Lith tried to lift the Forge, but it weighed too much, even for his inhuman strength.
‘Damn! Without dimensional magic, we cannot store it nor warp it away!’ Lith inwardly cursed non stop.
‘You could make it float with a spell, but this thing is too big to get it out of here by crushing through the walls. The cursed object that oversees this place would kill us before we manage to escape.’ Solus said.
Lith tried to lift it with a spell anyway. Much to his surprise, an external source of mana blocked his spell and the room started to rumble as if an earthquake was about to bring down the roof. The quaking stopped the moment Lith let the Forge go.
‘Let’s run away. There’s enough mana surrounding us to kill you in the blink of an eye.’ Solus warned him. Lith waited a few minutes and resumed searching the room only when Solus confirmed that the hostile mana was fading.
Even if it was very old, it was still a Forgemastering lab. After working for two years at the White Griffon, Lith knew how such places were built. He ignored the open cabinets and went straight for the test room, where any competent Forgemaster kept his prototypes.
A weapon rack full with all kinds of swords covered in blue runes was waiting for him.
‘Yes!’ Lith started picking them up, but after the first blade the rumbling resumed, forcing him to put them back in their place except for one. A second attempt to collect more than one sword confirmed his intuition.
“Okay, fine! They all have the same spell on them after all.” Lith’s sour grapes claim was followed by a quick read of the textbooks stored in the libraries. Once again, he could only pick one or pay the consequences.
The problem was that they were all written in gibberish and he was dangerously running out of time. The only silver lining in Lith’s situation was that even if he was unable to understand the words and all the magic circles depicted were unknown, the basics of Forgemastering were still the same.
Lith and Solus were instantly able to tell the tier of an enchantment just by looking at the complexities of the drawings and the number of pseudo cores each spell was devised to handle.
They picked a small book that was only filled with complex tier five Forgemastering spells.
“Let’s just hope they actually have a practical use. With my luck, they might as well be just teaching spells…” Lith choked on those words, finally realizing why the Huryole seemed so familiar to him.
The furniture’s design was outdated and he had met the rooms in a random order, but too many things inside the lost city reminded him of the White Griffon academy. Lith would have liked to put his intuition to the test, but there was no time.
He used his flight spell to backtrack, moving as fast as he could while checking the map so he wouldn’t get lost. Solus couldn’t help him this time as she was too focused keeping watch against possible threats.
‘Watch out! Something big and powerful is coming our way!’ She warned him. Lith turned to his right just in time to see and incredibly handsome man with emerald hair and purple eyes coming from around the corner.
‘Powerful I can believe, but big? Also, what’s wrong with his hair? Did he come out of an anime or what?’ Lith didn’t slow down and set up several barriers, just in case the newcomer was hungry like all the creatures Lith had met during his explorations.
<"Wait! If you help me to get out of here, I'll reward you handsomely!" > Said the green haired man in a forgotten language. Seeing that Lith wasn’t even listening, he charged forward with inhuman speed, shapeshifting into his real form.
An emerald scaled dragon the size of a three-storey noble house started giving chase to Lith, using air magic to support its gigantic wings and gain more speed.
< "I said wait!"> The creature roared while desperately trying to catch up.
Lith had never seen a real dragon before. His first reaction was surprise, immediately followed by his survival instincts kicking in.
‘How bad is our situation?’ He asked.
‘Bright blue core inside the strongest body I have ever seen! Shapeshift?’
Lith was losing ground, so he had his hybrid form’s wings emerge from his back.
One of the perks of the Orichalcum Skinwalker was that it was able to revert to its liquid form at will, so even if dimensional magic was sealed inside Huryole, Lith had no need to take it off to be able to shapeshift.
The wings allowed him to go as fast as the dragon since his much smaller figure had an easier time maneuvering along the corridors. Lith only needed to fold his wings to go through a door whereas his alleged enemy had to revert back to human form.
The emerald dragon was flabbergasted and overjoyed seeing a fellow dragon, so he attempted to speak in draconic.
< "Wait, I mean no harm, little brother. We can get out of here together!" > Too bad that draconic was a guttural tongue so filled with power that it would hurt the ears of a normal human, making them bleed.
Lith took it as some kind of sonic attack and moved even faster.
< "I said stop!"> Outraged by the blatant lack of respect from the lesser dragon in front of him, the emerald dragon breathed bright blue Origin Flames against Lith.
“Thanks, sucker!” Lith replied hurling a jet stream of Origin Flames of his own which countered the enemy attack and produced a conflagration that further enhanced his speed whereas it forced his enemy to stop.
The emerald dragon couldn’t cross the raging firestorm in front of himself without risking to die.
‘How can a lesser dragon produce such a powerful flame? I only fired a warning shot, but he still managed to block it. Father Leegaain must have become even stronger if even such a hatchling can reach that kind of skill.’ He thought.
Lith was back to the straight path, so he could put away the map and focus only on his speed.
‘How long until the reset?’ He asked.
‘Less than five minutes.’ Solus’s reply made Lith curse.
‘That’s too much time! I don’t want to fight a dragon. I don’t even know what they are capable of.’
Lith moved outside the barrier, using his army amulet to call for reinforcements. General Vorgh went pale hearing about the emerald dragon.
“Good gods, him again? The strike team will be there as fast as they can. Do not engage him unless the barrier is at risk. Fighting alone would be suicide.”
Lith nodded while preparing for the worst. Little did he know that the conflagration caused by the Origin Flames had damaged Huryole’s walls, making the cursed object overseeing the city react with extreme prejudice.
The emerald dragon was currently fighting for his life against an endless barrage of spells which prevented him from moving even one inch forward.
Vorgh and a full platoon of Spellbreakers arrived less than a minute after Lith’s call. They patiently waited for the enemy’s arrival, casting several arrays one on top of another and using the barrier’s power source to boost their spells.
When the reset time arrived, the whole stone dome surrounding Huryole trembled and the emerald dragon was sent to a remote corner of the city.
