Chương 31: 28. Draconic Crossfire

Marcus had some misgivings about leaving his students alone for large stretches of time. After all, they had only gotten the ability to cast spells recently, and were still at the stage where they had far more power than common sense. Helvran, although quite powerful, was not the sort of general spellcaster that Marcus was, and might be unable to handle some of the weirder ideas his students could think of. Then there was the matter of outside threats, of which there were many.

Being part of the Great Sea Academy was supposed to ward most of these off, but… well, he'd already seen how that turned out recently. Still, while Marcus had some misgivings, it wasn't too much of a problem. He'd had even less supervision when he'd been their age, and he ended up just fine. They would just have to manage without him for a month.

As for outside threats, he doubted anyone would really try something – he had recently demonstrated a level of power which few could match, and the memory of it should still be fresh in everyone's mind. It was also winter. While snow and cold weather weren't an insurmountable obstacle for powerful adepts, they were an obstacle, and most powers avoided starting things during winter if they could.

"I could always have some of my clansmen move into your tower while you're away to keep an eye on things," Beortan offered.

"Or you can ask Titus for some guards and stewards. I'm sure he'd be happy to lend you some."

"No, there is no need for any of that," Marcus said. In truth, Marcus felt that this would cause more problems than it solved. Any help Beortan and Titus would send would consist of low-level adepts and regular people that would do little for security, but would be tempted to steal things from his base. There were quite a few valuable things scattered around the base, largely unsecured from theft.

It wasn't a problem so long as the only people wandering about were his students and Helvran, but if he got a bunch of strangers like that, ones that knew they were here only temporarily, things were bound to disappear. They might even get into arguments and fights with his students, and end up attacking or abusing them. No, it was best not to introduce an unknown factor like that on a whim. That said, he would likely need to hire some trusted help in case things like this happened in the future.

He couldn't keep relying solely on Helvran, since there was no telling how long the priest would even stay in his base – at any point the Raven Temple might send new instructions to him and have him move elsewhere. However, if he were hiring mages and warriors to help manage and defend his tower, he would have to pay them. This would require him to have a more regular stream of income, since adept salaries didn't come cheap…

especially since he would ideally want someone of third or fourth rank of power, rather than just anyone. And what if that hired help wanted to take in students of their own to teach, or get some hired help from the surrounding villages, or… It occurred to him that this sort of thing was probably why most adept organizations kept growing in size as time went by.

Even if they were funded by someone like him, who had no ambitions of creating a major faction and becoming a big player in the Silver League political landscape, it was convenient to have a bunch of trusted underlings to handle small tasks.

Unless those underlings were truly mercenary and constantly rotating, they were likely to set down roots in their new base and start gathering their own underlings, and then you'd need support staff and police forces, and then everything would spin out of control and keep growing. Hm. Maybe he should just push his students to grow faster even harder? If he could get them to rank two or three fast enough, he wouldn't need to hire any outside help to help out. He gathered all of his students and gave them the news.

"I should be back in a month or less," he explained.

"Don't make trouble for Helvran while I'm gone. He's quite a scary guy when he gets mad, despite his usual demeanor." Helvran raised his eyebrow at him, but said nothing in response.

"Should?" Volesus asked.

"We could always die, of course," Marcus said casually.

"Dragon hunting is dangerous business."

"Don't talk that way," Beortan said unhappily.

"That's bad luck."

"I guess that answers my question about whether you'll be bringing any of us on this trip," Agron commented.

"It's too dangerous for any of you to come along," Marcus said, shaking his head. Agron nodded, having expected as much. He glanced towards Beortan.

"How are mother and father doing?" he asked.

"They are healthy and in good spirits," Beortan told him.

"They tell you not to worry and focus on your studies. You know how it goes." Marcus reflected that it was fortunate that none of the students with families got too homesick during their time in the tower. It was common for apprentices and other young adepts to spend a lot of time away from their families, given that many academies were placed in isolated locales and gathered students from a very large area around them.

Sometimes this led to serious problems, even though adept organizations usually recruited teenagers that would soon be expected to leave their families and start their own lives, rather than literal children still dependent on their parents. Thankfully, Marcus's students were all fairly independent. After saying goodbye to Helvran and his students, he and Beortan made their way to his trusty snow griffon and flew off in the direction of the Bloodstone Mountains.

