//------------------------------// // Chapter 11: Battling // Story: All The Way Back // by Jordan179 //------------------------------// Luna launched herself into the air, remembering at the last moment to leap to the left, away from the entrance to the crevice. As she jumped, wings spreading to grip spacetime, she projected a powerful shield forward, tilted slightly to the right. Given what the Dragon was likely about to do ... yes! A huge blue claw, each individual talon the length of a pike, came out of the dust cloud at the end of an arm that stretched out like a living construction crane. This shall be like unto a game of ball, thought Luna, as the claw struck and flared light from her shielding. She whuffed, as the fraction of the energy that penetrated drove the breath from her lungs. And I shall be the ball! She was in midair, so naturally the claw -- driven by the tremendous inertia of the charging Dragon -- batted her back toward the tunnel wall. But, because she had angled the shield to her right, the collision drove her to her left, away from her friends. Luna projected an elastic shield backward, tucked herself in, and bounded off the wall. She corkscrewed at the last moment, and a pair of jaws which could have engulfed a typical multi-roomed Pony house whole snapped shut on the space she would have otherwise occupied. Luna put on a bust of speed, rose and lashed the Dragon with lightning. She knew that this would be entirely ineffective against the great lightning drake; the whole point of this exercise was to annoy him, draw his attention away from the two other Ponies escaping into the crevice. As she did this she slowed, dropped and twisted unpredictably, the better to evade his expected counterstrike. The Dragon whirled with surprising rapidity, squalling in indignation and swiping about reflexively with his right claw. The great talons whistled past Luna's right wing and flank, missing her by but a few hoof-lengths. The closeness of this call was no accident. Luna was intentionally flying at the very edge of danger, tracking the giant archosaur's motions and skipping out of his way at the last moment. It was a dangerous game she played, for all her power. Luna, as the Alicorn Avatar of Gravity, disposed of more total energy than did the Lightning Drake, for all his great size. Such was the supernal skill of her Sister, Fusion, in crafting the Alicorn Pony form in the first place. But even the skills of Celestia, even when she was on the Cosmic Level, were limited by the fundamental laws of biology and physics. Alicorns were magnificently-engineered, and they could tap the Cosmic powers of their Creators -- albiet but weakly and clumsily, compared with the awesme, star-smashing strength and aeons-honed abilities of the Cosmic Concepts. However, Alicorns were small. Large enough, to be true, by the standards of Ponies; but no more but the bare minimum needed to generate, tap and control their Cosmic-spawned powers. They were most definitely not crafted for what the Cosmics would deem heavy fighting -- that was the job of the Cosmic Battleforms, those miles-wide living planetoids which wielded the reality-destroying Negation Bolts, the ultimate weapons of the Cosmic Concepts in this era. The Battleforms were awesome, but they were poorly-made for action on an equine scale. The purpose of the Alicorn incarnations among the Ponies, like that of the Angel forms in the Human worldlines, was to bear messages to and interact with ordinary organic lfe forms. As Alicorns, the Concepts could become Ponies, living among and enjoying the delights of Love and Friendship with them -- while still retaining access to a small measure of their Cosmic might -- the better to protect their client races from harm. The Alicorn form, therefore, was something of a compromise between Cosmic and Equine ends. And like all compromises, there were necessary trade-offs. Big, impressive, intelligent and powerful as she was, an Alicorn could only fit into Equine cultures at the highest social strata, which -- as the Royal Pony Sisters could attest -- was often more trouble than it was worth. An Alicorn, to a considerable extent, lived her millennia-long lifespan in a world increasingly too small for her body and spirit. Never dying naturally, and hard to kill, they often ended their lives by voluntary discorporation, owing to boredom and even madness, finally returning with relief to the larger spaces of the Cosmic Level. Contrawise,the Alicorn Pony was by Cosmic standards a very small and weak being. An Alicorn Pony was agile, quick-thinking and precise in the application of her powers. She was very tough for her size, with both