Magic-Smithing-Chapter 121.4

The winged serpent’s mana zone was gone, but it refused to lower its head high with its mouth wide open, looking like it intended to devour the sun.

“Any idea what it’s doing? Does pulling in its mana zone make it stronger or something?" Aaliyah nervously asked her senior.

“I don’t know,” Tabitha answered honestly. “Mana zones are like a more complex version of killing intent. Humans can unlock them, too, but again, they rarely manifest in people below level 150, and each is different. Even Master can only produce a zone a few feet around him, and all it does is help him dodge attacks better and wear down his opponents faster."

“Great, anything else?” Aaliyah asks sourly.

"Well, it's not much, but I do know one thing," Tabitha explains. “While a mana zone is largely instinctive, a wielder must remain in the proper headspace to utilize it.”

“You’re saying that if we keep injuring it and keep it mad, it won’t be able to use it properly," Aaliyah summarized.

“Precisely,” Tabitha nodded. “It’s why it could sense us when we first entered its clearing and when we left the ruins, but not your sneak attack on its blind spot. I don't know the winged serpent's level, but it hasn’t reached 150; I doubt it's even reached 140. It’s a miracle that it developed a mana zone at all. So long as we continue to push it during combat, it shouldn’t have the mental fortitude to utilize it properly.”

“That’s if it redeploys it,” Aaliyah notes with a calculating look. After deactivating its mana zone, the winged serpent had yet to do anything, but she and Tabitha could sense it was up to something big.

The two humans barely had a few seconds to breathe and discuss this information before the winged serpent across from them started stirring again. It started off as a rumble, like a volcano ready to explode, before turning into a loud hissing noise reminiscent of boiling acid.

“Tabitha!” Aaliyah called out in concern.

“I feel it.”

Both women could sense the winged serpent concentrating what remained of its mana into its mouth.

Without hesitation, Aaliyah frantically grabbed the remaining potion from her pocket, opened it up, and threw it back. Almost instantly, she began to feel her mana recharge faster, but the question was: Would it be fast enough? It was obvious that the winged serpent was going to try something with its poison breath again, and she was worried her mana had yet to recharge to suitable levels to combat something like that.

Aalyiah allowed the now-empty vial to slip through her fingers and hit the ground after licking her lips, not wanting to waste even the smallest amount of mana potion.

Meanwhile, the bubbling sound from the serpent’s maw was only growing louder until a pitch-black fog of poison started leaking out of its mouth, and instantly, the girls could differentiate that this poison was different from its previous attacks. This wasn’t the same venomous cloud it had previously spewed at them; that stuff had been green, not this pitch-black nightmare.

Just looking at this new cloud of poison gas made Aaliyah feel like Ebeon was standing behind her, ready to claim her soul. “Is that as bad as it looks?” Aaliyah asked nervously, suddenly feeling like her mouth was dry.

“It is.” For once, Tabitha didn't try to hide her concern. She scowled fiercely as more poison slowly cascaded down the serpent’s massive body. It looked like fog but clung to every surface like tar.

"We're dead if even a bit of that touches us," she tells her matter-of-factly.

All of Aaliyah's hair was standing on end now. She could sense better than Tabitha how dangerous the toxic mist was. It was infecting everything it touched, killing the microorganisms in the air and corrupting the mana it came in contact with like a virus.

It was so fierce that Aaliyah wasn’t even sure if her overpowered cleaning spell could overcome its caustic nature.

The black smoke trailed down the snake’s body, dyeing its green scales the same color as its wings, leaving it looking like one big shadow monster.

Then they felt it. Once the winged serpent was covered head to toe in poison, it reactivated its mana zone, only this time it didn't extend far, only a few inches from its scaly skin.

“No way,” Aaliyah’s voice cracked as the poison fog surrounding the winged serpent grew denser and refused to disperse. She was suddenly reminded of what Tabitha had originally told her about mana zones and how they boosted skills.

Behind a mask of poison, the winged serpent finally lowered its head and gazed at them with its remaining eye.

“Stay on the move!” Tabitha frantically shouts as she and Aaliyah flash-step away just as the lesser dragon in front of them let out a bone-chilling screech and rushed toward them.

The tide of battle had once again flipped. As it was now, just getting close to the winged serpent was a death sentence for Tabitha and Aaliyah.

With a great crack, the snake swept its broken tail at them, regardless of how much it hurt, realizing all it had to do was graze them and it would win.

Tabitha instinctively raised her shield to protect them, but realized that wouldn’t be enough at the last second. The two humans had barely enough time to dodge as the winged serpent’s tail slashed deeply into the ground they had just been standing on, avoiding the poison whip by barely a hair.