Beortan came from a small mountain village. In some ways, it was an even more humble base of operations than Marcus's own tower. Sure, the village had more people, but the land was harsher, and had less accessible food and building materials than the forest that surrounded the Zenith Academy. Many powerful adepts would move to a warm, wealthy city like Adria rather than persist living in a place like this after achieving power and fame, but Beortan was devoted to his people and never even considered it.

He was the leader of the White Dragon Clan, and though he travelled a lot and was frequently absent from his home, he regularly came back to this mountain village to solve disputes, preside over important tribal events and rituals, and check the young clansmen for any sign of potential talent worth nurturing. The journey to the village was uneventful. Bloodstone Mountains had plenty of flying predators, but since Beortan was riding a snow griffon, none of them wanted to try their luck with them.

It was one of the advantages of riding a magical beast over simply flying through magic like Marcus tended to do. Wild creatures did not necessarily recognize the level of danger that a flying mage represented – they were even less able to tell an adept's rank than people – but a big, predatory-looking griffon commanded respect. Marcus was slightly jealous about that… but only slightly. Griffons were hard to care for.

They were obligate carnivores, very picky about their accommodations, and took a long time to bond and get used to a rider. It was not worth it, or at least not for him. The village was surprisingly active when they landed, and not because they were expecting their arrival either. This high in the mountains, the winter was even harsher and snow covered everything, but people still departed from the village in small groups to hunt and forage in the wilds.

White Dragon Clansmen, both warriors and mages, had a fairly heavy focus on ice-element spells and abilities, which allowed them to operate in this kind of winter weather a lot more easily than adepts from the lowlands. They were also composed entirely out of adepts, though many were very low ranked – but that was still enough to make them able to go out into the wilds much more freely than comparable human communities elsewhere in the Silver League.

Marcus observed the place for a few minutes while Beortan exchanged greetings with some of the villagers and asked some basic questions about how they were doing. He tried to figure out what had changed since his last visit here, but Marcus had only been in Beortan's village once before, and that was in spring.

All the ice and snow made it difficult to do comparisons in his head, but he thought that Beortan upgraded his house somewhat in the six years he had been gone and reinforced the walls surrounding the village. The settlement as a whole seemed bigger, with sturdier buildings and a healthier-looking populace. Unsurprisingly, the White Dragon Clan was prospering.

Not only was their leader one of the most powerful elders in the Great Sea Academy, they also had a huge advantage when it came to exploiting the resources of the Bloodstone Mountains. Adrian adepts found it difficult to practice the cold-based magic necessary to operate here. Practicing a cold-based technique, learning ice element spells, and absorbing the logos of ice and snow… these things required a cold environment, the colder the better, and Adria was warm.

While Great Sea did set up some operations here, the native tribes simply had too much of an advantage on their home ground, and the academy had to settle for working with them for the most part. From what Marcus could tell, all of the mountain tribes were lately doing relatively well for themselves. The White Dragon Clan, Black Eagle Clan, and Rockbiters Clan were all slowly expanding their settlements and influence.

However, since the other two didn't have a spirit-rank adept, they lacked the power and prestige behind the White Dragon Clan. Beortan was just turning towards him, clearly wanting to say something, when he was interrupted by a very loud roar. A huge white shape flew overhead at high speeds, passing right above the village without stopping and sped off into the distance, towards the mountain tops.

Everyone – Beortan, Marcus, and all the villagers that were present outside – were silent and still for a full second, staring at the disappearing white shape in the distance.

"Is that the white dragon whose 'traces' you said you found?" Marcus asked casually. Beortan didn't answer him.

"She's bigger than I imagined," Marcus commented.

"How do you know it's a she?" Beortan asked, giving him an odd look.

"I have good eyesight and I know my dragon biology," Marcus said with a shrug.

"You know I've spoken to dragons before. I confused a female dragon with a male once, and she gave me an extended lecture on what to look for." It was the horns, mostly. Male dragons had much bigger horns than female ones. There were some other clues, but since he only had a quick glance at this one, he couldn't really notice anything more than that. That aside, the dragon seemed to be around ten meters long, although a lot of that was the tail. That was very big.

