Path of Dragons 16 - Chapter 50 - Avatar (Patreon)

Moving the double chapter to today instead of tomorrow because I realized that was a horrible cliffhanger.

The storm sputtered.

Elijah felt his body ripple. 

Then, as he saw a notification flash before his inner eye, time seemed to stand still. It read:

The second he read the new ability notifications, his body changed in a couple of ways.  The first was the most obvious – he shrank down to nearly half his previous size.  But the transformation wasn’t confined to mere size.  His skin took on the sleek, rubbery texture of a frog, rather than that of a rough and bumpy toad.  Meanwhile, the crystals on his back retracted into reflective scales, while the rest of his skin took on the striated greys of a storm cloud. 

Lightning exploded from his back, arcing around him to form a field of sizzling electricity that left the local atmosphere smelling of ozone and petrichor.  That was Shield of Lightning, clearly.  Anyone who attacked him would feel its bite.

However, as intriguing as the transformation was, Elijah was far more interested in how his powers had changed.  The description of Eye of the Storm hadn’t changed, save for the name of the form through which it was available.  But the expression of that ability was very much altered. 

Elijah could see everything so much more clearly, and the flows had become much crisper.  He could see deeper within them, down to the comprising threads, woven together so densely that he’d never even known they were there. 

Yet, there was more to it than that.  Something more profound, because he could immediately tell which ones could contribute to the creation of a storm. 

Furthermore, Elijah could tell that his previous level of power remained mostly intact.  He could still manipulate every element, but his control would be much better in the context of creating a storm.  Eye of the Storm hammered that into his head in a way that almost felt instinctual.

Maybe it was.

The storm frog was clearly based on a real creature, just like all the rest.  Perhaps that intuition was what differentiated it from other beasts.

Either way, when Elijah took hold of Way of Storms, the flows of ethera leaped to his command.  Wind and water swirled, almost as if he’d woven those threads himself.  It was as if all the work he’d done to hone his storm-summoning spells had imprinted the method into his mind.  Now, he didn’t even need to think about it.

Instead, he only needed to decide what sort of storm he wanted to summon.

He chose fire.

A tornado of flames exploded into being.  It was smaller than the one he’d conjured with Cyran’s help, but it was even more intense.  It cut across the landscape, leaving a track of melted rock along the way. 

Ok’tarik didn’t wait for it.

Instead, he leaped, bounded off a plane of ethera, and came at Elijah like a bullet.  Elijah leaned back, then leaped.  Wind swirled at his feet, forming localized storms that carried him away.  Ok’tarik tried to change directions, but he wasn’t quite nimble enough. 

The fiery tornado hit him a moment later.

It scorched Ok’tarik’s flesh, but only for a moment before he exploded with a bubble of blue eithera.  Elijah counted by switching the nature of the storm, and in a way that Ok’tarik could never have expected.

Fire became earth.

Great hunks of rock formed out of thin air, only to pummel the orc from every direction.  Elijah quickly switched from that, adding water to the mix.  Rock became mud that clung to Ok’tarik’s body, weighing him down.  He tried to continue his pursuit, but Elijah hit him with another pure windstorm that blocked his passage.

So it went, with Elijah rapidly shifting the nature of the storm to keep his opponent off balance.  Most of them failed to do any real damage, but they were fantastic for establishing control.  The combined effect was that it was almost impossible for Ok’tarik to reach Elijah.

Over the next couple of seconds, he got a handle on the newly evolved abilities, and to the point that he felt comfortable adding multiple flows together to create a new kind of storm.

In this case, Elijah was tempted to just let a fiery wind funnel form.  It had worked before, so there was no reason to think it wouldn’t be just as effective again.  However, returning to that well felt insufficient.  Not because it wouldn’t work.  He had every reason to believe it would, at least to some degree.  But Elijah wasn’t satisfied with good enough.  He wanted to put Ok’tarik out of commission, and this ability evolution was just what he needed to make that a reality.

He hoped.

So, he dipped into his knowledge of physics, focusing on something he’d learned decades before when he was in college. 

He wanted to create a solar storm.  And not just any solar storm – the crown jewel of space weather.  He would create a coronal mass ejection.  Or something close enough that he was comfortable calling it that.

The first step was to create the body of the storm.  For that, he grabbed as much air as he could manage.  That was when he discovered something he’d not expected – he wasn’t limited to what he could find in the atmosphere.  He could produce it himself.  To do so, he let it build within him, letting it inflate his throat.  Then, he let it free in a swirl of air that joined the other flows.

At the same time, he compressed it into a dense ball that was almost visible to the naked eye.  It was little more than a shimmer, but to Eye of the Storm, it was a roiling sphere of ethera, maybe a few feet across.  Small, but containing the force of a hurricane. 

Elijah decided to set it alight.

To do so, he wrapped it in thick bands of fire attuned ethera.  However, he kept them separate from one another.  Instead, he churned the air, creating tens of thousands of atom-thin layers that rolled against one another.  That friction created heat, and that heat arced with lightning that he didn’t allow outside the ball.  And eventually, it started to glow with repressed flames.

That was when Elijah fed it the fire-attuned ethera.

It blazed so brightly that it could’ve been a miniature sun.  Elijah suspected that if he let it loose, it would burn a hole in the entire landmass.  Maybe not stopping until it hit the core. 

