Overture 1.22

"Do you?"

I wrenched my arm away in the other direction, throwing his to the side and opening up his chest, then I brought my other hand forward, balled into a fist, and planted it with about half my full strength right into his ribs. Each one of them popped and broke with a sickening crunch — I could almost feel them, even through my gauntlet — forcing all the air out of his lungs as a gurgling wheeze, and the sheer power behind the blow sent him skidding several feet back.

Lung wasn't that easily beaten, however. He didn't fall or collapse, he just bent his head over — his mask had already been shifted away by the snout sprouting from his face — and heaved up a truly obscene amount of blood, which began to boil at his feet. The stump of his right elbow bubbled grotesquely; the arm I'd severed was starting to grow back, like the timelapse video I'd once seen of an injured starfish. The rest of him glimmered in the heat of his flames, shimmering silver scales reflecting the light like a tightly woven suit of mail, and because he had swelled to nearly nine feet of bulging muscles, the tattered remains of his pants fell from his body and caught alight.

"Muv'r…'ugger…" he gurgled out.

I was confident that it still wasn't enough. My sword hadn't seemed to stunt his growth or anything, no, but maybe that was because he wasn't enough of a dragon, yet. The closer and closer he got, I thought, the more and more he'd be affected by the special attribute of my sword. Once he reached the point where he looked like the real deal, wings, tail, and all — if he could go that far, and I had no idea if he could — then I would have him. The wounds delivered by Balmung would heal slower, his growth would creep down to a crawl, and every hit would feel to him like a concentrated blast of weakness.

I leapt backwards another thirty feet, further away from the downed gangers. I had no intention of catching them in the crossfire, no matter how despicable they were, and I wasn't about to become a murderer, even on accident. This was between me and Lung, now, and we needed room.

Lung didn't seem to notice or care why I'd increased the distance, but if the crooked grin that worked its way across his twisted maw was any sign, he probably saw it as me retreating. I didn't care to correct him; it just made it easier to convince him to come my way if he thought I was trying to escape.

Fortunately, it seemed my guess was right. Lung charged in my direction as his arm finished reforming, eating up the space between us with great, loping strides. By now, his neck had elongated into something serpentine and inhuman, and his head was a mass of gleaming scales and crocodile teeth. The mask had been completely abandoned — it served no purpose anymore, because there was no way to match what I was seeing to a human being's face, not even with the best facial recognition software.

As he came upon me, he reached out with a long swipe of his regrown arm. The force of it transferred by his momentum alone would have snapped a man's head clean off, and I was sure I could have taken it completely unscathed, but it was too open, too telegraphed. Siegfried's instincts were almost impossible to ignore as I ducked and spun underneath it, bringing Balmung around and down to carve at horrific line right across his back. I was sure I had severed his spine, and his pained, angry howl told me exactly how much it hurt.

Even still, Lung only stumbled, one, two, five paces, and before his foot came down on the sixth, the line I'd carved was healed up. The scales that had been scattered by my slash were replaced in an instant, and before my eyes, he grew again, bulking outwards and shooting up nine more inches. Two bulges that I had first thought were his shoulder-blades wiggled and grew, and at the base of his spine, a third bulge began to lengthen and thin.

Wings and a tail, I realized. He really was becoming a dragon.

I closed again, even as he started to turn, and lopped off the same arm I'd first severed. He loosed another howl and eyed me with inarticulate fury, and the flames turned bright, blazing yellow. Even the asphalt at our feet was beginning to melt — he had to be burning at eighteen or nineteen-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, at least.

He swung out at me with his other arm, again, but I just lopped that one off, too. I stepped in, angling Balmung for a stab — but Lung's severed arm had already regrown, much faster than before, and I saw it too late to move back. It slammed into my face, claws scratching towards my eyes, with the force of a speeding truck.

There was no way to describe exactly how it felt. It wasn't exactly a tickle, per se, but he still wasn't strong enough to do any damage, and his claws slid right along my skin like water over a wetsuit. Siegfried's impenetrable flesh couldn't be broken by something only capable of destroying a car; if Lung wanted to hurt me, he needed to hit me much harder.

Admittedly, it would've been a much different case if I'd been using just about any other Hero. Heracles or Achilles wouldn't have felt the blow either, but they both had a similar impenetrable skin and were some of my top of the top tier Heroes, and so was Siegfried. Most of the rest of my roster would've felt that hit much more keenly, and if I'd tried to win this one with Hassan, that would've been game over, right there.

