Path of Dragons 16 - Chapter 41 - Not So Friendly Fire (Patreon)

A roiling ball of ethera smashed into Elijah, melting the outer layer of his skin.  Along with it went most of his hair, and any non-magical equipment he carried.  Fortunately, his bonded gear endured, largely because it existed partially in its own reality.  Because of that, it was incredibly difficult to destroy, as he’d discovered during a few of his more gruesome battles.

Or his routine cultivation advancements.

The bottom line was that even when he’d been destroyed down to a single cell, his equipment came back. 

Not every piece of gear – magical or otherwise – could do that, though it was much more common among system rewards than with crafted equipment.  If directly targeted, some of those pieces could be destroyed, but that wouldn’t be the case with tertiary damage. 

Which was a good thing, because the alternative was that Elijah would be more frequently nude than he already was.

Not that he was thinking about such things.  He didn’t even give his gear any thought, distracted as he was by the unfathomable agony of being burned alive by densely concentrated and weaponized ethera.

It also confirmed that the cannons weren’t orcish in origin.  Rather, they’d been fired by the Vengeance’s dedicated crews.  Was it another assassination attempt?  His enemies taking advantage of his distraction, maybe?  Or were they targeting Ok’tarik and just considered him acceptable collateral damage?  They might’ve even assumed that he would survive just fine.

Though Elijah couldn’t help but question that, given the nature of his relationship with the dragons populating the trial.

Or, if he was honest, the entirety of his experience in the Empire of Scale, which had been characterized by everything ranging from basic disrespect to outright hostility.  Sure, there were moments of acceptance, but they definitely weren’t the norm. 

Either way, once Elijah recovered his wits, he found himself both unsurprised and flying across the surface of the Vengeance.  He skipped across the rocky ground before coming to a stop only a few dozen feet from his forest.  As he picked himself up from the ground, Wild Resurgence and Bough of the World Tree worked to heal him.

With a groan, he looked around, only to find himself surrounded by stunned orcs.  Of Ok’tarik, there was no sign.  However, the cannon fire had never stopped, filling the air with a sound not dissimilar from machine-gun fire, albeit on an entirely different scale.  In the distance, explosions rocked the surface of the Vengeance, with the cannoneers obviously targeting Ok’tarik.

One of the orcs stepped forward with a growl.  With his hands on his knees, Elijah held up a single finger, miraculously stopping the orc in its tracks.  The others backed away, but only a step.  “Give me one second, guys.  Just need to catch my breath,” he rasped before spitting a glob of blood and organ meat onto the ground.

He straightened to his full height, then stretched his back. 

That was when the orcs remembered that they were, indeed, orcs.  After a single blink, that first creature gathered his courage and rushed forward.  With a sigh, Elijah summoned Thorn. 

The following attack was so quick that even Okar would’ve had difficulty countering.  The orc never had a chance, and his head ended up tumbling to the ground as his body continued to surge forward.  He went three steps before his legs recognized the decapitation.  They collapsed, followed quickly by the torso.

After, the world seemed to hold its breath.

The backdrop of cannon fire continued, but the other orcs looked on with dense confusion, their eyes darting back and forth from their fallen comrade’s body and the much smaller Elijah.  In the space of a couple of seconds, they reasserted their characteristic rage.  Then, with a collective roar, they charged.

Elijah met them with Thorn, moving more fluidly than he ever had in his human form.  After a few moments, three more orcs lay dead at his feet, and he continued to dance between the others.  He felt almost like he was in the Shape of Embers, though not because of enhanced reaction speeds.  He still had those, though not as potently as if he’d taken on his emberkin form.  Rather, he relied solely on his passive buffs and the faster reflexes granted by his Girdle of the Wild Revenant. 

The big difference came from his frequent practice with Okar, which had not only forced him to think more strategically, but also to move with more purpose and a lot more fluidly.

The result was that the orcs, even ones that had reached higher levels than him, felt as if they were moving in mud.  Elijah wasted no time in dispatching that first wave, but they were soon replaced by another.  Vaguely, he was aware that the barrage against Ok’tarik had never ceased.  In fact, it had intensified, mostly on the backs of various spells being cast.  In addition, archers like Kalyn had begun to target his position.

Maybe they would kill him.

Elijah didn’t believe that for a second, but he would be more than happy to be proven wrong.  As it was, he sliced through the other orcs like a scythe through wheat.  At the same time, he conjured Eternal Plague, filling the air with tens of thousands of predatory hornets.  The insects descended upon the orcish army, inflicting debilitating afflictions upon them.

Simultaneously, Elijah cast Nature’s Claim, over and over while filling the air with spores from Thorn’s activated ability, Fungal Growth.  They combined with the fungi native to the forest, some of which had survived the domains by going dormant.  Now that Elijah was there, they awoke to aid his attacks.

It would take days – or even weeks – to nurture the colony back to where it had been before the orcs’ intrusion into his cave, and even then, only if he used Dictate of the World Tree on cooldown.  However, the current incarnation maintained enough of that progress to make a nuisance of itself. 

As more and more rushed Elijah, the orcs discovered just how frustrating that fungal colony could be.  Not only did the tendrils serve to foul their footing, but the spores combined with Fungal Growth and Nature’s Claim to verge on lethality.  It didn’t quite reach that threshold, but the longer Elijah fought, the more intense the fungal atmosphere became. 

