Diamond Dragon: A Slice-of-life LitRPG adventure by Chucho Jones & A.C. Whitney

Author:Chucho Jones & A.C. Whitney [Jones, Chucho & Whitney, A.C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2026-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

Behind us, Cherry Pass Junction burned.

Not the whole town—the Darkwings weren’t scorching everything. They were focused. Precise. Circling a single point in the market square where a column of light—tonal energy, visible, blazing—rose from the ground like a pillar. Nalgazdaz’s last stand. I couldn’t hear the song anymore—we were too far, half a mile and growing—but I could see the light, and I could see the dark shapes diving at it, pulling up, diving again, repelled each time by something that was weaker and smaller and more stubborn than they were.

He was still fighting. With what, I couldn’t imagine. A man with three broken ribs and burns down one arm and reserves that had been burning on fumes before he started singing. Fighting nine dragons with a song and a refusal to stop.

The light flickered.

I saw it from the road—a single stutter, like a candle in a draft. Then it steadied. Then it flickered again, longer this time, and the dark shapes pressed closer, the circle tightening.

Then the light exploded.

Not outward—upward. A column of white that shot straight into the sky, piercing the smoke canopy, visible for miles, so bright that it left afterimages on my retinas even at this distance. The Darkwings scattered—flung outward by the blast radius, tumbling through the air like leaves in a storm. One of them hit the eastern ridge and didn’t get up. Another crashed through the roof of a building. The rest climbed, screaming, disoriented, circling at altitude.

The column lasted three seconds. Maybe four. An eternity measured in light.

Then it was gone. The smoke closed over the gap like water filling a hole. The market square was dark. The light was gone.

Nalgazdaz was gone.

Loola didn’t stop running.

She didn’t slow. She didn’t turn. She didn’t look back. She ran with her face forward and her jaw set and her eyes dry—stone dry, desert dry, the dryness of someone who has decided that tears are a luxury she cannot afford and may never afford again. Her stride was mechanical. Perfect. The stride of a body running on discipline because everything else had been burned out.

I ran beside her. Not behind—beside. Close enough that the Catalyst effect was probably active, close enough that the warmth in her hands might be building, and I didn’t care about the three-foot radius rule and she didn’t enforce it. We ran together. In silence. With mud on our faces and the smell of smoke behind us and the road to Cherry Pass unspooling ahead.

Pitman ran on my other side. Silent too. Not narrating, not explaining, not identifying minerals. Just running. His short legs pumping, his breath steady, his face set in an expression I’d never seen on him—not the engineer’s analytical focus, not the grim humor of a man who’d been tied to a thorn-tree. This was older. Simpler. The face of a person who has witnessed something that will live in their memory for the rest of their life and is choosing, in this moment, to keep moving rather than stop and let it destroy them.

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