The Conjurers

Chapter 5 

Black energy

The fall was a silent, gut-wrenching plunge through smoke and embers. Kai had released the fiery chain and dagger the instant they bit deep into the dragon's neck, the weapon vanishing back into the ether from which it was conjured. Gravity reclaimed him. 

The wind ripped at his tattered coat, ash stinging his eyes. Above, blotting out the hellish sky, the dragon convulsed. Its wounded shriek was a physical thing, tearing through the roar of the burning forest below a sound of violated divinity, raw and terrifying.

Dark, steaming ichor, thick as tar and smelling of burnt copper and volcanic sulfur, rained down in glistening ropes from the grievous wound where the molten dagger had pierced scale, muscle, and something vital.

Kai snapped his fingers mid-fall.

Crack.

The cool, familiar weight of the dark metal dagger materialized instantly in his right hand. He clutched it like an anchor. Above him, the dragon wasn't dying. It was enraged. Agony translated into world-shattering fury.

Its massive wings, faltering only a moment ago, beat with renewed, desperate violence. Its sinuous neck whipped side to side, trying to dislodge the phantom pain, spraying gouts of ichor. Its molten gold eyes, wide with shock and blinding pain, rolled wildly, searching for the falling spark that had dared wound it so deeply.

It hadn't spotted him yet, lost in its disoriented thrashing against the pain.

Now.

Kai triggered the golden eyes.

The world didn't slow. It stopped.

The sensation was beyond disorientation; it was the universe pausing for him. The rushing wind ceased. The falling embers hung suspended, perfect points of fading orange light against the bruised twilight sky.

The dragon's thrashing became a frozen tableau of agony a colossal statue of scaled fury captured mid-spasm, wings outstretched, neck arched, mouth open in a silent scream of pain, droplets of dark blood crystallized in the air like grotesque jewels.

But Kai saw more. So much more.

The very air around him was no longer empty. It was thick with swirling currents of energy not the vibrant, life-giving Ambient Spirit Energy (ASE) Conjurers painstakingly drew upon, but something corrupted.

It fell like invisible black snow, tendrils of pure negation, darker than the deepest void between stars. It was a viscous, tar-like miasma that clung to everything: the suspended embers, the smoke, the very particles of air.

Kai understood instantly, viscerally, why Conjurers couldn't see it, why they absorbed it unknowingly with every act of creation. It was poison woven into the fabric of power itself, the hidden cost pulsing beneath every conjured flame, every summoned gust. The sight was horrifying, a glimpse into the decaying engine of the world.

His gaze, burning with ancient, molten gold, snapped to the dragon.

The colossal beast wasn't just flesh and scale anymore. It was rendered transparent, a complex, horrifyingly beautiful diagram etched in light and shadow against the frozen sky. He saw the dense latticework of bones, thicker than ancient oaks.

He saw the rivers of ichor, not just blood, but liquid fire and raw elemental force pulsing through veins wider than his body. He saw the dense knots of muscle, layered like geological strata, humming with contained power. He saw the intricate network of nerves, glowing faintly like buried lava flows.

And he saw the source.

Deep within the armored chest cavity, beneath layers of scale, muscle, and pulsating energy-veins, lay the dragon's heart. But it wasn't a heart of flesh. It was a core. A fist-sized, multi-faceted crystal, burning with an intensity that dwarfed the sun. Pure, condensed elemental fire, bound and regulated.

Radiating from it, feeding the furnace in its throat and the power in its wings, were thick, luminous conduits of raw energy, the dragon's version of ASE veins, pulsing with blinding white-gold light. Yet, even here, Kai saw the insidious black snow of corrupted energy swirling, drawn towards the core, tainting the edges of its pristine light.

The core was the anchor, the wellspring. The vulnerability he instinctively knew Conjurers could never perceive.

Target.

Time remained frozen, but Kai moved within the stillness. His golden eyes narrowed, focusing solely on the pulsing core visible through layers of phantom-translucent scale and muscle on the dragon's underside. He didn't conjure fire. He didn't summon wind. He pushed.

With a thought that felt like tearing his own mind, Kai manipulated the air directly beneath him. Not conjuring it, but commanding the existing, frozen molecules. He slammed them downwards with impossible force.

CRACK!

The sound, impossibly loud in the timeless void, was the air itself fracturing under the localized pressure wave. Kai shot upwards like a bullet fired from the sky. The frozen embers parted around him. He arrowed straight towards the dragon's massive, exposed belly, hanging vulnerable and exposed in its frozen agony.