The groove the snake’s tail left in its wake was only a few feet deep, but that wasn’t the worst part. The area surrounding the cut was visibly turning white like bone from the poison, meaning it was strong enough to harm even this bleak landscape.

“What do we do?” Aaliyah shouted as she dodged a swipe from one of the serpent’s wings, her heart pounding in her chest like a war drum as she struggled to avoid being touched by her opponent. “It’s not dispersing,” she was obviously referring to the poison covering the snake. If anything, it was only growing stronger as small amounts continued to leak out of the dragon's mouth and cling to its scales.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

“I’m not sure,” Tabitha shouted back as she nimbly danced around a section of the snake’s coiling body that it intended to flatten her with. There was a chance they could damage it with their weapons, but in the process, they would lose access to them once they were tainted.

“How’s your mana?”

"Still recovering," Aaliyah yelled back as she put her last five free stat points into Dexterity. The boost immediately came in handy, helping her dodge a close swing of the serpent's head.

“We won’t be able to keep this up for long,” Tabitha noted grimly as they continued to do their best to avoid being hit.

In her head, Aaliyah scoffed; she didn't need to be told that. Her whole body was hurting after that full-powered strike to the winged serpent's head, and her Stamina was already circling the drain. It was only the fear of death that was keeping her on her feet, and even that wasn’t enough to fuel her indefinatly.

The stat points she distributed over the battle were helping to mitigate things, but that boost wasn’t going to last much longer, either.

Neither of them said it out loud, but things weren’t looking good for the pair of warriors.

If she thought she would listen to her, now would be the time Tabitha would order Aaliyah to try and escape while she sacrificed herself to deliver one fine attack against the lesser dragon. But Tabitha knew that was just wishful thinking on her part.

Even with their backs against the wall, Aaliyah wasn’t looking for an opportunity to escape; in fact, the only thing on her mind at all was helping her and Tabitha survive.

Yes, things were scary, and yes, there was a good chance they would die—But so what; when had that ever stopped either of them before?

If there was one thing both of them knew, it was that every monster had a weak spot, a specific skill that was their kryptonite.

Even in the heat of the battle, Aaliyah never forgot about the soul devourer’s single weakness that allowed her to survive her encounter with it, and it was arguably much stronger than this worm. Moreover, they already knew how to beat the winged serpent’s poison; they just had to commit it.

Agonizingly slowly, Aaliyah was piecing together one last-ditch plan. If it worked, they stood a single chance at winning; if not— Well, they would die trying like they always knew was a possibility.

All Aaliyah needed was time to recharge her mana and, hopefully, a bit of Stamina.

The only problem was she didn’t have time, or at least not enough.

Aaliyah’s lungs burned as she dodged another wild strike from the winged serpent. She had gotten her wish; it no longer viewed her as inferior prey. The snake was attacking her just as much as it was Tabitha, if not more so.

She, a lesser being, someone it usually didn’t even consider a threat, had critically wounded it, which resulted in him losing one of his precious eyes. The winged serpent craved revenge against both of them equally and wouldn’t stop until they were lying dead underneath him or in his stomach.

It’s why the winged serpent was going to such lengths to kill them. His current form wasn’t something his body could endure for long. This particular venom he coated himself in was so strong that even he was having trouble against it. It pushed his natural resistance to the precipice and was moments away from consuming him in turn, but the snake felt it was worth the risk. All it took was a single touch, just one glance, and they would suffer an agonizing death in mere seconds.

Without either side noticing it, the battle had entered its final minute. Both sides were being pushed to their breaking points, and only one would win.

Time ticked down as both sides made their final moves. While the serpent did everything it could just to graze the flies buzzing around it, Tabitha and Aaliyah secretly signaled each other for their final joint attack.

Through a series of gestures and pointed looks, the two hatched a crazy plan without words, one that would likely get one or both of them killed. But it was all they could do, so they didn’t hesitate to try it.

Unsurprisingly, it all came down to Aaliyah, like it always seemed to—the weakest of the three—someone who was almost 50 levels lower than the lesser dragon. Everything rode on her shoulders, and she carried that weight proudly.

Gradually, Tabitha and Aaliyah started to sync up their movements, something the winged serpent noticed this time. It refused to be caught off guard again, which, funnily enough, made the women’s jobs that much easier.

The two moved in perfect tandem until Aaliyah made her move.

By herself, Aaliyah jumped back with everything she had, putting as much distance between her and the snake as she could in her current state. This sudden movement naturally drew the winged serpent’s attention to her, as it refused to allow her to escape its reach, leading it to barrel past Tabitha while simultaneously trying to poison her, in an attempt to once again close the distance between all three of them.

