Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 14 - Limited Power (Patreon)

The mental attack washed over Elijah’s defenses like a wave crashing against a jetty.  The combination of his Antlers of the Wild Revenant and his uniquely structured mind worked together to create an insurmountable barrier.  The termite queen’s assault wasn’t meant to batter through those defenses, though.  Rather, they slithered through the cracks that Elijah didn’t even know existed.

It was further evidence that, despite his advantages, Elijah wasn’t nearly as invulnerable as he liked to think.  Sure, he could stand up to the likes of Skahan.  He could resist the larva-based attempt at mental control he’d experienced back in the Broken Crown.  And he could even maintain his sanity before the attention of a transcendent-tier manta ray. 

But this attack?  It almost made it through.

Fortunately, Elijah’s spores were both strong and adaptable.  They swarmed the invading psychic tendrils, latching onto and smothering them.  That gave Elijah a chance to regain his footing, mentally and physically.

Once he did, he refocused on the chamber. 

The queen dominated the space, but she was not alone.  Her bulbous mass, stretching as long as a passenger train and ten times as thick, rolled with undulating obesity.  Some bits of her skin, such as it was, sagged.  Other parts stretched taut.  The result was a disgusting sight that Elijah knew he’d never forget.

It was nothing compared to the smell.

Elijah had experienced some truly foul odors before.  He had developed  a nasty habit of swimming through sewer pipes.  He’d stood in the middle of a battlefield of rotting bodies.  But he had never smelled anything like the queen’s chamber.  It was a combination of sweetness, decaying fish, birth, and something disgustingly acidic that reminded him of vomit.

It turned his stomach.

As he processed that, Elijah catalogued the rest of the cavern.  The space was more than large enough to accommodate the massive queen, and it featured jagged stalactites jutting down from the ceiling.  Between those were hundreds of tunnels, each one wide enough to permit passage of the nasute soldiers.  Though they weren’t big enough for the much larger mandibulate termites.

Elijah saw hundreds of the former skittering across the ceiling.  Of the latter, there was no evidence. 

Instead, the ground was covered by crawling larva.  Rather than appearing defenseless, as Elijah might have expected, they looked a lot more like lampreys, with sharp teeth and a swarming, piranha-like behavior.  They roved across the chamber floor, latching onto dead carcasses clearly brought there by the workers.

Everything about the queen’s chamber made Elijah want to turn away.  Not out of a desire for preservation.  That had faded the second he’d laid eyes on the queen.  But instead, because he just didn’t want to see, smell, or hear any of it ever again. 

Elijah advanced, though he knew he couldn’t kill the queen in Shape of the Reaver.  He could feel her vitality even from a quarter of a mile away.  In a lot of ways, the reaver and the queen were similar.  She could probably heal from just about anything he could throw her way.

But he’d spent quite a lot of time in a similar situation, and he knew precisely how to counter it.  The key wasn’t to try to whittle a regenerator down.  No – dealing with one required a quick end.  Overwhelming violence was the key.

And he had two forms capable of that.

The first was Avatar of Storms.  With it, he could conjure enormous elemental disasters capable of destroying the entire landmass. 

But in this instance, Elijah didn’t want to use it.  Not unless absolutely necessary.  Instead, he considered the Shape of Embers.  He hadn’t used the form quite as much lately, probably because he expected it to evolve sometime soon.  Probably at the end of the demigod levels.

Because of that, he’d formed a somewhat erroneous perception that it had become outdated.  Of course, at its base level, that idea was accurate.  Even with two hundred charges, it just wasn’t strong enough to kill deities.  However, Elijah was more than capable of overcoming that weakness by infusing the ability his soul. 

That didn’t just ramp the power up.  It practically counted as an evolution in and of itself.

However, before he used that, he wanted to soften the queen and her subjects up.  To that end, he shifted into the Shape of Withering and rode the wind to the top of the chamber.  Two things happened the second the form took hold, though.  First, his irrational hatred of the termites returned, and more forcefully than ever before.  Elijah had to catch himself before he activated Falling Talon to attack the queen more directly.

Second, the colony came alive.  Termites poured out of the holes in the ceiling.  Some were exactly what he expected – the nasute versions that spewed goo in his direction.  However, another type came on their heels.

Flyers.

They were smaller than the ones he’d encountered on the surface, but they were still capable of inflicting quite a lot of damage.  So, Elijah immediately took to evasive maneuvers, wheeling between them as he sought cover amongst the stalactites.

As he did so, he activated Cloud of Decay. 

The flyers swarmed, though when they came into contact with the venomous mist he left in his wake, their wings withered and they began to fall.  When they hit the ground, the piranha-like larva collapsed onto them, failing to differentiate between members of the colony and food.

The queen redoubled her efforts, sending one mental attack after another at Elijah.  He responded by coughing up a steady stream of Plaguebursts, all the while filling the chamber with Cloud of Decay.

Unfortunately, the nasute soldiers weren’t as vulnerable as the flyers.  However, Elijah had more than a few tricks up his sleeve.  So, once the enormous cave was filled with green-and-yellow fog, he retreated to an isolated corner of the room and dove into a tiny hole. 

