Severa Book 1 (Chapter 13)

This chapter got some crazy shiii.

Her fire struck the dragonkin’s neck. For a moment, the cavern lit like a forge. But when the flare died, the Juggernaut remained exactly as it had been—its crystalline plates unscorched, its glacial veins untouched.

DeShawn’s overlay bloomed across her vision:

Frostborn Juggernaut — Hostile

Emotional Equilibrium: 78%

Emotional Status: Stable, Confident

[See that 78%? The lower it gets, the more rattled opps are.]

Stable. Confident.

So that wasn’t it. Or maybe her spells were simply too weak to matter, an ant’s bite against a mountain. She swallowed the sting of that thought, breath ragged against the bitter air.

If I can’t break its armor, then I have to break its stance.

Her gaze darted to its trident, then back up to the way it hunched. Big, armed creatures with wide swings always had one flaw: they hated enemies up close.

Wind surged at her heels, and she darted.

She saw the opening—those glacial ribs, those seams of aetheric flows running beneath the frozen lattice. All she had to do was—

The Juggernaut’s other hand slammed her away. 

She smashed into the cavern wall, the shock ringing through her spine, and then—mercifully—snow. A cascading drift softened her crash, though each layer still hit like stone packed to powder. Snow poured around her, burying her where she lay. 

[You okay?]

Don’t ask unless you can help, she replied as she dug herself from the snow, melting it with her firespark fingertips. 

Her Tier II upgrade—Airstill Bulwark—thickened the air around her at the last possible instant. The impact still rattled her bones, but the difference between ‘painful’ and ‘fatal’ was that stubborn cushion of frozen wind.

Severa staggered to her knees, coughing hard enough that each spasm scraped her ribs raw. Her lungs burned like she’d inhaled shards of frost. When she pressed a hand against the snow to steady herself, she realized her fingers trembled. 

The Juggernaut’s blow hadn’t just flung her. It had left something behind.

I feel sluggish.

[I thought that was your natural speed.]

Please, be silent. I’m . . .

The thought gnawed at her: I’m losing it. I couldn’t even see that hand coming earlier.

She glanced down as her fingers scraped against something hard in the snow. The glint made her heart jump—her magnifying lens, spiderwebbed with cracks. The lens had been her edge, her tool to read the aetheric flows and strike them where it could hurt. That was the only reason she’d been able to see the aether concentrated along the dragonkin’s rib earlier.

The ground trembled. Her head jerked up.

The Frostborn Juggernaut was moving. Its trident dragged at its side, gouging furrows of glittering frost in the cavern floor.

Severa forced herself upright, knees shaking. She sucked in a freezing lungful of air and let it out slow.

The monster is coming. I have five seconds at most.

Then, she raised her hand to her lips. Her index finger pressed against the edge of her teeth, harder, harder—until enamel met flesh. The bite split skin with a hot sting. Blood welled instantly. It had been so long since she smelled her own blood.

Then she swallowed.

Her eyes burst bloodshot, sclera veined and gleaming as though her own capillaries had caught fire. The veins raced across her face, dark red and black, crawling like ink beneath her skin. They splintered from her throat to her collarbone, down her arms, across her chest, until her entire body looked like parchment overlaid with a map of burning rivers.

Bloodform, Tier IV, Rank I.

Tier IV was the Legendary tier, the highest form of spellcasting a thaumaturge could reasonably learn (because Mythic spells were unreasonable).

But Severa hated her Bloodform. 

Not because it was weak, but because it was unearned. She hadn’t trained for it, hadn’t bled for it; she was simply born with it by bearing the Montreal lastname. And she had never been able to force it past Rank I. This Bloodform wasn’t a gift but a scar, the one humiliating shortcoming in her otherwise immaculate record of thaumaturgy. It reminded her that no matter how far she climbed, there was still a rung she could never reach.

[Something is wrong with your body girl . . . Lemme show you.]

> Hyper Awareness Mode Initiated

Duration: 30 seconds

Thirty seconds. That was the limit of her bloodform.

The Juggernaut lunged. Shards of rime peeled from its trident as it swiped the weapon in an arc.

But she wasn’t there anymore.

The veins across her body flared crimson. It was pumping her own blood. Her thumb pressed to her lips—one more bite, sharper this time. A tiny vein burst under her teeth with a copper tang. She growled:

“Ignis; Shutur; Veyne”

A firebomb swelled, its heart a writhing sphere of molten red, but now its edges ran dark where her blood threaded into the blaze. Flame and vitae tangled, sparkling on the edge with the golden hue of reverence.

Explosive Pyroclasm, Tier III, Rank III was the name. Bloodbound was the variant.

She thrust both hands forward.

The blood-fed inferno roared away.

It streaked across the cavern and slammed against the Juggernaut’s rib seam before the dragonkin could parry.

The Pyroclasm gnawed into its chest, the blood-stained flames searing deep until the outer shell of ice cracked, then burst into a stream of melted water.

[Holy shiiiiiiiiii. That’s fire, girl.]

The one time she let her emotions get the better of her judgment in a dungeon, something horrific happened.

Whole plates sloughed off in molten sheets, dripping like slagged armor to the floor. Beneath, raw frost-bone gleamed—exposed, vulnerable.

The monster reeled, a sound like grinding glaciers tearing out of its throat.

