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The parking structure had three levels of exposed concrete, the roof torn open by the undead dragon's initial landing. Each floor was its own arena, connected by ramps built for cars and people, now shared with something that occupied two floors simultaneously: tail hanging over the south edge, neck stretched across the gap where the roof used to be.
The dragon's first move was the breath attack.
It came before they finished establishing position: a column of necrotic energy, black-tinged and dense, aimed at the gap between them. Armand moved right. Suture moved left. The breath dissolved the concrete between them, the floor below briefly visible.
"It's testing range," Suture said, already on the ramp up.
"I know." He was climbing. "Don't give it the same position twice."
The dragon tracked Suture, not him.
He moved into the dragon's line of sight. The head turned toward him. He deployed the barrier.
The golden dome expanded over Suture's position. The tail sweep from the right distributed across it, the shock running through his arms to his shoulders.
"Starting," Suture said.
"Take your time."
She was threading the Affection Parasite through every point of contact between the dragon's mana and their proximity. Against a standard target, five minutes. An extinction-rank undead would take longer.
The greatsword met the dragon's foreleg scale-plate and the impact ran up both arms with the force of hitting something structural. The scale cracked along a hairline. He pulled back and came lower, targeting the joint where coverage was thinner.
The dragon brought its full weight down on the foreleg and he went sideways.
The tail caught him across the back.
The force drove him into the concrete wall. He pushed off.
Suture had reached the second-floor balcony. She raised her staff.
"Sun Commandment: Crown of the Burning Saint."
The halo appeared above her head, solar light pressing heat outward against the necrotic cold of the dragon's domain. The dragon's attention split: Armand with the sword damage, Suture with the solar field disrupting its mana boundary.
The breath attack came at her. Armand caught it on the dome, the necrotic column distributing across it in sheets of black light. Seven seconds. The breath stopped. He let the dome down.
"That's going to happen again," he said.
"I know. Thank you."
He was already moving. Greatsword to the right shoulder joint: first exchange to test the gap in the scale overlap, second to open it, third to commit.
The third blow put a ten-centimeter line through the scale.
The dragon screamed, the sound bouncing off every concrete surface in the structure at once. It swept its head toward him and he went under the arc, the air pressure from the neck hitting him as physical force.
He came up inside its guard.
"Sun Commandment: Scales of the Judicator."
His gauntlet pressed against the dragon's lower jaw. The divine authority stopped its movement for a fraction of a second, and Armand drove his knee into the jaw.
The dragon's head came up and knocked him off his feet.
He landed on his back, rolled, and came up standing two meters left of where the tail hit. The concrete did not survive the tail.
"Left shoulder. Thinner coverage there."
"Armor breach in three minutes," she said. "The mana saturation is different."
He worked the left shoulder for three minutes.
The dragon learned. By the second exchange it had started rotating its body to keep the thicker coverage between his sword line and the target. He adjusted: mixing attack vectors: low right, high center, occasional feints at the neck, keeping it from optimizing coverage.
The tail caught his right leg at minute six. The ankle joint, the scale edge finding the gap in his armor. He went down on one knee and came up already deploying the dome because the breath was already coming.
The dome held. His right leg was slower than before, and he adjusted for it.
The necrotic buildup was accumulating on the dome's surface, a faint darkness in the golden structure. Each deployment was costing more than the last.
"Fifty percent," Suture said.
He heard her cough.
"Suture."
"I'm fine."
"You're—"
"Armand. I'm fine."
He kept fighting.
At minute fourteen, the wing discharged.
The dragon had not used the wing before, the confined space making it awkward. The necrotic buildup in the secondary membrane had hit discharge pressure, and it came from above at an angle the barrier did not cover cleanly.
It hit Suture's position before the barrier fully expanded upward to cover her. He caught the discharge on the upper curve and held it until it spent itself. Her injuries transferred: bruising across the ribs, mana disruption behind his left ear, both layering on top of everything already absorbed.
