----------Kick it in.
I pick up the concrete.
The legend said that the solution was to throw in a stone with the shell of a mollusc in it.
This piece of concrete has shells in it, but does it count as a stone?
I suppose there's only one way to find out.
I throw the concrete into the river.
At first nothing happens.
The water simply laps at the shore.
But then.............................
There's a burst of prana, one so large that every person in the city must have felt it.
Like a tidal wave of water, it washes over the town, passing through stone and steel.
Like a bubble, the surface of the water bulges upward.
It's a enormous bulge.
The bridge is almost a hundred meters above the surface of the river. If you jumped from here you would die.
The Dragon easily makes that height with only half it's body exposed, and even that it bends, a snake-like stoop to put it's face close to ours.
It's mouth is large enough to swallow a small car, each nostril wider than a dinner plate.
It's eyes are yellow as the sun, and are larger than I am without stretching.
Whiskers like pythons droop five meters down through the air, stirring lazily in the breeze.
Each scale is the size of a plate on Saber's armor, and seaweed has taken root there, giving the dragon a greenish fur that does nothing to hide the sapphire blue of it's scales.
“........................”
The Dragon stares at us.
Or rather, stares at Saber, who merely stares back.
“The one you stand before is Hinode no Kawakami Denryu, The Serpent of the Sunrise Current. Kneel.”
Me and Arturia get to our knees.
I'm not going to be the one to tell a dragon no.
It seems Saber is still standing.
She plants the iron remnant of Excalibur firmly on the bridge, and places both of her hands on the pommel.
She almost looks like she's having fun.
“The one you swim before is Arturia Pendragon, King of Britannia, leader of the Knights of the Round Table. You kneel.”
There's a tense moment of silence.
“Impudent. Do you not speak the language? I am a god. Kings bow before me, where I go.”
Saber simply grins.
“In Britannia, Dragons bow to kings.”
The Dragon snorts.
A wash of pure Prana, so dense it's visible, washes over Saber.
Any human would be dissolved into pure energy by that cloud.
To not die would make you inhuman. A monster.
“No fair if we get into a fight before I can make my demands. Let's decide on a wager beforehand.”
Saber isn't dead.
In fact she's just talking calmly.
The mist clears, and the bridge under her feet is bubbling.
Excalibur looks better for it though.
The filigree is back, though it's dull and tarnished.
The hilt has returned to a dull blue as well.
Did it absorb the Dragon's breath?!
“Very well, impudent King. On my victory, you shall be eaten, and your bones shall lie in my stomach for a century, until the stench is so foul even the Netherworld will not accept your soul.”
“And on my victory, Snake, I shall take a piece of your power, to fix my sword.”
Hinode no Kawakami Denryu looks at Excalibur.
“You will not win.”
Like a cobra, he lunges forward, far passing the speed of sound.
But Saber is gone.
I see a blue blur bounce off of a steel girder, leaving a pair of boot-shaped indents.
“We need to go!”
Arturia drags me to my feet as I hear Saber smash into the Dragon.
We're running down the bridge.
I take only a second to look back.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Her Master flees the scene.
That's fine; She would be more of a liability than an asset.
Saber's blade took the Prana of the Dragons snort, which is the only reason it cuts at all.
Even so, the Dragons scales are like plate mail.
Again and again, Excalibur is turned away by those scales, or thuds uselessly into thick strands of seaweed.
The Swordsman snorts.
She's never seen Excalibur so lackluster.
Repelled again, she leaps from the snapping jaws onto a steel girder on the bridge.
She tried to hide it from her Master, but she's feeling the effects of Ruin in her bones.
A Servant is construct of magic, and Saber has had little time to recover since coming in contact with Rider.
No time to worry now.
Steel clashes with tooth as the dragons maw is repelled by the King.
Despite herself, the Swordsman smiles.
She hasn't seen much proper combat since the war started... And she is enjoying it.
It's just her and the Dragon.
A Knight and a Beast.
She tenses her legs and springs, crying a battle cry as she flies over the Dragon, searching for a weak point.
A missing scale, a chink in the natural armor.
All a swordsman like Saber would need.
But all she sees is a glittering blue field of overlapping armor.
Scale armor, such as the Arabians had in her day.
Even the eyes are sheathed by a clear film, harder than any mortal steel.
If so then....
Clang!
A pounding heart bounces off the scales.
She launches herself back towards the bridge.
