Path of Dragons 16 - Chapter 39 - Plague (Patreon)

The air whistled past Elijah as he dove.  Falling Talon activated automatically, and he hit the top of the pyramid like a falling missile.  His target – one of the shamans – exploded under the impact, and the surface of the stone pyramid sundered.  At first, it was just a spider-web of cracks, but with the sound of a calving glacier, a deep rift split the entire structure in two.  It fell apart, dumping hundreds of lesser shamans into the air below. 

Elijah barely noticed it.

Instead, he was already riding a summoned updraft into the upper atmosphere, where he would soon look for another target. 

He’d been going for what felt like hours but was probably closer to thirty minutes.  The battle raged on in the distance, the surface of the Vengeance having turned into a bloody quagmire of mud and dead bodies. 

Some of them were dragons.

But most were orcs.

The fight was going much as he’d expected, and though every dead dragon came at a steep cost to the orcs, the hateful creatures had plenty of bodies to throw at the problem.  The writing was on the wall – they were all doomed. 

And there wasn’t much Elijah could do about it.

Still, he tried.  Not so much because he cared about the fate of the dragons.  Their attitude toward him had long since pushed him over the edge and into apathy towards their fate.  But rather, he fought because he knew his friends wouldn’t abandon the others.

They were too attached.

They were all citizens of the empire, after all.  It was their home, and for all their faults, the others were their people.  Elijah felt no such attachment.

It didn’t matter.  He was committed, at least for the time being, and the situation hadn’t grown so dire as to force his hand.  Retreat would come.  He was certain of that.  It was just a matter of how many orcs they could kill before that happened.

Of course, there was always the possibility that he was mistaken.  He would welcome that, even if he didn’t believe it was possible.  In any case, those thoughts barely even distracted him as he searched for his next target. 

It didn’t take long.  There were plenty of options. 

Soon enough, he flew into one of the clouds, which provided enough cover for him to resume Guise of the Stalker.  Once he was safely cloaked in stealth, he climbed in preparation for his next dive.  Before he flipped over, an idea occurred to him.  If he could have smiled in the Shape of Withering, he would have been grinning ear to ear.

As it was, his face remained expressionless as he flipped over, tucked his wings, and began his dive.  As before, Falling Talon activated automatically, but not before Elijah used Phase Shift.  It took hold, manifesting multiple shadowy clones, each one infused with a sliver of his soul.  Not enough to drain him, but more than enough to push their solidity to the brink of realism.

Together with his fleet of venomwing stalkers, Elijah dove, gaining speed with every second.  Behind him trailed a cloud of yellow-green mist – Cloud of Decay, which he’d kept active for the past half hour.  As a result, a small portion of the orcish armada remained cloaked in a dense fog.

Elijah hit the next shaman just as hard as the last, but he’d chosen his new target specifically because it was stronger.  It didn’t explode like the last, though it did end up sprawled across the top of the pyramid.  The clones hit a fraction of the second later, one after another.

Each impact broke the shaman’s bones, but even after they’d all launched themselves back into the air, the thing was still alive.  So, Elijah grabbed the limp shaman in his talons, then rode an updraft back into the sky.  When he was over open air, he released the body.

It fell, tumbling through open air, and Elijah returned to the cycle. 

One after another, he slaughtered shamans.  They tried to stop him.  Every time he revealed himself, the accompanying warships fired hundreds of harpoons in his direction.  However, he was moving far too quickly for their aim to remain accurate.  In addition, he chose his targets more or less at random, so they couldn’t really predict where he would appear next.  From their perspective, he simply appeared out of the clouds, visible for only a second before killing another one of the shamans.

It was no surprise that they couldn’t track him.

At the same time, Elijah saw Palikina assassinating other shamans.  She wasn’t nearly as effective as he was, largely because she couldn’t move quite as quickly as he could.  Instead, her progress was much more meticulous. 

Together, they gradually whittled the number of shamans down, softening the overlapping domains until they became little more than an annoyance for Elijah.  For others, they were probably much more impactful.

Either way, his rhythm was so measured that he barely even noticed when he passed the four-thirty mark.  The only reason he saw it was because it came with a message flashing before his inner eye.  And it was an unexpected one:

Plagueburst

Conjure a ball of concentrated venom, then drop it on foes.  Venom detonates on impact, spreading in a cloud of moisture that degrades enemy souls and dissolves flesh.

Potency based on ethera and dexterity attributes.  Resistance based on relative soul cultivation. Splash radius based on conjuration time.  (Max: 72.3 feet)

Only usable while under the influence of Shape of Withering.

The notification came as a surprise, largely because he rarely received completely new abilities anymore.  However, it was a welcome one. 

So, he didn’t waste any time before deploying it, and the first thing he discovered about Plagueburst was that it worked similarly to how he compounded spells in his dragon form.  Except it was a lot more uncomfortable, and as he held it a beat away from activation, it felt like he had something lodged in his throat. 

Finally, when he could hold no more, he opened his mouth and coughed up a basketball sized sphere of roiling green and yellow liquid.  It held its shape, hovering only a foot or two in front of his open mouth.  Then, with a flick of willpower, he released it to fall toward a ship far below.

That told him two things.

First, that aiming was difficult.  Even as he saw its descent, Elijah recognized that it wasn’t going to be a direct hit.  Second – and this one was much more positive – was that using it didn’t break Guise of the Stalker.

He watched as the ball descended, leaving a light trail of yellow mist behind.

It barely managed to hit, but that was enough. The explosion was kinetic, ripping a sizable hole in the side of the ship.  Orcs at the immediate point of impact were vaporized as a dense wave of yellow-and-green energy arced across the deck and into the ship’s hold. 

That was only the beginning, though, and it wasn’t even the worst part.