"Thank you," she said. Quieter than before.
"Don't thank me. How far."
"Sixty percent. Ten more minutes."
Both arms worked. The right leg was uneven. His back had not been happy since minute two. The barrier was below half.
He went back in.
The dragon's behavior had shifted. The tail sweeps had started covering Suture's flanks rather than his position. The breath attacks had stopped targeting her since minute eleven. It still fought, still responded to his sword work, but something in the aggression structure had changed.
He said nothing. He kept hitting the right shoulder.
The next ten minutes cost the most. The dragon used the structure against him: driving him into columns, pushing toward the open floor edge where the drop was twenty meters. Seven more barrier deployments, each smaller than the last.
At minute eighteen, Suture said, "Armand."
He was at the far edge of the upper floor.
"It's complete," she said.
"Suture," he said, during a brief gap after the dragon's third failed lunge in a row, each one subtly redirected to miss her position. "Is it—"
"Yes," she said.
"Already."
"Extinction-rank mana capacity," she said. "More to work with. It accelerates."
"Is it aware?" he said.
"Becoming." She was watching it. "The undead architecture is fighting the infection, but the capacity is too large. Ten more minutes."
The dragon lowered its head toward her.
It did not breathe fire. It did not attempt to strike.
It lowered its massive skull until one eye was at approximately her height, the pale light in the socket different from what it had been forty minutes ago, something in the structure of it changed.
Armand stood between them with the greatsword up. The eye looked past him.
"Suture," he said.
"I see it," she said.
"What do I do."
"Nothing, for a moment."
He stood with his sword up while the undead dragon looked at Suture Mornveil with an expression that should not have been possible in an undead entity, and which was unmistakably present.
The Affection Parasite completed its primary cycle.
The dragon's posture changed entirely. The aggression structure that had been sustaining it through forty minutes of combat dissolved, replaced by something Armand had no category for. The dragon pulled its injured wing closer. It arranged itself, and the only word for what it was doing was presenting itself.
Suture looked at it.
"Transform for me," she said, with the ease of someone who has said this kind of thing before. "Humanoid form. Smaller."
The dragon looked at her for a long moment.
Then it did.
The necrotic mana restructured over twenty seconds, the enormous frame compressing and reshaping, scales drawing inward. The extinction-rank entity took a form three meters tall rather than thirty, fitting inside the parking structure without occupying two floors. It retained the dark scale texture, the pale eye-light, the bone structure of centuries compressed into a smaller frame.
It stood in front of Suture.
Suture reached up and touched its jaw with two fingers.
"Good," she said.
She turned to Armand. She was more than pale now. The sustained output had cost her significantly, the life force expenditure visible in her face, the slight tremor in her hands.
"I need to recover," she said. "The bond stabilizes if I complete a mana exchange. I need extinction-rank capacity for that."
Armand looked at the transformed dragon, at Suture, at the cracked concrete and exposed rebar and the open sky through the destroyed roof.
"I'm going to find a chair," he said.
He walked to the stairwell where he had stacked his gear at the start of the engagement. There was a folding chair from the parking attendant's booth on the ground floor, knocked over during the initial fight. He carried it up to the second floor, set it down facing away from Suture's position, and sat.
He sat with forty minutes of accumulated injury. The concrete was cold. Several blocks away, the convention hall was still ongoing.
He sat with his hands on his knees and thought about the last hour.
He thought about the barrier deployment, the twelve absorbed hits, planting himself between Suture and the breath attack without being asked.
He thought about the parasite.
Why do I feel like I'm being cuck, he thought, with the tired clarity of a Mythical-rank hunter who had just fought an extinction-rank dragon for forty minutes and was now sitting in a folding chair in a parking structure while things took their course behind him.
He looked at the sky through the torn roof.
The engagement in the convention hall was still ongoing. He would be needed there eventually.
He stayed in the chair.