Being huge was awesome. It was just a shame that I didn’t have eye beams or radioactive fire breath. Other than that, things couldn’t get any better. I got to unleash my titanic fury on a helpless city. It was also guilt-free, since there wasn’t anyone around, and these buildings were in the fancy part of the capital city of a bunch of fascists.

Spending time drawing a ‘dotted line of destruction’ from the city gate to the palace was addicting, but I needed to keep an eye out for Laomedon. Also Axios and the other fighters, but they weren’t my personal responsibility unless things went bad fast.

After a bit more smashing, one of the elves peeked out over a roof and gave me a hand signal. They sighted the enemy. Off in the distance that they pointed towards I saw a small silhouette floating over the buildings. There was a spearman on the ground, but it was pretty obvious that the flyer was my target.

Mun-gi dashed past me and drew Axios’s attention. The two ran down a side street, leaving me and the mage looking at each other. It seems like these schmucks have a similar strategy to ours. My guess was they were hoping Axios would last long enough for Laomedon to bombard me with spells.

I started shrinking myself down to size. It was relatively easy to do; forcing myself to grow that large in the first place was the hard part. The mage flew into firing range as I was shrinking down to the size of a Clydesdale horse. He raised the wand in his right hand and drew out a symbol in midair with ridiculous speed. I didn’t wait to see what would happen, I just dove for a nearby alley, forcing myself down to the size of a normal horse as I did.

This was going to be tricky.

Since the dude could fly, I had to rethink my strategy. Since my target was floating above the rooftops I wasn’t going to be able to ambush him the way I had been planning. If he had been street level then I could use the buildings as cover, but that wasn’t going to happen here.

When I first heard that I was going to be fighting a high-level mage I had been strategizing carefully. This was a new one for me, so I needed to make sure I wasn’t going to fried because I got careless. Even at my largest, I was only dinosaur-sized and my fastest speed was nowhere near that of lightning.

This fight required a more cautious approach. I needed to figure out the mage’s abilities before I threw everything into this fight.

Say, there’s an idea...

There was a medium sized cart nearby, the kind made for hauling goods rather than people. I reached under the axle and hooked a transformed claw into the thickest portion. This thing was awkward to wield, but I had a surprising amount of space to move, and my claws gave me plenty of traction to use my strength properly.

Laomedon floated into view; his twin wands raised to cast a spell at any moment. He had this pretentious look on his face and a stupid, wispy beard that made me hate him at first sight. I twisted my body, the cartwheels scraped across the cobblestones as I dragged it in a circle, building momentum for my throw. Our eyes met as I released my grip on the improvised projectile, and I got the perfect view of the whites of his eyes as he stared bug-eyed at the cart arcing through the air at him.

The cart had been solidly built. That and the speed it was flying at made the heavy wood vehicle into a scarily dangerous projectile. Laomedon frantically strengthened his shield, barely making it in time. Magic shield and wooden cart crashed into each other and the shield held, barely. The cart came apart from the force of the impact and bits of wood flew everywhere.

The shield wobbled dangerously and the mage inside was nearly knocked out of the sky. Even without seeing his pale, sweating face, I could tell I’d nearly shattered his barrier with that hit. This was definitely the go-to strategy from now on.

Smashing the nearby walls gave me a decent supply of bricks and chunks of rubble to use as more projectiles. My scythe-like claws didn’t make throwing very easy, but I had gotten used to shape-shifting them enough to be able to hit the big bubble that Laomedon was hiding inside.

He flinched badly at first, but it became pretty obvious that these bricks and chunks of woods weren’t nearly as dangerous as an entire cart was. Wearing him down like this wasn’t possible. This was a guy who could block arrows from powerhouses. Depleting his energy one brick at a time would take all day.

I jammed my claws into the broken wall and carved out a piece the size of a small table. Stepping into the middle of the alley, I began to spin myself around and build momentum. Once I had the speed I slung the piece of wall at Laomedon like a giant brick frisbee.

This time Laomedon managed to fly out of the way. My projectile barely missed, skimming past and smashing through the roof of a jewelry store. The mage finally returned fire; a glowing symbol spouted a cone of flame at me. In moments the entire alleyway was on fire. I wasn’t fast enough to dodge it all completely, but I managed to hide inside one of the buildings I had been smashing for ammunition.

The fire had covered a good chunk of my rear, along with my back legs. It didn’t have anything fueling it, so it guttered out quickly, but I still felt like I had been barbecued pretty badly. I gave my back end a quick wiggle, it hurt but still moved perfectly. That fire wasn’t as hot as I was worried about. I still didn’t want to get hit by that again.

This was going to be tricky. Laomedon seemed to be able to freely defend and attack while flying around. That was three spells at once, and as far as I knew a mage could only manage two at maximum. There was probably some trick to it, but I didn’t know enough about magic to guess. I didn’t even know why some people used wands and some people used those cat’s cradle thingies but no one used ‘premade’ magic circles.

Bulldozing through the opposite wall gave me more ammunition to use. I nabbed a pair of oblong chunks the size of manhole covers and leaped up the wall of another building. Laomedon and I locked eyes before I slung both my projectiles at him. He cursed, trying to dodge and return fire at the same time. A lightning bolt scorched the roof behind me as the chunks of the wall I threw smashed against Laomedon’s shield. They didn’t hit head-on, but at least I had hit.

The magic shield vibrated under the blows rather than deforming. I really wish I knew how these things worked. His barrier could be a force, like a magnetic field, or some sort of temporary physical object. I wasn’t a physicist and besides, it wasn’t like my body and abilities followed the laws of nature either. Still, I doubt that barrier will last forever, so as long as I kept hitting it I would eventually win.

