Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 71 - Rescue (Patreon)

“You’re a hard man to find,” Elijah said, thudding down beside Gunnar’s sniper’s nest.  The man was lying prone, his comically oversized rifle propped on a tripod as he stared through the scope.  He squeezed the trigger, the discharge sending a shockwave across the tiny landmass.  Elijah maintained his footing, mostly because of a quick activation of Absolute Grasp.  Otherwise, he might’ve stumbled.

“Kind of the point,” Gunnar pointed out, his voice entirely unconcerned.  That should not have been the case, considering that only a hundred feet away, a spiderweb of spatial rifts inched across the atmosphere.  From those leaked the caustic atmosphere of the void, threatening to unmake any living thing it touched.

Elijah could endure it, but Gunnar hadn’t progressed his body cultivation enough to say the same.  Still, he remained in place, completely ignoring the incredibly dangerous situation in favor of getting off a few more shots. 

“Are you even doing any good?” Elijah asked.

This time, Gunnar glanced at Elijah.  “Does it matter?  I’m not going to go down without putting a few shots downrange,” he stated evenly.

“That’s a pretty fatalist attitude.”

Gunnar barked a harsh laugh.  “The world is shattering a little more with every second,” he remarked.  “I think a little pessimism is warranted.”

He refocused and fired again.

This time, Elijah followed the shot’s trajectory.  The target was dozens of miles away, but the two wyrms were both large enough that they were still clearly visible.  Presumably, the attack landed, but to no real visible effect.

“We’re retreating,” Elijah said without preamble. 

“Pass.”

“What?”

“I’m not going anywhere.  I’ll cover everyone.”

Elijah almost rolled his eyes.  It wasn’t really a surprise, but it was annoying just how much Gunnar’s attitude reflected his own.  The difference was that Elijah had some reasonable notion of survival.  Gunnar had resigned himself to going down with the proverbial ship.

But just as assuredly, Gunnar wouldn’t be moved.  He had made his choice.

“Fine.  We’re going after survivors,” Elijah said.  “The Comet went down over that way.”  He pointed to the south.  “I’m going to go rescue them, and I could use your help.”

“Copy that,” Gunnar said, firing another shot.  Even as the ethera-laced bullet sailed across the atmosphere, the sniper picked himself up, shouldered his weapon, and asked, “Where do you need me?”

“I’ll leave that up to you,” Elijah answered. “There are a lot of dragons in that area.  We’re going to carve a path through them.”

Most of the other stranded survivors were much closer to the Vengeance, so they could be rescued by people like Bogoni and the rest of his team.  Mostly, they were pilots whose planes had been destroyed, but there were a few more conventional combatants who had been wounded badly enough that they’d had no choice but to hole up and hope for rescue.

But the Comet was far enough away that only Elijah – and maybe Miguel – possessed the combination of mobility and endurance needed to fetch them.  If the dragons had been dealt with, a real rescue operation would have room to work.  The only evidence that they still lived at all was a weak distress signal.  When one of the drones got eyes on the crash site, they saw that the once-magnificent plane had been reduced to scrap. 

Gunnar scratched his chin, then looked in the direction Elijah had indicated.  His eyes flashed as he used some sort of ability.  “Six positions,” he muttered to himself.  Then, refocusing on Elijah, he said in a louder voice, “I can do it.  But I need a promise from you.”

“You’re going to make rescuing people conditional?”

Gunnar shrugged.  “If I need to.”

“Fine.  What do you want?” Elijah asked, not knowing what to expect.  Even so, he was surprised at Gunnar’s answer.

“Get Palikina out of here.”

“What?”

“That’s all I ask.  Just make sure she retreats with everyone else.”

Until that point, Elijah hadn’t really put the pieces of the puzzle together.  Certainly, he’d noticed that Gunnar and Palikina were friendly.  The two had spent a bit of time together while he was busy with Fungee’s satellite colonies.  However, he hadn’t realized it had progressed beyond friendship.

The two were antisocial enough that, until Gunnar’s request, Elijah wouldn’t have even considered it a friendship.  Instead, he had assumed they were nothing more than acquaintances.

Clearly, he wasn’t as perceptive as he sometimes believed himself to be.

“I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s not what I said.  I don’t want your best effort.  Get it done,” Gunnar said.  “Or I’ll do it myself, and you can rescue those other people alone.”

“You’d let them die?”

Gunnar shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, they’re already dead.  And even if they weren’t, I don’t know them.  I don’t care about them.  I care about Palikina,” he pointed out.  “She’s what matters.”

Elijah shook his head, but in the end, he agreed by saying, “If I have to carry her to the dolmen myself, she’ll get out.”

“Good.”

Then, Gunnar strode toward his other ridiculous piece of equipment – a hoverbike that looked like it belonged in an old-school anime.  Once he’d thrown his leg over it, Gunnar turned and said, “Give me a couple of minutes to get into position.”

Elijah didn’t get a chance to respond before Gunnar activated the machine’s cloaking device and zoomed off.  Elijah still felt him via Soul of the Wild, but he couldn’t see any evidence of the sniper’s passage.

The world shook, and Elijah jerked his attention back to the warring wyrms.  Another web of spatial rifts had just erupted from the site of battle, and the ones nearest to Elijah had grown by a few dozen feet, sheering through a hunk of the landmass upon which he stood. 

Clearly, disaster wouldn’t wait on them to catch up.  So, he shifted into the Shape of the World Serpent and took off.  Speed was his primary advantage, but Scales of Eternity protected him if he got too close to one of the spatial rifts.  Still, he didn’t just barge through them.  Instead, he wove between them, slithering along until he’d left the tiny landmass far behind.