The orcs died in droves, but no matter how quickly Elijah killed them, there were always more to take the place of the fallen.  Corpses stacked up all around him, forming walls of the dead or dying.  Elijah never stopped moving, and after a few more minutes – during which his swarm continued to grow, he began to integrate his other forms into the mix.

Human flowed into dragon toad, and he manipulated the wind to guide the spores into rivers of infection that descended upon the orcs with ever-increasing potency.  At the same time, he spat balls of molten rock and shot out jets of superheated water that cut through orcs like they were nothing.

The dragon toad became the Shape of Withering, and he added Cloud of Decay, Wither, and Virulent Rot to the mix.  From time to time, he coughed up a Plagueburst, grabbed ahold with his mouth, and tossed it at oncoming hordes or orcs.  Those balls of rotting poison hit with explosions no weaker than the cannons’ issue, spreading clouds of soul-scouring gas among the enemy.

Elijah was unaffected.

Shape of Withering soon became his dragon form.  It offered a massive increase in size and strength, both physical and ethereal.  His spells – like Nature’s Claim and Eternal Plague – became far more potent.  In addition, he also used it to conjure a rejuvenating storm via Blessing of the Grove, adding his other two heals to the mix as well. 

At times, he shifted into the Shape of Spores, which not only increased his regeneration and overall durability, but it also offered a sort of kinship with the fungal colony.  He used that connection to push it to greater strength, showing the way when he used Throne of Spores to conjure tens of thousands of fungal tendrils.  He used those to not only control the battlefield, but also to teach the more permanent tendrils the means of fighting the orcish horde.

And finally, he shifted into Shape of Embers, though he refrained from using either of its two signature abilities.  Instead, he fought much as he did in his human form, leading the way with Thorn.  The two major differences came from his much-enhanced reflexes, which made the orcs look like they were standing still, and the additional damage that came from Wildfire.  Finally, Cloak of Embers swirled all around him, mingling with Cloud of Decay, the gas from Plagueburst, the spores from Fungal Spread and Nature’s Claim, and the rain from Blessing of the Grove.

The combined miasma was both rejuvenating and debilitating for his enemies. 

Elijah kept it going, leaning on his massive attributes, advanced cultivation, and his varied abilities to stay ahead of the orcs.  And they responded with increased vitriol, clearly regarding his continued survival as a challenge to whatever sense of self they possessed.  So long as he stood, they couldn’t ignore him.

Gradually, the entire battlefield shifted in his direction. 

The cannons continued to fire in the distance, confirming that the Vengeance was keeping Ok’tarik pinned down, but the rest of the orcs flowed around that increasingly large crater to attack Elijah.

More than a mile separated him from that site, but it was entirely crowded with orcs.

Of the other dragons, there was no sign.  Had they completely abandoned him?  No.  But it seemed that they were more than content to let him fight alone.  Maybe they intended to swoop in if he started to flag.  Or perhaps they were fighting on the other side of the mountainous ship.  There was no way to know for certain, and Elijah was in no position to check for himself.

Instead, he just continued to fight, slaughtering the orcs by the hundreds.

And briefly, he started to think he had a chance of winning the battle.  That lasted right up until the fleet finally turned their crude cannons on his position.  Just like the dragon cannoneers, they seemed to have done the appropriate math, weighing getting rid of him versus however many casualties would be incurred by firing on their own people.  And that calculus told them to kill Elijah at all cost.

The barrage came with very little warning, catching Elijah entirely off guard.  The first to arrive missed by a few feet, and Elijah managed to ride the shockwave to dodge the next.  Using Cloud Step, he danced between the ethereal explosions of jagged iron and roiling energy. 

But eventually, the bombardment became too ubiquitous to avoid. 

A cannonball hit him in the left leg, shattering bones and nearly amputating the limb.  His tendons held on by a thin thread, and the momentum of the attack sent him flipping end over end.  As he shunted the pain into its own leaf, Elijah braced for the explosion.

He still wasn’t ready for it.

Or them, rather.  Because dozens of cannon balls hit simultaneously, throwing him back and forth like a pinball.  Hundreds more orcs were vaporized in an instant, while others were shattered by the shockwave.  Still more were thrown outward to tumble across the artificial landmass, and many found themselves going over the edge and plummeting to their demise.

For Elijah’s part, he managed to keep his wits about him just enough to initiate a shift into the Shape of Spores.  A little focus sent the fungal tendrils attached to his shoulders arcing out to latch onto the nearby rocks, arresting his momentum.  But when he landed, he was broken. 

It was just the beginning, though.

Just as the Vengeance had focused all its fire on Ok’tarik, so too did the orcish fleet turn all its cannons on Elijah.  And there were tens of thousands of ships out there.  Hundreds of thousands.  Virtually uncountable, when they fired as one, their issue cast the entirety of the Vengeance in deep shadow.

Elijah looked up, and he knew he couldn’t survive.

Not even in his most durable form.

So, with no small degree of reluctance, he burned Mycelial Regrowth, sending his regeneration skyrocketing to such a degree that it practically became a different measure of regrowth entirely.  With that active, he could come back from just about anything.

And given what he saw descending toward him, Elijah knew that the ability would be pushed to the limits of what it could endure.

He braced, sending out fungal tendrils to anchor him in place.

The cannon fire fell.

A moment later, his world devolved into molten iron, fire, and scathing ethera.