active and passive defenses against harm most importantly, unless her form was entirely destroyed, she was hard to slay permanently; even then, the destruction of the Alicorn Pony form only released the small portion of the Cosmic spirit with which she was imbued to return to her greater Cosmic Self, bearing knowledge from the mortal world. But her force was inconsequential beyond her immediate vicinity: making her utmost effort, Luna Selena Nyx could only emit a couple dozen TNT-ton-equivalents of energy per second, barely enough to level a moderate-sized city in a whole minute or so of application. And she couldn't keep that up for more than a few minutes. This was greater than the maximum destructive output of the great Lightning Drake, but not by more than a single order of magnitude. In terms of brute physical strength, however, the Alicorn was much weaker. Perhaps more importantly, the Alicorn was far more fragile. Their defenses all drained thaumic energy, and though they could regenerate with fair rapidity, they were made of near-ordinary flesh and bone clothed in horsehide and hair coats -- nothing like the magnificent metal and silicate polymer composite-armored sandwich that was Dragonscale and Dragonhide, and which, as grown by a full-grown Dragon, could shed all but the most precisely-crafted and targeted artillery. Even a dazed Dragon was hard to harm; by contrast, once the thaum-thirsty defenses of the Alicorn were knocked down, the Alicorn Pony became terribly vulnerable. An Alicorn was potentially more powerful than any Dragon ever hatched. But to win against an ancient Dragon like the one Luna was fighting, and to do so without bringing the mountain down on top of the very Ponies she meant to protect, Luna had to fight with finesse, rather than merely raw force. Thus, Luna's strategy was essentially to draw the Dragon's attention away from her escaping friends, preoccupying the great Lightning Drake while those Ponies escaped to the caverns far beneath. She must be careful how she wielded her gravity lances, her most powerful form of energy-projection, lest she do major damage to the mountain. However, she must also be careful to avoid letting the Dragon score a serious hit on her, lest she be stunned and lose the fight. It was a nice tactical problem. Luna was very, very good at tactics. Luna corkscrewed back down the tunnel toward the mouth of the cave complex; the high opening from which the Lightning Drake had previously defied her demand to leave Equestria. As she did so, she sprayed the Dragon with a burst of short but sharp gravity darts -- lances low-powered, but tightly focused. They were not strong enough to penetrate his thick scales to the relatively tender flesh beneath, but each packed enough force to rip off flakes and sting the great archosaur. The Lightning Drake was already lowering his head to chase after Luna, and thus the darts spattered off his head and shoulders. The effect was visually-spectacular, as the gravitons dumped their energy into the metallic scales, spalling off fragments of those scales in a shower of white-hot sparks. However, Luna's experienced eye told her that little real damage had been done. The Dragon hissed, stopped and replied with a shower of many small lightning bolts that arced down the tunnel at the Moon Princess. The bolts were poorly aimed and Luna was fortunate; she dived straight down, under the fusillade, then to the side as the Dragon tried to correct his aim down onto her. The electrical energy spent itself harmlessly against the top and sides of the tunnel, blasting masses of solid stone into rubble. The loose debris, tumbling from the glowing impact points, gave Luna an idea. Seizing the pieces in her aura, she flung them in a series of stacatto snap-shots at the Lightning Drake, each one making an acoustic explosion at launch as it went supersonic, then spattering into smaller fragments on the Dragon's armored scales. The rocks, ranging from pebbles to a few small boulders, dented and cracked the scales, but could not pierce the thick composite armor of metallic scales backed by silicon-fiber reinforced hide. It was a deliberately-desultory reprise of her earlier javelin attack. Her goal was to sting the Lightning Drake into committing himself fully into the fight against her, drawing him farther from her friends. In this, she was successful. She felt the telltale buildup of electromagnetism a moment before the Lightning Drake's spikes started to glow with blue to ultraviolet light. Luna threw up her shields, angling them in front to refuse the left and in back to cushion that same direction. Luna leaped into the air just as a tremendous ion