Yet, he kept it constrained.

Because a coronal mass ejection wasn’t just fire.  No – what made it truly devastating was the inherent magnetism.  But before he could tackle that, he needed to get it moving.  To do that, he latched onto the water-like properties of the swirling ball of plasma and set them to spinning even faster.  The currents charged the fluid, creating the foothold he needed to take the next step.

Elijah latched onto flows of earth, dragging them from the ground.  Due to the nature of Orveth Kaal, they were particularly anemic, but he expected they would be strong enough for his purposes. 

He wound the earth around the ball of churning plasma, twisting the threads into a magnetic coil.  He wound them tighter and tighter, coiling the magnetic field lines like a plasmatic spring. 

It wasn’t long before two things happened.

First, Ok’tarik broke free of his muddy prison.  With a roar, he threw himself upward.  Meanwhile, Elijah leaped away, clinging to sheets of wind like they were solid surfaces.  He didn’t even need Absolute Grasp.  Nor did he need Cloud Step.  The air simply obeyed his unconscious need for a foothold.

It was a good thing, too, because holding the coil took every ounce of focus he could muster.  He continued to twist, tighter and tighter.  The ball glowed with heat and ethera, brighter and brighter with every passing moment.

Elijah’s willpower stretched to its fullest.

It occupied every leaf within his mind.  Spores started to die off, burst by the sheer weight of the task. 

Then, at last, he slipped a sliver of his soul inside.

It exploded immediately, the magnetic field lines uncoiling in less than a millisecond.  And in that brief moment in time, everything stood still.  Then, the atom-thin, whip-like field lines unfurled. 

The effect was devastating.

The first thing Elijah grasped was that the world went entirely silent.  The thread of plasma was so bright that it looked like it split the air in two, creating a hairline crack in the very notion of reality.  Then came the radiation.  It blistered Elijah’s skin, corrupting his cells and forcing tumorous growths.  He latched onto them, taking a page out of Ok’tarik’s book and harnessing the excess vitality to force it to heal his blistered skin.

That thread lashed out, cutting through Ok’tarik’s chest.  Just off-center, the two halves weren’t quite symmetrical, but it was devastating enough that it separated a good chunk of his chest.  The cut ended just below his hip.

The magnetic field line didn’t stop there, either.

It cut through the landmass.  Then, it cut through the air on the other side, not stopping for a thousand miles or more.

The heat came next.

If Elijah had thought the flaming tornado was hot, then there weren’t words to describe what he felt in the wake of that miniature version of a coronal mass ejection.  In fact, the term heat didn’t seem to apply.  It was too mundane a word for what Elijah felt.

If he hadn’t possessed a silver-tier body, he would have been burned to nothing.  If he hadn’t been in the shape of the storm frog, he would have boiled alive.  If he’d lacked even a few points of constitution, he never would have survived.

As it was, he burned in a way he never thought possible.  He used Wild Resurgence to counter some of the damage, but it was too weak to do more than keep him conscious.  However, that probably saved his life.

That, and the sometimes-forgotten Mantle of the Chimera.  The few points of regeneration it offered weren’t that important, but it gave him extra resistances.  The combination of that, plus his natural resilience and his buffs, allowed him to survive that first burst.

But he did not survive it well.

Even amidst the pain, Elijah couldn’t help but marvel at the beauty of that tiny ribbon of burning nothingness as it sliced through everything in its path.  Shimmers of other colors – red, yellow, blue, and pure white – trailed behind it, forming a cloud that settled into the atmosphere.

And then, everything went still.

Terrifyingly, beautifully still.

Ok’tarik broke that silence with a roar that jerked Elijah’s attention in his direction.  There he was, his skin bubbling with tumors, popping blisters and running pus.  His right shoulder was gone, a neat cut running all the way to just below his hip and exposing his insides. 

He staggered, then pitched forward onto his face.

The landmass shook before a sound like a calving glacier echoed through the area.  Elijah watched as a slice of earth shifted.  Then, it fell, taking Ok’tarik with it.

Elijah leaped higher, outpacing the worst of the radiation.  Relief flooded through him as he saw an unconscious Ok’tarik tumbling toward the distant and unseen core.

Just as the orcish warchief passed out of view, the consequences of Elijah’s spell hit him.  A sense of vertigo washed through him, mingling with the aftermath of the heat and radiation to send him reeling.  He lost his grip on the air, and for a few moments, he fell. 

Fortunately, he maintained consciousness and shifted into his dragon form.  That allowed him to cast the entirety of his healing suite.  All three spells settled onto him, and he recovered just enough to snap out his wings and climb to a higher vantage point.  In the distance, he saw the Vengeance. 

He flew in that direction.

As he passed over the orcish ships, no cannon fire or harpoons accosted him.  It was as if he’d finally stunned them into peace.  He knew it wouldn’t last, but he hoped that the armistice would stretch at least long enough for him to reach safety.

Because he knew he didn’t have much more in him.

Gradually, he drifted closer and closer until, at last, he crashed into the Vengeance.  His wings had given out, but he maintained consciousness long enough to feel someone dragging him inside.

That was when he finally relaxed and let darkness wash over him.  But he didn’t fully fall asleep until he felt the telltale surge of dozens of engines as they pushed the ship to full speed.  Hopefully, that meant escape was imminent.