All The Skills

Arthur’s area-of-effect Mental Shield skill snapped up into place.

That was all that kept him, and everyone else, from keeling over.

The sharp drilling pain stopped. Arthur glanced at his mind-block anchor card and saw that the bar was rapidly running dry. Perhaps ten percent left.

As he watched, it dipped by another small notch.

If not for that and his skill . . .

He glanced back up at the white dragon. She sat in the middle of the room on a slightly raised platform surrounded by eggs. She was just as affected by scourge-rot as the other nesting mothers had been—especially her jaw, which was so diseased he saw yellow-white flashes of bone.

She hadn’t moved other than to swing her head around and stare intently at Arthur. But he could feel the weight of that gaze pressing against his Mental Shield skill. It was as if she held both sides of his head within her claws and was steadily pressing in. If he slipped up for even a moment—

“Arthur, the ceiling,” Brixaby said.

Keeping a firm hold on his skill—having a nearly unlimited source of mana behind him from the silver helped—he looked away.

His first impression of the space they’d stepped into was that it was vast, with a curved stone ceiling so high up it was lost in shadow. Following Brixaby’s gaze, Arthur realized that it was dark with brown-black scourgeling bodies. Most clung upside down like bats. Alive and wriggling, the entire ceiling seemed to pulsate with them.

Arthur saw flashes of long gangly limbs here and there. Not all were a batlike shape. Some had evolved.

It seemed the mother dragons weren’t the only ones busy laying eggs . . . or however scourgelings bred. He had no idea.

What had he led his retinue into?

At last . . . The Mind Singer’s voice penetrated straight into his thoughts, despite the shield.

And so have I, he reminded himself.

With a snarl, Brixaby moved forward. “Reveal yourself, worm!”

“I am no worm. I am your host, and I have provided quite the welcome.” Her lyrical cadence still managed to drip with sarcasm. “My children, kill them all but the Legendary boy. Harvest their cards and bring them to me.”

The ceiling above seemed to pulse. Countless spells, effects, and card techniques rained down.

Arthur had no hope of counting them all. They represented all elements, almost every material from steel bolts to lightning, boulders of earth, nightmarish illusions he couldn’t look away from until they were briefly obscured by a sheet of toxic yellow snowflakes. There were summoned creatures of all shapes and sizes, including a fiery horned dog that was rapidly consumed by rain . . .

The Mind Singer had been taking the cards from the farmed hatchlings and passing them to her children.

The only reason Arthur and his retinue were not evaporated from the hundreds of card effects was that all had been released at the same time. Most interfered with each other.

Untrained dragon formations had the same problem, and the final weeks of training were meant to address it. Arthur had never gotten that far, but he’d seen the schedule.

He saw the result now.

Forks of lightning went awry, not shooting down but striking metal spikes, which were blasted sharply to the side or else turned into shrapnel, which struck earthen boulders. Those boulders crumbled into dust, which soaked up much of the acid rain . . . when that rain wasn’t eating into the summons, which went wild with rage. And dozens, maybe hundreds of other interactions and interferences.

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That was their only saving grace. It bought them the extra second they needed for Cressida to snap her mana shield up. With Tannai aiding her, the shield was thicker than it had ever been before.

It wasn’t large enough to cover Arthur and Brixaby. They’d taken that extra second to leap to the side. Then Brixaby plopped down on his hind end, his eyes half shut in concentration.

He opened his mouth and roared out his Stunning Shout for all that he was worth—the one ability they’d kept back for this fight, lest it tip the Mind Singer off.

His Stunning Shout, too, was aided by the extra influx of mana.

Arthur, who sat just behind the cone of destruction, felt nearly deafened by it.

Spell effects and debris that had been on the verge of raining down on them were blasted away. Most of it crashed into other debris and effects, to ruinous results. Even more interference.

The results would have been deafening all by itself, but compared to the force of Brixaby’s shout, it happened in silence.

Then the shout reached the scourgelings high above.

Swathes of the ceiling seemed to peel away and fall down—but it was only the densely clustered creatures losing their grip and falling off.

These, too, came to bad ends as their uncontrolled fall brought them into contact with card effects that had been lighter than gravity. Or else defensive measures that now worked against them.

Arthur wasn’t sure what some of them hit—some kind of powerful explosive effect—because a soundless ball of flame blossomed from the middle of the ceiling and spread in secondary and tertiary explosions. These possibly took out more scourgelings than Brixaby’s initial shout had.

Still, Brixaby roared again and again. He targeted different dark points along the ceiling and several clusters that had outright panicked and tried to fly away.

Brixaby was not the only one attacking, either.

Cressida dropped her shield, which allowed Laird and Sams to step forward.

Laird sent out a rippling dome of purple candle-top flames that caught even more of the falling debris. This was not a normal fire. Some of the flames ate through spell effects as long as they took a visible form.

Meanwhile, Sams seemed to glow under the odd purplish effect that was his and Horatio’s invisible light. Though there was no beam, suddenly everything up above was lit in garish display. scourgeling teeth and claws glowed as if from an inner source. It made them that much easier to target.

“Laird!” Tannai yelped. “Don’t burn the bodies! The cards!”

Arthur didn’t understand what he meant until Laird grunted in acknowledgment. His purple flames flickered, glowing briefly brighter, then dimmer again as he adjusted some quality within them.

The flames still vaporized anything that came falling down . . . except now for organic material. scourgeling bodies fell straight through.

There was an awkward moment where Cressida snapped her shield up again. A wave of stunned—and now broken—bodies struck against it like heavy rain.

Arthur and Brixaby were protected thanks to the Stunning Shout knocking everything aside.

Cressida let the shield down the moment the worst had passed.

As soon as she did, Laird and Tannai both jumped forward and started grabbing the scourgeling bodies—no, they were harvesting them for the cards. So many cards, free for the taking, represented tremendous wealth.

“Stop!” Arthur ordered. “We’re not done yet! We need to find the Mind Singer.”

“Where is she?” Cressida asked. They had not started harvesting, though even Joy eyed the nearby scourgeling bodies speculatively. Looking around, Cressida repeated, “Where is she? Did we kill her?”

No, it couldn’t be that easy.

Arthur’s gaze turned aside as if he had been compelled. The white dragon still stood in the middle of the room. Debris and scourgeling bodies surrounded her—some had landed on the unhatched eggs. But nothing had touched her directly, as if the scourgelings had done everything in their power to avoid her.

Or what was perched on her.

It was hard to tell at first. The white dragon’s scales were peppered with rot and her jaw was particularly bad. One white cheek was gone, showing teeth underneath.

And there, tucked up against the base of her neck where a rider would sit, was a brown-black spot larger than the others.

It was a batlike scourgeling. The Mind Singer.

Why is she still there? Arthur wondered. She was so still, it looked like she was waiting.

But for what?

Perhaps she was exhausted from controlling all her thralls in the hive. In that case, he had to act now.

“The white dragon!” Arthur yelled.

His mind-block card anchor had only a sliver of power left. They had to end this now.

Brixaby opened his mouth for his Stunning Shout.