“ABSOLUTELY NOT!” John practically screamed at Thana who took a surprised step back at the outburst. Worry and the idea itself made the blood pump through John’s veins like he was done running a triathlon while being chased by Romulus himself.
He took a deep breath, seeing the blood mage shrinking back like a scared bunny at the Gamer’s rage. “Calm the fuck down,” she pleaded. Even while afraid of her lover’s rage, she still couldn’t stop swearing. Wisdom and experience made John recollect the path to the current situation in an effort to analyse how this even came to be.
It had begun with John reprimanding Nathalia over the dinner table after Thana had informed everyone else what had transpired. Well, Lydia had a whole lot of other berating she had wanted to let Thana know first. “If you do something like that, at least inform me!”
“Make less of a fuss if you are doing secret meetings.”
“You could have at least taken his book.” And other such things.
John was more focused on the fact that Nathalia had even let her go. Of course, the dragoness proved completely indifferent to his comments, simply staring at the vegetables in her stew as if she hoped she could shame them into becoming meat.
Afterwards he had gone with Nathalia and Thana to supervise their training efforts for a bit. The two of them had been bashing heads for a while when Thana had finally said the thing that made John burst out like this.
“Last time I was really angry, like fuck-ass mad,” she had pondered. “So how about we stick me in an incineration chamber and put me on fire?”
John’s reaction to that had been understandably explosive. He took a second deep breath and then, in as calm a fashion as he could, pointed out, “That is an absolutely terrible idea, and I will not allow it.”
“Allow it? Motherfucker, I don’t need you to allow me to do anything,” Thana, her fear swinging directly to rage of her own, growled.
“Thana, please,” John tried to plead with her. “Don’t take this as a challenge to do it. We both know that you aren’t the most stable person and sticking you into an ‘incineration chamber’ is just bound to lead to trouble. You also just said you DIDN’T want to get some of your memories back. Triggering past traumas sounds like a perfect way to remember unwanted stuff. Furthermore, at best this does what you want and at worst you will go into a complete berserker rage AND you get what you want.”
“Fuck you, I am doing it.” Thana flipped him off.
“No, just…” Before John could get anymore arguments in about how terrible of an idea this was, black stone walls pierced out of the scorched earth that was Nathalia’s domain.
They had been fighting in the lava field that was the dragoness’ home. Although the actual lava was pushed far to the horizon. In this plane, her Sanctum, Nathalia was as close to almighty as they came, being able to create life in the shape of golems or restructure the landscape as she saw fit.
But the question of how home barriers worked had to wait for another time. For right now, John glared at Nathalia. “If it is her wish, I will oblige,” she just shrugged it off and jumped at the top of the construct she had just made. It looked like an upside-down funnel. “We are not bound by your opinions, little John,” Nathalia shouted to him with a grin that revealed her dagger-like, carnivorous teeth.
“Of course you are not, this is not about you having to do whatever I say,” John shouted back; “This is about this being an absolutely terrible idea! I don’t want Thana to live through this stuff again!”
“I won’t be a burden to Lydia or anyone else!” Thana shouted out of the funnel. “So let me do my shit, John!”
“You are not a burden just because you can’t take out the whole enemy team alone,” John still attempted to talk some sense into her. “You can rely on us a little more.”
“I tire of this bickering,” Nathalia sighed and waved her hand; “Her resolve is set, you cannot stop us either way.” She was absolutely right on that front, John didn’t hold a candle to either of them.
‘Yet,’ he reminded himself and sighed heavily. “Fine,” he spat out, “but if this goes south, I will never let you forget about it.”
Nathalia made a dismissive gesture and her chest swell up as her inner inferno was fanned. Her maw opened wide, and a moment later, she spewed forth fire of such intense heat that John scrambled away from the premise while keeping a close eye on Thana’s health bar in his interface. It didn’t drop, so at least Nathalia was holding herself back.
Then Nathalia, the funnel and the fire were suddenly gone. All John caught was a stripe of blue ripping upwards. He ripped his eyes up to the sky and sent Jack flying after them.