This was an ice dragon – they were the most reclusive and mysterious of the five true dragon species that inhabited Tasloa, so Marcus was unsure what was normal for them, but they should be similar to their more common relatives - the fire dragons and storm dragons that also made their home in Bloodstone Mountains. If they were comparable, then this was an old, experienced adult.

"This cannot be a coincidence," Beortan eventually said.

"Us coming here and the dragon deciding to take flight over a village just minutes afterwards…"

"Of course not," Marcus agreed.

"She saw two powerful mages arriving into her new territory and decided to send a message. But what message was that? That she'll destroy the village if we go after her? That she's challenging us to a fight? I don't get it." In old times, before the Lament Spire and the rise of the great academies, dragons like this would often move into an area and start demanding tribute from local communities. However, the age of dragon tyrants was long past now. Plus, fire dragons had usually been the ones doing that.

Ice dragons were… well, not exactly friendly to humanity, but more contemptuous than predatory. They rarely came down into the lowlands, preferring to stay in the mountain ranges year-round. Really, why didn't the dragon just speak like a normal person and tell them what it wanted? As far as Marcus knew, they pretty much all knew how to speak the human language.

"I've traveled in and out of the village several times since we detected traces of a dragon nearby," Beortan said, frowning.

"Why does our arrival suddenly warrant this kind of reaction?"

"Because another powerful mage is accompanying you this time around," Marcus guessed.

"She's not stupid. It makes sense for you to be coming and going all the time – you're the White Dragon Clan high chief, after all. But bringing an unknown powerful mage with you? That's unusual."

"Hmm," Beortan hummed, stroking his beard contemplatively.

"The direction the dragon flew off to… it's the same direction we discovered the traces of the white dragon recently. I hope it's the same dragon and not a bonded pair looking to raise their young." That would be a disaster. The two of them tackling a fully grown ice dragon… that was doable. Even if they didn't get much out of the encounter, they could at least drive it off from Beortan's land and turn it into someone else's problem. Two adult dragons working together…

they would probably have to retreat and ask Great Sea for help.

"My friend, don't take this as cowardice, but have you thought about maybe negotiating with the dragon instead of fighting it?" Marcus asked.

"I know parts of a dragon would be a blessing for someone practicing a draconic foundational technique like yours, but no treasure is useful to you if you're dead…"

"I know that, of course," Beortan said, giving him an annoyed look.

"The truth is, I'd be happy to settle for some scales and a drop of blood, but you know how dragons are. They won't even part with a discarded nail without a fight or a literal fortune offered to them. And even if I didn't care about that, I at least want her gone from my lands. Nobody prospers by having a dragon for a neighbor. Either we drive it away, or she will drive us away instead." That was probably true, Marcus silently acknowledged.

Especially since dragons loved frequenting Bloodstone Mountains for the same reason humans did – the stones that gave the mountains their name. Bloodstone Mountains were rich in various ores and special materials, but the most common resource mined out of them were blood stones – garnet-like dark red gems that held a strange vitality within them.

They were incredibly useful to warrior adepts and anyone pursuing body-strengthening magical abilities and foundational techniques, but were also very enticing to all manner of magical beasts. Dragons were especially fond of them, because they apparently helped their young grow faster and healthier, so most dragons had the habit of rearing their young in Bloodstone Mountain ranges since times immemorial. This placed dragons and humans into frequent conflict.

Well, it put pretty much everyone who lived in the mountains or around them into frequent conflict. The dwarves and orcs also loved these gems. In fact, different factions of the same species often clashed viciously over these stones! If a dragon suddenly moved into the region, Beortan's tribe would surely start quarreling with it over the blood stone supply. After they went quiet for a few seconds, one of the clansmen hesitantly approached the two.

"Greetings, high chief and honored guest," the man saluted.

"I hate to interrupt your discussion, but our hunters have been observing the signs while you were away, and there are some things you must know about."

"I see," Beortan said. He turned towards his house and motioned for the man to follow him.

"Follow me, then. You too, Marcus. We'll discuss this in a more private setting." A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

In the long discussion that followed, the man explained to Beortan and Marcus that they had uncovered signs of multiple groups of outsiders in the region, likely tracking the dragon. The outsiders were never actually spotted, which spoke to a high level of skill and power, and was more than a bit disturbing, since White Dragon Clan's hunters and scouts had the advantage of home terrain.