He reached it in a timeless instant. His right hand, clutching the dark metal dagger, drew back. He didn't aim for scale or flesh. He aimed for the precise point in the translucent image overlaying reality, the point directly above the pulsing, crystalline core burning within the beast.

He drove the dagger home with every ounce of strength, desperation, and the alien power fueling his golden eyes.

The blade struck the thick, overlapping scales. In frozen time, there was no sound of impact, only a visible shockwave rippling outwards from the point of contact, distorting the translucent image of the dragon's innards. The scales resisted, ancient armor forged in stellar furnaces.

Kai pushed, pouring the will channeled through his golden eyes into the strike. The dagger flared white-hot, not with conjured fire, but with pure kinetic energy amplified by temporal distortion. It punched through.

Deep. Deeper. Through layers of scale, dense muscle, protective membranes of elemental energy.

It found the core conduit.

The dagger's tip scraped against the searing surface of the crystalline heart.

Time snapped back.

Kai was slammed back into the roaring chaos. He was under the dragon's belly, clinging like a parasite, his dagger buried hilt-deep in a wound that pulsed with blinding white-gold light. The shockwave of re-engagement was physical. The dragon's convulsion became a world-ending spasm.

"SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEONNNGH!"

The sound was beyond rage, beyond pain. It was the shriek of a god having its divine spark violated. It tore into the sky, louder than the thunder of its own fire, vibrating through Kai's bones with such intensity he felt his teeth rattle loose.

The dragon exploded upwards. Its wings beat with frenzied, panic-driven power, no longer seeking combat but desperate escape from the agony inside it. It corkscrewed violently, rolled, dove, and climbed again in a series of gut-wrenching maneuvers designed to dislodge the impossible tormentor.

Kai held on. His left hand gripped a protruding scale edge, fingers screaming as they threatened to tear off. His right hand was fused to the dagger's hilt, buried in the pulsing wound. The heat radiating from the puncture was immense, searing his face, cooking the leather of his glove. He could feel the chaotic energy surging through the blade the dragon's life force, its elemental heart screaming in protest.

He couldn't pull the dagger out. He couldn't let go. He had to hurt it more.

With a roar that was swallowed by the dragon's ongoing shriek, Kai raised the white gun in his left hand. He jammed the unnervingly cold muzzle into the wound, right beside the buried dagger, into the searing, light-filled gash leaking molten ichor.

He pulled the trigger. Again. And Again. And Again.

THWUMP! THWUMP! THWWUMP! THWUMP!

The silent concussive blasts weren't hitting armor now. They were detonating inside the dragon's body cavity, right next to its crystalline core. The impacts weren't physical cracks anymore; they were muffled, sickening THUDS felt through Kai's arm and the dagger hilt.

Each shot sent a visible tremor through the colossal beast, a fresh wave of that world-shattering scream tearing from its throat. Molten ichor, mixed with flecks of white-gold crystalline shards and superheated steam, geysered from the wound, spraying over Kai, scalding his skin even through the coat. The smell was apocalyptic: burnt ozone, vaporized rock, and the coppery stench of divine blood.

The dragon went berserk. It wasn't flying; it was dying in the sky, and taking the world with it. It spun like a top, plunged towards the burning forest canopy, pulled up at the last second with a wrench that threatened to tear Kai's arms from their sockets, climbed vertically until the air grew thin and cold, then tumbled into a chaotic, wing-over-wing fall.

Fire erupted uncontrollably from its maw, not aimed, but vomited in great, spastic gouts that rained down indiscriminately, setting new swathes of forest ablaze far below. Its shrieks were constant now, a sonic weapon of pure agony that cracked ancient boulders on the ground and made Kai's ears bleed.

Kai clung on, a grim rider on a dying star. He fired the white gun until it clicked empty, the cold metal now searing hot from proximity to the dragon's internal inferno.

He felt the core through the dagger, the brilliant light flickering erratically, the structure fracturing. The corrupted black energy swirled violently around the wound now, drawn to the dying light like scavengers.

Then, the dragon ignited.

It wasn't breathing fire. Its entire body became fire. From the wound Kai had created, a blinding white-gold light erupted, consuming scale, muscle, and bone from the inside out. The heat radiating from the beast spiked exponentially, becoming an oven that would vaporize steel in seconds.

Kai's coat began to smolder instantly. His skin blistered. He had milliseconds before he was cooked alive within the dragon's own death throes.

He triggered the golden eyes one last time. The effort felt like driving red-hot spikes through his temples. Blood, thick and crimson, welled from the corners of his molten gold eyes, tracing heated paths down his ash-blackened cheeks.

Disappear.

He vanished from the dragon's searing underbelly a nanosecond before the internal conflagration would have consumed him.

