The wind coming off the black reeds smelled like iron and rain that never fell. Noon hung dim behind a veil of ash-cloud, and the fields beyond the palisade trembled with a life that wasn't supposed to be there—roots bulging, soil sighing, veins of dark mana threading like dye through water.
Andy rested the Draconic Oathblade across his palms and let it breathe with him. The fused steel—once four ancient blades, now one living oath—answered his pulse with a low hum. For a heartbeat the edge flashed a heat-flare of ember-red, then a cold lick of ocean-blue, then a thin gleam of storm-green, each color sinking back into the metal as if the sword had blinked.
A chime skimmed the rim of his vision—only his.
[Weapon Resonance Detected]
Draconic Oathblade — Elemental Cores: Fire | Water | Wind
Attunement: Stable
"Still with me?" he asked, not sure whether he meant the sword or the two women flanking him.
"Always," Nia said. Her Staff of Lumina traced a slow circle, silver crystal scattering pale motes that sank into the ground and held. Runes bloomed like dew, quiet and stubborn. "Wards are anchored. If the corruption surges, it stops at us first."
Aurelia flipped her dagger in her fingers and caught it by the point with a grin that promised bad luck to anything that came too close. "What she means is: come and try it." She tilted her head toward Andy, golden hair catching the flat light. "You're extra handsome when you pretend you're calm."
He snorted. "I'm not pretending."
"Exactly," she purred.
Beyond the fence, the reeds parted. Something crawled out on too many joints, head cocked at a wrongness that imitated curiosity. Then another, and another—shapes like wolves sketched by a fever: rib-thin, hide threaded with dark veins, eyes a flat, spilled-ink black. Behind them, the soil bulged again, and a second kind of shadow moved with purpose—as if wearing a man the way rot wears fruit.
The villagers lining the inner palisade went silent. A woman pressed both hands over a child's ears and then, realizing that would not help, over the child's eyes. An elder set a clay jug down with both palms, throat bobbing, and whispered a prayer that looked like swallowing.
Andy stepped forward. The ground whispered under his boots, and the Oathblade warmed.
The thing that wore a man's shape stopped ten paces beyond the line of Nia's wards. Up close it was worse: a lean figure in tattered leather, veins etched in soot along the neck, the whites of the eyes stained gray. Bands of baked clay had been pressed into the skin around each wrist—ritual cuffs, cracked and bleeding under the corruption. When it spoke, the voice had to choose between two mouths; the human's won by a narrow margin.
"You carry a dragon's heart," it said, not greeting, not threat—just hunger given grammar. "We came to take it."
Aurelia's smile sharpened. "Try."
Nia's staff clicked once against the ground. Glyphs rose in thin pillars around the palisade. "You won't pass," she said, and her voice was a soft-iron certainty that dared the world to be otherwise.
Andy lifted the Oathblade into guard. "You want what you don't understand. That's how people die."
The mouth twitched. "People." For a moment the human inside seemed to look out, as if from behind a pane of smoked glass. "Yes. People die."
Then the Corrupter lifted both hands and clapped once.
The field broke.
Black reeds tore free like lash-whips. The soil heaved, vomiting dragonlings half-grown and half-ruined—wings not fully formed but edged like broken glass, scales thin as scabs, black blood weeping from the seams. They moved wrong, like marionettes pulled by bitter strings, but they moved fast.
"On me," Andy said, and his body accepted the command before his mind finished forming it.
He stepped into the first wave, and the Oathblade's edge flushed ember-red.
[Skill Cast]
[Flame Spiral]
He cut a circle at his feet, a clean line through corrupted stalk and shadow-flesh. Fire rose in a collar of petals and then unfurled outward in a low, devouring ring. The dragonlings hit the flame and shrieked without throats, skin blistering shadow to shadow and sloughing off as ash. Heat rolled back in a wave that licked the wards; Nia's runes drank it and did not break.
Three shapes leapt the ring together, jaws yawning with black threads of not-smoke. Andy pivoted, felt the Oathblade cool through his grip—the steel went sea-cold, edge shading to ocean blue.
[Skill Cast]
[Aqua Fang]
He slashed once, twice—and water bit like glass. Pikes of compressed tide erupted from the arc of his swing, spearing the first two mid-leap and pinning them to the field. The third landed short, skidding on mud dark with its siblings' ichor; before it could gather itself, a column of silver light hammered down from Nia's staff, a clean bell of radiance that unthreaded the shadow out of its shape and left emptiness behind.
"Thank you," Andy said.
Nia's breath fogged in the warded air. "Next time you can thank me with a bath and a nap."
Aurelia laughed and blurred past them both—Moonstep snapping her from dirt to back of a dragonling in a single thought. She drove her dagger down under a plate, rolled with the buck, and kicked free, landing low and grinning. "I'll settle for a kiss," she called.
"Later," Andy said.
"Promises."
A bruise-dark shadow crossed the field. The Corrupter had not moved, but the ground around his feet had begun to sink, as if the earth were a lung drawing bad air. He lifted one hand and crooked a finger; a dragonling with the least-wrong wings clawed upright and shuddered. Something like speech rattled out of its chest. The Corrupter smiled with a mouth that wasn't practiced at it.