Beortan and Marcus spent the rest of the day making preparations and then set off from the village early in the morning next day, heading in the direction that the dragon flew off.

They were both dressed in heavy winter clothes made out of magical beast furs, and openly carrying their best combat staffs and several spell items attached to their belts – metal spheres that activated one-time magical effects, potions of healing and recovery in case things went badly for them, and a pair of poisoned daggers to give the dragon a parting gift if things went really badly for them.

Beortan also carried a lantern that would automatically detect any magical traps they might encounter – a powerful artifact he had found on one of his independent adventures. They didn't want to take any chances whatsoever when dealing with both a fully grown dragon and an unknown number of intruders of unknown allegiance. They departed on foot. Beortan didn't want to risk his griffon on this hunt – normal magical creatures might be intimidated by a snow griffon, but an ice dragon would easily kill one.

Additionally, being in the air would make their movements plainly obvious to everyone, including the mysterious outsiders that were also pursuing the dragon, and would make them easy targets for sudden attacks. They still utilized brief bursts of flight to get past particularly tricky obstacles, but most of the time they walked. They were looking for signs of other groups, not just the ice dragon.

Beortan was not happy to have a bunch of outsiders enter his tribe's land unannounced, and wanted to find out their identities.

"I bet it's those bastards from Four Elements Academy," Beortan grumbled as they walked.

"They're always testing their luck."

"Your hunters said they couldn't recognize the campsites they found," Marcus pointed out.

"Surely they would have realized if it was the usual suspects?"

"Well, maybe. We're not a particularly worldly people and most of the clansmen have never left these mountains. Maybe the hunters in question were young or just never the ones to confront outside intruders in the past," Beortan explained.

"This is all very unusual; there is no use in speculating. We'll just look around and see what we find." As they explored, they glimpsed the outline of a snow leopard in the distance, before it noticed them staring and fled out of sight. Beortan took it as a lucky sign. White Dragon Clan considered snow leopards to be sacred animals and refused to kill or hunt them. They appeared often in their art, along with images of dragons, eagles, and mountain goats.

It occasionally led to issues when outsiders wanted to hunt the beasts for their precious pelts in their lands. Supposedly, the clan was aided by the snow leopard spirit in ancient times, and was thus indebted to it in some way. Marcus was not aware of any god associated with snow leopards, but perhaps it was something that predated the foundation of the Illuminated Pantheon and the abyssal incursion? Or maybe a powerful spirit beast from the Outer Planes that graced this area at some point in the distant past?

Snow leopards didn't make a habit of hunting humans, so it probably wasn't difficult to leave them alone, but he doubted there was much substance to this belief of a blessing supposedly conferred on the clan. Then again, he'd thought the same about the Sacred Oak's blessing once, hadn't he?

"When I was born, our clan's oracle said I was blessed by the snow leopard spirit," Beortan told him as they walked.

"How does that work?" Marcus asked. Beortan had never told him this in the past. Admittedly he had never really asked.

"Secrets of the oracle are passed down from mother to daughter, and are never shared with anyone else, even among the clan. How should I know?" Beortan countered, shaking his head.

"But I trust her reading of the stars and heavenly omens. Her predictions are said to have saved the clan several times in the past."

"Right," said Marcus blandly.

"I did become very powerful in time," Beortan pointed out. Perhaps the clan's oracles simply had a very good method of assessing someone's magical talents. From what Marcus heard, Beortan had shown extreme talent from a very young age, and had a very powerful ice affinity. He had demonstrated magical abilities before he was taught a foundational technique of any kind, being able to freeze water by touch and walk on ice without slipping.

He'd once gotten lost in a snow storm as a child, and spent an entire night exposed to the elements, surviving temperatures that would have killed a normal human, especially a young child, with no ill effects. Perhaps a sophisticated enough technique could catch hint of something like that, even at birth. Great Sea's evaluators couldn't, but Marcus didn't think they represented the pinnacle of ability in this area.

"Wait," Marcus said suddenly, stopping in place. Beortan immediately followed his example.

"I saw something. Someone." They weren't just walking through the mountain on foot. They were both using scouting spells to explore a much larger area around them for any sign of clues or intruders. Marcus was not sure what method Beortan was using, as his friend was apparently using some kind of secret technique of his tribe and didn't want its limitations to become known, but Marcus had simply created a dozen spectral eyes and had them roam around him at all times.

