Lindon had nothing to brace against. He gathered wind and force aura beneath him to push him upward, but that shouldn’t have been enough. A platform of aura was too flimsy to hold against a Dreadgod.
He shoved against the Weeping Dragon anyway. The Dragon Icon gave him strength that defied the rules of the world.
With both hands, Lindon pushed against a sky of blue scales. Every piece of him was burning away to fuel strength that, for at least a moment, dwarfed the Monarchs.
Gradually, the Dreadgod’s head was forced up.
The Dragon’s breath slashed across the sky again, until it finally erupted straight up. Madra gushed into the sky, and suddenly Lindon had nothing to push against.
He flew up, turning to keep his enemy in view. He had to strike again. He couldn’t keep this Enforcer technique up for much longer, so before it wore off…
Lindon coughed up blood.
[I think we took it a little too far this time,] Dross said.
Blood trailed from his eyes. It trickled from cracks that opened on his skin. For one dizzy moment, Lindon wondered why his Iron body wasn’t handling the wounds.
Then his aura control failed him. His techniques died.
For the first time since training in Ghostwater, he felt power abandon him completely. He couldn’t even hear the Icons anymore.
Powerless, Lindon fell from the sky.
When the Weeping Dragon’s attention locked onto Ziel, he knew they were all going to die.
It had passed over his sect long before, and he’d felt as though the end of the world had come. But that was without the Dreadgod noticing them at all. Its very gaze was enough to crush spirits and strip away hope.
He tried to escape, and he wasn’t the only one. Ziel stopped pushing through the animated lightning bolts and the hostile storm the instant he felt the Dreadgod watching them and gathering power.
He commanded the air to open, but it wouldn’t. Yerin tried to activate her Moonlight Bridge, but it only sputtered white light. Mercy used her new technique that allowed her to fade into the shadows, but darkness passed over her without taking her anywhere.
They were spatially locked. Without discussion, the three of them buckled down to defend. They landed on the ground, and Ziel stood in front with his large, steel shield braced. He clung to the Shield Icon as well, mustering all the willpower he could focus.
Yerin lay a hand on his shoulder and joined her will to his, reinforcing his defense. The two Remnants following her around generated a barrier of lightning around them and pushed against the storm aura in the air.
Mercy was covered head-to-toe in amethyst armor, and she Forged a web of dark madra around them. He suspected that wouldn’t do anything to stop the Weeping Dragon’s breath, but maybe she was setting something up.
They continued layering their defenses. Ziel spun emerald runes into a circle around them with the Path of the Dawn Oath. Further and further he went, adding several concentric circles. Two of the script-circles resisted madra, one resisted physical force, and he even quickly improvised one that resisted storm aura specifically.
As Ziel watched the shining star of madra gathering in the Dreadgod’s mouth, he tried to convince himself that this would be enough. He was the perfect person to stand in front of the others. He was the Shield Sage, now. He had a Path suited for defense.
He was a wall that wouldn’t buckle.
Then the Weeping Dragon unleashed its breath, and he saw how wrong he’d been.
A solid cylinder of light split the sky in half, tearing open the storm clouds. The pressure from the technique alone crushed his script-circles, stripped away the authority of his Icon, and shoved him back a dozen paces.
Trees and grass were stripped away as far as Ziel could see. The breath hadn’t even hit. This was just the wind from its passing.
He’d seen Monarchs and Dreadgods attack, but this was a technique on a different level.
Yerin planted her feet and cycled all her madra to resist, her red lock of hair flapping in the wind. She gritted her teeth and glared up at the technique over them, but she didn’t waste any power attacking it. Everything was going toward keeping her upright.
Mercy was braced against the stone ground, fingers and toes dug in to keep herself from blowing backwards. She was still covered in her bloodline armor, and she tried to lash herself to the ground with Strings of Shadow, but the techniques were destroyed the instant she tried to Forge them.
This overwhelming, impossible spiritual pressure was just the wake of the Dragon’s breath. Ziel couldn’t imagine how it had missed, and his spiritual sense was blinded. Either the Dreadgod had aimed at something else, or Lindon had done something.
Then the technique began to lower, like the sword of an executioner.
Ziel lifted his shield. It was like holding up a leaf against a wildfire, but he had to do something.
This was the third time his death had descended on him from the sky.
Long ago, the Weeping Dragon had attacked the Dawnwing Sect. A malicious living thunderstorm had stretched from horizon to horizon. At the end of his fight with the Sage of Calling Storms, Ziel had looked into the flashing lightning and known it would be his death.
Then, not so long ago, the sky had turned black. Everything with the slightest spiritual sense in all of Cradle felt the end had come. If Eithan hadn’t risen to defend them, the entire world would have died. Once again, Ziel had been certain he would die.
Now, the Weeping Dragon was back. And there was another force from the sky that Ziel couldn’t affect at all.
Something in him snapped.
He was already braced with his Enforcer technique, the Stone Anchor, which allowed him to keep his feet. If barely.
Ziel lowered his shield and shouted up into the dragon’s breath.
“COME ON!” he shouted. “TRY IT! HIT ME!”
The wind snatched away the sound. Even he didn’t hear his own words.
But fear had left him. It was replaced by anger.
How many times could he survive so-called ‘inevitable’ death before it stopped scaring him? He had given up too many times. He wasn’t doing it again.
The Dragon’s breath lifted, slowly sliding upward.
For a second, pure astonishment cut through his anger. Had the Dreadgod heard him? Had his desperate shout actually done something?
The line of light sliced upward, back through the sky. It picked up speed as it moved, revealing the Dreadgod’s warped sky. Each Dreadgod affected the aura such that the sky changed colors when they were around, but it was rare to ever see the Weeping Dragon’s, thanks to the dark clouds it dragged around everywhere.
This one was a bright, eye-searing electric blue that no one could mistake for a natural color.
Its breath cut through that blue at a jagged angle, as though the Weeping Dragon were spraying its breath randomly.
In its flailing, the technique passed over the moon.
In less than a second, there was a visible trench gouged into the gray-white surface of the moon. Rock and dust sprayed out to the sides like the waves of an ocean.
It looked like someone had taken a dagger and scraped a line across the moon.
The Weeping Dragon vomited the rest of its breath straight up into the sky, and finally Ziel could sense what had happened.
Lindon was a dense core of black-and-white power beneath the dragon’s head. He hovered there, the center of a gravity so intense that he seemed more real even than the Dreadgod.
Judging from Lindon’s position, Ziel could tell what had happened. He’d forced the Weeping Dragon’s breath up and into the sky.
Without him, they’d be dead.
His was an awe-inspiring presence, as Lindon flew upward and moved to launch another attack against the Weeping Dragon. This was the sort of feat that would be legendary even for a Monarch, and Ziel prepared to witness the young man kill a second Dreadgod.