Weakened Balmung KOs Lung

“O sword…”

Energy surged through my arms and into Balmung. An eerie orange light shone from the jewel in the hilt.

“Let thee be filled.”

I lifted the sword above my head. Two seconds — that was how long it had taken me. Lung was already approaching, dashing with such speed and strength that he was eating up the ground and the world felt as though it was shaking. Against one of the Protectorate heroes, he probably would have been too fast to counter.

Not me.

Phantasmal Greatsword
“Bal —”

I swung down.

Felling of the Sky Demon
“— mung!”

A wave of twilight. A cresting wave of energy surged outward from the arc of my swing, traveling over the ground even faster than Lung. What pavement had not been broken and shattered throughout the rest of the fight was utterly destroyed by its passing, upheaved and rendered into dust.

An Anti-Dragon weapon. The feat which had been captured by the legend of Siegfried and Balmung was that of slaying a great dragon with a single blow. The wave of energy moving swiftly through the intervening space now was the embodiment of that attack, an attack which could defeat an entire host of five-hundred men and laid low anything that could call itself a dragon. If even Fafnir, who only Siegfried had been strong enough to defeat, had been killed by it….

Lung met the wave head on.

In the first place, there was nowhere for him to go, no way for him to avoid it. Even if he’d jumped, the wave was too high and covered too large an area. The best he could have done would have been to move to the outer edges, where the attack wasn’t quite as potent.

But even Lung had to obey physics. Stopping and jumping straight up might have worked to dodge the brunt of it, but Lung had already been barreling forward like a freight train. He didn’t have the time or the space to get even partly out of the way.

So he crashed into it head first.

At the last possible moment, I saw him shield his head and torso with every available limb, from his arms to his legs to his wings.

When the light faded and I had blinked the bright spots out of my vision, it took me a moment to find Lung again. Not only was there no longer a hulking beast of a dragon right in view, but most of the fires had either been swept out by my attack or were dwindling down to flickering embers. The street had, once more, been plunged into total darkness.

It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the stars and the light of the quarter moon, now that there weren’t any major sources of light to let me see by, but Siegfried seemed to have better night vision than a normal human, because once I did adjust, I could see the street with much more clarity than I’d had before the fight. Then again, maybe Siegfried’s vision was normal and the reason I’d had trouble in my base Breaker state was because my natural eyesight wasn’t exactly 20/20.

Either way, it only took a moment or two of looking to find the great lump of flesh that sat further on down the road. I looked behind it, but even with Siegfried’s better vision, I couldn’t see the gangers we’d left behind at the beginning. Maybe they’d woken up and left…but I had a feeling the answer was actually that Lung and I had just gone so far away from them that they were too far to see in the moonlight.

I frown and cautiously made my way over to the lump on the road I’d spotted — was I just imagining things, or was it actually shrinking? Absentmindedly, I tried to keep track of the distance and found that Balmung had thrown Lung back about forty or fifty feet from where he’d collided with that wave of energy. I probably should have been more surprised that it didn’t throw him further.

The lump was Lung and it was shrinking — scales sloughing off, excess skin falling away or just plain disappearing into nowhere, and all of the draconic features turning back into something more like a human. His arms and legs were just plain missing, like they had been neatly seared away by some incredibly hot flame. My attack had, indeed, defeated him in one blow. The only trouble was that I wasn’t sure it hadn’t killed him, too.

In the end, I was terrible at going all out. I was too afraid that I’d become a murderer, and that wasn’t a step I wanted to take — especially on my first night out. I’d unleashed Balmung at something like half strength, maybe closer to two thirds. I didn’t think Siegfried was entirely happy about that, but he did know how to do it.

Even like that, I didn’t know if the ultimate Anti-Dragon weapon had killed the dragon, Lung.

Hesitantly, I leaned down and pressed two fingers against the side of his throat, feeling for a pulse, and found nothing. It was only belatedly, after I had a brief, confused moment of mingled panic and satisfaction, that I realized I wouldn’t be able to feel it through the metal of my gauntlets and the leather padding on their insides.

I needn’t have bothered, anyway. Even if I missed the rise and fall of his chest, his injuries were already starting to heal — much, much slower than they had at even the beginning of the fight, but still noticeable. He’d probably have his arms and legs back within an hour, three at the long end.