Lich for Hire

Dragons had been absent from the world for over seventeen centuries. For the vast majority of Lyon's soldiers, they existed only in the dusty tomes of history.

These red dragons were somewhat smaller than the time dragon the emperor had become, but to human eyes, they were still creatures of terrifying scale.

Moreover, there wasn't just one of them. There were dozens.

Lyon's soldiers stood frozen. The red dragons did not.

The moment they cleared the passage, they banked into steep dives and opened their jaws. Sheets of flame poured down into the packed formations below. Soldiers caught in the blasts ignited instantly.

The priests snapped out of their shock and responded, conjuring rain to douse the fires, then channeling healing magic to treat the burned. The response was swift enough to keep casualties low, but it was frantic, ragged work, and everyone could see it.

Lyon's morale fractured. No one broke and ran, but the commanders were lost. None of them had trained for this. Orders stalled in their throats. No one knew what to shout.

As one, the soldiers looked to their emperor.

Surely the enormous time dragon in the sky would be able to take on the red dragons?

Considering that the Draconic Armaments were so powerful, surely—

What they instead saw was the time dragon being set upon by five red dragons at once.

The emperor was throwing the Armaments' power at them and reversing time, but accomplishing nothing.

From his vantage point, Ambrose muttered something unflattering. "Idiot. Dragons can live for a thousand years. Rewinding them a few decades back in time does nothing."

That wasn't how temporal energy worked. If Ambrose were using it, he wouldn't be pointing it at the dragons at all—he would be using it on himself. Constant temporal reversion on his own position would be indistinguishable from infinite teleportation. He could run those red dragons ragged without taking a scratch.

A fool with a divine artifact was still a fool.

And this particular fool was doing worse than simply wasting the Armaments' power. He was being chased and mauled, flailing in the sky like a man who had forgotten he was supposed to be fighting.

Time dragons were naturally a fast breed with potent passive acceleration, and inherently more agile than the red dragons. Somehow, the young emperor still couldn't pull away. Within minutes, he was bleeding from a dozen wounds.

Then, in a panic, the young emperor did the worst thing he could have done. He dove toward his own army.

His only thought was to get back to his soldiers, to put them between himself and the dragons.

The Lyon forces below saw their emperor coming at them and didn't dare move out of the way, paralyzed by the prospect of failing to cushion his landing.

The temporal dragon plowed directly into the rear support units. Its enormous body crushed dozens of soldiers flat in an instant.

The damage it caused rivaled the red dragons' breath.

The dragon carved a red smear through the formation. Then, the young emperor reverted to human form, and his voice rang out across the army. "Protect me! Someone, protect me!"

That single outburst struck Lyon's morale like a hammer.

This campaign had been his idea, his personal crusade. He had claimed sole command, wielded a divine artifact, faced the enemy in the form of a dragon—and it had come to this. If the emperor himself was reduced to screaming for a bodyguard, what hope was there for anyone else?

Once that thought took root, it spread.

It was a tribute to Lyon's military discipline that the army didn't break outright. Any other force, with its commander having just crushed a swathe of their own men in a panic landing, would have collapsed entirely.

The red dragons showed no interest in giving Lyon time to recover. They kept coming, their breaths sweeping across the formations. Then, figures began leaping from their backs.

All of them wore bright silver armor and carried an assortment of weapons. They hit the ground from twenty or thirty meters up, rolled smoothly to their feet, came up firing crossbow bolts before they had fully risen, and then drew their blades and charged.

The githarks had arrived. These were their vanguard. Githark society was militarized to its core. The weak were eliminated through training long before any campaign began. Every githark who crossed between planes was an elite.

They analyzed the battlefield and immediately identified the support units as the weakness in Lyon's formations, which they then moved to exploit. They threaded past the paladin cavalry and the priests, driving directly for the units that were already in disarray.

They were merciless. Arrows fell like rain. Blades gleamed and shone. The moment they hit the formation, they began killing in earnest. Lyon's soldiers went down in swathes.

The young emperor was in danger of being overrun entirely when hoofbeats thundered from behind. The paladin cavalry had finally wheeled and was charging back.

A massive barrier of holy light materialized again at the front of the formation, absorbing the crossbow fire from the githarks. The cavalry crashed through the clustered attackers, trampling many of them into the earth.

This was the same tactic that had erased the cultists, but this time, the charge cost them lives.

The githarks' counterattacks made it through all that heavy barding, all that spell enhancement, all the raw power of legendary paladins. It spoke to just how dangerous these opponents were.

Then one of the priests cried out over the clamor, "In the name of the Lord of Dawn, destroy them!"

Light descended from above. A column of holy radiance slammed down across several of the red dragons and a dense cluster of githarks, and the air above them filled with the smell of burning.

Divine Intervention was the most powerful technique available to a priest, calling down the Lord of Dawn's direct attention and allowing the god to pierce through Aion's restrictions and act on behalf of the faithful.

Whatever legendary priest had called for it, the effect was immense. The holy light scorched the red dragons badly enough that they screamed and scattered to higher altitude. The githarks caught in the radius left nothing behind but ash.

One strike, and the red dragons backed off.

The ground-level githarks absorbed the shock and dispersed their formation, but they weren't frightened.

In sheer fanaticism, Lyon's soldiers could hardly match them.

The ugly, warty-skinned githarks reformed and pressed in again. The paladin cavalry had to break formation to meet them on multiple fronts simultaneously, and all the while every soldier had to keep watch overhead for the dragons circling above.

Attacked from the ground and from the sky at once, Lyon's line was beginning to buckle.

But the real threat wasn't the githarks' ferocity, or even the dragons' firepower. It was the spatial passage, still open and still pouring enemies through in an unbroken stream.

There were now over forty red dragons overhead. Githarks were coming through the passage directly now, many of them falling freely and deploying parachute packs just before they hit the ground.

Within a minute or two, the githark numbers on the ground had exceeded ten thousand.

Then, one of the larger red dragons emerged from the passage with a githark in silver armor standing on its back, one arm raised high.

Dark clouds massed overhead. Acid rain began to fall, drenching the Lyon formations in corrosive downpour.

Weather control on that scale meant only one thing: a legendary githark had arrived.

At this rate, Lyon's army would be buried under sheer numbers.

But at that critical moment, a figure blazing with holy light appeared in the sky above the battlefield.

He moved like lightning, a streak of light that flickered from point to point across the sky. Each time it stopped before a red dragon, a sword driving through the dragon's eye before it could react.

Agonized roars rang out one after another. The red dragon formation overhead descended into chaos for the second time.

Allen's voice cut through the roaring, aimed down at the Lyon forces below. "Fall back! Retreat to Lavarun and hold the walls!"