Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 75 - Fire (Patreon)

Elijah dove between a pair of spontaneously appearing spatial rifts, then sank his claws into the wyrm’s flesh.  He’d spent the past thirty or so seconds prying the scale free, meaning that he’d finally gained access to the meat beneath. 

Wither and Virulent Rot activated, seeping into the wyrm’s body.  It was just one more drop in the ocean of afflictions he’d already inflicted via his storm, but he reasoned that every single attack counted. 

However, it was becoming clear that he wouldn’t down the warring creatures through infections alone.  He’d expected as much from the very beginning, but the ongoing fight had more than confirmed that reality. 

Thankfully, Elijah was nothing if not versatile, and he had a lot of damage left up his proverbial sleeve.  Still, he remained in the Shape of Withering, snaking between rifts and using Absolute Grasp to cling to his enemy’s body as he continued his mostly fruitless assault.

It wouldn’t kill the wyrm, but it would set the stage for what he had planned.

“Need to get a move on,” came Gunnar’s voice.

“Working on it,” Elijah spat, his voice coming out as a hiss.  Partially because of his shape, but mostly because he was annoyed.  He didn’t like having a backseat driver in his ear.

As if to punctuate his presence, Gunnar fired.  The sound didn’t come until after one of the scales exploded in front of Elijah, giving him another opening.

Annoyed, Elijah still used it as an opportunity to spread more afflictions.

“Save your ammo,” Elijah growled.  “You don’t need to –”

“Focus on yourself.  I’m good,” Gunnar interrupted.

Elijah opened his mouth to offer a counterargument, but he cut himself off when he felt something stirring in the air.  A second later, he found himself nearly twenty miles away.

“Fuck!” he shouted, using Ride the Wind to keep from falling.  He dodged another quivering rift.  Suddenly, he understood exactly why Illska had been so frustrated.  It wasn’t the first time he’d been teleported against his will, and he suspected it wouldn’t be the last. 

Over the past hour or so, he’d experienced it four or five times.  The first couple had come out of nowhere, but he’d felt the third coming.  That simple stir of ethera didn’t offer enough of a warning for him to escape the teleportation, but it had given him hope that doing so was possible.

He just needed an extra second’s warning.

That was a tall order, considering he was currently dealing with microseconds. 

He shifted into Shape of the World Serpent and jetted across the intervening distance, resuming Shape of Withering when he reached the ongoing battle. 

“She’s getting antsy.  Whatever you plan on doing, you need to do it sooner rather than later,” Gunnar told him through the communicator. 

“I’m not fighting on Illska’s schedule,” Elijah replied.

“Tell her that.”

Elijah knew just how poorly that would go.  Illska was a lot of things, but patient was not an appropriate adjective to describe her demeanor.  He could only imagine her pacing back and forth, eager to resume the fight she had so far failed to bring to a conclusion.  Doubtless, she wanted to rectify that shortcoming, and she would only wait so long before she ignored the plan to which she had agreed.

In that way, she was definitely Mano’s other half and wholly draconic in demeanor.

It was no wonder that the rest of the Vyrin expedition had been so difficult to control, what with her as an example.  That kind of attitude was infectious, and they had clearly succumbed – to their detriment.  Many had died emulating her attitude.  The death toll would’ve been even higher had so many not been so grievously injured and forced to recuperate in the Vengeance’s clinics.

Now, they were all back on Earth, which came with its own issues.  Hopefully, Sara would know what to do with them so that they didn’t run amok.

In any case, Elijah once again used the Plagueburst-Falling Talon combination and went back to work infecting the wyrm that had once been Masasha.  She was the stronger of the two, and as such, she was his priority. 

Meanwhile, Gunnar continued to take his shots while the storm raged above.  Hornets, mutated and flying in sudden, jerky motions stung the wyrms as well.  Lightning fell, and the mist corroded the wyrms’ defenses. 

After another half hour, when Elijah received word that the last of the expedition were moving through the portal back to Earth, he decided he’d done everything he could to soften the targets.  More would help, but he’d already reached the point of diminishing returns.  Hopefully, his progress would be enough.

“Shifting,” he announced.  “Get ready.”

“Copy,” came Gunnar’s reply.

Illska didn’t have a phone, but she knew the signal.  In fact, Elijah didn’t think she’d be able to miss it.

After all, Flames of Renewal was quite a flashy ability. 

Elijah took on the Shape of Embers, planting his feet on the wyrm’s blue scales.  He could feel the creature’s muscles writhing beneath him, moving like subtle waves as she continued to fight.  He was forced to keep Absolute Grasp active just to maintain his position.  Otherwise, when the wyrms flipped upside down – which was often – he’d have been sent tumbling to the ground.

Elijah’s hands erupted into fire that traveled down the recently-summoned Thorn.  Those flames mixed with the spear’s natural green tint, changing the hue of its cast illumination.  At the same time, a cloak of ashes flowed from his pale-scaled shoulders, spreading across dozens of feet.  They too sank into wyrm’s body, adding another affliction – this one specifically tuned to weaken his enemies – to the mix. 

A subtle shift in the air announced another attempted teleportation.  However, now that Elijah was under the effect of three separate increases to his reaction speed, he saw it coming from a mile away.  And what’s more, he had time to dodge.

It wasn’t a spell, per se.  Instead, it felt more like a natural atmospheric event.  Though even those had structure.  And where there was structure, there was the opportunity to dodge. 

In the Shape of Embers, that was precisely what he needed. 

