Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 12 - Infestation (Patreon)

Elijah advanced, his footsteps light despite the massive form he’d taken.  He had no idea how heavy Shape of the Reaver really was, but he suspected it was at least as large as a draft horse.  Maybe heavier, given its density. 

Whatever the case, he still felt small as he stepped through that entrance and into darkness.  At first, there was no response from the termites, but after only a couple of seconds, he felt something deep in the pit of his stomach.  It took him a few seconds to recognize that the ground had begun to shake.

Not as if it was under the effect of an earthquake.  Rather, it was similar to how it had felt when the massive automatons took a step back in the Labyrinth of Mad Gods.  It reminded Elijah of the scene in Jurassic Park, when the tension built around something as simple as ripples traveling across the surface of a glass of water. 

He half expected a tyrannosaurus rex to show itself.

Instead, only darkness greeted him. 

Vaguely, he sensed something moving in the shadowy recesses of the tunnel.  A subtle shift of air and the sound of scraping claws.  Yet, his eyes were incapable of penetrating more than a couple of feet into the gloom.  In addition, Soul of the Wild was muted, limited by the reality that he had stepped into another creature’s domain.

Or rather, that of many, many creatures.

He extended Tyrant’s Edge and took another tentative step forward.  The vibrations continued, rhythmically pulsing through the entire compound of tunnels.  That was when he remembered something from one of his earliest biology classes during his undergraduate years.

It had been a section about social insects, so it had focused mostly on bees, ants, and termites.  Back then, Elijah hadn’t been all that interested.  He’d taken the class during his freshman year, when his parents’ deaths were still foremost in his mind.  However, he still remembered bits and pieces, though not with the level of recall he extended to most subjects within the field.

Either way, he might’ve been a bit slow to remember, but when he did, it all made sense. 

On Earth, termites usually organized themselves into a caste system.  Specifically, they featured soldiers and workers.  The soldiers were considered the defensive caste, sterile and massively built.  They tended to be specialized entirely for violence.  In Earth’s termites, they came in two general varieties.

Mandibulate soldiers were just what their name implied.  Huge termites with proportionally enormous jaws.  Some sliced.  Others snapped.  The mandibles were held under tension, then released – not unlike a spring-loaded trap, delivering a blow far faster than simple muscle could drive. 

By comparison, nasute soldiers were oddities, and terrifying ones at that.  Their heads were shaped into pointed nozzles, from which they sprayed a sticky, resinous fluid at attackers.  Effectively, it was a caustic hot glue gun that entangled, poisoned, and corroded, all at the same time. 

They didn’t bother attacking in melee.  Instead, they just hosed down an entire tunnel, trapping and dissolving intruders in the process.

As horrifying as that scenario was, those particular details weren’t the most prominent in Elijah’s mind, though.  Rather, he focused on the reality that termites were blind.  They were entirely incapable of sight.  Because of that, they focused on vibration and chemistry to both communicate and to detect their enemies.

When they did find intruders, the soldiers tended to ram their massive heads into the walls of their tunnels, rapidly vibrating the substrate and letting the entire colony know that they’d been invaded.  The drumming propagated through the mound as a seismic alarm. 

And at the scale of the termites in Orveth Kaal – car-sized creatures that possessed deity-level strength – the effect was truly disturbing.  The ground didn’t just shake.  It sent deep vibrations deep into Elijah’s stomach, activating a primal sort of dread that came from the sonic effect as much as from the knowledge of what he expected to face.

He stepped forward, expectation building with every footfall.  The rhythmic vibrations continued. The skittering sounds persisted.  The subtle shift of air swirled just out of reach.  Yet, the anticipated attack failed to materialize.

Elijah turned a corner, leaving the pinprick of light behind.

He plunged into total darkness.

Ten feet later, something lanced in, the displaced air buffeting him as a massive spike of pain ripped through his stomach.  Elijah lashed out, Tyrant’s Edge flailing blindly.  The jagged, bone-like blade found nothing.

However, the burning pain pulsing through his stomach – in time with the rhythmic vibrations – had a secondary effect.  Each heartbeat sent a puff of spores into the air.  Normally, they were a dull ochre, more vibrant when the light hit them just right.  In the dark, it was different, though.

They shone with bioluminescent light.

The glow wasn’t enough to truly pierce the darkness, but it did give Elijah an idea.  He embraced two abilities.  The first was Fungal Leech, the passive trait which was responsible for the spores in the first place.  The cloud would infect his enemies, spreading a virile fungus that was deadly against weaker foes.  Against stronger enemies, it only hindered their physical attributes.

Elijah wasn’t really that interested in those two effects.  They would doubtless help in the coming battle, but he was far more focused on a secondary function.

Because each one of those spores was part of him.

He could feel them almost as well as he could sense things through Soul of the Wild.  Normally, that trait wasn’t all that important.  He had other senses.  Yet, in this very specific situation, it would prove invaluable.

But Elijah wasn’t interested in depending on the most basic representation of the ability.  Rather, he wanted something more all-encompassing.  Something stronger.  Something driven by his powerful soul.

And now that his body had advanced to gold-tier, he could handle it.

So, even as another creature darted in, its snapping mandibles taking a hunk of flesh from his torso, Elijah focused inward.  By that point, he was intimately familiar with his branching soul.  He’d spent years forging it, and years more exploring and using it.  So, when he directed it to intertwine with Fungal Leech, it responded eagerly.

