Leon, Red, Maia, Cassandra, and Penelope stood on the edge of the cliffs overlooking the gorge, all dressed in their respective armor and ready for battle. It wasn’t much longer that they were met by two more women, each one looking quite similar to Red, though the scales that surrounded their eyes were Blue and Gold, respectively, showing better than any introduction who they were.

“Everyone ready?” Cassandra called out as the other two joined them.

[We are,] Red replied, speaking for the other two as well, and saying no more.

“Good,” Cassandra replied. She then glanced at Penelope and Leon. “Hopefully this will go better than the previous fight…”

“I have no doubt that it will,” Leon replied as a challenging smile spread across his face, his aura rising to match.

“I want this over and done with,” Penelope said, her eyes unwaveringly locked upon the curtain of darkness at the bottom of the gorge.

Without a word, the three wyverns spread out, and then their bodies began to shift, drawing Leon’s intensely curious gaze. A blinding rush of magic power exploded out from them, however, forcing Leon to look away for a second. When he looked back, he didn’t see three humans with scales around their eyes, but three enormous wyverns, one with ruby-red scales, another with scales the color of the clearest, cleanest ocean waters, and the last with scales like forged gold. All affixed him and the other three in their imperious, almost baleful gazes, their orange eyes blazing with magic power and killing intent.

There was nothing more to say. So, Leon turned around, checked his equipment one last time, and then leaped off the cliff, closely followed by Maia and Cassandra, and only a step or two behind them came a more reluctant Penelope. The wyverns went over the edge a moment later, but spread out quite a bit more to accommodate their gigantic bodies.

The gorge was deep, but in only a matter of seconds, Leon hit the black curtain and passed right through, encountering no physical resistance. He felt the darkness press in on his helmet, but his defensive enchantments warded that pressure off with ease.

A second later, he hit the ground on the other side of the curtain, the stone beneath his boots shattering from the force of his impact.

Immediately, he heard a roar of fury from his right, but to his left he sensed a momentary spike of magic power, so that’s where he turned his attention.

He found the ground already cracking open in a long line making right for him originating from the brown wyvern. However, that crack that opened like the earth itself was about to try and swallow him up never made it to him; he barely had time to register what was about to happen and to formulate a response before Red came barreling out of the darkness above and sank her fangs deep into the neck of Brown. Red’s enormous weight and force from the descent had them both crashing into the floor of the gorge and disappearing in a titanic cloud of dust and debris. The crack that had nearly reached Leon immediately halted as Brown’s attention was forcibly shifted to Red.

“Ha!” Cassandra shouted in glee from where she’d landed beside Leon. “Monsters fighting monsters! Glorious!”

Leon just gritted his teeth and filled the area beneath the curtain of darkness with his magic senses. He saw White about three hundred feet ahead of his group, but Blue had already landed and had engaged her. Green was behind them, and likewise, Gold had seized her attention by breathing a stream of golden lightning at her.

That only left Black, to Leon’s right, who was glaring at them with both unmatched fury and extreme wariness.

“Do you think he’s scared?” Cassandra asked, seeming to revel in this as she started to slowly, menacingly, walk in Black’s direction. “He has to realize that this isn’t a battle he can win, anymore…”

“Be careful!” Penelope shouted. “A cornered monster is more dangerous than one who can run away!”

“I know,” Cassandra replied, and a moment later, she leaped into the air, Sunlight in her hand tripling in length as the blade blazed with white light.

“You two take range!” Leon shouted as he began sprinting after Cassandra, her opening slash already connecting with Black, who began trying to stomp the Princess into red paste in response.

Behind him, he could feel Maia forming a huge water dragon and half a dozen ice lances big enough to threaten even the immense Black. Penelope, meanwhile, began conjuring a huge fireball above her, but for what, Leon couldn’t say, for she wasn’t throwing it at Black or any of the other wyverns.

Regardless, he charged Black, lightning surging through his body, the world seeming to slow down as his senses were elevated and dramatically sped up. He could see with perfect clarity the way that Cassandra danced around Black, Sunlight raking across his scales and deflecting his retaliatory blows.

But the Princess wasn’t keeping her situation or the physical capabilities of her foe in mind, and Black whipped his tail at her. Leon surged right past her and crashed into the beast’s tail, the impact causing his body to shudder and all the air to erupt from his lungs. His body strained as he dug his feet into the stone around him, trying to find purchase, and the enchantments in his armor designed to heighten his strength flooded with power.

But he caught the tail and stopped it from hitting the Princess. He couldn’t wrap his arms around the entire thing, but his body detonated in a storm of lightning, flowing out through his arms and dancing across the sparkling black scales of his enemy. Black roared in pain and whipped his tail back, pulling Leon along with it. For all his strength, both personal and conferred by his new armor, he still didn’t weigh that much compared to the wyvern.

But as he was lifted off the ground and pulled through the air, Leon kept his magic power flowing. Lightning cracked and sparked across Black’s backside, inundating his tail and ripping at his scales.

