The Fall of Dusan Village

  The village heard Mizi before it saw him.

  Not his voice or his footsteps. The specific quiet that precedes something that carries authority over the natural world, the way animals and wind both make the same decision at the same moment. The security forces at Dusan's perimeter had been briefed. They deployed anyway, because deployment was the job, and they had done the job long enough that the gap between what was likely and what was required had stopped mattering.

  The white-haired disciple came first, which was tactical. The Thunder Dragon Lord arrived with him and moved through the security forces' positions the way lightning moves through a conductor: not around the obstacles but through them, each arc finding the least resistance, the most catastrophic path. The forces that took the hit went down with the particular totality of people hit by something that operated at a speed their response time couldn't access.

  The Cheetah Lord appeared from the village's upper edge with the one quality that matched the Thunder Dragon Lord exactly, which was speed, and the two creatures found each other in the air above the middle distance between their summoners, the impact of equals stopping them both, and the Thunder Dragon Lord fell.

  The white-haired disciple moved to press the advantage.

  Mizi put a hand on his shoulder.

  "Finish the others," he said, without looking at him. "He's mine."

  Azizan stood with his sword drawn and his body no longer trembling, which was the change that the years had made. He had trembled through every fight he could remember, the excess of his own energy working against him. It had taken time to understand that the trembling was fear wearing the wrong costume, and more time to understand what fear actually was and what to do with it.

  He looked at Mizi's face and found almost nothing he recognised.

  "What happened to you," Azizan said. It was not a question so much as an attempt to reach something.

  Mizi looked at him for a moment. "I don't fully understand it myself," he said. The honesty in it was the most unsettling thing he had said so far, the specific honesty of someone reporting a fact rather than defending a position. "Every time I do something that I know is wrong, my heart says it's right. I hear it clearly." He drew his sword. "Step aside. I need to reach the Ancient Tree."

  Azizan stepped forward instead.

  The fight had the quality of a reunion in the way that fights between people who know each other well sometimes do, each move read slightly before it was made, each response a half-beat faster than it should have been possible for. Azizan and the Cheetah Lord attacked together, which was the only approach that had any chance, and Mizi moved through the combination with the supernatural agility of something that no longer spent energy on hesitation. He broke the Cheetah Lord's arm at the joint with a specific economy of motion, the minimum force required, redirected, and his boot found Azizan and introduced him to a large rock.

  Azizan stood up again.

  The sword exchange that followed was longer than the first exchange, and more equal than either of them had expected, and the mistake, when it came, was small. A fraction of misalignment in a parry, the kind of error that in a practice session is noted and corrected. The sword found Azizan's hand.

  Azizan's scream was brief and controlled, which was also something the years had given him.

  Mizi caught him by the throat before he fell, held him for a moment, and looked at him. "I wasn't going to kill you," he said, and let him go, and turned toward the Ancient Tree.

  A gunshot.

  Mizi moved out of the bullet's path with the reflexes of something that has registered the shot's origin before it was fired. He turned.

  His father was standing at the village's centre with the gun in both hands in the specific stance of someone who learned to shoot and hoped never to use the knowledge. The expression on his face was not anger but something past anger that doesn't have a clean name.

  "Stay away from the tree," his father said.

  From behind the father, Idham and Azmei. The Ancient Tree had been in this village longer than anyone living could account for, and it had its own understanding of what this moment required. It had given what it gave to people who had proven they would use it to protect rather than to hold. Idham's hands found the earth. The rock around the Golden Dragon Lord's legs hardened and locked, the ground becoming architecture, the architecture becoming a prison. Azmei's hands found the trees. The trunks elongated and sharpened and drove through the Dragon Lord's chest with the specific force of living wood that has been given purpose.

  The Golden Dragon Lord dissolved.

  Mizi looked at the space where it had been. He called other monsters. The Ancient Tree produced its light, and the monsters caught in it burned cleanly and completely, and what was left when the light faded was the Thunder Dragon Lord and the white-haired disciple and Mizi, and the three of them looked at the village that had not been taken.

  Mizi turned and left.

  His father watched him go.