The eyes were semi-autonomous, able to notice interesting things on their own and draw his attention to it, but he could also just tap into any and all of them at will to extend his perception over a large area. That was a fairly dangerous technique to use while flying, as having that many extra eyes was a little disorienting, but since they were travelling on foot and he had Beortan ready to defend him, he could afford being distracted as he travelled. His eyes spotted a group of people in the distance.

Beortan had ordered all of his clansmen to retreat into the village, so it shouldn't be any of them. Those mysterious outside dragon hunters, then? They looked weird, even from a distance… He took a deep breath as one of the eyes flew in closer to get a better look. A barely-perceptible dot of red light appeared on one of the figures as it turned its head in the direction of the floating eye.

The spectral eyes should have been invisible to anyone outside of Marcus, and hard to detect from a distance even for practiced mages, but that didn't seem to matter to the fur-clad figure. The moment the red light appeared, the image sent by the eye warped and blurred, and then cut off as his spectral eye was destroyed. A lesser mage would also suffer a powerful backlash, too. However, Marcus only suffered a brief headache that faded quickly.

He rubbed his forehead, instructing the rest of the eyes to avoid entering the region.

"What is it?" Beortan asked, mildly concerned.

"They popped one of my eyes," Marcus explained.

"But you got a good look at them, yeah?" Beortan asked.

"I did," Marcus confirmed, hesitantly.

"They're orcs."

"Orcs!?" Beortan exclaimed, surprised.

"This far south? How did they get here? Are you sure?"

"I'm sure," Marcus confirmed.

"I've seen plenty of them during the war with Veldoran. They weren't really trying to mask themselves. They are just avoiding conflict for some reason." In truth, that alone answered Beortan's question on how a group of orcs managed to get this far south. Bloodstone Mountains were very sparsely inhabited. A small group of powerful adepts travelling on foot could easily slip by undetected by any major power. However, orcs generally didn't operate like this, and there were good reasons why.

Doing this put this group way out of range of any reinforcements, and human powers all had an agreement to kill any orc they found in their territory, with no exceptions. If a group like this was discovered at any point, it would be hunted down and killed… and there was a lot of ground to cover before they could reach any nearby orc-controlled territory. Put another way, a trip like that was near certain death for any orc party that tried it. What could possibly justify something like this?

Marcus knew they spent a lot of time hunting dragons, but this was too much. Not to mention, the group clearly had a very powerful mage with them. Orcs weren't known for their mages. They were slave soldiers of the Abyssals, and were trained under brutal conditions, pitting them constantly against one another and culling anyone who didn't advance fast enough. Abyssals had their own methods of advancement, but orcs were almost always warrior-types. Orc mages had to be terrifyingly good to survive in their society.

Nevertheless, neither Marcus nor Beortan would let themselves be daunted. In some ways, this actually made things really easy. No need to worry about the political ramifications of attacking an orcish raiding party, after all.

"Just like old times, then," Beortan said.

"We beat back a whole army of these creatures. One group is nothing!" For the moment, they stopped focusing on the ice dragon and instead sped off in the direction of the orc group, abandoning all attempts of staying stealthy.

It wasn't easy to catch up to the orcs. They clearly knew someone was after them, and they didn't stay around and wait. Odd. Orcs rarely backed down from a fight unless they were very clearly outnumbered or otherwise felt they had no chance, but this group was odd to begin with. The orc group consisted of seven enemies: a mage of some sort, two sword-wielding warriors, and four archers. Marcus found this out the hard way because he tried to use flight to close distance with them and attack them from above.

His answer was two volleys of arrows launched at him with flawless precision. The arrows shone dark red as they streaked across the sky with incredible speed, and tried to embed themselves in the center of his chest. Marcus erected a convex shield of force around himself, and it held against the assault, but it cracked slightly after the first volley, and it became dangerously unstable after the second.

Meanwhile, the archers kept firing arrows without even waiting to see if the first two volleys had killed him, and the mage was casting some kind of spell… Marcus quickly decided to abort the idea of approaching the group from air and dropped down to the ground. He and Beortan kept chasing the group, but only used flight in brief bursts to avoid inconvenient obstacles.

