The awe was genuine and he didn’t try to contain it.
’The abilities of an ancient dragon keep surprising ,’ he thought.
And then another layer arrived.
He looked at the frozen wolves. Then back at Kael. Then at the smoking corpses of the alpha and the first wolf, and the dead dog further back in the trees.
Kael had used the black fire. He had used those strange dark portals. He had used the black slash.
He had done all of that — the full performance, the demonstration of darkness elent and shadow manipulation and whatever category the severing slash belonged to — when he could have simply issued a Dragon’s Order at the start and ended the entire engagent before it began.
He had chosen not to.
Not because the Order was unavailable to him, not because the situation had required sothing else — but because this was a demonstration.
Noah understood exactly why Kael hadn’t started with the Dragon’s Order.
It wasn’t a tactical decision. It wasn’t because the situation had required a different approach or because the Order had limitations that made the other abilities more appropriate for the opening exchanges.
The reason was simpler and considerably more Kael — he had wanted to show off his other skills first.
He had wanted Noah to see the dark portals, the black slash, the black fire, each one demonstrated separately and clearly, before revealing the Order as the final piece.
Using the Dragon’s Order from the start would have ended everything in seconds and left nothing to observe. And Kael, had not co into this forest to be efficient.
He had co to be witnessed.
He had perford for Noah.
And Noah, looking back across everything he had just watched, found that he was genuinely, thoroughly impressed.
He had known Kael was exceptional. He had understood from early on that what was living in the shadow beneath his feet was not an ordinary creature by any asure.
But knowing sothing in the abstract and watching it dismantle a pack that included an advanced-rank mana beast while simultaneously demonstrating four distinct and categorically unusual abilities were different experiences.
The fantasy books had been useless.
That was the honest assessnt.
He had read about dragons in multiple texts across different traditions — mythology, magical theory, historical accounts of alleged sightings — and what those sources had collectively produced was a picture that, placed next to the reality of Kael, looked like a rough sketch made by soone who had heard a description of a dragon from soone who had heard a description from soone else.
And this was days old.
Noah held that thought for a mont, really held it, because it was the kind of thought that required actual residence rather than a quick pass-through.
Kael was days old. His existence could be asured in a ti fra that applied to very recent events.
The egg had hatched, the dragon had erged, and what had followed in the short interval since then had included abilities that magi spent lifetis attempting to develop and frequently failed to reach.
Days old.
’If this is what a few days looks like,’ Noah thought, his eyes tracking Kael’s movent through the air, ’what does a few years look like?’
The question didn’t have an answer he could construct with any confidence, which was itself informative.
With Kael, the projection kept producing numbers that his instinct flagged as potentially unreliable simply because they were so large.
’Could he even beco as strong as a supre magus?’
He wanted to doubt it.
Supre magus wasn’t a rank that existed in the sa conversation as most things.
It sat above everything below it — a tier beyond a tier, referenced in the oldest texts with a reverence that suggested even the people writing about it weren’t entirely sure it was real rather than theoretical.
He couldn’t deny the possibility.
Looking at what Kael had done in the last few minutes, with a body that was still in the first week of its existence — he genuinely couldn’t close the door on it.
He filed the thought carefully, in the section of his mind reserved for things that were too significant to dismiss and too uncertain to act on.
Kael had turned his attention back to the frozen wolves.
The four animals felt his gaze return to them and responded imdiately — the trembling that had been present since the Dragon’s Order intensified, moving through each wolf in visible waves, their bodies betraying the fear that their locked muscles couldn’t act on.
They were aware of him looking at them. The awareness alone was enough to do things to their composure.
Then four dark balls appeared in the air beside Kael.
They floated at even spacing beside the dragon, rotating slowly in place, the mana coming off them carrying the particular signature that Noah had already learned to associate with Kael’s darkness elent.
A wide smile spread across Kael’s face.
It was sinister in the specific way she to the huge contrast between it and his small size.
The whole scene look a bit comical... with the huge wolves trembling on the ground, and Kael who was as small as a pup hovering above them.
The dark balls suddenly launched, moving towards the wolves at terrifying speed.
They closed the distance in a second.
They hit the wolves without slowing — not impacting against their bodies the way a physical projectile impacted, not producing the sound or the force that contact between solid things produced.
They simply passed through the surface of each wolf and were gone, absorbed into the animals as though the skin had parted to receive them and then closed again, leaving nothing on the exterior to indicate that anything had entered.
The wolves shivered.
The sensation that moved through them was clearly sothing — their bodies registered it, the shivering expressing a response to an internal experience that had no obvious external cause.
But the response was confused rather than pained, carrying the quality of a creature that had braced for sothing and found that the expected impact hadn’t arrived in any form it could identify.
They had seen the dark balls coming.
They had tracked them closing the distance, had their bodies tensed against the Dragon’s Order that was still holding them, and in the last fraction of a second before contact had prepared themselves for whatever impact sothing like that produced.
Instead, nothing.
Or what seed like nothing.
The balls were simply gone — not embedded, not visible beneath the skin, producing no wound, no entry mark, no evidence on the surface of the wolves’ bodies that anything had reached them.
Each mana beast looked down at itself, then at the others, the confusion moving through the pack in the specific way confusion moved through creatures that communicated in instinct and body language — a collective disorientation, shared without words.
The Dragon’s Order released.
Whether Kael had withdrawn it deliberately or whether the completion of the dark balls’ delivery had concluded whatever chanism held it, the frozen quality left the wolves’ legs simultaneously.
The paws that had been locked to the ground found their function again, and the animals acted on the freedom imdiately and without deliberation.
They ran.
All four, in the sa direction, paws driving hard against the forest floor, the undergrowth parting around them as they pushed through it with everything they had.
The forest accepted them, the trunks and the brush closing behind each wolf as it passed, the sounds of their movent becoming the dominant sound in the clearing.
They didn’t get far.
The change started small — a visible tensing in the hindquarters of the wolf running at the back of the group, a stride that broke its rhythm, a sound from inside the animal that had no natural explanation.
Then it spread forward through the pack in rapid succession, each wolf hitting the sa mont slightly after the one behind it, the sequence moving through them like a wave.
And then the spikes ca out.
Black, dense, the sa darkness material as the balls that had entered — they erupted from within the wolves’ bodies simultaneously, punching outward through skin and fur with the force of sothing that had been building pressure from the inside and had reached the point of release.
Not one per wolf but multiple, bursting from different points across each animal’s body, impaling outward in every direction.
The blood ca with them.
It splattered with the force of the eruption, rraching the nearby trunks and the bushes in patterns that spoke plainly to the violence of what had just happened.
The sound that accompanied it was brief and brutal — not prolonged, not the extended suffering of the first encounters, but the sudden, total conclusion of sothing that had been decided from the mont the dark balls entered.
The wolves froze.
Not the Dragon’s Order this ti — the stillness of death, each body suspended on the black spikes that had erupted through it, held in the position it had occupied at the mont of eruption.
Four of them, scattered across the stretch of forest floor they had managed to cover before the dark balls delivered their contents, impaled and motionless, the blood still moving slowly down the spikes toward the ground.
Noah stood completely still.
His eyes were wide.
’What kind of skill is that?!’ he thought.
He stared at the four suspended wolves, at the black spikes holding them, at the total and complete absence of any struggle in the aftermath — no final movent, no residual resistance, just four bodies that had been alive few seconds ago and were now architectural features of the forest floor.
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