"Give me the heart," he said. "Or I give yours to my garden."
Andy stepped again. The Oathblade's hum rose, an eager cat under his palm; the blade turned storm-green, hair on his arms lifting with the static.
[Skill Cast]
[Gale Rift]
He cut the air sideways and the air agreed to be cut. A wedge of pressure peeled off the edge of the sword and tore across the field, shearing reeds, snapping the first rank of dragonlings like dry twigs. The shockline hit the Corrupter's chest—the thing rocked back a half-step as if surprised—and the clay bands at his wrists fissured with sharp, complaining pops.
A hiss—sound or breath—rippled the line of villagers. A boy near the gates clutched a tin charm around his neck and squeezed his eyes shut, and then, very slowly, opened them.
Nia pressed her palm to the Staff of Lumina and the runes at the village edge deepened from dew to frost.
[Lumina Ward → Integrity 92%]
[Shared Sync → Minor]
"Don't let him pull you past the line," she said. "He'll try to make you angry."
"I'm not angry," Andy said. He wasn't. Beneath the adrenaline, beneath the war-taught economy of motion and breath, something else had settled in him since Solaris—quiet, tensile, sure. He didn't have to prove a storm by shouting.
"Then show him," Aurelia said, chin lifting.
The Corrupter raised both arms.
The field answered.
Dragonlings came on in a rush that sounded like rain crossing leaves. The wards flared—silver arcs catching the first bodies and sloughing them into ash—but pressure built fast in the gaps, black tide prying at light with patient claws.
Andy moved. Fire bloomed where his feet turned—Flame Spiral low and controlled, a gardener's knife keeping weeds at bay. A shadow shouldered through anyway, fast, jaw wide. He slid a half step inside and let the Oathblade flood cold; Aqua Fang flicked and a wheel of water-teeth spun out from the guard, biting the thing into neat, evanescent slices. Behind him, wind gathered like a coil warming; he snapped his wrist and sent Gale Rift along the ground to pick up a row of broken-limbed creatures trying to crawl through a seam in the wards.
The sword sang. Not loudly—no battle-hymn blaring—but a steady undernote that matched his breathing. He cut where he had to. He didn't chase. He learned what the corruption wanted and declined to give it.
A quiet ping touched the corner of his sight.
[Constellation Sync]
Bond Pulse Registered
Nia +1% | Aurelia +1%
Status: Emotional Vectors Aligned
He almost laughed. Of course the system would choose now to be pleased.
"Left," Nia said.
He was already turning. It had the wrong number of legs and too many teeth; it died anyway. Silver radiance spread out from her staff and settled into the seams of his footing. The ground held because she asked it to.
Aurelia took the high places—fence post, low roof, the knotted stump where someone long ago had tried to grow a tree in soil that resented it. From a leap she threw, not the dagger, but a knucklebone-sized charm—the silver brooch she wore at her collar winked, and light rang against the Corrupter's shoulder like an insult. He snarled at her, then looked immediately back at Andy, hunger unable to prioritize anything that wasn't a dragon's heart.
"Predictable," Aurelia sang, delighted.
The Corrupter's wrists finally gave. The clay bands cracked with the dull clap of a pot breaking; dust fell from his fingers. For an instant the human's face showed again—young, tired, hurt—and then the rot leaned forward inside him and wore that face better.
"You're wasting good dirt," Andy said, and didn't know why he said it until the Corrupter smiled with all its teeth. The black garden around the man quivered, pleased to be thought of as a garden.
It drove both hands into the ground and pulled.
The earth tore open like a wound and something bigger clawed out—a dragonling closer to dragon than its siblings, wings ragged but wide, horn-buds pushing through its skull like regrets that had grown too long to ignore. It coughed shadow and swayed, then fixed both eyes on Andy and unfolded its hungry. It stepped forward and the field sobbed under its weight.
The villagers drew together as if pulled by thread. The boy with the tin charm climbed onto the fence and fell off and climbed on again. Someone started to sing and then apologized to no one and kept singing anyway.
Nia's hand brushed Andy's back, brief and burning. "I can hold the ward," she said, and he could hear the calculations running in her head like beads clicked by a patient thumb: rune integrity, stress load, radiance consumption, margin.
Aurelia came down beside his other shoulder, grin all wolf. "You cut. I'll hunt the holes."
"Don't get cute," Nia said.
"I'm gorgeous, not cute."
"Focus," Andy said, and both of them—blessedly, beautifully—did.
He lifted the Oathblade into the space between breath and motion. The edge glowed ember, then sea, then storm—ready to be what he needed, not what the enemy wanted. He rolled his shoulders once, feeling where the night had left him, and the sword felt lighter for knowing.
A whisper touched him—no words, just a presence he had bled for and earned. He let it settle in his bones and did not ask for more.
The Corrupter pointed, and the almost-dragon screamed a challenge that used to be for skies.
Andy exhaled, steady, ready. Nia's staff flared brighter, Aurelia's dagger gleamed hungry. Villagers fell silent, breath caught in their throats.
The first true clash was about to begin.