It was one of the few not connected to the larger network, which gave him an opportunity to shift into his human form and embrace Eternal Plague.  The swarm of hornets manifested a few dozen at a time, though Elijah held them at bay until there were enough of them to gain a foothold.

Only then did he let them loose.

In the chaos of the green fog, they went unnoticed for quite some time.  By the time the termites mustered a response, it was far too late.  Elijah had already summoned tens of thousands of them, and hundreds more were conjured with every passing second. 

Of course, doing so came with a significant cost.  Despite the spell being one of his oldest, it was still extremely hungry when it came to ethera.  Fortunately, Elijah had ways to counter that.  Grove Conduit was the most steadfast, but False Grove was incredibly useful as well.

Elijah’s own core had grown too, so he managed to keep Eternal Plague going for more than an hour.  By the time he let it lapse, the entire chamber was filled with stinging hornets.  Already, some of the termites had succumbed to the combination of their afflictions and Cloud of Decay.  More would die in the following minutes.

Still, Elijah wasn’t finished softening them up.

Instead, he summoned Thorn out of his Arcane Loop, took aim, and unleashed Fungee’s spores.  They immediately took hold and began to spread, leaping from one half-consumed corpse to another.  At the same time, they began to infect the larva, killing most, but only slowing the strongest among them.

It was apocalyptic.

And Elijah had no intention of letting up.

Despite his previous resolution to finish things with Shape of Embers, Elijah instead chose to take advantage of his hiding place and summon a storm.  It wasn’t long before he’d taken on the shape of the storm frog, which allowed him to command the elements of nature.

Threads of various elements danced among the fog, visible to Elijah through Eye of the Storm.  He took hold of them, cycling through the process of creating a lightning storm.  Once, such a feat would have required Elijah’s unfettered concentration.  The first time he’d done something similar, he’d forced himself to go through each layer, step-by-step as if he was checking off a to-do list.

Now, the flows of ethera leaped to his command without him even thinking about them.  The moisture, the updrafts, the opposing pressures – it all formed so easily that it almost surprised him.

Then, the first bolt of lightning lanced down from his conjured clouds, striking the queen.  Elijah couldn’t see it, but he could feel the electricity scorching its way through her bulbous body.

She panicked, sending out spears of psychic energy in every direction.  And through sheer luck, she managed to hit him with one.

It didn’t really affect him.  His mental defenses held strong.  However, the contact did allow her to find him.  Before two seconds had passed, the remaining swarm converged on his position.

With his hiding place ruined, Elijah leaped free of the tiny cave, already taking on the Shape of Embers.  Returning to that form was like putting on an old and comfortable coat.  It just felt right, and in a way that none of his other forms ever did.

In those, he was comfortable. 

As the emberkin saint, he felt like he had found his place.  His purpose.  He felt as though he belonged in that form.  Part of that came from the fact that he’d used it so often.  It was the trump card he employed when he needed true combat prowess combined with the power of a nuclear bomb.

A potent mix.

Yet, there was more to it than simple usefulness.  Like his other shapes, the emberkin saint came with its own instincts.  Mostly, they concerned fighting, and to a degree of sophistication that often made Elijah wonder if it was truly a beast.  However, there was something else in there, something Elijah could only refer to as enlightenment. 

It gave him the impression of wisdom, which didn’t make a lot of sense, given the fact that none of his forms came from sapient creatures. 

But there it was, all the same.

Elijah raced ahead, already dodging various globs of goo as well as rushing larva.  More than a few mandibulate soldiers had arrived as well, and though they’d been affected by Elijah’s cascade of attacks, they were far more durable than their comrades. 

Thankfully, they were also slow, at least compared to the Shape of Embers.  And that meant that building charges of the Seed of Ashes was incredibly easy.  Before Elijah had even crossed the chamber, he’d already built a hundred.  The next hundred came just as quickly.

And the second he reached that mark, he unleashed Flames of Renewal.

The cycle remained familiar, but the intensity of that first explosion was something entirely new.  Elijah no longer had to hold back when infusing his soul into the ability, and because of that, the destruction was unprecedented. 

The termites couldn’t endure the heat of one wave, much less nine.

By the time Elijah fused with the ash, everything but the queen was dead.  And she wasn’t far from it, either.

It had been a calculated risk, using Flames of Renewal.  Not because he was afraid it wouldn’t work, but rather, because he feared that it would work too well.  After all, he needed the creature’s body, and for more than one reason.  If there was nothing left, he would need to start over.

Fortunately, as he’d already discovered, she was a creature of vast vitality.  Not unsurprising, given her role in the colony.  But even then, by the time the forest sprouted and Elijah reformed, she was barely holding on. 

Elijah transformed, taking on his draconic shape.

She cringed away from him, obviously afraid.

That did nothing to assuage the budding guilt that came from destroying an entire colony.  There were still termites left, and a lot of them. But the loss of the queen would announce a slow death spiral. 

Because of him.

He stood over the queen, his muscles tense.  Just as he raised his claw, she mustered a last line of defense.  It took the form of her strongest mental attack yet, and while it was no more successful than the ones that had preceded it, some bits and pieces made it through.  Some of the queen’s thoughts came with them.

Despair.  Confusion.  Pain.

Elijah pushed them aside and, with a final swipe of his claws, ended her suffering.