Things were not so good in the Seishen Kingdom. They'd been attacked by an Archlord as well, and no Sages had conveniently appeared to protect them. King Dakata had died defending the capital, and only Meira's timely advancement to Overlord had stopped the entire country from being overrun. Her and Kiro had managed to hold onto the western third or so of their territory, near their border with the Frozen Blade School, but the dragons were still pressing them hard.
Whoops, I tripped over some inspiration and a thing happened.
The Last Stand of the King
It was strange, King Seishen Dakata found, but here, at the end of a life of conquest and rulership, with everything falling to pieces around him, he was not as explosively angry as he would have expected.
That was not to say he wasn't angry. He was
furious, on a level he didn't think he'd ever been before... but it was a cold fury, a rational one. He would not live to see tomorrow, but he would spend himself as well as he could along the way.
For the moment, he meditated, cycling as best he could, while attendants brought him natural treasures he could burn for soulfire and others brought his armor, his shield, his sword: the treasures with which he had personally carved out a kingdom.
"Sire..." Dakata didn't know which of his ministers it was, with the minister behind him and Dakata facing the wall, and the poor man's voice quavering to the point he didn't sound like himself. "The scouts and oracles agree, the Archlord will be here in less than an hour."
After a lifetime to create it, it now appeared that the Seishen Kingdom would fall in just two days. It wasn't yet two full days since flights of dragons had appeared on their eastern border, smashing defenses and slaughtering all they came across. The Kingdom had responded as best it could, spending ancient secrets and irreplaceable life-saving tools with reckless speed, the accumulated power of the Seishen Kingdom turned to its last defense. It hadn't helped. The Seishen Kingdom's best tools were Underlords and a handful of launcher constructs and boundary fields that, themselves, might measure up to an Underlord at most.
For anything beyond Underlord, the only tool the Kingdom had was Dakata himself. And he was only an Overlord, no match for an Archlord, even in his prime.
"Sire?"
"I heard you." With deliberate motions, the King stills his cycling, and climbs ponderously to his feet. He is not yet an old man, but age has begun catching up to him. He feels it, yet it scarcely matters. His body will hold up well enough for a single fight. His armor was in place, now, so he held out his left hand, and one attendant, struggling despite Truegold muscles, handed him the lion-faced shield he's weathered a dozen fierce battles behind. He held out his right, and the other attendant handed him his blade that has hewn four hundred foes of his rule. "Go. All of you. Do what you can for yourselves and your loved ones."
He did not give any empty words about valuable service and faithful loyalty. What the last day has told Dakata is that none of that matters an iota in the face of an even more iron law of Cradle: the strong take what they choose. The weak endure.
Five minutes later, the King stood erect and alone on a Thousand-Mile Cloud above the keep of his castle. Below and around him, a hundred warriors and constructs peppered the late afternoon with Striker techniques, and as often as not, a dragon of Truegold or Underlord strength responded with an attack of far greater strength.
This was already the dregs of the defense. One of the city's walls had been reduced to rubble and cinder by a single attack that the oncoming Archlord sent ahead as an introduction.
Dakata could not keep himself from scanning the situation with his spiritual sense. It told him nothing he didn't already know: the dragons were making sport of his people. Of
his people. Lines of refugees tried to pour out of the capital city, or tried to navigate around it. Those who tried to run
to it were already dead, columns of thousands of people slain as a side-effect of the attack on the walls he'd been so proud to help construct. Even this was not even a tithe of a tithe of the death there had already been in the Seishen Kingdom. The Kingdom had had millions of citizens in its eastern reaches. No more.
Finally, the Archlord arrived. With a thunderous clap, a dragon perhaps twenty feet from horn to tail
appeared in the air. Mighty wings beat, keeping it hovering in the air as it surveyed the ground with profound satisfaction.
Dakata had slain larger dragons than this. He had never faced one with even a fraction of what the red-scaled figure before him commanded. Whether its appearance had been simply the speed of an Archlord or some movement technique, the dragon gave no sign. It simply fully unleashed its spirit.
Even Dakata flinched and had to fight back sweat as the potent power of fire clawed at him. Some of the Golds on the ground didn't even survive this simple exercise of madra: they burned. Roofs and groves gradually caught fire.
Just the presence of this dragon was a fiery calamity, but Dakata urged his Cloud forward.
Before he could strike, the dragon's eyes latched onto him. "Ah, a human. Allow me to introduce myself." It was a woman's voice, and it sounded strangely cultured, in contrast to her words and actions. "I am Alziordra."
"Why are you here, dragon?" It went against every instinct in Dakata's body, but the truth was that every minute spent talking was a minute for thousands of refugees to get further away.
"No particular reason." Alzi smiled, showing off teeth five inches long. "I have decided to fly in this direction, and so I have done so. Ah, but evening is beginning to fall! I think I shall bed here, in this castle, once I have knocked off the unsightly parts." Slowly, she began beating her wings to circle Dakata, and he urged his Cloud to match her motion. "Why, perhaps you could provide some hospitality. If you swear on your soul to serve me in all things and never to resist me, I'll let you organize my dinner! And then in the morning I'll decide whether to keep you as a servant or just kill you. Does that sound like a deal?"
"Never." And Dakata took a ready stance at last, shield held before him and sword behind, with his body to disguise its exact swing.
Alzi laughed, and it had only mockery in its tone. "You're going to try to fight me with so little advancement and with the body of a human?"
"No." And a Forged sword fell on Alzi like a meteor.
It was Dakata's strongest attack, powered by the full force of his madra and shining with every wisp of soulfire he could command at once. It fell from the sky, longer than a yacht and accelerated by every bit of gravity and will Dakata could muster. Alzi, secure in her superiority, had sensed it, but had allowed Dakata the moment to trigger it.
