A protective dome rose over the arena. Exactly one thousand individuals were released onto the sand: five hundred ordinary soldiers, three hundred explosive ticks and two hundred swift scouts that had appeared after the second evolution.
The rest of the swarm remained outside the academy. If I tried to summon it, the Seal would register a violation.
Leon took the Void Dragon off its lead. The young beast leapt into the arena and grew in mid-air. Its wings spread ten metres wide. The black haze around its scales thickened and swallowed its shadow.
"Begin."
I sent the scouts out in a wide ring. They did not attack. They tested the boundary of the void field.
The first twenty vanished without a sound.
The bond did not break in death. It simply ceased to exist, as though those individuals had never been. The dragon had neither burned nor poisoned them. The space around it had swallowed the path itself.
Leon laughed.
"You're used to beating things that can't close their ears. The Void Dragon leaves no way through."
The beast swept a wing. A black arc passed over the sand and carved a broad strip out of the swarm. Every soldier it touched vanished along with the dust beneath them.
Styx entered phantom flight and struck from above. Her thunder stinger reached the scales, flashed violet and went dark. The void consumed the discharge, the venom and part of the impact. Styx was thrown towards the protective dome.
Leon ordered the dragon to open its jaws.
There was no tongue or throat inside. A dark vortex turned there. It drew in two hundred mosquitoes before I could spread the broods apart.
We were losing the direct fight.
I looked at the dome's metal supports. During assessments, they channelled excess energy beneath the arena. The void could extinguish a single discharge, but it did not change the physics of the entire field.
"Explosive ticks, to the supports. Soldiers, spread out between them."
Leon decided I was trying to bring down the defences.
"Dragon, sweep them away."
A black arc raced towards the nearest support, but the ticks exploded first. Acid stripped off the protective coating and exposed the metal. Soldiers with lightning-charged abdomens settled on the bare surface, then formed a chain to the next support.
Styx released a short discharge.
It was not aimed at the dragon. Electricity spread around the arena's ring and lifted metallic dust from the sand. A thin glowing boundary appeared around the void field.
Now I could see where space warped most severely.
The dragon leapt. I broke the chain at one point and closed it at another. The grounded lightning struck not the scales but the sand beneath its paws. The beast lost its footing and drove one wing into the ground.
The soldiers surrounded the joint without entering the void field. Instead of attacking, they beat their wings and drove acidic dust into the damaged membrane.
Leon stopped smiling.
"Get up!"
The gold collar flared, and the dragon roared in pain. It obeyed, though its injured wing could not bear its weight.
I felt Styx ready to throw every remaining brood into the exposed joint. If five hundred individuals slipped beneath the scales at once, we would finish the fight.
The cost was clear. The void field would close, and not one of them would return.
I began to form the command.
Styx said:
"No."
This time the word was clearer.
"There won't be another opening."
An image came from her: not soldiers inside the dragon, but the entire arena as a web. The supports, the sand, the dome and the metal filaments underground.
She was proposing that we change the battlefield itself instead of sacrificing the swarm.
I cancelled the attack.
"Scouts, raise the dust. Soldiers, hold the ring. Styx, lead."
Now only the nearest hundred individuals received precise commands. The rest followed their queen. I stopped forcing a thousand bodies to repeat the same movement and divided the arena into tasks.
The dragon opened its void maw again. The swarm did not retreat from it as a single mass. The ring opened, let the vortex pass through its empty centre, then closed behind the beast's head.
Styx struck the metal network.
The entire arena flared.
For an instant the void field became visible, and it was not a sphere but a multitude of dark folds. Narrow channels of ordinary space remained between them.
The soldiers went straight for those channels.
They did not enter the body. Some settled on the edges of the scales and passed the charge to the next in line. Others widened the damage to the wing with acid. A third group kept the dragon inside the ring, forcing it to expend the void in dozens of directions at once.
Leon's commands grew sharper. The collar heated up. The dragon obeyed more slowly, and every time it flinched not from our attacks but from the pain inflicted by its own bond.
What Kane had built into the seal was not an amplifier.
It was a whip.
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