  "His eyes," his father said, to Azmei, to the air. "Those aren't his eyes. That isn't something he was." He stopped. "The Golden Dragon Spirit has a nature of its own. Aggression. No mercy. That's its original nature. Mizi has been weakened enough that he can't hold that nature back anymore. What you see in his face is not him. It's what he's been carrying."

  Azmei asked what they should do.

  His father lowered the gun. "We hold the village," he said. "And we pray the boy from the future figures out the rest."

  Siege of the Lubanaki Hideout

  The gate was set into the mountain's face in the way of things that have been built to communicate permanence, and the man standing in front of it had the composure of someone who has been placed there and considers that placement final.

  He was not large. He carried a katana in the low position of someone who has spent enough time with the weapon that holding it is simply how they stand. He looked at Lyra's team the way a door looks at someone who doesn't have a key.

  "You weren't invited," he said. "If you're uncertain about this, I recommend going home."

  One of Lyra's people raised a rifle. "Name."

  "Syizl. I'm not from this world. I came specifically to study with Mizi." He paused. "I've finished studying."

  The first shots were aimed with the precision of a trained team. Syizl moved through them the way water moves through things, the bullets finding the air where he had been, and his katana moved twice and the bullets that would have been hardest to dodge became two pieces each. He was already at the team's left flank before the adjustment had been processed.

  Lyra drew her swords.

  "Go," she said to Hamiz, without looking at him. "Inside. Now."

  She engaged Syizl with the forward pressure of someone who has decided that space is the enemy, that the technique which splits the ground and cuts through hundreds requires distance to build, and she was not going to give it distance. The cybernetic legs gave her angles that were not angles a human frame produces, and she used all of them.

  Behind her, Hamiz and two Neuroprotection operatives moved through the gate.

  The throne room was large and dim and the blue smoke arrived before Hamiz had reached the centre of it. He felt the edge of the sedative in his lungs before his barrier came up, the light forming a membrane around his body with the instinct that had replaced deliberate summoning. The two operatives behind him went down without making the transition from standing to floor.

  The smoke cleared. The red-haired man was standing across the room with the patience of someone who had been waiting here specifically.

  "I'll make sure you don't leave," Ignis said.

  "Let's see," Hamiz said.

  The Fire Dragon Lord came out of the dark air of the throne room with the specific quality of a summon that has been trained in a space designed for it. The Golden Dragon Lord came out of Hamiz with the less-polished quality of something that has been accessed three times in controlled conditions and once in a crisis.

  They met in the room's upper space.

  The fight's first phase was worse than Hamiz had expected. The Fire Dragon Lord moved with the specific dominance of a monster that has sparred daily against an opponent who pushes it, and the Golden Dragon Lord's imperfect form was visible in the specific gaps between its responses. The Fire Dragon Lord burned one of its hands and pulled its tail and brought it down, and then lifted it by the chest with both claws and pulled.

  The Golden Dragon Lord separated into two pieces.

  The Fire Dragon Lord dropped them.

  Ignis smiled with the relief of someone watching a problem resolve. "Imperfect summon against mine. You see the problem."

  Hamiz was on the ground where the Dragon Lord's dissolution had dropped him, and the room was smoke and the aftermath of heat, and he looked at the space where the Dragon Lord had been.

  He remembered what Azraie had said at the wall: your father's power was fueled by the rage of protection. Release your feelings. The breakthrough comes from the feeling, not the technique.

  He thought about the woman in PaP Town with the groceries. He thought about Azizan, somewhere in Dusan, missing a hand. He thought about his father as a fifteen-year-old standing on a bridge with a watch that burned, fighting something no one else could fight because no one else was there, and the version of that man that the years had turned into something else, and what it would mean to lose that.

  The mark on his face lit.

  The Complete Golden Dragon Lord was different from the form that had emerged in the alley. It arrived with the weight of something that has been called correctly, fully, without reservation, and it looked at the Fire Dragon Lord with the attention of something that has found its context.

  The Fire Dragon Lord's arms came off at the joints. The Blaster Light followed immediately, no pause for acknowledgement, just the directed force of a Dragon that knows what it has been pointed at.

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  When the light faded, the Fire Dragon Lord was gone.

  Ignis tried a punch. Hamiz caught the arm and twisted and the break was specific and clear, and then his fist found Ignis's face once, which was enough.