If Alzi had merely dodged, it would have done vast damage to the Seishen capital below them, but instead she batted at it with one contemptuous swing of her wing. In the face of superior advancement, even Dakata's best attack could slow her for barely a second as she shattered the technique.
It was a second he used, as he darted forward with all the speed the Cloud could muster, but it wasn't enough to land a single blow before she recovered. The dragon reared up and her rear talons flashed. The sun was setting behind Dakata, and he saw the reflection of it on her dark, polished nails. He tried to ram into her, but one talon held off his shield. He swung to injure that talon, but the other one countered his strike, as easily as a swordmaster deflecting a novice's foolish rush.
But, for the moment, Alzi was not striking back. She was playing with him, a cruel smile as she let him try everything. With a sharp exhale he obliged her. The Titan's Blade filled his shield, and it suddenly expanded in size and toughness, a defense more adamant than mere city walls.
With a snort of impossibly hot flame, the Forger technique vanished, seared away. As it went, Dakata's sword replaced it. This, too, had been enveloped and grown by the Titan's Blade, and the massive sword swung quicker than Dakata had ever moved before, a perfect arc aimed to tear one of Alzi's wing membranes. This, too, she batted away, only to find a spread of Striker techniques in its shadow. For just an instant, her eyes widened in mild surprise.
The earth-aspect techniques struck her and vanished. Between her draconic body, her Enforcer technique, and her Archlord advancement, such attacks could not hurt her.
"Enough. I tire of this." For the first time, Alzi went on the attack, and her claws tore the Thousand-Mile Cloud to shreds. With some satisfaction, she looked up to see where he was trying to jump to... only to find the King landing on her back.
Power flowed through his Iron body as he activated the Mountainroot to its fullest. His Iron body made him stronger and more stable all the time. When his madra coursed through it, its effects were magnified. He would not be dislodged easily.
This was what he had tried to maneuver to, the only position where he might trade his life for some injury, instead of simply dying futilely.
A surprised Archlady, who had only expected a normal human weight, shook her body violently, halfway between a dog shaking itself dry and a horse throwing a rider.
Dakata held on. He had only a second to steady himself before she tried a Ruler technique, instead. The already unendurably hot air turned even hotter, and Dakata's hair, clothing, even his armor begin to sizzle and melt. He'd already suffered severe burns before he hacked at her neck, his sword held one-handed as the other screamed in pain as he
forced it to hold to a ridge of scales hotter than a blacksmith's forge.
Two, three times the sword struck, each time barely chipping her neck scales even as his sword, too, began to melt and crack from the punishment he was dealing out.
With the fourth swing, the sword finally hit flesh, and Dakata was gratified to see a spray of blood, no matter how minimal, even if it was also accompanied by three-quarters of his blade broken off, spinning into the distance.
It was the only victory he was allowed. Finally, his body betrayed him, and he could hold onto her scales no longer. His Mountainroot body disconnected from her, and he peeled away.
He did not plummet far before Alzi fell on him, a scream of frustration as her talons sank into him. She beat her wings, faster and faster, pushing them to the ground. When they hit, he didn't feel it. He couldn't feel much at all. He could see the crater walls around him, though, courtesy of their impact. "Idiot. I told you you couldn't fight me with a human body."
"Wrong." Dakata's negation was spoiled by a cough, but she still understood, and twisted her sinuous neck to consider this strange claim, to judge if he had lost hold of sanity or simply failed to understand. So, Seishen Dakata spoke his final words, to explain it. They were not a whisper. They were a roar of defiance. "Not a human body. The body of a
King!" The body of one who would die defending his people.
A frustrated Alzi tore him to pieces.
Then, something even more irritating happened. Alziordra's gaze flicked to the spirit of a newly minted Overlord, still some distance away. Gingerly, she felt the little injury she had taken. It wasn't bad. But it was more than she had expected to take already, and now there was another of these irritating gadflies.
"Oh, never mind, this isn't any fun any longer. I'm not dealing with that today."
Slowly, lazily, Alziordra swept a majestic half-circle in the sky and winged her way back east.
Miles away, despite how long and how hard they had pushed their own Thousand-Mile Clouds, Prince Seishen Dakata and Meira sensed the King's death.
"Kiro... don't go." Meira seized the Prince's arm with desperate force. "You can't win. We have to flee. Even the King couldn't stop that dragon."
Kiro's jaw set. The two of them had been flying back from the Viridian Winnower sect, having left as soon as they had heard of the attack. "I have to."
"You can't win if
he couldn't. Please, Prince, think about this!"
"I'm not going to fight the Archlord," Kiro argued. "But there's people out there, who still need me. If my father is really dead, that means I'm the King, and millions of people who looked to my father need me now. I have to lead people away, fight off as many of the lesser dragons as I can, and then... then we have to regroup." He shivered as he realized the magnitude of the impossible task before him. "There's going to be food shortages, dragon raids, countless displaced refugees, and no one to help us. That's what I'm going for. I'm going to do what I can for the innocent Golds who need a guide and protector right now."
In the face of his vehemence, Meira, betrothed to the First Prince—and thus now to the King—took a deep breath and let go. "I understand." Until now, Meira had had to serve and save the Kiro. Now she realized the new path her life would have to take. "Your people are my people, and I will protect them as as you do. I will stand by you, Seishen Kiro, not as bodyguard, but as the Seishen Queen."
Meira meant it with every scrap of her being, and she was so busy calculating every lesser dragon she would have to slay to honor her vow that she only barely noticed as the soulfire in her spirit blazed, reached a new level, and baptized her body.