Black violently shook his tail, but Leon stubbornly hung on, and after a moment, Black could no longer focus on Leon as Cassandra charged. Light flashed as she swung Sunlight, her own skills in light magic showing as bright white light struck Black again and again, the wyvern only avoiding damage by coating his body in darkness. But Leon knew that Black couldn’t become intangible, though, not while he was still hanging onto the monster’s tail.

But a moment later, Black whipped his tail again and slammed Leon into the ground with colossal force, and the stony ground beneath him crumbled. Leon was battered and nearly crushed; all the air in his lungs was forced out once again, and his mind momentarily whited out with pain. His stream of lightning was interrupted, and Black’s tail rose into the air above him again, was quickly coated in a smoky black film of darkness magic, and then slammed back down on Leon.

This time, everything that Leon could see was shrouded in darkness, though mind-numbing pain raced through his battered form. He even felt a couple of his ribs crack, not even his armor or his eighth-tier body able to stand up against such weight and physical strength.

He came to only a second later as the tau pearl’s healing power spread throughout his body, repairing his ribs and clearing the fog of pain from his mind, only to find that everything around him was still and quiet. He couldn’t sense anything other than darkness magic—not Maia’s water magic, not Cassandra’s blasts of light, not Penelope’s fire. Everything around him was pitch-black darkness, and when he tried to move, his mind panicking at the unfamiliar surroundings—it felt like he’d been submerged in the thickest, dirtiest, muddiest bog in all Aeterna.

And he realized where he was: Black had pulled him into a shadow, somehow. If his black stealth opal had functioned as well as he’d hoped, it would’ve been able to do just this sort of thing for him, only he didn’t think that it would leave him so weak and feeling like he was beneath a thousand feet of water.

Leon wasted no time calling upon the Thunderbird’s lightning. Silver-blue lightning surged out of him, arcing across his body, channeled and amplified by his armor. In the same breath, he conjured his anti-darkness magic gem into his left gauntlet and activated it. A pulse of magic spread out from him, and under the pressure of both of his magic and his antimagic tool, the shadows that surrounded him melted away.

He rose from the ground almost as if he’d been encased in the stone of the gorge’s floor, still lying down, and quickly leaped back to his feet. He’d been absent from the fight only a few seconds, but much in the fight had changed: Cassandra was on her knees, staring at something only she could see; Black was wrestling with Maia’s water dragon, and one of the river nymph’s huge spears of ice was lodged in his left wing; Penelope was still charging up her magic, and the fireball floating above her head was starting to almost resemble the sun itself, the yellow-hot flames roiling and churning. Meanwhile, Red, Blue, and Gold were still tangled up with the other three wyverns. Red looked like she was winning, but the other two fights were a little more even.

‘Shit,’ Leon thought to himself as he ran for the Princess. Black was occupied with Maia, for the moment, so he needed to see to Cassandra. Then, the two of them could resume their assault on Black.

When he slid to Cassandra’s side, he roughly shook her, hoping that that would be enough to shake her out of her stupor, but the Princess remained unresponsive. Leon focused his magic senses in and around her, and had his suspicions confirmed: she’d been somehow affected by darkness magic. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the time he was knocked unconscious by the vampire Bran during the Bull’s war with Talfar, but as far as he could tell, it was still the same affliction.

Without hesitation, Leon rested his hand upon Cassandra’s armored shoulder, intending to use just enough of the Thunderbird’s lightning to dispel this affliction. But as powerful as his magic was, her armor was strong. Every arc of lightning that surged out of him was pulled to her cuirass, no matter how he tried to channel it. He’d need to either use more powerful magic to overcome her wards or touch her a little more intimately. Leon wanted to do neither, but a quick glance at Black still struggling with Maia’s water dragon was all he needed to convince himself that he needed to move quickly.

Instead of getting more powerful, though, Leon went for the other option—he couldn’t be sure that bypassing Cassandra’s defensive wards wouldn’t injure her. Fortunately, unlike him, she was wearing a helmet with a liftable visor, so Leon lifted her visor, pulled his gauntlet back into his soul realm, and placed his hand upon her cheek, then channeled his power to defend the mind against attack as gently as he could.

This time, after the first arc of lightning touched her skin, her eyes lost their dazed look and she focused on him. Leon immediately pulled his hand back, redonned his gauntlet, and shouted, “You back?”

Cassandra blinked in confusion, looking like her mind needed a moment to catch up, and then she nodded to him. Sunlight was still in her hand, and her gaze dropped to it. A moment later, her fingers tightened around the hilt, her ruby eyes blazed with light magic, and she shot to her feet.

“I’m all right!” she shouted, though her voice wavered a bit.

Still, Leon had no real reason to think she wasn’t good to go, so he just nodded to her and began charging at Black, Cassandra only a step behind him.

Black had managed to overpower Maia’s water dragon, black tendrils rising from his back like eldritch tentacles and whipping through the water dragon like the sharpest of knives. Maia’s water dragon reformed almost instantly, though, and continued throwing itself at the wyvern.