Unfortunately, so did the orcs – the mage seemed to be able to transform the entire group into a black cloud of smoke, and in this form they could fly over obstacles or even flow around them. They never kept this up for long, likely because they knew they would be just as vulnerable like that as Marcus was in the air.

"I guess this is how they could keep up with a dragon," Beortan mused.

"How long have they been pursuing her? It's probably why she suddenly showed up here. I have a feeling she flew above my village so openly just so she could draw our attention to these orcs and get them off her back. Clever." Marcus didn't answer him. He had retrieved one of the arrows the orc archers shot at him while they pursued the group and was studying the arrowhead on the move. It was black, dark as night, and extremely pointy and sharp.

Tiny dark red runes, barely visible on the metal's black surface, danced along the razor-sharp edges of the arrowhead, flickering in and out of existence.

"Blackblood arrows," he informed Beortan.

"The other weapons they carry are probably blackblood weapons too. An elite group like this wouldn't settle for anything else. Be very careful not to get hit." Blackblood weapons were the orcs' signature equipment. Not all orcs carried blackblood weapons, but they were the only ones who knew how to make them. They were abyssal in nature, and not even selenite artifice could replicate them. Their special trait was that wounds inflicted by them took a long time to heal naturally and resisted healing magic.

Blackblood weapons were the main reason why the dragons were faring so poorly against the orcs. Dragons were mostly solitary, and didn't have anyone to care for them while they recovered from the cursed wounds inflicted by the weapons. Other dragons were more likely to kill them in a moment of weakness than nurse them back to health. That meant that orcs could gradually wear one down through persistent attacks, and even minor wounds gradually grew worse and transformed into something much more serious.

Of course, while these weapons were particularly effective against dragons, their effect worked against just about anyone and anything. Human adepts feared these weapons almost as much as dragons did. He pocketed the arrowhead and made a mental note to gather the other arrows as well when they were done here. He had always been curious about these things. He doubted he would figure out anything that a multitude of other mages hadn't, but there was no harm in trying.

It was certainly best not to have these things lying around the mountain too, waiting for an unfortunate clansman to accidentally slice his foot on one or something. The orcs were clearly powerful individuals. They didn't panic and were very clearly practiced, but it still wasn't enough. Marcus couldn't detect if any of them were on the level of a spirit rank adept – abyssal power levels were impossible to assess with usual methods – but he didn't think they'd held back when fighting them off.

After a few more probing clashes, he was confident they could simply overpower them with raw might. The opportunity would come soon. Using his greater knowledge of the terrain, Beortan managed to herd the group to the shore of a small mountain lake surrounded by tall rock formations. The orc mage tried to turn the group into a black cloud again to escape, but Beortan made a massive serpentine dragon out of ice and had the construct charge at the group from above.

Blackblood arrows, shining ominous red, immediately pierced the ice dragon, punching through it with barely any resistance. However, the serpentine dragon was just a magical construct and not a flesh-and-blood creature, and was not significantly harmed by the arrows. It was just minor structural damage, not enough to halt the spell. The orc mage was forced to abandon its escape spell to defend the group, conjuring its own magical construct – a horned, four-armed, blood-red skeleton wreathed in fire.

The horned skeleton seized the ice dragon construct with its four hands, halting it in its tracks and visibly melting it. But that wasn't good enough. The construct did what it was meant to and stopped their escape – it didn't have to do anything more. Marcus launched a rain of bright red stars at the orc group – dozens upon dozens of fast-moving lights that exploded with the full force of a fireball upon reaching their destination, blanketing the entire area in fire and explosions.

Before the explosions even cleared, a dark shadow surged out of the blast field and swung a long heavy blade at him with great speed and force. Marcus simply leaned to the side, evading the blackblood blade with practiced ease. He had fought against orcs before, and knew their tricks. The orc recovered almost instantly from his failed strike, and struck again. This time, however, Marcus didn't try to dodge, and instead raised a thin sheet of water in front of him.

The orc warrior tried to punch through the mirror shield with overwhelming strength, but his blade bounced off and sent him stumbling. Marcus activated the seismic traps around him, and expanding waves of yellow magical energy crashed into the orc, pulverizing him from the inside. The orc dropped to his knees, vomiting dark blood. This close, Marcus could finally get a good look at one of the orcs.

