//Author's note:
While writing this chapter I've noticed just how much my original design for beasts and dragons overshot the initial goal of allowing for clashes between titanic creatures, so I've decided to partially retcon that and reduce the measurements. The new values will roughly be 1/3 of the old, so for Darganth that means from 300 to the 80 meters that are also mentioned in this chapter.
I also looked through all past chapters and every instance in them should be corrected now.
//End of Author's note
[Ouroboros' End]
Having seen the proficiency of the five mages in ritual magic, Darganth decided that he had to take care of them first before he could offer Yldra and Scalladras any meaningful help. When given enough time, ritual spells could allow a mage or a group of mages to threaten foes significantly stronger than themselves. Even with only a few seconds and a few hundred low-ranking mages as support, the group before him was able to match Darganth's spell. And while it wasn't the strongest attack he could've launched, it wasn't all that weak either, so he wasn't going to risk learning what they could do with a minute or two of preparation.
Thus, Darganth kept his attention on the aura users despite having the opportunity to leave and gently landed on the battlements. Staying close to the ground and using his wings to block off the small gap that was left between his sides and the walls, he launched himself at the three aura users.
As the man in the second order stood closest, Darganth naturally focused on him first. Even with his massive form, his claw moved as a blur as he slashed at the man. With it, the sharp talons tipping his fingers scraped gaping gashes into the stone as his target barely dodged the worst of his strike.
Still, the man's body was flung into the wall to the left as Darganth's open hand struck him instead of the sharp edges of his claws. Impacting there, his body cracked the enchanted stone of the battlements as it slammed into it. However, this sudden stop also caused the aura user's head to be thrown back, causing it to slam against the stone and the man to sink to the ground with blood soon dripping out from beneath his helmet.
His two fellow aura users, however, didn't have the time to check on him, if they even noticed his state in the heat of battle. Instead, they were immediately forced onto the defensive when Darganth turned his attention to them a moment later. Even without being taken by surprise as their colleague had been, the gap in both power and skill made their attempt to fight back entirely futile as Darganth easily overpowered them without even mobilizing his mana.
After only half a dozen exchanges that all happened within only a few seconds, Darganth finally managed to leverage this overwhelming strength for a decisive hit. As one of the aura users once again managed to block his claw with his already heavily damaged shield, Darganth's claw didn't cleanly slash through the metal-plated wood. Thus, his swipe abruptly pulled the man to the side. Then, before the man could recover from this, Darganth swung his other arm, with his claw striking his opponent's chest-plate and cleanly sinking into his torso.
Attempting to use this brief moment where Darganth had neither of his forelimbs in a position to defend himself, the last of the aura users jumped at Darganth with a roar. Straining against the domain enveloping him with every ounce of mana he could mobilize, he managed to form a flickering aura avatar around himself right as his jump reached its peak, with the constructs towering form appearing meters away from Darganth with its two-handed sword raised high.
Already shifting his weight to dodge the attack, both Darganth and his foe were surprised when Alicia's head suddenly shot up over the battlements. Having taken on her full true form, her open maw alone towered over the aura user as she unleashed her dragon's breath. Faster than the man could react, the almost gaseous stream of silver energy struck him. In an instant, the already barely stable aura avatar shattered into a cloud of raw mana. With it, the smuggler's body was catapulted sideways, causing him to fly over the edge of the battlement and disappear somewhere into the distance.
Closing her maw after this short burst of her dragon's breath, Alicia turned to Darganth. "We'll take care of this. So go, we all know you'd much rather join the real fight over there."
Watching Allaire and Serania appear on the battlements next to Alicia's head a moment later, Darganth's question of who that first we included answered itself. As such, he instead only nodded thankfully.
"I appreciate it." He said and spread his wings.
Waiting only briefly as Allarie and Serania responded to his words by glancing back with a smile, he then leapt over the edge of the wall. Spreading his wings, he quickly propelled himself away from the structure, soon bringing enough distance between himself and it for it to fill his full true form. And with the space in which he fought no longer limiting the usefulness of such a large form, he used the opportunity to let his body expand to its base size of just over eighty meters.
With the twentieth anniversary of his rebirth having passed during their trip into the wilderness, this base size of his was also no longer the full size to which he could push his form. However, he saw no need to do so. Especially as, to his disappointment, he had discovered that after crossing the threshold of physical adulthood, the significantly sped-up aging he was experiencing since his rebirth had slowed back down to normal, meaning his full true form was only about a meter larger than his base form. Though that did give his strikes more mass, the difference was minimal enough that he didn't care for it, not when staying in his base form always felt more comfortable for him.
Soon, Darganth's massive form cut through the skies beyond the wall. Within seconds, a sonic boom announced his breaking of the sound barrier as he rapidly closed in on the battle ahead of him. Even from a distance, he could make out Scalladras' flames in the chaos. Raging brightly amid a hurricane of ice and frost, they cast shadows of the three other combatants across the empty plains below.
Through them, Darganth watched as Yldra twisted and turned her body as two comparatively tiny specs circled around her. Each time she struck at either of them, the other would strike at her in return.
Despite knowing that Scalladras was there, this sight worried Darganth.
Yldra's form was massive. Each one of her strikes carried hundreds of tons of mass behind it, with her limbs managing to scatter parts of the ice storm just through the disturbance in the air their motions caused. In addition to this, she was exceedingly fast. While not quite reaching the speed of sound, her dashes came close to that, even with only fractions of a second of acceleration. Yet still, her two foes weren't struggling.