As Elijah leaped aside, avoiding a spatial rift that suddenly appeared in the spot he’d just vacated, he focused mostly on sensing more.  It strained every leaf he had available, but he managed to dodge three more before one clipped him.  Frustrated with having to start over, he watched the charges on Seed of Embers dissipate.

“You got this,” he said to himself, though his voice wasn’t audible over the sound of howling wind, clashing wyrms, and the crackle of the void as it seeped into the atmosphere. 

Lightning cracked, scorching across blue scales, and Elijah dove.  Another spatial rift appeared where he’d just been.  But he didn’t stop moving as he turned that dive into a roll, then a spring into the air.  He left behind two more rifts that had suddenly formed behind him.

The problem wasn’t avoiding the rifts.  If he kept moving randomly, he could mostly keep from being bisected.  However, Seed of Embers required conscious dodging, so he was forced to sense, then move. 

Doing so when the rifts formed over the course of a couple of milliseconds was borderline impossible without his buffs.  He’d discovered that as he built his storm and stacked afflictions upon the wyrm.  Doing it with his buffs was only marginally easier, especially when he was expected to string dodges together without making a single mistake. 

Fortunately, Elijah’s mind cultivation was perfectly suited for that kind of thing.  Some people focused on depth of thought.  Others, on mental defenses.  Elijah had focused on multi-tasking, largely so that he could handle himself better in battle.  Sure, he also had incredible defenses, but that had been something of a byproduct rather than the point of his cultivation.

Either way, his leaves – and the spores surrounding them – came in very handy when he was trying to track a thousand subtle cues in the atmosphere while contorting his body in a dozen different directions.  He sank into the act, treating it much like meditation. 

He felt every movement.  He sensed every flutter of spatial energy.  He could feel the crackle of lightning in the air and the spores slowly infesting the wyrm beneath his feet.  Yet, none of those mattered.  Instead, he relegated them to a single cluster of leaves, right next to the one housing all his pain and emotional turmoil. 

All the others – seventy-nine of them – were dedicated to dodging, and all the bits and pieces that comprised the act itself.

Elijah sank into an almost zen-like state, and with each dodge, Seed of Embers gained another charge.  That wasn’t to say that he didn’t fail.  Six times, he was forced to start over because he failed to dodge a rift.  One instance even saw him nearly lose his arm.  As he began to rebuild the charges, it dangled, nearly useless by his side.  Accounting for that limp appendage was a chore, but he made it work nonetheless.

And gradually, he accomplished his task.  He passed fifty charges.  Then a hundred.  A hundred-and-fifty.  Finally, he reached two hundred.

As he built those charges, he wove his soul through Seed of Embers, empowering it and branding it with the essence of his identity.  By the time he reached the limit of two hundred, he could scarcely contain the power.  His entire torso glowed with sizzling embers, and ashes swirled for hundreds of feet in every direction. 

He didn’t release it, though.

Not yet.

Instead, he raced toward the wyrm’s head, leaping over rifts and skipping along her blue scales.  Lightning flashed, rain fell, and spores swirled in his wake.  Finally, he reached his destination.

And at last, he released those charges into Flames of Renewal.

Unlike Herald of Regrowth, where the power focused inward, Flames of Renewal sent everything outward in a massive and fiery shockwave that tore across the wyrm’s back, leaving melted scales behind. 

That was just the first wave.

Nine more followed, each stronger than the last.  Elijah pushed his Mantle of Authority outward, forcing as much energy into the branches as he could.  A massive, ethereal tree bloomed into existence, briefly sheltering him from the spatial rifts.

That was necessary, too.  Because he’d finally gotten the wyrm’s attention.  She broke off her attacks against the other wyrm and focused her power on him.  In the sky above, two forces collided.  The tree of Elijah’s soul stood firm against a massive spatial storm that ripped into its limbs and attempted to sever the trunk.

Elijah felt every cut, and on more than a physical level. 

He pushed that pain aside just as he’d done with every other instance of agony.  He would deal with that later.  For now, he only needed to accomplish his task.  Everything else would wait until that was finished.

Or probably longer, given his track record.

In any case, he gave it no thought as, one after another, fiery waves scorched across the wyrm.  More rifts exploded into being, gaping wide enough to absorb some of the flames.  Yet, that spatial storm couldn’t even begin to swallow all of them.  The rifts were too random, too fractured, while the fire was ubiquitous.

At epicenter of each explosion was Elijah in the from of the emberkin saint, his billowing cloak of ashes swirling all around him.  Every eruption burned through a little more of his body until, with the ninth, he dissipated entirely.

As a cloud of ash, he joined the storm and looked down at the destruction he’d wrought.

For hundreds of yards in every direct, there was only fire and melted scales.  Beneath that was charred flesh.  And beneath that was boiling blood and superheated organs. 

In the middle was Elijah’s soul tree, towering over everything, its branches merging with the storm above.  The effect was hypnotic. 

And yet, even that wasn’t enough to kill the wyrm.

Injure her, yes.

But kill her?

That had never been the plan.

Even as a grove of trees exploded from the wyrm’s back, their roots snaking through her body like another infection, Elijah’s own body began to reform.  He let it happen, and as soon as he was once again solid, he once again shifted.

Into a comparatively tiny frog.

And with Way of Storms, he grabbed hold of the still raging inferno and forced it to integrate with the storm he’d built, layer by layer, to receive it. 

Until that moment, it had been focused on gradually chipping away at his enemy’s defenses.  Now, with the fires from Flames of Renewal, he could add a significant degree of destruction to the mix.