Frostborn Juggernaut — Hostile

Emotional Equilibrium: 49%

Emotional Status: Disturbed, Panicked

That’s the right spot. The scales must not be as thick, or not as strong against flames.

Her bloodform made spellforming instantaneous now. There was no sequencing, no careful weaving of runes; her body forced the shape into being. Her hands shook, but her voice did not.

“Ignis; Shutur; Veyne!”

Another Pyroclasm flared into existence, but this one swelled far past what her veins were meant to contain. She was climbing to Rank IV—the very lip of her boundary. The fireball expanded with a convulsive upheaval, heat screaming off it. The sphere’s surface spat sparks like molten hail, edges flickering white-hot where the core collapsed in on itself.

Black and crimson rivulets slithered around the orb like serpents, strangling the blaze tighter, compressing it into a weapon too violent for its own frame.

Both her spell prisms slipped free from her belt. She didn’t aim with one—she hurled two. They caught the cavern light like twin shards of starlight before locking into place in front of the Juggernaut’s fractured rib seam.

The firebomb streaked forward. It struck at the exact instant both prisms slammed against the beast’s chest.

The firebomb imploded first, then the prisms refracted the collapse into a stormburst outward. The blast clawed into every direction at once, a corona of searing bloodfire that burned red at its edges and pure white at its core.

The Juggernaut’s torso convulsed, ice ribs shattering, frost-bone shorn open as if by a giant’s axe. The cavern itself shuddered under the thunderclap.

Frostborn Juggernaut — Hostile

Emotional Equilibrium: 17%

Emotional Status: Shattered, Desperate

[OOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH]

[YO GIRL, YOU JUST DROPPED A NUKE ON HIS CHEST.]

[WHAT’S THAT TING YOU THREW? DOUBLE NADES? WHO EVEN DOES THAT? YOU DO. YOU A PROBLEM.]

The dragonkin was still standing. At the center of its chest, where the twin firebombs had struck, a cavernous wound gaped open. Frosted ribs splintered in every direction, and vaporous curls rose as blood and melted ice mingled.

[KEEP PUSHING, SEVERA. YOU GOT HIM STAGGERING. HE DON’T WANT NO MORE.]

Severa collapsed. The veins that had glowed like living embers now throbbed painfully, empty and sluggishly retreating, leaving her limbs heavy as metal. It was like a sugar crash—if sugar were blood. 

If only she had been able to push her Bloodform to Rank II, the surge might have lasted longer. She could have paced it, let the energy ebb instead of burning it all away violently, and avoided this crippling aftermath.

Her father’s words returned to her, “When you have distinguished yourself as a thaumaturge, do tell everyone that you only used a Rank I Bloodform out of sheer modesty.”

How she yearned so much to have been able to prove him wrong.

> Hyper Awareness Mode Disengaged

> Emotional Read — Severa Montreal

> Emotional Equilibrium: 17%

> Current Mental Stability: 16%

> Primary Emotional Read: Despair

[Severa. You can do this. One more push.]

[C’mon, girl. Stand. I’ve just been awakened. You can’t go so soon.]

All Severa managed was lifting her head. Her head lolled back against the icy floor. Her vision swam, but she caught the sight of the dragonkin coming nonetheless.

Its massive chest still bore the gaping wound where her twin Pyroclasms had struck, yet the creature’s limbs moved with relentless intent. Each step it took gouged frost and stone, crushing the ground beneath it.

Have I misjudged? A dragonkin has two hearts; one in each rib. Maybe I should’ve shot the other rib instead of doubling down.

Then she saw something else. Behind her, beyond the fractured cavern wall, the void bloomed from possibly the same blot of darkness she’d seen before. It looked like some sort of gate; a void gate. She didn’t know its mechanics, had never studied it, and yet the raw presence of void thaumaturgy screamed its danger.

Void thaumaturgy was forbidden art. That was the reason why her last mentor had been arrested.

Why is the void here?

But maybe she’d never get to know.

A cold crawled up from her bones. Her muscles spasmed, her joints stiffened, and every inhale brought a sting sharper than ice itself. This Juggernaut could employ some sort of aetheric magic, and it had left a debuff, an internal wound woven into her aetheric core.

The Juggernaut’s trident rose. She couldn’t look away. The intent was obvious.

I’m so stupid. Why did I think I was anything special?

A fissure ripped open in the cavern floor, bursting with crimson sparks and screaming with raw aetheric energy. From it erupted a surge of red aether, spiraling like a living lance. 

The dragonkin stumbled, snow and shards of ice spraying outward, its trident sliding from its grasp for just a fraction of a second. The force left it reeling, a choked bellow escaping its throat as it fought to regain balance.

Marrieh Halveth glided on a gust of aetherically-enhanced wind. Three arrows were nocked on her bow, each shaft blazing with red aetheric fire—the very color of unrestrained rage. She drew her bow back, and the three arrows sang through the aether in unison, each with a zigzag trailing tail of scarlet light like lightning scarred across storm-tossed crimson clouds.

The arrows struck in perfect sequence, one after the other, embedding into the Juggernaut’s exposed chest. The crimson aether flared on impact, fusing with the melted fissures from Severa’s firebombs. The beast convulsed violently, staggering under the combined assault, frost-bone cracking further and shards tumbling like shattered glass.

“Hands off my protégé,” she bellowed.