That wave continued to expand, turning into a gas that attacked flesh and souls alike.  Even the high-level demigods among them didn’t stand a chance.  The deities survived, but Elijah suspected that that wouldn’t have been the case if they took a direct hit from what amounted to a poison bomb.

Or maybe venom.  Elijah wasn’t really sure what the correct label was.  What he did know was that it was incredibly potent, sending a steady stream of experience his way. 

Was it enough to tip the balance?

No.  The situation was still dire.  But it was another potent tool to add to his arsenal.  Plagueburst, combined with Cloud of Decay and Falling Talon, completed Shape of Withering’s toolkit in a way that surprised him.  Until that very moment, he’d not even considered it incomplete.  In retrospect, the gap in the toolkit was obvious.

For the next hour or so, Elijah continued to bomb the fleet.  Doing so netted him a steady stream of experience.  It was also relatively safe, considering that the orcs were incapable of seeing through Guise of the Stalker. 

Or that was what he thought right up until he saw a group of gliders coming toward him.  It only took one glance for Elijah to recognize that they were different.  Higher level than most, with more than a few deities among them. 

Their arrival should not have been surprising. 

After all, it seemed as though the entirety of the orcish population had shown up for the battle.  There were obviously plenty of deities among them.

And the ones coming for him could clearly see through his stealth.  By what means they could do so was unclear.  Not that it mattered.  He banked, and they tracked him, confirming that he was visible.

So, he stopped fleeing.

Instead, he turned toward the oncoming swarm of gliders and shifted into his dragon form.  He beat his wings, gaining more control over his flight.  At the same time, he cast his trio of healing spells.  And finally, he let loose with Eternal Plague, conjuring thousands of hornets in the few seconds it took him to reach his enemies.

The clash was brutal.

Orcs leaped upon his back, while Elijah lashed out with claws and teeth, ripping gliders from the sky.  The hornets descended upon the orcish horde, stinging them and spreading even more afflictions among them. 

The onslaught wasn’t enough to kill most of the orcs, but it definitely made the fight easier to manage. 

But easier didn’t mean easy.

Elijah quickly discovered that when he felt the bite of dozens of blades.  The orcs hacked at his wing joints, his emerald scales, and anything else they could reach.  Elijah’s silver-tier body combined with his endurance and the shielding effect of Bough of the World Tree to hold up well, but he knew it was only a matter of time before they broke through.  His healing would repair the damage to his flesh, but if they disabled his wings, things would go very wrong, very quickly.

Still, he resolved to hold on for as long as he could, if only so he could continue to fill the air with hornets.  Meanwhile, he lashed out with every ounce of fury a three-hundred-foot dragon could muster, ripping through gliders and orcs alike.  In the span of only thirty seconds, he disabled the vast majority of that first wave.  Though more than a few orcs remained on his back, hacking away at him.

And there was another wave of gliders on the way.

Just as he felt an axe cut through one of his wing joints, briefly disabling it, Elijah shifted into the Shape of the Magus.  The decrease in size left most of the orcs with nothing to hold onto, and the second he took on the form of the dragon toad, he sprang away on a Cloud Step, his path sped along by a gust of wind.

He landed on a pyramid ship and immediately lashed out with his tongue.  The roiling flames in his mouth took care of a shaman even as he leaned hard into a couple of rarely used elements.

Normally, earth and fire only provided passive support.  Elijah had always been much more comfortable with wind and water.  Yet, ignoring the other two was selling the Shape of the Magus short. 

So, he’d been practicing.  A lot.

And in doing so, he’d progressed his understanding of both elements.  They were very different from water or air, and manipulating their flows required quite an adjustment in strategy.  For instance, earth wasn’t something to be controlled.  Rather, it was meant to be nudged, slowly and steadily, like wind eroding a mountain.  Fire couldn’t really be controlled either, and it could only be guided by what Elijah thought of us violence and aggression. 

And steady fuel.

Elijah leaped from one shaman to the next, ramming some and introducing others to his furnace-like mouth.  And all the while, he layered fire and earth atop one another.  In only a few seconds, the surface of the pyramid became more pliable, with smoke rising from the much hotter stone.  After another minute, it turned orange-ish red.

That was when another wave of gliders descended.

The arrival of the additional warriors split Elijah’s attention into a hundred different directions.  Thankfully, his mind cultivation helped him deal with that, and to the point where he managed to manipulate his budding spell while fighting against hundreds of orcs. 

He pushed more and more ethera into the woven flows of fire and earth, gradually building them upon one another until it became difficult to discern where one ended and the other began. 

In the meantime, Elijah clamped down on it with a cushion of air, holding it all into place while continuously feeding oxygen to the budding fire.  Water, he used to keep himself reasonably cool, though his elementally infused body did more for that than any amount of water ever could.

Soon enough, the entire pyramid began to vibrate.  The air quivered with both ethera and heat.  But he didn’t let the impending and inevitable explosion express itself. 

Not yet.

Not until he’d eked every ounce of power from it.

As it turned out, his plan never had a chance to reach fruition.  Instead, he was forced to cut it short when he saw a familiar figure slam into the liquified surface of the pyramid. 

Ok’tarik, the other orc had called him.  The war chief.  The one Elijah had fought and failed to kill.

The orc had grown slightly taller.  A little more muscular.  He bore a few new scars and held an ivory spear that pulsed with dense ethera.

But he was unmistakable.

Especially that twisted expression of hate, anger, and a hint of respect. 

He began to speak, but Elijah never allowed him to get a word out.  Instead, he released his spell and leaped away. 

An explosion followed him, and it was much bigger than he ever could have expected.  He’d built a miniature volcano that, as it turned out, wasn’t so miniature after all.