‘Of course, I had to be right,’ John thought as he saw the scene unfold. Behind Thana’s back burned six pillars of ghastly blue fire like the gas flames used in chemical labs. Fuelled by an invisible source, their clearly outlined shapes stuck out like the full moon in the otherwise red and black landscape, the tips forming a hexagon.
Normally, John would have just been amazed by that Stat increase. Even though he had no idea where those numbers came from, they seemed to be rather arbitrary. The problem was that those pretty high stats were currently bashing against the ones of Nathalia. Even worse, they were higher than those of the goddess of volcanoes.
This was only reinforced as the mid-air exchange of blows turned into Thana spinning the dragoness around and tossing her to the ground. The ground splintered under the impact, lava spurting out of the cracks. The lava uselessly hit John’s Mana Protection, and he peeked into the crater.
Nathalia rose on shaking feet and growled. Orange glowing blood ran down the side of her face, slowly due to its high viscosity. She spat out, the mixture of saliva and yet more blood searing into the stone. “I will make her regret that,” the dragoness announced, and before John could warn her she was already in the air again.
If there was one critical advantage Nathalia had over the enraged Thana, it was that she could actually fly. On wings of flowing lava and cracking obsidian, she soared into the sky and towards the falling blood mage.
The initial impact had pulled them a hundred metres into the ground, pure force used in a mindless manner. All Thana could do in this situation, now that she no longer had a grip on Nathalia, was tumble through the air and wait for the dragoness to attack.
Or so she had presumed until a torrent of blue fire ignited the sky, HER sky. Her narrow dodge was largely successful, only her foot getting caught in the onslaught of pain. And it was pain, that much was sure.
The fire itself had no temperature, if it just had been plain hot then Nathalia would have felt next to nothing. No, it was the pure, quintessential feeling of getting burned that she was assaulted by. A feeling so alien to her that it caused her to actually groan in pain.
But a bit of torment wouldn’t stop her. She flew a wide curve and then slammed into Thana’s side. “Insolent girl,” Nathalia screamed and punched the blood mage in the face. Blood splattered into the air and became a shower of the same pale blue fire, self-igniting, as Thana was pummelled by a series of strikes.
In the middle of these strikes, she started laughing. Crazed sounds echoed through the air as the two of them returned back to the floor where John hid behind a rock to not get caught up in the crossfire. Nathalia kept the strikes going, kneeling over Thana’s chest.
Each punch created a shockwave that made the ground tremble as the might of an exploding mountain crashed down on Thana again and again. The crater deepened to the sound of hammering and maddened laughter.
“Stop this ceaseless, annoying sound!” she demanded and started choking the blood mage, crushing her windpipe in mere moments. While that didn’t eliminate the smile on her lips, that did at least shut her up. As long as Nathalia kept her hands in place to prevent the regeneration, that was.
The dots in her eyes were moving in an erratic fashion. Like broken clockwork, they ticked forwards irregularly, both in interval and distance, only to occasionally jump back to their starting positions. “Thana, calm down,” John, now halfway certain that it was safe to come out (or that he at least had to take the risk to end this debacle), shouted as he crawled out from behind the rock.
Whether or not the blood mage even heard him was unclear as she grabbed Nathalia’s arms on her throat and started prying them open. The dragoness’ orange eyes opened wide as she was not only challenged in strength but slowly getting overpowered. For a few seconds, they were wrestling, angered roar against reignited laughter, then Thana got the upper-hand and whirled Nathalia around like she was a ragdoll.
The landscape shook once more as Thana slammed the dragoness into the floor repeatedly. Then the blood mage dropped her in mid motion and sent her flying with a kick. John couldn’t even see the dragoness flying off, all he noticed was a mountain in the distance cracking and a chunk of it collapsing on top of Nathalia.
Thana turned to John, raising a hand. Then she froze, the smile still on her lips, only to then grab her head and cry out in anguish. John slowly stepped closer. “It’s all good,” he tried to calm her down; “Just take a couple of breaths, Thana.”
