Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 76 - Snipes and Storms (Patreon)

Elijah seized the storm.

Various parts – fungi, Cloud of Decay, hornets, and fire –fused into a single entity, all held together by Way of Storms.  In turn, it only maintained its influence by the thin thread that was Elijah’s perception of what constituted a storm.

Though it was thin, it was strong.  Elijah’s will had become iron.  He wouldn’t let his assessment stray.  He didn’t alter reality.  Instead, he just looked at it from a different perspective that said just about anything could be a storm. 

Then, just as he fed it ethera, he realized something that should have been obvious.

If fire and fungi could be a storm, then couldn’t the same be said of the spatial rifts erupting across the atmosphere?  Some were naturally occurring and mostly stable.  Those, he couldn’t affect.  He knew that much instinctively.  However, that did not apply to the spontaneously appearing and disappearing rifts he’d been dodging all along.

Those were a lot like lightning strikes, weren’t they? 

That simple thought was enough to skew his perception to include the spatial rifts. It was like looking at a blue sky and convincing himself to see purple. Elijah grabbed hold of them, and though they resisted, his grip remained firm. 

Only then did the blue wyrm that had once been Masasha recognize what was going on.  Perhaps she felt her control slipping.  Or maybe she wasn’t capable of such clear thought.  Whatever the case, she fought back, and viciously.  Suddenly, the spatial rifts felt like they’d been coated in oil.  He tightened his grip, but that just made them slip away more easily.

At the same time, the two wyrms turned their attention to him.

Their enmity for one another wasn’t forgotten, but merely put on hold.  Like animals, they were more than capable of recognizing a more potent threat.  And to them, that was what Elijah represented. 

His storm descended, scorching and infecting, scouring and poisoning.  Hornets swarmed their every orifice, ever searching for some weakness in the wyrms’ defenses.  They found few.

But even one was enough.

The wyrms fought back, sending more spatial rifts to split the fungi-dominated hornets into hundreds of pieces, but they couldn’t get them all.  In the meantime, the wyrms split their attention and focused on Elijah.

He leaped, barely avoiding a slashing claw the size of a semi truck.  Then, he bounded off of solid air and into a rift.  He stayed there for only an instant before passing through another and back into Orveth Kaal, but the void left his rubbery skin in blisters. 

Elijah once again ignored the pain.

Instead, he focused on stoking the storm, pushing more and more ethera – and his soul – into the construction.  It coalesced even further, producing an unholy amalgam of fire, fungi, poison, and spatial rifts. 

Any other time, and it would have been enough to destroy a continent.

The wyrms weathered it like the ridiculously powerful creatures they had become.  Never before had it been clearer that the system was holding dragons back.  The before and after of Masasha’s power showed as much.  As a dragon, she was strong enough to fight Illska to a standstill.  Sure, she had been forced to rely on potions to replenish her ethera and heal the damage Illska caused, but she’d still managed a stalemate. 

Now, she could hold up to Elijah’s storm while fighting another wyrm.  She barely paid attention to Gunnar’s frequent shots. 

It should have been glorious.

But to Elijah, it was just sad.  Not that she’d grown so powerful.  That was impressive enough.  Rather, he saw it as a judgement of dragons themselves.  It was as if the system had tamed them.  And Elijah had been around enough captive animals to recognize that there was a marked difference between a kept creature and one that lived in the wild.

It wasn’t a one-to-one comparison, but there was a thread of commonality there that Elijah simply could not ignore. 

Unfortunately, he didn’t have the mental bandwidth to govern the storm, dodge the wyrms’ attacks, and consider the philosophical and metaphysical implications of what he’d discovered.  Perhaps there would be time to do so at some later date.

Elijah continued to use the spatial rifts to dodge the wyrms’ continued attacks, but he wasn’t always successful.  More than once, he found himself narrowly avoiding being torn to pieces by spatial attacks.  Other times, he failed to dodge a swiping claw, only to be swatted hundreds of yards away. 

Thankfully, Elijah still possessed a significant degree of body cultivation.  That, coupled with his constitution and his ability to heal, kept him going.

Still, he could feel just how close his limits were.  The contents of his core, drained by his efforts with the storm as well as the constant need for healing, had long since passed the level of comfort. 

But the wyrms were almost as bad off.  Their scales melted, and they suddenly found themselves on the wrong end of the spatial rifts.  Huge chunks of their massive bodies had been sliced free, some disappearing into the void.  Others fell toward the distant core.

Was he winning?

Elijah knew he wasn’t.  He’d run dry of ethera long before he put either of them down.  And yet, that had never been his goal.  Instead, his efforts were just the first part of the plan, meant to soften the targets so that others could finish them off.

To that end, he continued to work, pushing the storm as hard as he possibly could – until he had nothing else left to give.

Once his core had shrank from a lake into a puddle, he called it.

“I’ve done everything I can,” he said into the communicator.  “You’re up.”

                          *

Gunnar watched in awe that he tried not to feel.  Even from nearly a hundred miles away, he could feel the heat of that storm.  More, he could see the evidence of its destructive power.  Any landmasses that had been within a few miles of that fight between blue wyrms were now gone, either swallowed by the spiderwebbing spatial rifts or simply melted into slag.  The latter robbed them of whatever magic kept them aloft, sending the remnants falling toward the core.

Even the tiny landmass upon which Gunnar was perched had grown so hot that a mortal would have been egregiously burned.  Even he found it uncomfortable.

