Last Dragon Standing (Heartstrikers #5)(72)
Her voice faded from Julius’s fire after that, leaving the actual Amelia smirking at him from behind a wreath of smoke. “That went well,” she said brightly. “You’ve got a line to the Phoenix, right?” When Julius nodded, Amelia rubbed her claws together. “Excellent. You’ll be my wingman. You feed me intel from the ground, I’ll spread it to the troops in between bouts of being a fiery god of death.”
“Sounds good to me,” Julius said, looking nervously at the dozen tentacles he could see in the area immediately surrounding them. “We need all the firepower we can get.”
“Firepower is my middle name,” Amelia said, the words coming out in curls of smoke as fire licked at her fangs. “You might want to get behind me.”
Julius dove at once, darting behind his giant sister seconds before a wave of fire exploded out of her mouth. It was so bright, it whited out Julius’s vision. By the time he could see again, all the tentacles around them were ash, and Amelia was looking very pleased with herself.
“Not bad, not bad,” she said, lifting her eyes to the giant above them. “I wonder if that would work on the big one?”
“But you just told us to ignore the Leviathan’s main body,” Julius reminded her. “And aren’t you the one who said it couldn’t be defeated?”
“Normally, yeah,” Amelia said. “But as I just demonstrated, I’m a god now. Gods don’t follow normal rules.”
“Neither does he,” Julius argued. “Remember what Raven said? The Leviathan is using Algonquin’s magic as a cover to hide his true form from the plane. Underneath that, though, he’s still a Nameless End. If you go inside, he could devour your magic.”
His sister scoffed. “Who said anything about going inside? I’m just going to try and burn a hole in his belly. I bet that would slow the tentacle production rate.” She grinned. “No way to know except to try.”
The idea of getting any closer to the Leviathan than they already were made Julius’s skin crawl. Even this close, he could already feel how alien it was. How hungry. But when he turned to tell his sister that he really didn’t think this was a good idea, Amelia beat her wings, blasting him away.
The wind rolling off her flaming feathers was hot as a furnace and strong as a hurricane, and it got stronger with every flap. All of her was looking bigger, actually. Julius didn’t know if she’d been hiding her true size this whole time or if she was simply whatever size she wanted to be now, but Amelia’s fiery body was already twice as large as Justin’s, her fiery wings spreading until they lit up the entire DFZ. With one flap, she rose a hundred feet, bringing her flaming body directly below the Leviathan’s as she opened her mouth to unleash the brightest gout of dragon fire Julius had ever seen.
He almost turned away too late. Even after he closed his eyes, the blast left him blind, lighting up the dark city like an atomic noon. Amelia’s fire was so powerful, the heat of it curled his feathers and made it hard to breathe even a hundred feet away. He couldn’t see what it was doing to the Leviathan, but it seemed impossible that so much fire would have no effect. Then, just as his hopes were starting to rise, the light snuffed out, and his sister vanished, her fiery form going dark as dozens of black tentacles shot through the air where she’d been.
“Amelia!” Julius cried, dodging frantically as one of the spears shot past him. “Amelia!”
Don’t be dramatic, scolded the voice in his fire. His sister reappeared beside him a few moments later, though in a much smaller form. Her feathers hadn’t even finished firming up when Svena swept in.
“What was that?” the white dragon panted, lowering the temperature several degrees with her frosty breaths. “And did it work?”
“Testing the Leviathan’s resistance,” Amelia replied, her own breaths worryingly short. “And no.” She glanced up at the Leviathan’s black shell, which, despite her incredible display of firepower, looked just as glossy and impenetrable as it had before.
“I don’t understand,” Svena said, pushing back one of the whelps who’d crawled too far up her neck. “I felt that blast all the way to my core. You hit him with the combined force of all dragon fire. Nothing should be immune to that.”
“I don’t think he’s immune,” Amelia said. “I saw my attack do a little damage before he tried to spear me, but not nearly as much as I’d hoped, and I’m afraid that’s kind of my fault.”
“How do you figure that?” Julius asked.
“Being made of sentient magic, spirits aren’t usually bothered by physical weapons,” his sister explained. “For example, you couldn’t hurt Algonquin with a sword. No matter how hard you hit, your blade would just go right through her while she laughed. The reason dragons have never had a problem with this particular defense is because we’re magic too. We’re fighting fire with fire, so to speak, except our fire is from a different plane. That’s why spirits have always seen us as such an enormous threat despite our relatively small numbers. We have a weapon they can’t easily counter: our dragon fire. Unfortunately, when I became the Spirit of Dragons and tied our fire into the magic of this plane, I might have… broken that.”
“What?” Svena shrieked. “I noticed the tentacles were taking longer to burn than they should, but I thought that was just the Nameless End’s influence. I didn’t realize you’d broken our fundamental advantage!”