The subtly glowing spores flared with light, fighting against the unnatural darkness to cast illumination across a fifteen-foot radius.  That revealed the first sight of Elijah’s enemies. 

As he’d expected, they were termites, and they possessed massive mandibles sized to snap through concrete telephone poles.  He could see the tension in their biological, spring-loaded mechanism.  It sent subtle fluctuations through the air, almost as if the atmosphere could anticipate their release.

Elijah attacked.

The termite charged.

He underestimated its speed, and in a microsecond, Elijah found out just how powerful those mandibles really were.  They exploded inward, nearly cutting him in two at the waist. 

Blood, flesh, and spores spewed in every direction.

But the termite was briefly immobile, and Elijah wasn’t going to let that opportunity go to waste.  He reared back and rammed Tyrant’s Edge into the insect’s head.  The thick chitin deflected the blade, but Elijah didn’t let that stop him from hitting it again. And again after that.

His gold-tier body responded to the challenge, pushing faster than it ever had before.  The result was that he slammed Tyrant’s Edge into the creature’s head seven times in the space of a single second.  Each blow harnessed the entirety of his strength, albeit with only his arm as a driver.  The rest of his body was held in place by the insect’s sharp mandibles.

The penultimate blow sent a deep rift arcing through the natural armor, and the final attack slipped through and into the insect’s brain.  When Elijah ripped it free, the thing went limp.

He fell to the ground, the form’s massive regeneration already putting in the work to keep him from collapsing. He added Wellspring to the mix, and his torso began to heal.  The first stage was entirely fungal, with tendrils snapping out to intertwine with one another.  Almost like sutures, though far thicker and integrated with his actual flesh.  Then, the reptilian meat regrew, sealing the wound.

It happened quickly.

Almost too fast to track with the naked eye. 

Without his increased reaction speed, Elijah never would have been capable of seeing both stages of healing.  With it, he could sense everything.

He snapped the blade out, sending an arch of ichor to splash across the tunnel.

By that point, the entire width of the rough corridor had been filled with yellow glowing spores, and they revealed more than a dozen termites waiting in the darkness.  All mandibulate soldiers with overly large jaws and hulking, muscular bodies.

They let out a chittering roar and charged.

Elijah stepped forward to meet them, and he quickly discovered that he was entirely outmatched.  They were faster, stronger, and in a lot of ways, more lethal than he could ever be.  One thing he had going in his favor was his ability to regenerate, though.  With Wellspring flowing through him and accentuating his already-ridiculous natural healing, Elijah was nearly impossible to put down.

At least by these creatures.

However, they certainly weren’t opposed to giving it a try.  Elijah didn’t blame them, either.  They were defending their homes.  And while he struggled to empathize with insects, the Druid within him still balked at the slaughter.  He pushed those misgivings aside, as much because every other part of him was onboard as due to the reality that he couldn’t afford to be distracted by second guesses.

He was committed.

Sure, there was justification in there.  The termites were invasive.  Left to their own devices, they’d probably spread across the entire ancestral world.  So, in some ways, Elijah was like an exterminator. 

But that rang hollow.

Especially now that he didn’t have the instincts of Shape of Withering screaming at him to destroy the creatures. 

Shape of the Reaver was ambivalent about their continued existence, save for the fact that it craved dominance over the termites, just as it did with almost everything else. 

It was just further confirmation that each of his bestial forms came with instincts of their own.  In this case, they’d committed him to a fight that he may not have otherwise embraced.  The only reason he didn’t retreat was because, for better or worse, he needed to kill a worthy enemy.

Orveth Kaal didn’t have a bunch of monsters running around, either.  To date, Elijah hadn’t seen any outside of the cells.  Instead, they were all beasts, guardians, and orcs. 

And dragons, though Elijah wasn’t prepared to hunt them.

Not yet.

All of his draconic enemies within the Empire of Scale were deities, and fighting a dragon that had reached that tier was far different from destroying an overgrown termite mound.

So, he pushed his objections aside and recommitted to the task. 

The next few hours were more of the same.  The mandibulate soldiers continued to attack, but gradually, Elijah adjusted to their tactics.  Moreover, he left a trail of spores behind that allowed him to map the tunnels.  And finally, those spores acted as a crack in the ongoing domain.  In turn, the suppression that made Soul of the Wild so ineffective gradually dissipated.

Not entirely.

It still pressed down on him with metaphysical force.  However, it didn’t feel as oppressive as it once had.  That gave Elijah a freedom of movement that increased a little with every termite he killed.

He was just beginning to think that his task would be simpler than expected when he felt something slam into him.  In less than a second, fifteen more impacts followed, knocking him into one of the walls.  When he tried to move, he found his efforts countered by a thick goo that burned through his partially fungal flesh.

Elijah focused into the darkness, pushing Soul of the Wild as far as he could. 

What he found was a swarm of smaller termites down the hall.  They clung to the walls and ceiling.  They carpeted the floors.  Each one the size of a donkey, and with thin, oddly shaped faces that resembled nozzles.

He didn’t need to wrack his memories to know what he faced.

Nasute soldiers.

He braced, trying to rip free of the hardening goo, but to no avail.  So, when they reared back to issue another volley, he had no choice but to brace for impact.