Of course, that strategy would only work if I didn’t get hit either.

Smashing through the walls wasn’t exactly easy, but I could manage it so long as I had room to smash it in first. Even so, I preferred windows when I could. I moved into the main street and leaped through the front of some fancy clothes shop with a fireball literally hot on my heels. Diving into the back of the store, I burrowed up to the top floor and smashed out through the roof with a thick wooden beam in my claws.

Laomedon had drifted a bit too close as he prepared to hit me with a spell, and I was able to fly up in his face and clobber him with my makeshift baseball bat. He didn’t go flying as I wanted, but his flinching face as the beam snapped across the barrier protecting him was almost as good as the one earlier with the cart.

Credit where it’s due, he recovered quickly and returned fire, but this hit and run approach felt really natural to me. It didn’t have the finality of a proper ambush, but it kept him off balance. That would do until I could really get my claws on him.

Despite how much I was hitting him, Laomedon wasn’t really flying as high as I expected. Maybe he was trying to bait me into approaching and didn’t want me to go to ground, but he stayed within the range of my throws.

We were working our way up the road. Maybe a third of my projectiles were hitting his barrier, although that seemed to be enough to make him sweat. His own attacks weren’t nearly so accurate, although I was still a little burnt and fried from near misses.

This game of cat and mouse couldn’t go on forever though. Laomedon was getting frustrated and twitchy. His attacks got bigger and bigger, covering entire buildings in fire or ice. The power didn’t go up much, but I couldn’t dodge them so easily. I was forced to spend more time dodging and hiding. On the other hand, he was getting sloppier.

I’d been testing that shield for a while now and I was getting a good idea of its quirks. It was a solid shell that prevented anything solid from touching the user. I don’t know if poison gas or lasers would pass through, but I don’t have either of those, so the point is moot. What is important is that the shield has trouble dealing with steady pressure. It handles impacts just fine, but the momentum and weight are more taxing.

That’s great since it means I can end this pretty quickly if I get my claws on him. That shield of his will pop pretty quick if I start putting the squeeze on him.

I started faking an injury. It wasn’t much, just a bit of a limp, but the charred sections of my exoskeleton helped sell the act. I also started shifting one of my claws to make the spike launcher design. I ducked in and out of a few more buildings before catching my breath in the most ostentatious restaurant I’ve ever seen. I ducked away from the windows and was about to smash out the back when one of the decorations caught my eye.

It was a really pretentious looking set of statues. Laomedon and Axios were easy to identify, and I’m guessing that the third in the center would be the ‘esteemed leader’ of Macedor. I felt my mouthparts twist into a grin, and tore the statue free, snapping it off at the ankles and heaving it into the air.

I burst out the front window just as Laomedon flew lower. He was charging up some spell to fill the restaurant with fire and had been lining up a good angle. It put him right where I needed him.

I flicked open my shifted claw and launched a burst of spikes at him before he could fire his spell. He flinched slightly, and that was enough for me to snap open my wings and dodge the cone of fire. I zipped past him and used my wings to airbrake. By that time my claw had returned to normal, so I was able to grip the statue with both claws.

“Hey! Don’t you know courtroom etiquette?”

Laomedon turned to see me holding the statue of his leader over my head. His eyes widened as he saw my grin.

“When you see the king, you kneel!”

And with that, I brought down the heavy stone sculpture like a sledgehammer. The magic shield rang like a bell and Laomedon was sent to the ground. He smashed into the cobblestones like a meteor. The shield barely held, bouncing him into the restaurant.

I dropped the remains of the statue and flew into the restaurant. Laomedon was on his hands and knees. The hit hadn’t done any damage, but the violent movement had rattled him around quite a bit. He tried to stand, but his wobbling legs couldn’t hold his weight. I was amazed that he managed to keep the shield up.

Maybe I was feeling a bit cautious, but I felt like this needed something safer than just grabbing and squeezing. I grabbed the statue of Laomedon and tore it free as well. Walking over to the real deal, I lifted it up and slammed it down, over and over. Eventually, the shield failed.

“W-wait-”

I almost hesitated, but then I saw the way he was holding his right wand. I don’t have a clue how he managed it, but he’d managed to draw the magic circle and charge a spell while I wasn’t looking. I tried to bring the statue of him down before he could release it, but I was almost too late. The tip of the wand belched out a half-formed fireball right at my face. Luckily, the malformed blast collided with the stone chest of the statue, blasting the thing to pieces but leaving us both unharmed.

Laomedon started scrambling backward while whipping his arm around quickly to draw out another spell. Before he could finish I drove my claws into his chest, killing him. An almost finished magic symbol faded from the air as the mage took his last breath. I pulled free and stumbled back, letting out a gasp I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

The fight had been difficult. Not like when I had fought Mun-gi, but there still had been a tension there that I hadn’t noticed. Just thinking of that last desperate spell he’d pulled off made my shoulders knot from the stress.

The sound of clapping made me jump. I whipped around to see Mun-gi entering the restaurant with an odd look on his face.

“Well, you look like you had fun.”

I flicked the blood off my claws and tried to hide how badly I had jumped.

“I wouldn’t call it fun…”

He snorted.

“Well, at least your opponent was a challenge. And now we only have two pseudo powerhouses left.”

Ahh, That was why he was acting funny. He’d gotten a disappointing fight. Well, I didn’t mind taking a back seat for the rest of this battle.

“Hey, you can have them both, just let me knock on the door, okay?”

Mun-gi’s grin was worth a thousand words. I bet mine was too.