bolt flared white-hot from the mouth of the monster. As she leaped, she automatically angled her shields to refuse the top, and the immense wash of energy sprayed over her shields, pushing her to the left and upward, as if she were some cargo in the clutch of an electromagnetic catapult. The ion beam did not penetrate her front shields, but it slapped and scraped and bounced Luna off the stone tunnel wall and ceiling, which would also have hurt her had not her rear shields cushioned her from harm. As it was, the impacts were with sufficient force that the very rocks cracked open. As this happened, the energy from the powerful ion bolt washed over and into the flaws thus formed, flash-heating the newly-exposed surfaces and causing thermal explosions, which tore loose large chunks of rock. Luna sailed backward on a trail of glowing discharges from her shields, while the tunnel walls surged and collapsed behind her from her points of impact. Dust billowed out to fill the air, hiding the Dragon. Both Luna and the Lightning Drake had senses which could pierce his murk, though between the dust and the electrical discharges, none on either side provided anything nearly as precise a form of imaging as would have ordinary optical vision. Luna's senses were superior to the Dragon's, to the extent that -- as long as she kept maneuvering -- she was a difficult target, but not so difficult that she could count on the great Drake missing her. Super-equine senses, processed through an equally super-equine cortex, combined seamlessly to warn Luna of the tremendous bulk surging toward her through the billowing dust clud. At the same time, Luna's eidetic memory and perfect directional and kinesthetic faculties enabled her to 'see' a ghostly outline of the caverns and stairs leading down to the old missile base beneath, even without sending out a pulse of deep-radar. Her memories of the obstacles to movement along that path, coupled with her knowledge of the physical capabilities of Summer Lightning and Trixie Lulamoon, provided her a continual estimate of the positions of her fleeing friends. This had to do, as even her senses couldn't detect just two Ponies, through lengths and lengths of solid rock. Equipped with this information, she could position herself relative to the Dragon in such wise as to retain the tactical advantage while ensuring that neither her actions nor those of the Dragon could smash down the ceiling on top of her allies. She had to maintain a balance between preventing the Lightning Drake from defeating her and preventing Summer and Trixie from being harmed; a complex and continually-shifting geometric and tactical equation -- and one with considerable factors of uncertainity. It was the sort of problem that few entities on Earth could have solved; a very short list not selecting her Sister. Celestia was better at magic and at social skills, but battle was Luna's element, and as a tactician the Moon Princess was almost unrivalled. It was an extension into her Incarnate form of the aeons-honed skills with which Gravity formed and manipulated solar systems, galaxies, and the vast strands of matter which made up the largest structures in the Universe. In the exercise of these skills, Luna felt truly herself, truly alive: cleansed of the corruption of King Sombra and the Night Shadows; her heart was pure. She was Luna Selena Nyx, the Princess of War, and this is what she was born to do. She was fighting the foe and protecting her Ponies; there was room neither for guilt nor shame as she battled on. As the Dragon emerged from the dust cloud, claws and jaws gaping wide in the attack, Luna darted down and planted herself at a point on the tunnel floor which formed one focus of an ellipsoid curve described by the Lightning Drake's leap. With one set of tractors she grasped the immense mass of the mountain around her, anchoring herself firmly; with a second the smaller but still tremendous mass of her enemy. In this position, a relatively small telekinetic force could change the trajectory of the great archosaur. Luna pushed with a pressor beam. The Dragon banged and scraped against the ceiling his spikes scoring stone and ripping loose a shower of debris in his wake. He frantically flapped, the huge effector surfaces on his wings shaping his flightfield to push himself back downward. Luna responded by reversing the direction of her force, tractoring rather than pressing, deliberately overcorrecting his maneuver. With a startled cry, the Dragon smacked face-first into the tunnel floor; Luna had left him enough forward momentum that he flipped over his own head and slid for some distance, plowing up the solid stone with his