Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 24 - Unethical Necessity (Patreon)

The first punch took Elijah by surprise, though it likely shouldn’t have, given what he’d just suggested.  It hit him like a truck to the jaw, sending a deep reverberation of pain up his temple and into his brain.  The impact briefly stunned Elijah, but he recovered just in time to see the second punch coming.

This time, he rolled with it.

The strike still connected, actually fracturing his jaw.  However, it didn’t shatter like it would have if he’d taken it full force. 

Elijah let the momentum take him into a roll that ended with him having regained his feet.  A second later, he began the shift into the Shape of the Reaver.  Ok’tarik didn’t let him complete the transformation in peace, though.  Instead, he rushed Elijah, hitting him in the stomach with a shoulder tackle that would have driven him to the ground, had it not been for a quick activation of Absolute Grasp.  That let him keep his feet long enough to shift fully into the bestial form.

But that was never going to be enough.

From the moment of Ok’tarik’s attack, he knew he’d need to restrain the orc.  So, he used Bracken Crown and Myclelial Army.  The two worked in tandem, with massive fungal tendrils bursting from the ground to wrap around Ok’tarik’s legs.  At the same time, twelve fungal soldiers took form, leaping onto the orc and pinning him down.

Ok’tarik fought back.

Elijah would have expected nothing less.

However, there was a limit to the orc’s fury as well as his strength, and after a few minutes of battling through spongey tentacles and increasingly large mushroom men, Ok’tarik’s anger finally petered out.  It was replaced by resignation.

“Do it,” he growled, his voice muffled by a fungal tendril wrapped around his head.  “Kill me and take the child.  I hope he grows strong enough to kill you!”

“Calm down,” Elijah sighed, his own voice distorted by the form.  It came out slightly raspy, but with enough base to vibrate the ground.  “I don’t want to take your kid.  I want to give them a chance to overcome the system’s restrictions.  But to do that, I’m going to have to do something that might go horribly wrong.  I don’t know if you’re willing to take that risk.  If not, then we’ll find another way.  But if you are, then we might have found the means to fight back against the system.”

“Liar!”

“I’m not lying!” Elijah insisted.  Then, to prove the point, he shifted out of Shape of the Reaver and let his abilities lapse.  Ok’tarik proved that he could control himself when, after falling free, he pushed himself to his feet and faced Elijah.  He seemed incredibly calm. 

“Explain.”

Elijah did just that, describing what he’d done to the crab back in the Hartwood Grove.  It was an invasive spell, but it had effectively turned an ordinary beast into a guardian.  For a lot of people, the difference wouldn’t have been obvious.  But for Elijah, it was as clear as day. 

Before, the crab’s potential had been capped by the limitations of its species.  And it was just a crab – a comparatively weak bottom feeder that had only grown as strong as it had because of its habitat.  The Hartwood Grove had nurtured its kind for one generation after another until the Hartwood Sentries decided to bond with them and create a mounted division, led by Rosabella.

Without that, they would have remained what their natures dictated.

However, with the influence of the Hartwood Grove, they’d taken one step toward overcoming those limitations.  Elijah had pushed that further by applying Dictate of the World Tree and connecting that singular crab to the World Tree.

He wanted to do something similar to Ok’tarik’s unborn child.  The difference was that he wanted to do so while the infant was still in the womb, which he believed would make all the difference. 

Changing something’s nature was difficult, but Elijah had already proven that it was possible.  With enough time, a guardian crab would have probably been born among his island’s population.  By using Dictate of the World Tree, Elijah had accelerated that process. 

Still, it wasn’t perfect.

That crab wasn’t a born guardian, and afterwards, Elijah had felt the difference.  Not as keenly as he might have expected, but a difference nonetheless.  One day, that crab would bear children, though.  And those would be one step closer to becoming guardians in their own right.

“You want to turn my child into a guardian?  Like a beast?” asked Ok’tarik, having regained some measure of calm.  He was obviously still quite skeptical, though. And prone to anger.

“That’s not what I said,” Elijah pointed out.  “Orcs are already sentient by nature.  We agree on that, don’t we?”

That they’d formed a working society was evidence enough of that.  The real question – and one to which Elijah had no answer – was whether or not it was closer to that of humans or something more like a pride of lions.  Clear organization.  Obvious hierarchy.  But was there a spark of something else in there?

Elijah didn’t know.

But he suspected that bridging the gap between them and the World Tree might give them an opportunity to become something more than their current incarnation.  After all, Elijah had already seen evidence that something like that was possible.  The war elves he’d killed outside Kalki traced their ancestry back to orcs. 

Their aggressive nature and conqueror’s mentality aside, they were obviously sapient.  Which proved that orcs could become something else.  The question was whether or not breeding was the only answer, or if Elijah’s method might work.

“Is it safe?” asked Ok’tarik.

“I don’t know.”

Ok’tarik turned away, lost in thought.  To Elijah, the solution was clear.  Without his intervention, the child was doomed to become just like all the others.  But with Dictate of the World Tree, it had a chance.

