Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Plus, of course, she had Zorian riding on her back. Whenever she couldn’t dodge something, he would just deflect it away while periodically annoying the dragon with simple force projectiles. He was pretty sure that this was the dragon that had wanted to fight Princess when she had bellowed out a challenge at the start of the battle, so he should be a fairly irritable sort.

Annoyingly, the dragon had placed mental shields on itself before the battle had even begun. They weren’t much, but dragons were already a pain to affect with his powers, even without dedicated mental defenses, due to their magic resistance. The mental shield, crude as it was, simply made the idea of targeting it with mind magic a complete non-starter.

Thankfully, Zorian’s hopes about the dragon’s irritability proved to be correct. After repeatedly dodging his projectiles and harassing him with force spells, the dragon had apparently had enough. He could have continued flying high, outside of Zorian’s and Princess’s effective reach, but instead he decided to descend closer to the ground so he could catch them with a more powerful attack.

It was a good attack, Zorian had to admit. The dragon created a translucent blue ball in front of him and launched them at the pair. As it got closer, it suddenly extended into a large gelatinous dome and trapped them inside it. Princess tried to bit through it, but the gelatinous barrier resisted her effort and even glued one of her jaws shut, forcing Zorian to cut her free. Meanwhile, the dragon clearly took time powering up some kind of massive fire spell that would incinerate them both to ashes, now that they were both trapped in a small area with no way to dodge.

Unfortunately for him, Princess could teleport.

Just before the dragon could release his spell, Princess quickly curled up into a ball and disappeared from her gelatinous prison, taking Zorian with her.

Before the dragon could realize what happened, he had already launched the fire attack at the empty dome, wasting his spell and hitting nothing. Then Princess popped into practically next to him and Zorian quickly fired a whole bundle of severing whips at the dragon’s torso.

Being considerably tougher than a human, the dragon mage was not cut into tiny chunks by the severing whips, but they did cut into his flesh, drawing blood and wrapping too tightly around him to be easily dislodged. Especially since any struggle would just worsen his wounds. Zorian anchored the severing whips to Princess’s back and ordered her to pull .

She did. The dragon let loose an almost girlish scream and he plummeted to the ground, severing whips digging ever more deeper into his flesh. Before he could gather his bearings Princess was already upon him, heads biting and snarling, and they both went down in a tangle of limbs and necks. The fight quickly degenerated into a weird but vicious wrestling match, the dragon and divine hydra rolling around the ground, knocking down small trees and smashing boulders into powder.

As for Zorian, he had thankfully already jumped off Princess’s back when she went after the downed dragon, and was currently flying towards the other two dragon fights in a similar milky white sphere than Zach used to confront Oganj. He felt a little bad leaving Princess to fight the dragon on her own, but he had faith she wasn’t going to get herself killed in his absence. She was a pretty tough girl.

The other two fights, he soon realized, were still ongoing. In fact, they had merged into some kind of confused combined battle, thanks to two facts. One, Oganj’s student couldn’t really stop the flying sand worm – he could keep it busy, but the sand worm was too big and massive for the relatively tiny dragon to stop it from going wherever it wished. Secondly, the iron beaks decided, on their own initiative, to pick a fight with the two dragons. Zorian had no idea how that had happened, since picking up a reason from the minds of iron beaks itself proved unhelpful – they just very, very angry and apparently hated the three dragons from the very moment they had shown up and arrogantly claimed the mansion’s roof like they owned the whole place.

Compared to dragons, the iron beaks were nothing. However, there was a lot of them, and they knew when to attack and when to retreat. Morever, Zach and the others were protecting them, since they found the vicious corvids useful as a distraction.

Also, apparently Sudomir really didn’t like the fact his mansion, which contained his beloved wife’s spirit, was being in danger by all this fighting around it. As such, his voice constantly sounded from the mansion, shouting instructions at the two dragons and insults at Zach and the others. He was starting to sound increasingly incoherent as time went by, and by the time Zorian got close to the battlefield, the man had apparently had enough.

The roof of the mansion crumbled and the skeletal dragon hidden inside the top half of it started to pick itself up from the rubble.

Oganj gave the skeletal dragon an angry, and the mansion itself, a contemptuous snort before focusing back on his current fight.

Of course, the other combatants wouldn’t allow another powerful creature to join the fight like that, so before the skeletal dragon could launch itself into the air Daimen suddenly materialized a giant ectoplasmic body around himself and tackled it off the roof and into the ground below. Daimen had once used this spell to tangle with Princess, back before they had realized how to take control of her, and now it was being used to restrain Sudomir’s skeletal dragon.

Sadly, Sudomir was no amateur when it came to building his artificial horrors, and the skeletal dragon wouldn’t be so easily restrained. Daimen gave it his best, but it was clear that he was losing… and none of the others could afford to turn their back on the other two dragons to give him a hand.

But Zorian, who had just arrived on the scene, could.

Before the two dragons could react, Zorian reached into the imperial orb that he carried with him and an absolutely massive golem popped into existence. It was six meters tall and fully made from gleaming, nigh-indestructible metal. The ground sank under its weight as it barreled towards the skeletal dragon being desperately pinned to the ground by Daimen’s conjured giant. Perhaps it was just Zorian’s imagination, but he could almost see an expression of pure panic in the dragon’s empty eye sockets just before the metal colossus jumped on top of him and brought down its heavy spiked fists right on top of its skull.

Sadly, the moment was slightly ruined by the fact said heavy metal fists didn’t shatter the skeletal dragon’s skull into tiny fragments with a single blow. Instead, the golem just chipped the skull and ended any hope it had of getting into the air, where its maneuverability would make a huge threat to everyone on the enemy side.

Before Zorian could celebrate and focus on grinding the stupid bone dragon to dust, though, a strange ripple emanated from the mansion, causing both him and everyone else to halt in his tracks.

"I really hoped this wouldn’t be necessary…" Sudomir’s voice sounded again, this time sounding calmer and more subdued.

[Shit!] Zach suddenly swore over their telepathic connection, and then Zorian’s entire perception lurched and twisted. His vision warped, his knees buckled and bile rose to his throat, threatening to make him puke.

He immediately recognized the symptoms. It reminded him of a botched teleportation spell, except…

He quickly looked around. He was still next to Iasku Mansion, the colossus golem was still holding the skeletal dragon pinned to the ground not far from him, and the iron beaks cawed frantically in the sky above, their synchronized murder-flock wobbling chaotically in a disorganized fashion. He was impressed they hadn’t dropped from the sky when the dizziness hit them.