  Ignis went down.

  The red dragon mark faded from his face the way a shadow fades when the light changes, gradually and then completely. What was underneath it was the face of someone who has been asleep and is working out where they are.

  Redemption and Portals

  Outside, the duel between Lyra and Syizl had developed into something that neither of them had expected at the start, which was a conversation conducted in the language of sword technique.

  Syizl stopped.

  He lowered the katana to its resting position and looked at Lyra, who did not lower her swords, and asked her why she refused to stop.

  "Because Mizi is going to destroy the world," Lyra said. "Not by choice. By consequence. There is something coming from the ocean that human civilisation is not equipped to survive without everything working together, and what Mizi has done makes that impossible."

  Syizl was quiet.

  "He didn't tell you about R'lyeh," Lyra said. It was not a question.

  "He didn't." Syizl looked at the mountain behind her. "He told me many things. He didn't tell me that."

  The portal opened behind him, which was the specific timing of things that operate on their own schedule. The shimmer of it caught the mountain's light in a way that portals catch light, making it something other than what it is.

  "It seems I'm being called," Syizl said. He looked at Lyra. "I'm not interested in interfering in the affairs of this world. It isn't mine." He turned toward the portal.

  Lyra made the decision in the fraction of a second between him turning and the portal closing, the specific quality of a decision that doesn't have time for deliberation. She leaped.

  She went through with him, and the portal closed, and the mountainside was empty.

  In Habas City, the third disciple had cornered Ruby near the city's central bridge with the Thunder Dragon Lord's specific advantage, which was speed that a patience-based counter strategy could not match through conventional engagement. The Darkness Dragon Lord had taken the hits that speed produces when the opponent can't keep up, and Aziel watched it happen with the confident assessment of someone who has been told, and believed, that what he carries is superior to what she carries.

  "Failed product," he said, pleasantly. "The Darkness Dragon isn't original. It's a construct of darkness, not genuine Dragon Spirit. You and I are almost the same category of fighter, but I have actual blood."

  Ruby laughed.

  "Haha," she said. It was not the laugh of someone receiving bad news. It was the laugh of someone who has been waiting for a specific thing to be said so they could respond to it correctly. "Don't be too confident." She looked at him. "Turn around."

  He turned.

  The Thunder Dragon Lord had run through its speed reserves in the way of things built for sprints rather than sustained engagement, and it was in the gap between its last fast attack and its next one that the Darkness Dragon Lord had been waiting, gathering, concentrating the energy it had been absorbing from the combat's friction and heat for the entire fight.

  The Darkness Blaster was not a fast attack. It was a complete one.

  The Thunder Dragon Lord had no energy left for avoidance.

  Ruby walked up to Aziel while the dust was still settling and took his face in her hands, which was not a gesture he had expected, and pressed her palms against the dragon mark. The absorption was specific, drawing the mark's energy out of him the way you draw a splinter, and what remained was a man blinking in Habas City with no clear memory of arriving there.

  Azraie and Ashley had been managing the monster waves at the PaP Town fortress with the efficiency of two people who have been fighting together long enough that the communication has become mostly spatial. Then the monsters stopped coming.

  In the Lubanaki hideout, Hamiz had found the Power Court by following the infrastructure. The energy conduits led in one direction, and that direction led to the reactor, and the reactor bore an H logo that was not subtle, and the reading of the room's function had taken approximately four seconds.

  He ordered the Golden Dragon Lord to destroy it.

  The Dragon Lord's claws found the reactor's housing, and the energy pathways that the reactor had been maintaining collapsed simultaneously, and across the territory where Mizi's cloned monsters had been operating, they ceased. Not retreated. Ceased, which was a different kind of ending, cleaner and more complete.

  Azraie looked at the empty air where three monsters had been and felt the specific quality of a silence that has replaced noise.

  The Arrival of the Highlord

  Hamiz stepped out of the hideout's gate into the mountain air and found Mizi there.

  Mizi had arrived from Dusan with the speed of someone who had felt the reactor's shutdown from a distance and understood what it meant. He looked at Hamiz with the specific attention of someone reading a face they have not seen but have been expecting.

