Chapter 22: 22 The deserter dragon

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22: The deserter dragon 22: The deserter dragon On the second day, the journey continued slowly, punctuated only by the rhythm of his footsteps and the incessant sound of the rain.

The nameless lands were silent, but that silence was not reassuring: it was the stillness of a waiting abyss, the silence of a gaping mouth, ready to devour anyone who dared cross its borders.

Kairan walked with his head bowed, his soaked cloak clinging to his body, the mud sucking at his feet with every step.

Eight years old.

Yet his step was not that of a child: it was that of someone who had already learned that the world did not forgive weakness.

Then, suddenly, he stopped.

He had heard something, not with his ears, but with his skin.

He looked up, and from the cloud-torn sky an immense shape emerged.

He recognized it instantly: a black dragon.

Kairan knew them, black dragons.

He had met them in Sanguinarii years ago, when his solitary travels still took him to the edge of the Abyss.

He had walked among them as one walked among old acquaintances, and he had spoken with their lord, Zerthik, the Emperor of Dragons, in the ancient language of the Extras.

Between that child and the thousand-year-old colossus, something had grown that no demon had ever known: mutual respect.

Which is why seeing a black dragon so far from his realm chilled his blood.

Dragons never left Sanguinarii.

Never.

Unless they were fleeing.

“You have abandoned the Emperor,” Kairan said aloud, in the language of the Extras.

The dragon froze in midair.

Its wings opened fully, and the world seemed to bend beneath them.

Each was as vast as an entire demon city square, and their beating swept away the rain for dozens of meters around, generating winds that bent and snapped the twisted trees of the nameless lands.

“So?” the creature roared, its voice thunderous with contempt.

“Yes, I left Zerthik.

I left his pact, his surrender, his ten-thousand-year silence.

I bow to no one, not to a dragon emperor, not to a demon emperor, much less to a hatchling who still reeks of the Dark Tower.” Kairan didn’t answer immediately.

She studied the beast.

Its hide was made of black scales, as large as slabs of marble, gleaming like shattered mirrors that reflected lightning in the sky.

Each scale was a monument of power, set like the armor of a war god.

Its head was gigantic, its jaws armed with fangs like columns of bone, and its eyes, two incandescent orbs of crimson red, burned with an ancient flame, filled with eternal hatred.

Its descent was apocalyptic: the ground shook, mud splashed in every direction like a stormy sea, rocks split.

When its colossal paws touched the ground, they sank until they shattered the crust of the earth, raising clouds of dust and steam.

“A deserter,” Kairan finally stated.

Her voice was calm, but beneath that calm was something sharp.

“Zerthik has kept the dragons at peace for ten thousand years.

And you flee, spreading terror across these lands.

How many villages have you burned, dragon?

How many innocents have you incinerated just because no one could stop you?” The beast laughed, a laugh that caused a distant hill to collapse.

“And who should stop me?

You?” Kairan took off his cloak and dropped it into the mud.

Beneath it, the body of an eight-year-old boy: short, but already sculpted like a compact blade, short and unbreakable.

No armor, no weapons, just two bare hands.

And he could have weapons.

All he had to do was open a portal, just one, and let one of the golden swords he held emerge beyond the threshold of reality.

All he had to do was bend gravity, as he had done with the phoenix, and crush that colossus to the ground like an insect.

But he couldn’t, because the instant he used his true powers, the aura would spread throughout the Abyss, and his father, Zaroth, would sense it instantly.

The Demon Emperor would know where he was, would know that his son had escaped the Dark Tower, headed for a forbidden place.

And he would stop him.

No.

Kairan had to win this fight alone.

Without gravity, without portals, without anything but the strength of his own fists.

“Yes,” he asserted, clenching his hands into two clenched fists.

“Me.” The dragon narrowed its crimson eyes, opened its jaws, and vomited fire.

A torrent of incandescent light illuminated the rain, turning water to steam and mud to ash.

The tongue of flame struck Kairan like an apocalyptic hurricane.

He couldn’t cut through those flames with his skills, so he did the only thing he could.

He threw himself aside with a speed the dragon hadn’t expected, rolling in the mud as the fire passed where he had been a moment before, incinerating the earth behind him.

Without stopping, without slowing, he ran toward the colossus’s paw.

He lowered his head, surprised that his prey was still alive.

Kairan reached for the forelimb and struck: a single fist, hurled with all the strength of his superhuman body, against the colossus’s joint.

The sound was terrifying, a sharp boom, like breaking rock.

The dragon staggered, roaring in pain and disbelief: no creature, in ten thousand years, had ever inflicted such a blow on it with its bare hands.

But that was only the beginning.

The dragon recovered, and its long, armored tail sliced through the air like a colossal whip.

Kairan saw it coming and leaped to avoid it, but the beast’s speed was terrifying, and the tip of its tail grazed him, throwing him dozens of meters.

The child landed heavily in the mud, rolled, and got up.

He spat blood and smiled.

“Not bad,” he said in the language of dragons.

And he began again.

The battle lasted forever.

Under the incessant rain, on the mud that turned to swamp and then to ash, an eight-year-old boy and a thousand-year-old colossus faced each other like two titans from different eras.

The dragon struck with its claws, its tail, its jaws, and fire.

Each of its attacks could have pulverized an army, and each time Kairan dodged, by a hair’s breadth, reading the movement an instant before it was launched, the only art he had left: the perception Kaldreth had taught him.

He couldn’t bend reality, but he could feel it, and when the reptile exposed itself, even for a heartbeat, Kairan struck.

Fists like divine hammers, kicks that made the armored scales vibrate, blows that, one after the other, hour after hour, began to leave their mark even on the black marble skin of the colossus.

But Kairan, too, was paying the price of the prolonged battle.

His body, however superhuman, was still the body of a child.

His bones ached, his muscles burned, his breathing became increasingly heavy.

At one point, in a moment of exhaustion, he moved a hair’s breadth, prematurely, in the wrong direction.

The dragon’s jaws closed just a foot from his face; they didn’t seize him, but a fang, shiny and sharp as a bone spear, grazed his face.

A sharp pain in the right side of his lips: they tore, releasing a gush of blood.

It ran hot, down his chin, mixing with the rain.

Kairan stepped back, pressing a hand to his mouth.

The dragon roared triumphantly, certain that this was the beginning of the end for that little enemy, but when the child removed his hand from his bloody lip, there was no fear on his face.

There was something worse: calm, the absolute calm of someone who has finally understood how to win.