The Runic Alchemist

It was no normal attack. It wasn’t simple fire or lava; it was something even hotter. Something like plasma, or extremely heated metal in its molten liquid form, or a burning soul itself. A skill, not a spell. Using a skill was the distinctive difference between a high-intelligence monster and a simple-minded raging beast.

The hellfire — Damian could only describe it as such — broke through his giant golden shield seconds after the clash and landed squarely on his wide steel chest. Damian could see the massive beam of molten hellfire landing right in front of his air shield armor-covered window, making his skin feel the burn inside the fireproof armor.

The thick air shield was somewhat holding up, melting and cracking all over in seconds but still intact. Damian had to supply it with over 200,000 points’ worth of mana every second to keep regenerating it.

In front of his eyes, the steel and precious rare metals-mixed cube, inscribed with the air shield armor spell, was turning into more and more damaged metal.

Damian decidedly buried the enormous thin sword from his hand into the magma land and turned his hand around. The bigger and much heavier mysterious sword dropped beside the thinner one from his spatial storage, and Damian immediately grabbed it. Holding the handle with one hand and the sharper middle part with the other, Damian placed it between his melting air shield armor and the merciless beam of hellfire.

Finally having some success in being able to block it. He was being pushed back continuously, but that was fine.

At last, it ended. The wide sword, made of strange metal, was red hot in the middle, but fortunately, it had held up. Damian was just waiting for it to end — the second it did, he powered on the sword, all runes glowing with a dark hue. Then he launched one of the giant wormhole spells he was holding and opened it right behind Sulthar’s back. The ridiculous dragon sensed it in just a millisecond of its activation and quickly covered his back, folding the metallic wing plates.

Damian swung the sword at full power in an overhead slash, sending the all-incinerating, dark-flames-covered sword through the giant wormhole and onto Sulthar’s back. The wing plates may have protected against it, yet the Dragon King screeched loudly in pain. Damian could see black flames still burning on its back as the dragon flapped his one fine wing and moved a bit away from the open wormhole. Damian pulled back and canceled the wormhole spell.

Sulthar turned the damaged wing to the front — a long gash bleeding blood like molten lava out of it. Without even looking at his damaged wing, Sulthar’s two burning eyes locked onto Damian, and suddenly he felt a powerful pull toward the dragon. It lasted just for a few seconds though and wasn’t powerful enough to even move him a full meter.

Only seconds after did Damian realize it wasn’t an attack. All around them, the natural mana in the atmosphere was streaming directly inside Sulthar’s giant body. Damian looked at the dragon with wide eyes as the still black, burning gash on his wing started to slowly close up. In seconds it was completely closed off, healed, only leaving a big mark behind. The black flames too vanished as a coating of blood-red aura, or life energy, enveloped the massive dragon for a minute, fully restoring both his health and mana.

The monstrous thing had not even used up 10% of his total mana pool, and it was already back to full. Damian gritted his teeth and pulled one hand free from the bigger sword, then grabbed the sword he had made himself. Raising both of them high, Damian powered both and released the slashes straight at the dragon’s recovering figure.

The black flames swept through the land, incinerating everything in between like an avalanche, while the paper-thin aura slash spell from his steel sword left a clean straight line on the land, with a sharp ‘Shnnn’ sound as it traveled at twice the speed compared to the black flaming arc and crashed onto the metallic wings of the giant dragon. A few seconds after, the black fire arc also caught up and clashed onto those wings, still covered in red aura-like energy.

The clash of the attacks landing on the wings sent shockwaves across the land. Damian threw away the damaged air shield cube, pressed the pedal to get another one, and quickly activated it. Even his steel golem was bright red at some places where the hellfire beam had grazed it.

When the dust settled, Damian saw Sulthar standing there tall, not even moved an inch from his position. The wounds on the wings healed just as fast as the attacks had left Damian’s sword. Damian noticed the dip in 5% of Sulthar’s mana in one instance, but it was meaningless with that cheating-level skill of his.

The strategy he had used against the Red Demon would not work here. Sulthar would not run out of mana, and neither would Damian. Before the wounds had fully healed and left behind two more marks beside the earlier one, Sulthar raised his fire-breathing head up, and a second later, four massive blood-red runic circles appeared meters from its nostrils, out of which was conjured a giant plasma-like sphere of molten fire and lava. This one too had that weird sense of holding a strange feeling mana that normally enchantments had — there was a piece of soul mixed in the attack.

Damian stared as the gigantic sphere emitting waves of solar flares was thrown towards him. The air seemed like it was being stretched to the limit as the sphere came hurtling towards his steel golem. Damian immediately pulled up the massive Waygate runic circle he was holding onto for emergencies and pushed it in the path of the plasma sphere — he did not activate it though. It had the tracking spell; who knew if the Dragon King could move it too or not..

Damian waited till the very last second, but the moment it came midway through between Sulthar and him, he activated the spell and quickly swallowed the whole plasma sphere, spitting it out near the Red Demon once again. Damian was surprised that the guy was still alive — well, if this continued, he wouldn’t be for long.