  "So," Mizi said. He looked at Hamiz's eyes, at the dragon mark, at the structure of his face. "I get married in the future." He seemed genuinely pleased by this information. "How long do I have?"

  "That's not why I came," Hamiz said.

  "No." Mizi reached into the Golden Dragon Lord's mouth and produced a sword, which was an unusual place to store a weapon but was clearly practiced. He held the other one toward Hamiz, hilt-first. "Show me what you've learned. Succession duel."

  Hamiz took the sword.

  The first exchange was short. Mizi parried everything with one hand, the specific ease of someone whose technique has been refined beyond the point where effort is required, and Hamiz ended up on the ground at the end of it.

  "Not like that," Mizi said. "Get up. Clear your mind. Follow your heart, not your head. Your head knows you're behind. Your heart knows something else."

  Hamiz got up.

  The second exchange was longer. He stopped trying to calculate Mizi's responses and started reading the space between them the way the training had taught him to read it, and Mizi's expression changed slightly in the way of a teacher recognising something they hoped would appear.

  "You have my blood," Mizi said, parrying the last blow with a force that pushed Hamiz backward but did not put him down. "Come with me. We would make this world something that doesn't require defending."

  "No," Hamiz said. He was still standing. "I won't be what you became. I'm going to protect people. I'm going to make sure the innocent lives don't get spent on things that could be done differently."

  Mizi looked at him for a moment. Then raised the sword.

  "Then—"

  The ground moved.

  Not an earthquake in the natural sense. A dislocation, the specific tremor of something very large changing its relationship with the ocean floor after a thousand years of stillness. On the mountain's high face, both of them saw it: the water at the horizon doing what water does when something below it has decided to rise.

  The wave came first. It hit the city and the lowlands with the full weight of water that has been accelerating for the depth of an ocean, and it was only the Ancient Tree's light over Dusan and the fortresses that Habas had been building for two years that held the line, the preparations made by people who had been warned and had taken the warning seriously.

  Then, from the water that had come in, something rose that was not the water.

  R'lyeh's head appeared above the cloud layer. This was not a figure of speech. The clouds were below the crown of its head, and its steps found the city the way a person's steps find a puddle, with awareness of the surface but not particular concern for what the surface contains.

  Hamiz reached for the Crystal Mirror.

  The Titan heard it, or felt it, or sensed through whatever sense it used the specific resonance of the one object that had hurt its kind before. It opened its mouth.

  The sound that came out was not a weapon in the designed sense. It was simply what happens when something that large produces a sound, the shockwave of it. Every mirror in Habas shattered. The Crystal Mirror in Hamiz's hands shattered. The pieces fell.

  "We have no choice," Mizi said.

  He was standing beside Hamiz. Not at him, or across from him, but beside him, which was a different orientation than they had occupied thirty seconds ago.

  "Together," Hamiz said.

  "Together," Mizi agreed.

  The Supernova Megablaster

  In PaP Town, Azraie and Ashley had found R'lyeh's legs, which was a sentence that should not have been possible and was. Their summons hit the ankles and the shins with the specific futility of attacks that were not going to end anything and were not intended to. The intention was distraction, which is a different kind of usefulness.

  Aqif's Golden Wolf joined them. Ruby's Darkness Dragon Lord joined them. Other L-Fighters who had survived the preceding months brought their summons and found the same futility and stayed anyway.

  The summons fled except for the ones whose summoners held them by will alone.

  Sensei K arrived.

  He had not competed in years. His body had the specific wear of someone who has given most of what they had to give and is now working with what remains. He summoned the White Wolf Lord, which he had not summoned since the old days, and the Lord came out of him with the quality of something that knows it is being asked one last time.

  He pushed. Against a leg that was the size of a building, with a monster and an old man's will, he pushed, and he pushed until the White Wolf Lord's hand found its limit and broke, and the broken hand transferred its force one last time on the way to useless, and R'lyeh fell.

  The city shook with the fall. The ocean shook. The old man's nose bled and he went down, and Azraie was there before the ground received him.

  The Titan began to rise.

  Mizi and Hamiz arrived before it was fully upright.