Suddenly, the flames around Scalladras surged in intensity. Briefly erupting outward into all directions, they soon became more focused and coalesced into a vaguely humanoid torso. The figure's arms were held up high, with its fists closed around a spear easily twice the height of its torso. The figure's head was meanwhile staring down at Yldra and her two foes, the fury in its rough facial features visible even to Darganth through the storm.
Recognizing this spell, Darganth didn't need to hear Scallaldras' shouted words to ready himself, "Wrathful smite of primordial flame!"
As these words were spoken, the figure thrust the spear downward. As the flaming weapon descended, steam erupted as the ice storm melted, while flames flared up in its wake as the air itself ignited.
Then the spear stuck. Missing both of the smugglers by a surprisingly large margin despite the entire process from eruption to impact having taken no full second, it instead plunged deep into the ground.
Even at a few kilometers away, Darganth felt the shockwave that followed hit him. Though it wasn't strong enough to hurt him, the wave of scorching hot air still briefly slowed his flight and forced him to struggle against it as it tried to push him back.
However, while the shockwave slowed Darganth, it completely threw the battlefield into chaos. Not only that, it was closely followed by the eruption that had unleashed the heat and pressure in the first place. Where the spear from Scalladras' spell had sunk into the ground, a gaping hole filled with glowing lava had been ripped into the earth. From it, massive pieces of burning debris had been catapulted into the air. Accompanying it, a cascading wave of fire spread in all directions, igniting the air itself as the spear had done before, while an ever-expanding area of the ground below broke open as geysers of lava shot into the air.
All of this followed only moments after the initial shockwave. And in the short moments between when the steam of the melted ice storm dispersed and when the flames engulfed them, Darganth could see that the two smugglers still hadn't recovered from the latter when the first pieces of flaming debris struck. Even through the flames, Darganth could see the flashes that erupted when it struck the ice shield around one of the smugglers. And though he doubted that it was enough to breach even just the shield spell that was undoubtedly one of many the mage kept active, it also offered a perfect opportunity for him as he continued to cross the last thousand or so meters toward the battle.
Breaching into the still-expanding wave of fire a moment later, he approached the smuggler mage while remaining hidden from him until the last moment. As he appeared amid the inferno that had formed in the area affected by Scalladras' spell, he watched the man's eyes widen in fear just as he brought his claw down onto him.
The shield around the mage only endured a moment against Darganth's swing. Cracking, its icy surface soon exploded into a shower of icy air and frozen shards that shattered against Darganth's scales.
Despite this, Darganth's swing only found empty air. While a portion of the energy released during the shield's destruction had been directed at him, an even larger one had thrown the mage backward. Thus, even though his shield had been broken, it hadn't failed as he was catapulted out of the path of Darganth's claws before they could reach him.
Not having expected this, the sudden lack of resistance caught Darganth by surprise. Having expected at least a second shield around the mage, he had put quite a lot of force behind his strike, something that now put him off balance as the momentum of the strike pulled him ever so slightly downward.
Quickly reacting to this, possibly even having planned for and expected it, the mage was almost immediately ready to exploit this mistake. Coming to an abrupt stop a few dozen meters away from his original position, his mana surged before manifesting in an ice magic spell.
"Frost gale."
From the mage's outstretched arm, a blast of frozen air exploded outward, engulfing Darganth's head, neck, and parts of his torso. As it washed over these areas, ice started to form across his scales and quickly condensed into a continuous sheet that encased his head and neck.
However, as the ice only formed around him and didn't manage to get through his scales, and certainly not his skin, all this did was limit the mobility of Darganth's neck. What it didn't do was limit the movement of his claws, something the mage should've maybe focused on instead. Because as it stood, it took Darganth only a moment to adjust to the ice obscuring his vision, a fraction of a second to locate the mage and a single beat of his wings to reach him, before his claw already swung out for another slash toward the mage.
Though slightly disappointing when this strike once again impacted a shield spell, it didn't take Darganth long to notice the massive mana that drained from his foe into the shield as his claw dug into its shell. Realizing that he must have struck the man's reactive shield, Darganth quickly pivoted to applying as much pressure as he could and trying to drain his foe's reserves as much as possible before the latter managed to deploy a static shield to take over the burden.
Unfortunately for him, this plan didn't find as much success as Darganth had hoped. Just as he dug more of his claws into the shield, his opponent managed to collect himself and, that much Darganth had to leave him, wisely chose not to try and fight back from his current position.
Instead, the mage vanished from his position as his body turned into millions of ice shards. Though some of these were caught when Darganth's claw snapped closed around where he had been, they reformed at the cost of an acceptably high mana expenditure shortly before the mage reformed in physical form a few dozen meters away.
Watching the man regroup with his colleague, Darganth refrained from chasing after him and focused on his frozen head first. Briefly straining against the ice as he tried to move his neck, he quickly broke through the layer of frost covering his scales and lowered his head so that his claws could reach it. Closing them into fists, he slammed them against the ice, cracking it in the first swing and mostly freeing his head with the second. With a grumbling growl, he then shook off the last few remaining ice fragments before mirroring his foe and flying up to regroup with Yldra and Scalladras.