Only this time, she doesn't land.
------------------SHING!
A fragment of steel, sharp as any blade.
Her height and a half, and awkwardly shaped.
In fact, almost like a spade, it grows flatter and sharper at the tip.
Excalibur smashes into the dragon teeth reaching for Saber's middle.
But the Dragon never meant to bite her.
A blast of dragons breath, the equivalent of thirty A rank mages casting at once.
Saber is blown back by the sheer force.
She smashes into, and then through, one of the steel supports for the bridge.
Thirty pounds of broken I-beam drops into the raging river below.
Saber reaches for a handhold to keep from meeting the same fate.
In the water, she will be on her enemies ground.
In his home, he will be victorious.
Skitter skitter!
Her makeshift spear clatters off the walkway of the bridge.
No choice!
Saber leaps from her safety.
The spear is grabbed, but now Saber is moving away from the bridge!
There's no more time, she has to grab on now, or else she will be drowned.
Like a cat, she turns in mid-air, throwing her spear up and over a protruding bar, that had been knocked loose earlier in the fight.
She grabs the other end just as the spear catches, and Saber jolts to a halt, almost falling into the black waters below.
Holding the spear by both ends, she swings her legs, propelling her higher.
The dragon unleashes another torrent of caustic energy.
The blast goes low, but the sheer power causes Saber's hairs to stand on end.
Her legs wrap around a structural support, and she quickly slides on top.
One push of her leg has her back in the fight.
She flies back up to the top of the bridge, landing with a thud.
Gravel crunches underfoot as she sprints back to the other edge of the bridge, where the fight awaits her.
Dragonfire roars, sending the bridge rolling and the asphalt bubbling.
Saber dodges like lightning, using fallen I-beams to catch her momentum.
The whole bridge is beginning to rattle and shake as it collapses.
Too much of the structure has been lost.
She's reached the other edge now, and Saber jumps towards her foe.
The Dragon opens its mouth to catch her.
And instead receives a slice of steel through the back of it's throat.
The Dragon retches, a horrible sound like a jet engine played backwards.
It also, for the first time in the battle, opens its eye of the protective, clear sheathe.
Excalibur is like a bolt of lightning.
And it digs itself into the eye of the dragon like a razor slicing through tissue paper.
And coats itself in the dragons blood.
The battle seems to stop, time itself coming to a crawl.
Even the Dragon, which should be roaring in pain, seems almost serene.
“You have won. Truely, you deserve to be called a King of Knights.”
Saber nods.
The Dragons blood wicks away into the blade.
Excalibur begins to return to true form, dark iron turning to blue steel and gold filigree.
And then it begins to glow.
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Arturia and I stop as the light overtakes us.
Everything turns gold.
In the distance I can hear a woman shout.
“EX---------------------------------------------”She couldn't possibly?
Arturia drags me down, but my eyes stay turned towards the sky.
“-------------------------CALIBURRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!”A pillar of golden light turns night into day.
The full power of the Matter of Britain turns into pure energy.
A lance stretching into the sky that could destroy a wall of steel a kilometer thick.
And that's the reflection.
A wall of steam hits us at the speed of sound.
If Arturia and I weren't already on the ground we would be blown all the way back to the house!
The hot steam blisters our skin as it rushes over us.
The expanding cloud blows through the city like a hurricane, a growing amount of debris carried along in it's wake.
And in the center, a pillar of pure energy, surrounded by a growing amount of vaporized rock and metal.
Excalibur shuts off, and the pillar vanishes.
In its place is a cloud of condensing steel vapor, and a lake of igneous rock.
Water rushes in, filling the new lake in the center of town.
The afterglow alone is enough to see by, despite, or perhaps because of, the cloud cover.
Excalibur's light is trapped in the atmosphere.
And in the afterburn on my eyes, red turning a violent magenta, I see a figure.
Saber returns.
Excalibur is back.
The Once and Future King is back.
Arturia nudges my arm.
“Hey.” She says.
“Not to be a buzzkill, but... She just killed the local river god.”
I shrug.
“So?”
“So, that's bad, idiot! We need to at least scold her. That wasn't necessary!”
I get the feeling, Arturia, that I'm the one who will be doing the scolding, while you just shake your finger in the background and forgive her later.
When did we become parents to the King of Britain?
1) Arturia's right though.
2) We'll deal with the negatives as they come.
Author
Topic: Fate / Lunar Sun (Read 26465 times)