spikes, some of those spikes breaking loose. The whole tunnel shook to these titanic impacts. Rocks rained and dust sifted down from the pits torn in the walls and ceiling. For a moment, Luna feared that she had overestimated the strength of the surrounding stone, but a quick deep-radar pulse showed her that the formations were still structurally sound. Her problem was not the structural integrity of the caverns, of course. It was still the Dragon. The tremendous throw she had performed upon him would have slain many creatures; but this was an full-sized ancient Dragon, a millennial monster of might almost equal to her own; his bones and organs were massively reinforced and redundant beyond the capacity of any normal beast or even any machine within the possibilities of the Ponies of the Age of Wonders. He was what the Neigh-ponese would have called a Dai-Kaiju -- a "Great Beast" -- and between his massive musculature and his natural magic, he was almost a god. Faster than anypony who had not fought Dragons before would have imagined possible, the Lightning Drake rolled back onto his feet, shedding debris, including a few of his own spikes and a shower of glittering scales, as he struggled out of the trench which he had dug in the solid stone in his own sliding fall. He roared defiance at Luna, exposing individual teeth longer than her whole body, and emitted an electron spray which immediately jammed her electromagnetic radar and sparked lightning discharges all around her. The bolts were of trivial magnitude compared to his great ion bolts, but they forced her to keep her shields up to avoid numerous minor wounds. A fine spray of dust completely covered the vision of the combatants. Now she could see the Dragon only by means of her gravitic deep-radar, through which she perceived him as a dim outline of moving metallic higher density than the surrounding rock and air. This provided her few details; she could barely keep track of the position of his limbs, let alone the expression on his face or the emanations from his spines. She was robbed of clues which would enable her to predict his actions. She suspected that his cortex could compensate for his own electromagnetic jamming, meaning he could see her reasonably well. Luna rubbed air and water molecules together, emitting her own electron discharge from all around her, far weaker than the Lightning Drake's own, but in a pattern he should not be able to predict. If she'd done this right, she had successfully counterjammed him, and he had no gravitic deep-radar. The air was a choking hell of dust lashed by the lightnings from both sides; she knew that this would pose no difficulty for the Dragon's massively-filtered and incredibly-tough respiratory system, backed up as it was by organic earthfire batteries as a metabolic power source. For her part, Luna had simply shut down her oxygen-based respiration and biochemical power generation entirely and was drawing her life energy from gravitic-compressed nuclear fusion. So, in an environment in which neither normal mammal nor archosaur could have survived without either extensive magic or technology, they fought on, both mostly naked. Her deep-radar showed her plainly that the Dragon was charging. Indeed the floor under her hooves now shook to the Dragon's great footfalls; he had learned from his previous mistake, and was remaining on the ground to make it more difficult for her to repeat her throw of him. Her equine instincts told her to flee from the gigantic predator; her intellect told her that the last thing she wanted to do was lead him back toward the crevice into which her friends had fled. Instead of fleeing, she charged. She was counting on her jamming to obscure her exact position to the Dragon until she could get under him to strike from beneath. Whether by underestimation of the Lightning Drake's sensory capabilities or by sheer bad luck, her plan went wrong. As Luna darted toward the Dragon's belly, suddenly he changed the rhythm of his stride. Luna had just enough time to throw power into her top and bottom shields before the great foot, driven by his tremendout and massive muscles, slammed down right on top of her, smashing her into the solid rock beneath. Luna felt herself being crushed between archosaur and rock, energy sparking out through her shields, and loosed a diffuse gravity bolt downward, pulverizing the floor so that -- instead of having her bones broken by a compressing shield, the stone puffed out on all sides, as the Alicorn was pressed down into a pit roughly the size and shape of her own body. For the moment, though, the Lightning Drake knew exactly where she was, and Luna could well predict