Leon punched outward with his left fist, the runes on his anti-darkness gem flashing with arcane light, and about half of Black’s darkness tendrils dissipated like smoke and, without his power completely devoted to his protective shroud, the dark sheen on his scales vanished. Maia’s water dragon then surged forward and wrapped itself around the monster once more, and Maia launched the remainder of her ice lances, each one piercing through his wings without his darkness or mobility to protect him, nearly nailing them to the stony floor. Cassandra and Leon then leaped forward, Sunlight ablaze with radiant white light, Leon’s ancestral blade sparking with silver-blue lightning. Each of them swung their blades, the light and lightning hitting Black in the flank that Maia’s water dragon had exposed, cleaving scales from flesh and driving deep into his body.

Black roared in pain, but they weren’t done. Cassandra gave a roar of her own and slammed Sunlight into the deep fissure she’d carved, the enchantments within the blade burning all of Black’s flesh that the blade touched.

Leon did likewise, though he remained quiet. But his family’s Adamant blade pierced Black’s body, and he let loose with the Thunderbird’s lightning.

And then they felt an immense spike of fire magic, and both Leon and Cassandra glanced over at Penelope, who was finally making her move.

The fiery sphere she’d been building up was now flying in their direction and taking on something of an oval shape and burning almost white-hot.

“You two might want to move!” Penelope shouted as her face contorted with the strain of keeping her power from dissipating. She’d packed quite a bit of it into whatever she was doing, and Leon was quietly impressed that it hadn’t all exploded, yet.

Without a word, Cassandra and Leon hurled themselves back, each moving with the extreme speed inherent to light and lightning mages.

Only a couple seconds later, Penelope’s fire detonated outward, toward the roaring and screeching Black, who was still held in place by Maia’s water dragon and ice lances. This outpouring of fire formed into the shape of a hand in the air, and extended down toward the wyvern, wrapping around both him and the water dragon, and squeezing.

Maia’s let go of her water dragon, and it immediately exploded into steam thick enough to shroud Black from view, were it not for the fire that now squeezed his body. Black’s roars intensified, and then several seconds later, quieted. The wyvern stopped struggling, and as far as Leon could tell, fell still.

Penelope kept her magic on his body for a few more seconds, though, and the conflagration of magic and light blinded Leon’s magic senses to what was going on within the steam cloud.

But then her fire dissipated, and the steam cleared, revealing Black crumpled on the floor, about as strong and upright as a wet noodle. A few twitches showed that he was still alive, but Leon could see that his aura was incredibly weak, and his body still shuddered with labored breath. Most of his scales had been burned right off, though, and everything beneath seared as black as the scales that had just covered them a moment before. The holes that Maia, Leon, and Cassandra had opened were much worse, though, with Penelope’s fire having burned away so enough flesh as to expose some of Black’s bones.

With the intent to put the beast out of his misery, Leon conjured a lightning bolt and almost casually threw it at the wyvern’s fallen form. The bolt hit the monster in the chest, and Leon felt the flash of magic power as his heart exploded, the sign that the powerful beast had died as his soul realm collapsed and all of his stored magic burst forth and returned to Aeterna.

The black wyvern was dead.

Leon didn’t think that that was the end of their battle, but when he turned to face the remaining wyverns, he found that Brown had been torn asunder by Red, who now stood on wing and claw, staring at Black’s obliterated body. Blue and Gold, meanwhile—both looking much more worse for wear than the seemingly-untouched Red—stood above Green and White, both enemy wyverns now lying on the ground, their vulnerable backs and necks exposed to Blue and Gold in an obvious display of submission.

The battle was over. Their enemies either dead or surrendered.

“HA!” Cassandra bellowed as she ran to Black’s corpse. “Now this is what I was hoping for when I came down here! Ahhh, such a battle really heats the blood!”

Leon cocked his head in surprise, not expecting the Princess to be so overt in her revelry of blood and battle. But he smiled, understanding quite well her elation; his own heart beat furiously in his chest, pride swelling within, his glee in their victory unable to be overstated. They’d tested themselves against a true monster, and won.

True, they’d had the help of Red, Blue, and Gold, and even without the wyverns they hadn’t fought alone, but it was still a rush. One man against one wyvern, each equivalent in magic power, was hardly a fair fight.

Leon sighed as he walked over to join Cassandra and admire their kill, Penelope and Maia making their own way over. The black curtain above them, meanwhile, was already dissipating, allowing the light of the morning sky above the gorge to seep in.

“Everyone all right?” Leon called out.

Cassandra obviously was, despite her minor incapacitation partway through the fight. Maia, meanwhile, smiled at Leon, sharing in his elation at their victory and telling him without words that she was fine. Penelope, for her part, simply nodded, and stared at Black’s body, a look of utter satisfaction on her face.

“So,” Cassandra said, ignoring Leon’s question, “who gets the credit for this kill?”