Most people, faced with the beauty of the Arkenstone, would have been stunned, lost in a daze. But Bilbo Baggins's willpower was remarkable; he was barely affected at all. He tucked the gem gently into his coat and started back along the route he'd come.
In front of Bella, Bilbo didn't dare use the Ring. He kept feeling that this sorceress could see through every secret. And the Ring itself was quietly working on his mind; most of the time, he forgot he even had a ring that could turn him invisible.
He ran across the ocean of diamonds, gems, and coins. The anticipated mishap still happened: as he ran, the One Ring suddenly bounced from his pocket. The hobbit's reflexes were sharp, and he snatched it out of the air, then, as if compelled by some unseen force, he slipped it onto his finger.
He vanished. Without breaking stride, he kept running for the exit.
But the malice radiating from the One Ring stirred the sleeping dragon.
The ocean of gold and silver shifted, vast streams of coins sliding aside like water, and a hundred-meter-long body rose slowly from its depths.
Smaug's scales were a dark brown. He opened his eyes, vertical pupils burning with savage cunning, and looked around.
A dragon's senses told him something was wrong, but no intelligent creature appeared in his sight.
"Thief! I know you're nearby. Where are you? Show yourself!"
Looking up at that mountain of a body, the hobbit didn't dare stop. The Ring hid his form, but invisibility didn't pass through solid matter. His body was still physically present, and running across an ocean of coins was bound to draw Smaug's attention.
"Found you! Thief!" The dragon took a great stride forward, intent on running the hobbit down.
The reason he hadn't immediately breathed fire was the gold around them. This was his treasure; destroying any of it would hurt. And he sensed that the thief carried something precious; he feared dragonfire might destroy the prize.
He had barely taken two strides when he felt movement from the other direction. The chill in the air was intensifying rapidly, a piercing killing intent gathering in one place. He couldn't help but turn his head.
Bella came walking toward him, every inch the standard image of a sorceress: staff in hand, a sword at her hip, advancing at a steady pace.
But it wasn't her appearance that caught Smaug's eye. The dragon's gaze fixed on the pendant at her throat, that faint green light. What is that?
If he could have it… Smaug slowly turned. In his eyes, the hobbit had become beneath notice.
"Smaug, I've come to bargain!" Bella made no attempt to conceal herself, walking out into the open without any pretense.
The Ring leaping out on its own to lure Smaug: that was a variable even the Time Stone hadn't predicted. A pure coincidence? Or something the temporal simulation couldn't model, yet which reality would always produce regardless? She made a mental note to study it more carefully later.
She seemed not to notice the greed and savagery in the dragon's eyes. She raised a single finger.
"Surrender, and I'll spare your life. That is my condition."
The dragon roared with laughter, a sound like rolling thunder. He looked her over carefully.
"A human sorceress? Since I'm in a good mood today, leave that pendant here, and you can clear off!"
Bella sighed.
"Three hundred times. Every single time you say the same line. Why are you so greedy? Isn't being alive enough? Honestly, hired muscle of your caliber isn't easy to find. Killing you is such a waste… and the worst part is, I don't know any necromancy. You're really making things hard for me."
Her hands moved swiftly through a casting motion, and the Time Stone began to glow with a watery, screen-like radiance.
A second Bella, identical to the first, stepped out from behind her. Then more, robed in white, staff in hand, sword at hip, each one walking out from her own timeline. Ten. A hundred. A thousand. A full thousand Bellas surrounded Smaug, and they all raised their right hands in unison, every one of them pointing at the dragon.
"Looks like I'll just have to kill you and use your corpse to build a mechanical Smaug!"
"You think I've never seen the likes of you before? It's just a Mirror Image, a cheap trick!" Smaug was infuriated by the contempt in her voice. Necromancy? Mechanical replicas? Did she think she had him dead to rights?
Heat flared red along his chest and belly, fire taking shape in his throat. And just before the flames could erupt, Bella struck.
The Time Stone had no upper limit, at least within a single universe, but Bella did. If every temporal duplicate used a powerful psionic spell, then when the timelines collapsed back into one, her body would shatter outright.
So she used the simplest, most well-practiced spell she had: the Ray of Frost cantrip.
A full thousand frost rays slammed into Smaug's body. The fire gathering in his throat cut off mid-breath. The spell itself was low-level, but sheer numbers and clever angles made up for it.
Several rays would converge on the same scale at once, the extreme cold freezing it solid. Then another ray would strike from the left, warping the once-smooth, sturdy plate ever so slightly. Then two more from the right, deforming it further.
Bella hadn't been firing blindly. She had run hundreds of precise calculations on the angle and position of every shot.
By the time Smaug shook off the freezing chill and lashed out, his tail whip taking out more than thirty of Bella's temporal duplicates, three separate regions of his body, from neck to chest, from right wing to hind leg, from left wing to underbelly, had more than two hundred scales frozen solid and shattered to pieces.
Bella's plan was simple: expand the dragon's weak points. The frozen, broken patches were pale and unmistakable. Anyone could see them. From there, all you had to do was aim for the gaps.
Lose one scale, and Smaug wouldn't even notice. Lose two hundred, and it was practically being skinned alive.
Smaug exploded into a frenzy in the sea of coins, head, wings, claws, and tail all attacking at once. Bella couldn't afford to delay. Every temporal duplicate moved together.
A thousand bodies, one mind.
Three hundred Bellas swept their right arms forward. Frost whips, modified from the Kamar-Taj magical whips, layered themselves around Smaug, wrapping him in coil after coil. Without an Infinity Gauntlet, he had no way to break free, not for the moment.
The rest of the Bellas cast another low-level spell: Ice Arrows.
Frozen shafts hammered down like rain on the unscaled, exposed parts of Smaug's body.
Every arrow carried lethal toxin. The heart poison and aconitine from before were all in play, and Bella had added something new: a fire poison she had extracted from a Balrog's body. Violent, overwhelming, with the unique ability to burn life force itself.
Smaug was a fire dragon, but not all fire was alike. Fire poison and heart poison hit him hard. His strength, speed, and stamina all dropped, if only slightly.
Armor Break. Strength Down. Speed Down. Confusion. With more than enough debuffs stacked on the enemy, Bella dismissed every temporal duplicate, mounted her magic carpet, and turned to flee.