The snake caught Tabitha’s shadow, keeping pace with it out of the corner of its eye as it charged forward, but held absolute confidence that it was invincible in its current form, convinced that even if they somehow managed to scratch it, it meant certain death for its opponents in return.

From what it had witnessed so far, the lesser dragon was sure that there was no way the larger ape could dispel its venom in such a potent form! He was invincible!

The winged serpent didn’t bother with any fancy attacks as it sped toward Aaliyah.

Which was exactly what she was hoping for. The beast’s strategy was, and always had been, to be stronger than them, but strength wasn’t everything.

The world slowed to a crawl for Aaliyah as she entered a sort of Zen mode. She put aside all her fears, all her doubts, and focused solely on what she had to do.

It was now or never.

Live.

Or die.

This was it!

Aaliyah shouted the words to her cleaning spell as if they were the last thing she would ever say. Then there was light.

Aaliyah wasn’t able to fully recover all her mana available to her, even with the expensive potion she drank. When she chanted her spell, she had only recovered roughly 78% of her max mana. She did so, knowing it might not be enough.

Even still, Aaliyah channeled so much extra mana into her cleaning spell that she and her surroundings glowed with radiant white light as if she were the sun. The light was blinding, but even so, she didn’t look away from the monster closing in on her.

She fell to her knees, unable to move as she channeled everything she had to make her spell as strong as possible, increasing its range by only a few dozen feet.

None of this deterred the snake in the slightest from continuing its mad charge and killing the girl outright until the lesser dragon slammed head-first into it, and the world froze.

Magic met magic as Tabitha held her breath.

Quicker than any of them could process, a battle raged between opposing mana types. The winged serpent’s highly poisonous mana melted its way through Aaliyah's spellwork like acid while simultaneously being burned away in the process. The barrier between the two shifted rapidly back and forth as each side destroyed the other hundreds of times over in the blink of an eye, neither side giving in to the other.

Tabitha didn’t wait to see who would be the winner. She leaped from the snake’s blind spot, aiming for the section right behind its head where Aaliyah had ripped away most of its scales. The area was still covered by poison when she made her move, but that didn’t matter to her.

The winged serpent, still rushing at a now prone Aaliyah, noticed what Tabitha was doing thanks to how her shadow moved, but it didn't care—at least not initially. He was sure she would die before her sword pierced too deeply into its flesh. Her attack would hurt, but it was a small price to pay for his victory.

The snake was already celebrating his victory in its child-sized brain when he felt it. The closer he neared his weak and defenseless prey, the more the venom covering his head vanished. It didn't disappear all at once; it fizzled and fought back, but eventually, as he was mere feet away from swallowing his prey whole, his head and neck were completely cleansed of poison for one infinitesimally short second.

He was moments away from swallowing Aalyiah whole when all his instincts screamed at him to move.

For the first time ever, the lesser dragon sensed death approaching. Quicker than lightning, the winged serpent's one good eye swiveled around in its socket to see Tabitha plummeting out of the sky towards its now exposed neck with her sword held high. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Aalyiah had successfully pushed back the snake's poison just enough to give her teacher one opportunity, and she wasn’t going to waste it.

The snake's brain went into fight-or-flight mode immediately as it tried to stop its charge and dodge at the last second. The winged serpent’s head twisted in the air, narrowly avoiding Aaliyah, who was still collapsed on the ground in front of it, trying to move out of the way, when it suddenly froze in place.

On the ground, barely clinging to conciseness, spectral hands equipped with ghostly bracelets had erupted from Aaliyah's back and plunged into the snake's body.

Aaliyah had his soul in the palm of her hands. It was reckless of her to do so; she wasn't in the right headspace to utilize her skill. One wrong move and she could rip out the snake’s soul and turn into a monster—

But that didn’t happen.

Aaliyah ignored the voice in her head urging her to take everything from the snake and kept Soul Devourer plunged into the snake without harming its soul. Her skill did absolutely nothing physical to the snake, but the weird sensation of having its soul grabbed was more than enough to make it pause momentarily.

And a moment of hesitation in battle was equal to a lifetime of mistakes.

Tabitha repositioned herself mid-jump and landed squarely on the winged serpent's back, which was frozen due to Aaliyah's skill. Tabitha's junior sister had accomplished the impossible—again; now it was her turn.

Like Aaliyah, Tabitha put everything she had into one final sword swing before the poison clinging to the snake's lower half once again covered the rest of its body. She put her Stamina and health— her hopes and dreams— her mana and willpower into a single slash.

“Dragon Slash!" Tabitha didn't know where the name came from; it just felt right to shout.

Her blade flashed downward, cut through everything before it, and the battle ended as quickly as it started.

Total time: Nine minutes and fifty-three seconds.

The winners: Tabitha and Aaliyah.