his next move. He'll hit with a full-force ion bolt, she realized. I must not let him! She quickly calculated the angles and forces, was certain that she would not be aiming toward anyone or anything or important; also, that she would miss the archosaur's brain, which was vital because she did not want to actually kill him just because his shields were a bit weaker than she imagined. Then, as the great claw began to move, she loosed a full-strength gravity lance straight up into the Dragon. The powerful and tightly focused beam of force, cutting outward from a point no wider than the zone probably occupied by a single graviton -- the Horsenberg Uncertainty Principle prevented her from sharpening it any finer -- sheared through the shields on the Dragon's foot as if they weren't there, effortlessly slicing through mere metallic Dragonscale and the silicate-fiber Dragonhide beneath as if they had been so much tissue paper. They went through the flesh of the foot and the massive metallic bone of one metacarpal, stronger than the main structural support beam of a Pony skyscraper, and out through the other side of the Dragon's foot, and against the thicker shielding and armor around the Dragon's head. Luna swung the beam so that it made a cut rather than a narrow shaft, and the Dragon roared in rage and pain as she severed two of his metacarpal bones. She could not see what the beam was doing to his head, save to detect from backscatter that it was at least partially penetrating, causing Dragnscales to be cut loose from the hide of his face. The great head moved back rapidly on the lever of the long, almost serpentine neck, as the Dragon flinched back from the gravity lance. Now the beam, only slightly weakened by passing through the Dragon's foot, struck the unshielded and non-metallic matter of the tunnel roof. With a whining, crunching sound it cut through what must have been dozens of lengths of solid rock, thermal explosions occuring all along the length of the penetration, destroying the stability of the tunnel roof right overhead. There was a flare of shielding right over Luna as the Lightning Drake belatedly reinforced the protection over his foot and rapidly withdrew that member as well. He had the wit and grit not to move his foot until he shielded it, Luna realized, admiring the Dragon's intelligence and courage even while she fought him in deadly earnest. Had he not done so, I would have wounded his foot far more sore. Luna attempted to leap to her hooves but could only stagger clumsily, her whole body hurting from the crushing it had just received. Had she been an ordinary Pony, even the protection of her shields might not have been enough to prevent her from fatal injury; as it was, every part of her body ached, and she could feel the fizz of regeneration all through her system as severe internal injuries began healing. The ceiling fell in on her. Fortunately, she had been more or less expecting it, and so she kept her shields up, and also generated an oscillating area force beam upward and downward, reducing the rocks as they fell on her to gravel. This did not, of course, reduce their momentum at all, but it did mean that the mass was diffused and psuedo-fluidic above and beneath, trapping her within a vise of gravel instead of crushing her between two solid masses. As this happened, she was aware that masses of rock were also falling upon the Lightning Drake, who was roaring and thrashing about, a tactic which looked like mere blind rage and frustration, but which Luna knew had a similar effect of distributing the burden upon the Drake survivably. "Survivably," of course, given his tremendous strength, toughness, armor and shielding. What Luna and the Lightning Drake were doing would of course have already killed any lesser beings, whether by battering, crushing or suffocation, several times over. Luna could have cut herself free with her gravity lances, but she saw no reason to do this when she had subtler ways of regaining her tactical mobility. Instead, she Shifted into a mass of cold plasma -- an Alicorn enhancement of the Changeling Shifting power which Luna had especially practiced -- and oozed out of the still loose mass of rock into the relative freedom of the dust-choked air beyond. She then expanded a force field, clearing away both dust and air, and re-formed in the vacuum thus created before allowing the bubble to slowly collapse. Her gravitic deep-radar could clearly sense the struggles of the Dragon as he writhed and ripped and tore through the masses of rock around him, striving toward Luna, whose direction he could clearly sense by some means. Probably the electromagnetic signature of