They were heavily covered in furs, much like Marcus and Beortan, to ward off the cold, and so it was hard to distinguish their features from a distance. However, the warrior orc was really nothing special as far as orcs were concerned - green skin, small horns protruding from his forehead, an extremely muscular body, and bestial, carnivore-looking teeth. Male, of course. Marcus had never seen an orc woman, and neither had anyone else.

If they even existed, orcs never sent them into battle, and Tasloa was just a giant battlefield to them. No orc actually lived on the planet. He didn't waste much time studying the orc – once he confirmed he was dead, he turned his attention to the rest of the orcs. He had to immediately erect a shield to defend against two red arrows flying straight at him, and he frowned in annoyance. He knew his spell wasn't enough to kill an orc elite warrior, but he thought at least the archers would have been cooked.

However, it seemed only two of them had ended up killed by his fire stars – their charred, smoking corpses lay motionless on the frozen shoreline – while the other two had managed to retreat to the icy surface of the lake somehow and get out of the way. That was a dangerous position, however, as all Marcus had to do was melt the ice and - The ice beneath the two orc archers exploded, two giant scaled claws reaching through the ice and closing around them.

Focused as they were on launching arrows at Marcus and Beortan, they were only able to speak one final shout of pain and surprise as they were suddenly pulled straight into the freezing water below. It was the ice dragon, Marcus realized. It had been waiting here under the ice all this time? Terrifying. Even for a mage like him, ending up trapped in the freezing waters with an adult ice dragon trying to kill you was a scenario out of the darkest nightmare. He did not have to worry about the two archers anymore.

He fired a chain lightning spell at the orc warrior assaulting Beortan, more to distract him than anything. An elite orc warrior like that one was probably going to shrug off the lightning attack, but it would stun him for a moment and the lightning beam would arc towards the orc mage, forcing him to defend against it too. The orc mage screamed suddenly, an inhuman sound that caused scarlet flames to erupt around him.

The lightning beam hit the fire and fizzled out, and the horned skeleton suddenly doubled in size, grew black claws on the end of its skeletal fingers, and started to burn brighter. It had already destroyed Beortan's dragon construct by now, and now it fixed its eyes on Marcus and Beortan. It grasped at them with its four hands and, though the distance should have made such a gesture useless, it somehow bent and shattered space itself to reach them.

Marcus hurriedly launched himself backward with kinetic force, barely evading the pair of claws aimed at him. They sliced through snow, ice, and rock with great ease, leaving deep grooves in the ground where he once stood. He worriedly glanced in Beortan's direction, and found that his friend had also managed to evade the attack. This… was this even a magical construct? Or did the orc summon an actual demon to fight them? He and Beortan launched a quick series of powerful spells, focusing on the orc mage.

The logic was that if they killed the summoner, the summon itself should also disappear. The orc mage also seemed greatly exhausted by whatever he did to empower the skeleton, kneeling with one leg on the ground, panting. The sole surviving orc warrior was beside him, helping him back on his feet. The skeleton simply tore apart the offensive spells aimed at the orc with its enhanced claws, and the scarlet flames surrounding the orc mage negated the more subtle attacks.

Before the fight could continue, a huge white shape erupted from the frozen lake. The ice dragon wasted no time and immediately breathed a cone of magical frost at the skeleton, catching it in the back while it was busy with Marcus and Beortan. The fire around it was immediately snuffed out, and a layer of ice covered two of its hands and most of its torso, locking it in place.

The ice dragon spun gracefully in the air, impossibly fast and agile for its size, and slammed down on the frozen skeleton with its long tail. The ice, and the skeleton trapped within it, shattered into hundreds of pieces. Marcus glanced at Beortan and their eyes met for a moment. They didn't use any magic to communicate, but they both immediately came to a silent agreement. They would work together with the dragon to take care of the orcs.

Perhaps it would immediately turn on them afterwards, but the dragon was the lesser evil. But then, another surprise. Before either of them could capitalize on the situation, a crackling energy beam flew in from the distance, aimed at the ice dragon. Somehow, the dragon was able to detect the attack in the last moment and shifted its body enough that only one of its wings was pierced. Despite looking fairly fragile, dragon wing membranes were extremely tough and magically resistant…

but the beam burned a hole through it like it wasn't there, leaving a perfectly circular wound. The first beam was soon followed by another beam, and then another, and then another…