That did not have the intended effect, instead the blood mage started thrashing around and clawing at her own hair. Howling glued together syllables of all kinds of languages she created gibberish beyond any and all comprehension. Waves of fire, dozens of times stronger than the comparably small cascade he had experienced when he had fought her, exploded from her back and thrashing motions.
John wanted to reach out to her, but there was no way he could have survived even getting half the way there. Then a roar drowned all other sounds in the Protected Space; all laughter and cries stood no chance against this singular blast, loud enough to actually cause damage to John in the form of his eardrums ripping apart.
As Gamer’s Body fixed that, John reared his head towards the source of the sound. His jaw almost dropped as he saw the true form he had been wondering about for so long.
To say that Nathalia was gargantuan would have been an understatement. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she was moving, John would have mistaken her for a part of the ash coloured mountain range. About the length of a skyscraper’s height, untold tons of dragon goddess started moving.
Wings that could block out the sun, membranes of flowing lava, spread to assist the gigantic being’s advance. Her body was splintered obsidian broken into the shape of a mythological creature. She wasn’t scaled, there was nothing that made up her body but the obsidian, except for the magma pulsating through her body like blood through a human.
Her outer layer was criss-crossed with splintered volcanic glass, sticking out like irregularities in a mountain. Her long-limbed form only needed a couple of steps to cross the enormous distance. Fire leaked out of her closed maw, its origin inside her chest clearly visible through the slight translucence of her body, shooting forth through her snake-like neck.
Her jaw was terrible to behold; fleshless and lipless as she was, it looked like someone had brutally broken a sheet of glass over their knee and then sharpened the resulting product into two sets of teeth. The two horns at the back of her head made sure that no similarly large creature would be able to easily get at her neck while the one at the end of her snout would be able to impale a whale with ease.
That creature was now above John and, maw opening, about to breathe forth flames so hot they would turn white. Her orange eyes fell on John, however, and he could feel the burning gaze before the maw closed shut instead.
One of her gigantic claws descended upon Thana. A literal single claw was all the accuracy Nathalia’s form could muster against the incredibly tiny human. Thana caught the claw between her bare hands, her inner turmoil forgotten in favour of pure survival instinct.
It was like John was witness to a God of War cutscene. A little woman tried to hold against the sharp, not to mention house-sized, tip of the claw of a dragon who was the embodiment of volcanoes. It didn’t help that Thana was actually holding against Nathalia for a good few seconds.
Finally, however, the battle was over when the ground underneath Thana’s feet gave in and caused her to fall. The claw nailed her to the ground with impressive accuracy, penetrating her stomach just deep enough to fixate her on the tip of the dragoness’ claw without cleaving her into two parts.
Nathalia’s head reached downwards, and she hissed. It was a surprisingly high-pitched sound for a creature of that size. Hearing the throaty voice of the dragoness come from that maw was also a bit out of place. “Such an annoyance… stop ruining my claw!”
Thana was now busy trying to break free by repeatedly slamming her fist against the enormous talon. Small cracks spread and melded back together, the tiny wounds clogging with the magical lava. John barely even wanted to step closer, the dragoness radiated such extreme heat he was feeling like he was laying in the noon desert.
Still, he did it before the berserk girl had the brilliant idea of ripping herself apart to get free or something. Not only would that have been too much for his already strained nerves to behold, but it would also have worked and prolonged this cataclysmic fight.
The blood mage didn’t even notice him coming closer. Ceaselessly, she punched away at the claw holding her down until John kneeled down on her side, careful not to come into contact with the energy pillar like wings, and put a hand on her head.
Her movements slowed down as the rotation of her eyes slowly normalized, looking into his own. From jumpy to a quick rotation to finally slowing down. Then her hands collapsed. Nathalia kept a keen eye on the whole scene.
“Now I don’t want to sound smug,” John said very loud once the blue fire was extinguished; “But I totally told you!”