my plasma and my force fields, she thought. A reminder not to overestimate my own advantages -- I doubt he can image me as I can him, but he knows my rough location. Luna could have lashed the trapped Dragon with her lances, but they would have wasted energy penetrating the overburden of rock, and her energy reserves were momentarily exhausted from her recent flurry of action. So, instead, she stood and rested, letting her power recharge from their nigh-limitless Cosmic souces, channelling it into rapid regeneration, healing the myriad external and internal injuries she had suffered so far. She knew that, in his own fashion, the great Dragon was doing the same under the rockpile. Dragons could draw energy from the ley lines, augmenting their chemical and earthfire metabolic processes. She could detect the unmistakable thaumic scatter from such a draw, beneath those rocks. The regenerative power of a Dragon was slower than that of an Alicorn, and to really complete the process the Dragon would have to sleep for at least a few days; but this power was one of the reasons why Dragons, like Alicorns, were so hard to kill. Luna waited until all her serious hurts had healed -- there were still sore places, and angry red flesh under hide stripped of its coat, but those could be dealt with later, by means of long luxurious warm baths and lots of sleep in her own bed -- and then accumulated energy as she awaited the Dragon's emergence. She stood well back from the place of his burial. This proved well-advised, as the Lighning Drake erupted from the rock in a spray of sizable boulders, none of them on trajectories threatening to strike the Alicorn. More annoying and -- had Luna been anypony else -- more dangerous was the spray of lightning bolts heralding the apearance of the great archosaur's head. It was a blindly-aimed area attack, and Luna easily bent the few bolts aimed anywhere near her around herself with her own electromagnetic powers. Luna replied with a blunt pressor-beam ram to the Lightning Drake's rising head, rocking back that great cephalic appendage upon the serpentine but muscular neck from which it grew. The brute-force attack could not penetrate the Dragon's defenses to do significant tissue damage, but like a hoof to the head of a helmeted Pony, battered the brain within against its own cranial case. The Dragon shook his head, dazed and briefly unable to act. The Moon Princess pressed her momentary advantage. Shouting a war-cry of the Legions of Lith -- the now-over-fifteen-centuries dead and gone Hegemony of Lith had been on the whole a deadly-dreary civilization, but their Legions had developed some seriously awesome battle-cries -- Luna drew her battle axe and whirled it overhead in her aura as she at full gallop charged the Dragon. So began, and continued, the battle between Princess Luna and the great Lightning Drake. The Dragon tried to apply overwhelming force against Luna, in attacks which if they had connected would have badly hurt her; the Alicorn, used her superior senses, speed and shielding to avoid, dodge or block these blows. For her part, Princess Luna goaded the Lightning Drake with quick gravity lances, just enough to penetrate his armor and shields, but not enough to seriously impair him; mostly because the sustained application of her ultimate power would have collapsed the mountain on her friends in the tunnels below. For Luna, it was a precise and deadly dance, and sometimes she missed a step. More than once, the great drake hit her dead-on with a lightning bolt, penetrating her shields, tearing open her moonsilver mail, and painfully burning her. On those occasions, Luna flung force beams agains the cavern ceiling and walls, intentionally-triggering limited cave-ins, under the cover of which she gained the time to regenerate. Other times, the Dragon tagged her with a gigantic claw, or a sweep of his immense tail. Then she went flying, bouncing off or smashing into a stone surface -- being the "ball" in play, as she had predicted. Her shields were more than adqequate for absorbing any energy that could be transferred to her by the Dragon's musculature before it exceeded her inertia; here, the danger was that he might catch her and crush her from all directions at once, preventing her from simply bounding away. That could stun, or even kill her, if he did it right. Twice, the Dragon almost trapped her thus. Each time, a prompt slash of short-ranged graviton bolt, essentially "knives," coupled with energetic squirming and rapid flight, freed her from the grip of the great archosaur before she could be greatly harmed. Each time, Luna escaped somewhat shaken, aware of how close she was cutting