He reappeared above the dragon. Not falling, but hanging in the smoke-choked sky, fifty feet above the beast that was now a comet of its own demise. Blood streamed freely from his golden eyes, mingling with sweat and ash on his face, a testament to the cosmic toll. The disorientation was profound, a nauseating sense of spatial dislocation. But his will was iron.

His right hand snapped out. Crimson sparks, fiercer and more desperate than ever, exploded into being. Fire roared from his palm and coalesced not into a simple dagger or chain, but into a weapon of brutal finality. A long, heavy chain of solidified white-hot flame materialized, hissing and spitting fury.

At its end, instead of a hook, was the dagger but transformed. It was longer, serrated along one edge, and spinning with terrifying speed, a circular blur of molten metal. A chainsaw blade forged of pure, conjured fire.

He gripped the chain close to the spinning blade, the heat radiating up his arm even through his conjurer's protection. His golden eyes, leaking crimson tears, fixed on the dragon's thrashing form below. The beast was trailing smoke and internal fire, its neck still arched in agony from the earlier neck wound, its movements growing increasingly erratic as its core destabilized.

Kai didn't hesitate. He dropped like a stone, gravity aided by a thought-driven push of air beneath his boots, accelerating his descent. The spinning, molten chainsaw blade whined like a banshee, trailing fire.

He swung the chain in a wide, vicious arc as he fell, gathering momentum, aiming not for the body, not for the wings, but for the base of the neck the spot already wounded, already weakened, where the massive skull met the sinuous spine.

The dragon, sensing the new threat above through its agony, began to twist its massive head upwards. Its molten eyes, dimming but still filled with bottomless fury, widened as it saw the golden-eyed demon descending with a wheel of fire.

Too late.

Kai hit the apex of his swing just as he reached the dragon's neck level. He put every ounce of his remaining strength, every shred of the alien power burning through his bleeding eyes, into the strike. He didn't cut. He sawed.

The sound was horrific. A metallic, wet shrieking combined with the furious whine of the spinning fire-blade biting into scale, muscle, tendon, and bone. Molten dragon scales sprayed like shrapnel.

Thick cords of muscle, glowing with internal heat, parted like rotten rope. Superheated steam and gouts of dark, pressurized ichor erupted from the widening wound. The serrated edge of the conjured chainsaw bit deep, then deeper, grinding against vertebrae thicker than ancient monoliths.

The dragon's final scream was cut short, literally. It became a wet, gurgling choke. Its body spasmed violently, a death throe that shook the air. Its wings flapped once, twice, uselessly.

The uncontrolled fire vomiting from its maw sputtered and died. Its massive head, still connected by shreds of muscle and sinew, lolled grotesquely.

Kai held on, suspended by the chain wrapped around his forearm, his boots braced against the dragon's heaving shoulder. He poured everything into the sawing motion. The chain thrummed in his grip, the blade shrieking as it met the dense dragon bone.

CRUNCH-SNAP!

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-CHUNK! WHIRRRRRRRRRR!

A sound like a mountain breaking. The chainsaw blade, fueled by Kai's dying will and the dragon's own failing life force, severed the last of the spine.

The dragon's head, eyes wide and finally devoid of fury, filled only with shock and the void of death, sheared clean off.

Kai released the chain. The fiery construct instantly dissipated, the chainsaw blade vanishing in a shower of dying sparks. He pushed off the headless corpse with the last of his strength as it began its final, terrible plunge.

He fell backwards through the smoke, watching the colossal, headless body of the ancient beast tumble end over end, trailing smoke and gore, towards the inferno it had created below.

A rain of dark blood and molten viscera fell with it. The massive head spun lazily beside the descending corpse, those once-molten eyes now dull obsidian marbles reflecting the hellish glow of the burning forest.

Kai hit the ground hard, rolling to absorb the impact in a patch of relatively clear, scorched earth near the edge of the devastation. He lay on his back, gasping, every muscle screaming, his lungs burning with smoke and exertion. Blood, warm and sticky, continued to seep from his golden eyes, blurring his vision.

The golden light within them flickered, faded, and finally winked out, leaving only the familiar, exhausted black. The alien power was spent. He was just Kai again. Broken. Bleeding. Alone amidst the ashes of a dead god.

Above, the headless dragon's corpse struck the burning forest with an impact that shook the earth, sending a final plume of fire and debris high into the smoke-choked sky.

The ancient beast, a creature of fire and fury, was consumed by the very element it had mastered, adding its colossal pyre to the burning world. Silence, heavy and absolute save for the crackle of the all-consuming fire, settled over the corpse-strewn ruin. The battle was over.