“You ready, Tia?” said Li as let Tia hang from his arms. 

“Ready!”

“Alright, off you go.” Li let go, and Tia flew straight down, passing through clouds and pockets of ash and distorting waves of heat. Her body glazed over with a sheen of gleaming black and green until she disappeared in the thick of a particularly large cloud. 

When Tia emerged out the other side of the cloud, she was in her full draconic form. She had changed a good amount since the time she fully unleashed her draconic form against the undead haze. She was slightly larger, for one, and now there were several new elements to her that showed signs of the journey she had taken so far with Li. 

Her antlered horns were wreathed in black magical energy. Her scales were a bright emerald green on the upper half of her body, gleaming with a luscious shine like the green of leaves reflected off of early morning dewdrops. The scales lining the underside of her neck and belly were a lighter shade of black, but overall, verdant green dominated her color palette.

The scales over her wings and around her tail were thicker and colored like oaken wood, arranged in a tiled formation reminiscent of plate armor. This was the [Living Armor] and [Hollow Branch] spells that she had absorbed from Li.

Both of them manifested as defensive features on Tia’s body, showing that despite being a fighter, she was always one to look into the souls of others, to understand them and to protect those she loved before all else. 

Some patches of scales around Tia’s vitals, around her chest and lower stomach, were studded in gleaming blue adamantite from having devoured the metal back in the Triforge Mountains.

A single red gem shone with a fiery luster on Tia’s neck – this was Lira’s necklace. 

Li felt proud of Tia, that she had come so far in so short a time. All of the time they had spent together was manifested on her so clearly, and in her strength, too, she had progressed.

Tia was now level 68 with extra stats from being a dragon, so she was comfortably stronger than the vast majority of all of humanity by this point. Strong enough to take on the Gigant, that was for sure. 

Li watched carefully as Tia soared downwards, her wings flattened against her back to give her an aerodynamic boost. 

The Fire Gigant roared and fired two more beams of flame from its hands. Tia dodged these with graceful ease, weaving past the beams and shooting straight down to the Fire Gigant’s head. 

Meanwhile, Li saw as the Alpha Rocs engaged in battle with the Flame Sprites. Where the Alpha Rocs were level 60, the Flame Sprites ranged from level 20 to 40. Individually, the sprites were no match for the Rocs, but the sprites numbered easily in the hundreds, seemingly emerging in an unending swarm from the lake of fire that spawned them. 

The Rocs would quickly get overwhelmed over time. 

Li swept his hand forwards, gazing down at the Rocs as they slammed into Flame Sprites, digging their blade-like beaks deep into the fiery bodies and tearing out their monster cores, eliminating them. 

“[Dire Frenzy]. [Beast Vigor]. [Protection of the Wild]” said Li, chanting out three buffs for the Rocs to use. Dire Frenzy massively enhanced their stats and granted them the ability to restore their health by taking down enemy units, giving them huge sustainability against large swathes of weak mobs like this.

Beast Vigor boosted their health regeneration and improved their resistances, especially against fire type damage.

Protection of the Wild granted them a one-time use barrier that would severely negate the damage of a blow that would deal more than fifty percent of their max health. This was to prevent the Rocs from being accidentally sniped by the Fire Gigant’s wide area of effect attacks. 

The Rocs, their veins bulging, their eyes widened and filled with the adrenaline of Dire Frenzy, and surrounded by a sheen of defensive green aura, continued their attack with full and deadly confidence, tearing apart swathes of Flame Sprites. 

Meanwhile, Li dealt with plenty of Flame Sprites of his own in the manner he was most used to using to dispatch large clumps of weak enemies. He fired off [Moonbeams] with his eyes, spreading out their intensity to cover large, conical areas to dissolve and destroy Flame Sprites en masse. 

Tia roared as she crashed into the Fire Gigant’s head with…a headbutt of her own. Despite being a sixth of the Fire Gigant’s size, Tia was not much weaker in raw stats, and her headbutt knocked the Fire Gigant’s enormous forty meter bulk backwards with a painful grunt. 

The Fire Gigant rubbed his head and then opened his gleaming white hot mouth and bellowed out a wave of lava and fire. 

Tia flew backwards to make some distance and countered with a breath of her own. She met the beam of lava with a fiery breath of her own, unleashing a huge torrent of black demonflame. The dark fire slammed into the lava, and the white and black beams clashed together both in force and in color contrast.

The space between the beams started to distort, the heat waves emanating from the concentrated strikes intensifying tremendously before a deafening explosion occurred from the mass buildup of energy. The shockwave blew Tia a dozen meters backwards, but she righted herself in the air with a flap of her wings. 

The Fire Gigant stumbled back but prevented himself from falling in his lake of lava. 

“Tia!” shouted Li as he sprouted a summon known as a [Autonomous Death Vine] on his back that sent out spiked veins every which way, killing and skewering any flame sprites that annoyingly got close to him. “Fire breath is not going to work on him!”

“But…but I like fire breath!” said Tia. “Wanted to see if mine stronger than big fire man’s.”

The Fire Gigant changed its posture, placing its open palms near the top of its head, hovering around its crown of flame. Swirls of fire began to condense above the crown points, forming an orb of bright orange, and then lava and further fire began to swirl around this in an attack that rapidly began to charge up in mana density and destructive force. 

An attack easily capable of severely wounding Tia.