But this was the exact reason I'd chosen Siegfried. As a Hero whose skin was his armor, he could take a tank shell in the face without flinching, and Lung would have to bring the equivalent of a ballistic missile to give me anything more than a scratch — unless, of course, he hit the vulnerable point on my back. Siegfried was just so good that the former was likely to happen long before the latter.

As Lung's claw cleared my face, I twisted with the blow, then I abandoned my stab and backhanded him across the maw with my free hand. I didn't bother to control myself, this time: Lung got the full, unfettered power of my strength, and I heard his jaw shatter like glass. He howled another time through broken teeth and shards of bone, and blood poured out of his lipless mouth where fragments had broken through the skin. The side of his face that had been hit by my fist was a mangled mass of meat only connected to the rest by strained strands of sinew, whatever cords of muscle had survived, and stray patches of skin that hadn't been ripped away.

It was really a horrific thing to witness, and if it weren't for the situation I was in, I probably would have been throwing up. Siegfried, however, was a calm presence in my head; I was borrowing his strength, his skills, and his experience, and he had seen much, much worse.

My momentum was already carrying me in that direction, so I went with the flow and thrust Balmung forward and into Lung's gut. The silver scales that must have given many an opponent so much trouble parted effortlessly, and the huge greatsword would have nearly bisected an ordinary-sized man, but Lung was so large that he made Balmung seem normal-sized. I doubted I'd hit anything that would have ever been instantly fatal, and even if I had, he regenerated so quickly that it wouldn't have made a difference.

Lung didn't wait for me to follow up. His massive, tree-like legs pumped and pushed him backwards; he slid off of Balmung with a spray of blood and scales and cracked the pavement as he landed ten feet back. Before my eyes, his wounds vanished again, although the stab through his belly took longer than the slash to his back had moments ago. I took that as a sign that he was almost there.

I charged forward, Balmung trailing behind me, and Lung reached out and swiped at me as I came upon him, bright yellow flames blazing in the wake of his arm. I ducked under it again, but it seemed he'd learned from last time, because he spun with his swing and his half-formed tail came around for my head. I straightened and took it on my ribs, heavier and harder than the last one that hit me, but still not enough to really hurt, then wrapped my free arm around it and pinned it against my body. With my other arm, I brought Balmung down and cut the tail off of his body.

Lung let out a roar that shook the nearby buildings. Even as I threw the severed tail away, he reached around and blasted me with more fire, but I just charged through it, letting Siegfried's impenetrable skin turn the inferno into a balmy, almost pleasant warmth.

But I'd underestimated him, it seemed, because as I came through the flames, sword poised to slice into his side, he grabbed my wrist again and heaved me up and off my feet. I didn't have even a moment to struggle — he pulled me up and tossed me back like a sack of potatoes, and I went flying, skidding and rolling on the ground until I came to a rest some thirty or forty feet away. Somehow, probably because of Siegfried's instincts and skills, I'd managed to keep hold of Balmung, but I wasn't hurt. If he'd gotten me by my ankle and slammed me back-first into the ground, I might've been in trouble, but that was my advantage: as long as no one knew I was using Siegfried and that I had all of his strengths and his weaknesses, no one who fought me would think I was any more vulnerable on my back than I was any other part of my body.

I pulled myself back to my feet, taking a moment to move a stray strand of silver hair from my eyes, and when I looked back up and over at my enemy, I could see two great shapes spread wide like a large net amongst the flames. A new tail was already thrashing back and forth, and Lung stood, easily at least fifteen feet, powerful and dangerous and menacing, as the heat from his white-hot fire peeled the paint on every sign and building within twenty yards of him and boiled the asphalt beneath his clawed feet.

He was at the point, now, where most of the superheroes would probably have called it off and retreated. His fists were large, attached to arms like tree trunks, and could probably crumble a small house with one sweep of his arm, and his legs looked like they could crush minivans effortlessly. It wasn't hard to imagine the beast before me going toe to toe with the entire Brockton Bay Protectorate roster and coming away the victor, and even the E88 at their most fanatical would probably take one look at him and turn the other way. This was a dragon, as his name had claimed.

I felt my lips pull into a grin.