Return of the Runebound Professor-Chapter 811: Late

Seleth rubbed at her eyes. The cold night bit at her nose and lips. She wasn’t at all cut out for this environment, and the freezing mountain wind whipping her hair and slicing at her skin certainly wasn’t helping in the slightest.

She jabbed her hands under her armpits, teeth chattering. A new parasol bounced against her back with every new gust of wind. Ironically, that was one of the few things keeping her awake. The constant smacks were just enough to keep her eyes from fluttering shut in the wake of the freezing night.

Seleth still wasn’t entirely sure how she’d ended up here. She looked down at the small, blocky town embedded into the side of the mountain a few hundred feet below the outcropping she stood on.

The corpse of an enormous monster laid in two halves. It was perched precariously on the side of the mountain, far too large to be moved by any physical means in a reasonable amount of time.

Dread mingled with awe in her stomach. It was almost enough to cut through the freezing cold. The great beast didn’t have so much as a single wound upon it other than the fatal blow. Somebody had killed it with a single move.

The monster had clearly been dead for a short while. Perhaps a day, perhaps two. The townspeople had already started to pick the corpse apart. They’d be working at it for a while, by Seleth’s best guess. There was just so much of it. They’d need an entire caravan to come through to harvest the materials and bring it to a market. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

It was impossible to say how powerful the monster had been. Size and strength were often correlated, but assumptions were a great way to get oneself killed. But anyone that could kill such a large being with such a clean blow probably wasn’t going to be weak.

“Why are we here?” Seleth tore her eyes away from the monster.

She turned her gaze to the reason she stood here in the first place — the small, masked woman standing on the outcropping beside her. Her hood had been thrown back by the wind to reveal long silver hair the color of the moon. It flowed behind her like a serpent dancing to the tune of the howling wind tearing past them.

“Because it will be important,” the other woman replied.

Seleth looked back to the corpse far below. She wasn’t actually entirely sure how she’d managed to end up here. Nobody in their right mind volunteered to travel with a stranger that just happened to know their name.

But the masked woman had somehow known the perfect answer to give every single one of Seleth’s questions. It was as if she’d known Seleth for years. Seleth couldn’t even remember exactly how the conversation had gone.

What she did remember was the sizable bag of crystals that the other woman had plopped down on the table before her in exchange for… services. Now that Seleth thought about it, exactly what those services were meant to be had never been specified.

Their agreement had just been that Seleth would accompany her new masked companion on their way to Aqua Terra. It had seemed like a pretty good deal at the time. A ridiculous amount of money in exchange for doing what she’d already been doing.

The strange woman could be as suspicious as she wanted to if she was paying this well. At least, that was what Seleth had told herself. Now she was starting to second guess herself. There was something very, very off about her companion.

Perhaps anyone with a single functioning eye should have been able to tell that very quickly. But there was strange, and then there was strange. This woman was of the latter sort.

How did she know this corpse would be here? And what does she mean by important?

“We’re just here to… what, watch?” Seleth asked. She swallowed. “Shouldn’t we go somewhere a bit more out of the way? Something this big doesn’t go down quietly. It could draw attention, and we’re very out in the open.”

The masked woman turned toward her. The hair on Seleth’s arms stood on end. Even though the mask covered her odd companion’s face, she couldn’t help but feel like the gaze coming from behind the white ceramic was boring straight into her soul.

“That is the point,” the shorter woman said. The wind screamed by them, grabbing the woman’s hood and slapping it up into her face. That somewhat reduced the effectiveness of her words. She said something, but the hood muffled her words.

A second slipped by. Seleth blinked, then hurriedly peeled the hood away from the other woman’s mask and flicked it to the other side. It was easy to forget her companion had no arms. Seleth hadn’t asked how that had happened, and the other woman had never explained.

“Thank you,” the masked woman said simply. She craned her neck back to look up at the sky. “It will not be much longer.”

“I should hope not,” Seleth said, hugging her arms tighter to her chest as the cold beat against her. A Fire Rune was suddenly sounding like a fantastic investment. “What exactly is it that you’re waiting for? Do you have something to do with that dead monster?”

“No,” the other woman replied. She didn’t answer Seleth’s first question.

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“You… aren’t expecting me to fight another one of those, are you?” Seleth asked as a sudden thought struck her. “I’d normally be fine taking on a reasonable challenge… but in this cold, I’m pretty sure I’d trip and die.”

“Such a thing will not be expected. There is not another one of those monsters.”

“Oh,” Seleth said. She blew out a relieved breath. “Good. Then what are we waiting for?”

The other woman turned to the side. Her painted eye looked off toward the horizon, where the sun was just starting to begin its crawl up into the sky on its journey to banish the night. It would still be at least an hour before the shadows had faded. The sun provided just enough light to remind Seleth that she really should have been sleeping.

“Ah. There it is,” the woman said.

“There what…” Seleth trailed off. Her eyes went wide as her breath caught in her throat.

