Chapter 28: War of Luck and Snails

This was it. The moment Isao had told me about. A truly, absolutely hopeless situation.

Kenta was about to be turned into a fine red mist. Luna was exhausted. Rina was injured. Chloe was out of offensive potions. The dragon was angry, glittery, and seconds away from victory.

I pulled the crystal cherry blossom from my pouch. My hand trembled as I closed my fingers around it. "Sorry for the cliché," I whispered, "but I'm fresh out of options."

I crushed it.

The crystal didn't shatter. It dissolved into a million motes of pure white light that flowed into me. I didn't feel a surge of power. I didn't suddenly learn a god-tier spell. What I felt was a subtle shift. A tiny, imperceptible tilt in the fabric of reality. My LUCK stat, which was already maxed out, went into overdrive. The chaos engine was now a chaos supernova.

What happened next was a cascade of failures that resulted in a spectacular, improbable victory.

First, Ignis, in his haste to charge Kenta, failed to notice the massive puddle of Tanglefoot Tar his own tail had been stuck in. His giant clawed foot came down right in the middle of it. He didn't just get stuck; he slipped. A dragon, the size of a castle, slipped on a puddle of alchemical goo. His trajectory shifted by a few crucial degrees. Instead of slamming into Kenta, he slammed headfirst into the cavern wall right beside him.

CRACK.

The impact, amplified by the dragon's immense size and speed, sent a massive fracture running up the wall and across the ceiling of the cavern.

Second, the Snail King, who had been methodically and slowly trying to squeeze through the tunnel for the past twenty minutes, finally succeeded. He popped out into the main chamber with a loud thwump… directly onto the now-weakened section of the cavern ceiling.

The ceiling gave way. The Snail King, our colossal, indestructible, slow-moving friend, fell directly out of the roof.

He didn't land on the dragon. He landed right in front of the dragon. His sudden appearance, falling from the sky like a moss-covered meteor, was enough to make the already dazed and confused Ignis flinch back in shock.

Third, Chloe, in the panic, had fumbled her last remaining potion: a small vial of highly concentrated Bouncy Juice. The vial flew through the air, hit the Snail King's indestructible shell, and ricocheted at an impossible angle. It flew across the cavern and landed directly on the massive pile of treasure the dragon had been sleeping on.

The mountain of gold and jewels instantly turned into a super-bouncy, glittering trampoline.

Ignis, flinching back from the falling snail, lost his footing completely on the Tanglefoot Tar. He stumbled backwards, right onto the now-bouncy pile of his own hoard.

He hit the treasure pile and was launched, against his will, into the air. A multi-ton, glitter-covered dragon was now helplessly airborne in a subterranean cavern. He flailed, roaring in confusion, before gravity reasserted itself. He came down, hard, and landed squarely on his back, his head hitting the stone floor with a sickening CRACK.

The great dragon Ignis, the Inferno of the Second Era, was knocked unconscious by a combination of bad footing, a falling snail, and a bouncy castle made of gold.

We stared in stunned silence at the scene. The war was over. And we had won through the most ridiculous, convoluted, and luckiest sequence of events in the history of warfare.