It wasn’t long before he caught sight of the other dragons who’d surrounded the Comet’s crash site.  There were at least three dozen circling the downed bomber, though they refused to get too close.  Every now and again, they’d swoop in and rake their claws across its fuselage, but that was the extent of their attacks.

At first, it didn’t make much sense to Elijah.  They could have simply destroyed the thing.  However, after a moment’s further thought, he suspected that they were held back by fear.  After all, that plane had destroyed their forward base.  They clearly had no idea if it could repeat that attack. 

So, they were just being careful.

A good thing, too, because if they’d not been so cautious, they would have long since torn it to shreds. 

Elijah shifted into the Shape of Withering, then adopted Guise of the Stalker before he got close enough for them to see him.  After that, he used Ride the Wind to gain some altitude, which gave him a good view of the battlefield.

Of course, the distant wyrms dominated everything with their repeated clashes.  The spatial rifts made the entire atmosphere look like broken glass, through which various landmasses were visible.  Above it all loomed Elijah’s storm, which persisted even without his input.  Every now and again, one of those cloudy columns would snake out to latch onto a dragon who drifted too close.  Most of the time, they managed to escape its clutches, but some proved far too weak.  Those fell towards the core, twitching as their bodies seized under the influence of a fungal infection. 

Or maybe it was the hornets stinging them from the inside out.

The soul-abrasive Cloud of Decay probably contributed as well.

Either way, it had adapted to his lack of influence to govern itself, after a fashion.  It weakened a little with every passing hour, but Elijah suspected it would be days before it dissipated entirely.

In any other situation, he might’ve found it fascinating.  A part of him still did.  But at the moment, he couldn’t afford the distraction of thinking about it.  Instead, he ripped his attention away and focused on the dragons.

They wouldn’t just stand aside as Elijah escorted the survivors to safety. 

And he didn’t have the means to kill them quickly or easily.  The only option was distraction.  Thankfully, he’d planned for it.

“Open fire,” he said into the phone in his mouth. 

“Copy that,” Gunnar said.  A moment later, a dragon’s neck exploded, digging a crater down to its spine.  The whipcrack sound of a gunshot followed closely on its heels. 

Elijah climbed.

Gunnar fired again.

The dragons turned their attention outward, but Gunnar was far enough away – and cloaked by a skill.  So, he was entirely undetectable.

That didn’t stop them from looking.

Which gave Elijah a perfect opportunity to work without fear of discovery.  Predictably, he deployed Cloud of Decay.  At first, the corrosive mist was practically invisible amidst the already-ocher atmosphere.  Even if it hadn’t been, the dragons were a little too preoccupied by Gunnar’s repeated shots.  A few had broken away to search for him, but Elijah knew that the sniper had already relocated. 

Meanwhile, he continued to build Cloud of Decay.  Then, something unexpected happened, and the mist merged with the atmosphere, augmenting what was already there.  So, when it descended upon the dragons, they were entirely unprepared for the much more potent effect.

Elijah activated Falling Talon.

When he hit his chosen target – a white dragon that looked like she might be a mage – he found much less resistance than expected.  He didn’t go straight through, but the impact shattered her spine.  That was proof enough that the dragons’ exposure to Cloud of Decay and the fungal atmosphere that came from his storm had weakened their defenses by a significant degree.

It was also confirmation that his plan had a chance of working.

Instead of climbing free in the Shape of Withering, Elijah immediately shifted forms.  This time, he took on the Shape of Embers.

It was the first time he’d used the form in quite some time, but it still settled onto his shoulders with comfortable familiarity.  He leaped free of the wound he’d just inflicted, bounded off of Cloud Step, and launched himself at the nearest dragon.  A second before he hit the creature, another of Gunnar’s shots landed, hitting the dragon directly in the cheek.  He wailed in pain, his back arching as he threw his head back.

Elijah hit with Thorn leading the way, the blade easily parting the creature’s scales.  When he ripped it free, it came accompanied by a shower of blood.  He’d only nicked the artery, but it was enough.

Losing blood wouldn’t kill a dragon.  Not alone.  But it would weaken them. 

Elijah leaped away, using Cloud Step again to leap toward another target.  This one was ready.  And Gunnar’s shot only glanced off her skull, leaving a painful but mostly inconsequential wound.

The orange-scaled dragon opened her mouth and spewed a column of molten rock at Elijah.  He saw it coming from a mile away, and he managed to dodge it.  However, doing so put him among a particularly unstable bit of the atmosphere.  Tiny rifts – maybe as wide as a razor blade – blanketed the area, forcing him to contort his body to slide between them. 

Thankfully, the Shape of Embers was incredibly flexible and quite slim.  Otherwise, he’d never have managed it.  As it was, it took every ounce of concentration to slither between the rifts while avoiding the dragon’s next attack.  When the follow-up column of molten rock reached the rift-strewn region, it split into a thousand smaller streams. 

Elijah dodged them all.

And fortunately, each successfully avoided stream added a charge to Seed of Embers. 

By the time he sprang free, he’d built more than fifty.  Not enough to do what needed to be done, but it was still a good start.

Elijah turned and leaped off of Cloud Step, clearing the ruptured area.  He quickly reversed course, and made a bee line toward the orange-scaled dragon.  She seemed incredibly surprised that he was still alive, but that was nothing compared to the look of shock on her face when one of Gunnar’s shots slammed into her temple.

The momentum of the sniper’s issue rocked the dragon’s head to the side, which put her right in line to receive a thrust from Thorn that cut straight through her eye.  Elijah plunged into that gelatinous organ, digging deeper until he found her brain.

That was when he spewed spores into the vulnerable tissue.

After all, Elijah wasn’t that interested in killing her.  Instead, he wanted to do something even worse.  Something suggested by his storm but not really confirmed.  He wanted to make every dragon’s nightmare come true.