  Two Golden Dragon Lords from two dragons, their blaster light attacks finding the Titan's face at the moment it was between positions, and the Titan registered this as it registered everything: slowly, with the patience of something that has not needed to hurry in a thousand years.

  Hamiz sent the others away. The others went, which was its own kind of trust.

  Mizi and Hamiz flew on their Dragons and the Titan's hands found them twice and the evasion took everything the Dragons had and more, and below them the city continued to absorb what the tsunami had left it.

  "Concentrate," Mizi said, which was a strange thing to say at altitude while avoiding a hand the size of a building. "All of it, pulled up from your body into your mind. When you feel it there, let go of the mind. That's the moment."

  Hamiz tried to do this while flying and evading and holding the Dragon Lord together and not thinking about his father beside him finally teaching him something.

  The glow came from his forehead when he stopped trying.

  The aura showed him the Titan's weak points the way the right light shows structural flaws in material. He saw them clearly, the places where the impossible skin had its limits, and the Dragon Lords fired in sequence, each shot specific, and the blue blood that came from the wounds was the specific colour of something internal in a creature that doesn't bleed in the ordinary sense.

  R'lyeh's hand swing caught them both. Mizi caught Hamiz on the way down.

  "Here," Mizi said. He was already making the peace sign. "Watch this first."

  He merged.

  The Dragon Lord dissolved and reformed as something that was Mizi and the Dragon simultaneously, the humanoid-dragon form that was both and neither, and he opened the black hole with the full weight of what he had, and the black hole pulled, and R'lyeh was too large for it.

  Mizi began to fall.

  Hamiz made the peace sign.

  The Golden Dragon Spirit appeared in front of him in the space between him and the falling Mizi, and they looked at each other, and Hamiz held out his hand.

  The merging was the first time he had done it and it felt like coming home, which was not a comparison he had expected to make in the middle of a battle above a drowning city, but that was what it felt like. The humanoid-dragon form resolved around him and he caught Mizi before the altitude did and pulled him up.

  Mizi looked at his son in the dragon form.

  "Good," he said, quietly.

  They turned toward R'lyeh together.

  The first Supernova Blaster hit the Titan's raised arm and the Titan answered it with its own force, the specific blast of a creature that has been carrying the power of every monster that ever fled from it, and the two forces found each other in the air between them.

  The collision shook the galaxy in the specific way of things that are happening at scales above the planetary. Mizi and Hamiz held it, together, against the Titan's full answer, and the shaking continued until the Titan's force began to resolve in their direction.

  They focused it.

  The Supernova Megablaster was not a technique that had been practiced. It was the consequence of two people's combined strength finding a single point of application, and the point it found was the Titan's stomach, and the beam burned through the impossible skin with the specific quality of the right kind of light finding the right kind of surface.

  R'lyeh screamed.

  The sound of it arrived everywhere simultaneously, every ear on every coast, the sound of something that has not been hurt in a thousand years encountering hurt. It moved backwards through the city, which destroyed what the tsunami had not, and then it moved into the ocean, and then it descended, and then it was below the surface, and then it was gone.

  The water was still.

  Two Paths

  They came down together and stood on the mountain's upper face and let the changed world below them be the changed world.

  "What will you do now?" Hamiz asked.

  Mizi looked at the city. "Wait," he said. "The world will come for me. That's part of what I've done and what comes after it, and I won't make it worse by running." He was quiet for a moment. "That's my punishment. I know what it is."

  Hamiz looked at his father's face, which was the face of someone who has done everything with full commitment, the good things and the catastrophic things, with the same absolute investment, and who has arrived at the consequences of both and is standing in them.

  "I'm going back," Hamiz said.

  "I know."

  "I'm not going to change what you did. If I change it, the person I've become doesn't exist. Whatever you were building with your choices, it built me too."

  Mizi looked at him for a long moment. "You're better than I was," he said, which was not something that came easily from him.

  "You taught me how to be," Hamiz said.

  He made the gesture that activated the Time Regulation Mode, the sequence his instruments recognised, and the White Hole that had brought him here recognised him in return, opening the path.

  He looked at his father one last time. Mizi was already turned toward the city and what was coming for him, standing in the specific posture of someone who has accepted a weight and is carrying it.

  Hamiz went home, carrying what he had come with and everything he had found.