On top of that, it wasn’t as if Ok’tarik had only fathered a single child.  In his life, he’d likely sired hundreds, if not thousands.  Elijah had probably killed a few.  But that was before the orc had attained sapience – and all the emotional attachment that came with that achievement.

Did it make him weaker?  At times.  But Elijah also believed that the orcs could never escape their fate if they didn’t embrace such a state.  Was that important to him?  Increasingly, it had become so. 

It was so easy to see the orcs the same way the system clearly did.  They bred uncontrollably and spread rapidly, conquering everything in their way.  And they never tried to settle, either.  Instead, they consumed everything, not unlike locusts.

But was that because they’d never been given the opportunity to grow?

Or was that just who and what they were?

Elijah believed in giving them the chance the system denied them.  Perhaps he’d come to regret it.  Maybe he’d fail.  He could accept either.  What he could not live with was not even trying.

Elijah told Ok’tarik as much, then added, “This is the only way I know to help you.  If you want this alliance to work, then this is what I need.”

It was a harsh ultimatum, but Elijah fully believed that the entire thing would fall apart if he couldn’t give the child a chance at a better life.  Otherwise, what was the point?  If Ok’tarik couldn’t leave without the system’s permission, than none of them could.  Not without Elijah’s intervention.

And if that was denied, then the whole alliance would prove pointless.

The logic was sound, but Elijah still felt guilty for issuing those terms.  Ok’tarik didn’t like them either, but in the end, he gave Elijah a nod.  “Very well.  But if you kill my child…”

Elijah said, “Then we’re back where we started.”

“Indeed.”

He didn’t point out that Ok’tarik had likely watched hundreds of his own children die, and without giving their deaths a second thought.  Why this one would be special was explicable only via the orc’s sapience.

A double-edged sword, if ever there was one.  Obviously, it would’ve been easier if he lacked attachment.  He could fight and conquer without thought for unrelated things.  But Elijah believed that said attachment – love, perhaps – could drive the orcs to new heights. 

If only he could give them a ladder.

That was where the child came in.  Hopefully, the World Tree would cooperate and give the unborn infant a leg up.  But he couldn’t do it without Ok’tarik.

Or rather, he could.  But he’d have to kill the orc and return to Agmar, hoping all the while that no one asked after their warchief.  They probably wouldn’t, and for the very same reasons that Elijah wanted to address. He’d passed their tests.  He’d performed their rites.  Now, he was an unquestioned part of the orcish hierarchy.

If he wavered, they would attack.  So long as he presented strength, they wouldn’t ask any questions. 

“So?” he asked. “Do you agree?”

Ok’tarik didn’t answer.  Not for a long while.  When he did, there was a note of sorrow in his voice.  “I…I do.”

Elijah wanted to exclaim in excitement, but he could read the room a bit better than that.  So, he matched Ok’tarik’s somber tone – or attempted to – and said, “Then let’s get back to Agmar.  Makit looked on the verge of giving birth, and I want to get this done while the child is still in the womb.”

Elijah half expected an objection, but Ok’tarik offered none. Now that he’d agreed, he would not second guess his decision.

So it happened that they left the palace behind and took to the skies.  As they flew, Elijah could scarcely contain his bubbling excitement.  Did he recognize that experimenting on unborn children was unethical?  Of course.  In another life, he’d been a scientist, and those standards stuck with him, even a century later. 

Yet, Elijah intended to go forward anyway.  Was it because he considered orcs less important than humans?  Maybe.  He wouldn’t have dreamed of doing the same thing to a human child.  But there wasn’t a choice in the matter.  Not as far as Elijah could tell, which was the whole point.

Those thoughts followed him all the way back to Agmar.  Considering that the trip took the better part of a week, he went over his reasoning time and time again.  He explored alternatives.  He questioned his motives.  He subjected the entire line of thought to the strictest scrutiny.

But in the end, he kept coming back to the same conclusions.

So, by the time they reached the city, Elijah was as resolute as ever. 

Which was a good thing, because there was no time to spare, as they discovered when they returned to Ok’tarik’s ship to find a laboring Makit.  There was no real intelligence behind her eyes, proving her status as a work-slave.  However, there was a fieriness about her that Elijah found interesting.

Not attractive, but that might’ve been because she looked little different from a male orc.  If it hadn’t been for the bulbous belly, Elijah might not have recognized her gender at all.

“Do it,” Ok’tarik stated.  Then, he told a pair of rowers he’d brought along to hold Makit down.  She fought them.  She didn’t know how else to respond when Elijah approached and laid his hand on her belly.  Maternal instinct went that far, at least. 

But with their strong hands holding her still, she could do nothing.

That did elicit no small degree of guilt on Elijah’s part, but he kept telling himself that he was doing the right thing.  That it was the only choice.  And for the most part, he convinced himself.

A nagging doubt maintained its position in his mind, though. 

Perhaps it always would.  Even if things worked out, he would never escape the reality of what he’d risked. 

Once again, he pushed his doubts aside.  He ignored his guilt.  And more than anything, he focused on the task at hand.  Without any further delay, and with the orcish woman writhing beneath his fingers, Elijah embraced Dictate of the World Tree.