her course to disaster. If she lost this fight, the consequences might be dire, not only to herself and to her Sister, but to the Realm and all Ponykind. She must not lose. Time, fortunately, was on her side. With each passing minute, the projected position of her escaping allies moved deeper and deeper down within the mountain, reducing the danger to them from the forces she wielded. Gradually, she increased the power of her gravity lances, relaxing her self-imposed restrictions on her own might. As she did, the initiative in the battle increasingly swung to her side. Her ever-stronger lances tore through shields, inflicting more and more serious wounds even to the massive living structure of metallic bones and scales, super-polymer muscles and tendons and multiply-redundant major organs that was the Lightning Drake. Acidic, toxic Dragonblood splattered everywhere, stray drops hissing against and painfully-stinging Luna's own hide. Now, it was the Dragon who sought shelter behind rockfalls, to buy the time needed for regeneration. But Dragons regenerate more slowly than do Alicorns; and while his immediate reserve of endurance had been greater than Luna's, both combatants had long since run thrugh their initial reserves. His reserves recovered only gradually, fed by his internal earthfires and his tap of the Earth Currents; while hers drew from the nigh-inexhaustible pool of her Cosmic Self, limited only by her carnal form's ability to convert those Cosmic energies into ones Luna could use without reducing herself to a spray of subatomic particles. So, as the battle wore on, Luna gained the upper hoof. By this point, the original caverns had collapsed and been blasted open and collapsed again and again. The air was a choking mixture of dust from riven rock faces, combustion products where oxygen had reacted with white-hot stone, and vaporized Dragonblood; a soup of noxious gases in which nopony not an Alicorn could have long lived, and in which even few Dragons could have remained conscious for more than a matter of minutes. By both Pony and Dragon standards, this was no mere battle of mortals, but a duel of demigods. Finally, a moment arrived in which Luna judged it safe to use her gravity lance at full strength. Luna maneuvered the Dragon into a position from which he was leaping down at her to the attack, to crush her beneath his tremendous weight and pound her to ruin using his own body as both hammer and anvil. At that moment, he was entirely committed to the attack -- he could neither deflect nor dodge. That was the moment for which Luna had been waiting since the start of the fight. And in that moment, Luna loosed -- angled upward, so that it would endanger neither friends nor bystanders -- a tremendous scything stroke of sharply-focused phased gravitons. Her gravity beam sliced straight through shields and scales and sheared through the tree trunk thick vertebral column of the Dragon's lower neck, severing the connections between his brain and body in a single decisive act! Luna immediately flung herself backward and to the side, out of the path of what was now a huge inertly-falling bulk of flesh and bone and scales. For in that single stroke, Luna had instantly paralyzed the Dragon, a crippling cut which would have been mortal to most vertebrates, and immediately-immobilized even the gigantic archosaur. Unlike most vertebrates, the great drake had such incredible redundancy in his major organ systems that his heart would continue to beat, his lungs continue to breathe, under the direction of local nerve clusters, with no direction required from the brainstem. Also unlike most vertebrates, he could heal any injury that did not actually kill him in time, so he would not be forever quadraplegic from the wound. But fighting, at least in the immediate future, was utterly beyond his powers. The great organic mass of the Dragon crashed to the cavern floor in a thunderous impact. His body spasmed, and he wildly sprayed lightning in all directions, a last reflexive action. One bolt struck Luna directly, staggering her, for her shields were almost entirely down, owing to the immense power she had channeled into that last gravity lance. Luna shuddered as her own nervous system was temporarily overloaded by the tremendous jolt of electricity, and she sank to her knees, her hide smouldering from the flash-heating. But that was the Dragon's last blow; all it could do now was to feebly twitch, incapable of further conscious bodily action. Luna had won the battle. She groggily began to rise. A moment later, the top of the mountain, torn through and through by Luna's gravity lances, fell in on both the former combatants.