Sailing through the sky toward the town, held adrift by a pair of wings glistening with miasmic black and purple scale, was an enormous dragon.

It was clearly of the same species as the bisected monster lying across the town below them, but this one was easily one and a half times larger than its dead counterpart. Coils of shimmering gold smoke trailed out from the monster’s mouth and unmistakable rage burned in its deep yellow eyes.

“What is that?” Seleth asked, her eyes going wide in spite of the sharp winds.

“The brother,” her companion replied. “Not much stronger, but certainly angrier. Prepare yourself.”

“For what?” Seleth exclaimed. The monster was shooting toward them at a terrifying speed. It was headed straight for the town, and they were right along its path. She couldn’t feel its domain yet, but something told Seleth that she had absolutely no desire to find out just how strong it actually was.

Her companion didn’t respond. The masked woman had walked over to the edge of the plateau. She stood there watching the approach of the great dragon silently, almost as if she were considering throwing herself off.

Please don’t’ tell me she’s going to try to die. Surely not, right? Why would you pay someone to travel with you just so you can get—

The woman stepped off the edge of the mountain.

“No!” Seleth yelled, lunging forward. She was too slow. Her companion dropped like a rock, vanishing plummeting down toward the town below as Seleth’s hand caught nothing but air.

Before Seleth could even process what had just happened, a shimmer of silver moonlight flashed across the side of the mountain. But it didn’t come from the moon. It came from below.

She watched in equal parts confusion and surprise as the masked woman rose back up into the air. The fierce winds tearing by the mountain tore her cloak away from her, sending it dancing through the air below her, but she didn’t even seem to notice.

Brilliant silver light gathered in strands like spider silk around the masked woman. It wove into arms as the woman rose higher into the air. She pressed her new palms together as if in prayer, the moonlight within them flaring where her hands came into contact.

The huge dragon noticed her instantly. Its eyes narrowed in anger and its fanged maw opened. A keen whine split through the wind as magic gathered deep within the great beast. It hissed and popped, coiling golden mist condensing down into a single churning ball deep within the monster as it shot straight toward them, the town forgotten in the face of the clear challenge.

Then the dragon was upon them. Its domain rolled over Seleth’s. She grit her teeth as pressure slammed into her, nearly sending her skidding a step back. This was a Rank 6 monster, and a strong one at that.

A wave of brilliant gold exploded out from the dragon’s mouth. The power raced toward them both with a thunderous roar. Seleth threw her hands up before herself as she went to draw on her magic — but she was too slow.

Her masked companion pulled her palms apart.

A huge hand, easily the size of the dragon itself, materialized in the air in an instant. It grabbed onto the huge monster by the top half of its head, yanking it forward in such a sharp motion that Seleth barely even got a chance to process what was happening.

The monster was pulled so fast that the wave of golden magic it had just sent toward them was actually slower than it was. Slow enough that the dragon’s own attack was shoved right back into its own mouth and right down its gullet.

There was a sickly, bone-shaking crunch. The dragon’s eyes went wide. It convulsed, a wave of smoke rising up from deep inside the monster’s body.

Gods. How insane is her reaction speed? It was almost like she knew exactly what the dragon was going to do.

Seleth’s companion dropped back to the ground beside her.

“Now, please,” she said.

Then two shimmering silver hands appeared in the air on either side of the great monster. They slammed together on its head, clapping it like a pest and blowing straight past the beast’s domain as if nothing were there at all.

The monster’s skull splattered.

“The parasol,” her companion said. “Now would be a good time. Before—”

Blood and gore rained down, coating them and the outcropping they stood on a sickly red. Thick chunks of flesh bounced and splattered to the ground all around Seleth.

The great dragon’s body tumbled through the air above them. It slammed into the mountain with a brilliant crash, then rolled down the side of the mountain to impale itself on a jagged peak with a final booming crunch.

Debris and stone raced down the side of the mountain in a small landslide. It came to a stop as quickly as it had started, leaving Seleth and her companion staring in silence.

Seleth gagged. The taste of iron and hot ash filled her entire mouth. There was blood in it— along with some thicker pieces of flesh that she didn’t want to think too hard about. She spat onto the red-splattered snow beneath her.

Hot, sickly blood and chunks of flesh had completely covered her body. The scent was horrible. Her companion hadn’t fared much better, but at least she’d had a mask to cover her face. Seleth couldn’t even muster up any words. All she could do was stare.

“Maybe I should have checked the probabilities,” the other woman said with a small sigh. “I had thought it would be obvious.”

Seleth touched the parasol hanging from her back. “I… what? What was that? Why?”

“The legend had to be a little larger. Just a push.” The masked woman shook her head. “You were late.”

“I — what? — no. Who are you?”

“Use the parasol next time. Now, come.”

“Wait. Next time?” Seleth’s eyes went wide, but her companion had already started off along the road into the mountains. She raced to catch up with her, shaking blood off herself along the way. “What do you mean, next time!?”