in the sky above the mansion. As for Oganj, he seemed to have identified Zach’s group as the biggest danger out of them all, and thus something he should deal with personally.

Zorian was modest enough to admit the dragon mage was probably right.

In any case, once Oganj decided it was time to fight, he did not hold back in the slightest. Zach’s sphere was too fast and maneuverable for the great dragon to dodge it or breathe fire on it, so he instead reached for his magic. Waving his hands in a surprisingly human-like gesture, Oganj created an incandescent white sphere in his hand a thrust it in the sphere’s general direction.

Even though the attack wasn’t aimed at him, and he was quite a distance away, Zorian could still feel his neck hairs raise at the amount of mana Oganj poured into the spell. Dragon magic was bullshit.

Thankfully, all of them were quite unusual in their own way, and Zach had three other people supporting him. Before the destructive sphere could actually get close to Zach’s sphere and detonate, space started to bend around it, like something invisible was being wrapped around it, and then the sphere seemingly winked out of existence.

Moment later, a terrifying detonation sounded in the distance. Xvim had teleported Oganj’s projectile away into a nearby region, but its detonation still sent vibrations to Zorian’s chest and lit up the sky like a second sun.

Gods… no wonder Zach had died to Oganj so many times. How were they even supposed to fight someone like this!?

"Watch out, you stupid savage!" Sudomir’s voice suddenly echoed all around the mansion, magically amplified and projected so that it could be heard clearly in the whole region. "You’re lucky they got rid of that projectile or you’d have leveled the whole mansion! Since when is this kind of magic acceptable when you’re defending a place!?"

"Shut up!" Oganj yelled back in clear human tongue, his voice just as loud as Sudomir’s, despite using no magic to amplify it. "I know what I’m doing! Go whine to your dead wife instead of bothering me when I’m fighting!"

Zorian ignored the bickering between Sudomir and Oganj, because he had more immediate issues to worry about. Oganj’s student was probably not as powerful as his master, but he was still a dragon mage and he was coming for him.

Zorian fired a force lance at the incoming dragon’s wing, hoping to ground it. Dragon flight was magical, but they still needed their wings intact if they wanted to use it, so wing membranes were a big, well-known weakness.

Too well-known, apparently. The dragon tried to swerve out of the way of the force lance, but when Zorian reveled he could make the lance pivot in the middle of flight and change directions on a whim, he found out that the dragon also erected a shield around himself just in case. The force lance hit the shield and shattered harmlessly upon it.

Visibly narrowing eyes at Zorian and Princess, the dragon took a deep breath and fires a stream of fire at them. Apparently this dragon practiced magic that allowed him to shape his breath into various projectiles like exploding fireballs and fast-moving beams of flame.

He still couldn’t hit Princess. With her eight heads and her strangely-shaped body, she kind of looked like she should be clumsy and slow… but she was a divinely-enhanced beast and this impression was totally wrong. Princess was both fast and maneuverable, and not only did she skillfully dodge every projectile the young dragon mage directed at her, she even found the time to pick up various loose stones and small winter wolves that hadn’t moved away fast enough and hurl them straight at the dragon in the air. She was a pretty good shot, too.