Not that he would allow that to deter him.

Gunnar had spent his life ignoring discomfort.  Once, he’d lain in a fire ant bed in the middle of a meadow, waiting for his target to show his face.  By the time he had, Gunnar had been eaten alive by the detestable things.  But he’d never moved.  Not when he was bitten hundreds of times, and not when enemy patrols had come too close for comfort.

And at the end of those torturous two days, he’d taken the shot.

His target lost his head.

And Gunnar slowly retreated, one more bad guy marked off his list.

So, a little heat wasn’t going to distract him.  Nor did the apocalyptic storm – like a hurricane of fire, lightning, green-and-yellow clouds, and hornets – draw undue attention.  He acknowledged it, then calculated how it might affect his shot, then moved on.

Over the past few hours, he’d continued to take shots at the creatures.  It didn’t do a lot of good, but he figured it wouldn’t hurt, either.  Meanwhile, the atmosphere had continued to destabilize.  It was worst in the couple of miles surrounding the wyrms, but the effect had continued to spread.

If they kept going, it would swallow the entire ancestral world.

Not quickly, but as surely as Gunnar needed to breathe, the world would be shattered.

He could only hope that Elijah’s plan – simple as it was – would be enough to avoid that fate.  Gunnar didn’t have a death wish.  He wanted to live as much as the next man.  However, there was also a part of him that refused to give in to what he thought of as inevitability.  He’d spent his entire life defying the odds, doing things that other people considered impossible.  And while he wasn’t an aberrant prodigy like Elijah Hart, he had learned to trust himself to come out on top.

If he didn’t?

Then, that was just the way it was meant to be.  He would retreat if necessary, but he truly believed that he could help avoid catastrophe.  Not for the sake of Orveth Kaal.  Not for Elijah Hart, either.  Rather, he just didn’t like the idea of losing a planet just because a pair of dragons couldn’t control themselves.

He intended to help put them in their place.

And he also couldn’t help but consider the feat of strength he would add to his Legacy if they were successful.  Killing deities was one thing.  Not quite unprecedented for a demigod like him, but rare enough that it would help augment his next class evolution.  But a pair of wyrms at the peak of the realm?

That would be big.

As he considered that, Hart continued to stoke his apocalyptic storm. 

Then, suddenly, the call came.

“You’re up.”

So far, Gunnar hadn’t used any but his most basic abilities.  In part, that was an effort to minimize his ethera usage.  After all, he’d been running a little low when Hart had given him the plan.  Now, his core was as full as it could be.

There was another reason he’d held back, though.

Too much damage, and he might’ve garnered some attention.  That would have ruined everything.  In most cases, he could escape his enemies’ focused attention.  but against those ridiculously powerful and entirely unhinged monsters, he didn’t think that was possible.

So, he’d laid low, trusting his abilities to keep him hidden until he could make a bigger difference in the battle.

And that time had come.

He reached into his pocket and gathered a very special round.  He’d commissioned it for one specific purpose, and he had been forced to search far and wide to find anyone willing to make it.

Earth’s Tradesmen wouldn’t touch it.

Instead, he had found a willing dwarven Blacksmith on a faraway world.  The dwarf worked for the Green Mountain Mining Company, and the only reason he’d agreed to the commission was because Gunnar had revealed its purpose.

He didn’t want to kill Elijah Hart.

He hoped it would never come to that. 

But the wyrms in the distance had reaffirmed his precautions, telling him just how close dragons were to going over the edge.  Hart was closer than most, and he’d never shied away from slaughter.  There was a good chance that one day, Hart might need to be put down.

Thus the round he carefully loaded into Silent Death.

It was made from metal harvested from the depths of a black hole and infused with vespiran venom.  And that was just the raw materials.  The method the dwarf had used to create it was a mystery known only to him, but one thing was absolutely certain – it was a bane weapon meant to kill dragons.

Appropriately, it was named a dragon slayer bullet.

Hopefully, that bane applied to wyrms, too.

Once the dragon slayer bullet had been loaded into Silent Death, Gunnar worked the bolt and chambered the round.  Then, he took aim.  Ethera gathered in his soul, then drained into the weapon.  One chamber filled.  Then the next.  And another after that, not stopping until all nine chambers were full of ethera.

It took nearly half the contents of his core.

And he hadn’t even activated any abilities yet.  Once the weapon was charged and subtly vibrating, Gunnar ticked off his list.  Sunder Armor.  Cripple.  Explosive Round.  And finally, Assassinate.

The last one had evolved three times since he’d first gotten it, though the name had never changed.  Nor had its purpose.  So long as he remained undetected, it would vastly increase the power of any shot he fired.

And in this case, the power contained in the dragon slayer bullet.

He took a deep breath, aiming.

Finally, he used Bullet Storm.

As he exhaled, he squeezed the trigger.

The weapon kicked hard enough to shatter any other man’s shoulder, but Gunnar absorbed it with a silent grunt.  The ground beneath him shattered entirely under the shockwave, and a tremor told him that it would soon crumble into dust.

He never took his eyes off his target, though.

The dragon slayer bullet stormed across the miles, igniting the air with a trail of blue ethera.  Gunnar watched it subtly bend according to his intended path, avoiding rifts and landmasses. 

Then, just before it hit, it seemed to shatter.

One bullet became a thousand.  Then two thousand.  All with the same power he’d infused into his original shot.

They hit the blue wyrm in the ribs, just behind the front leg, and Gunnar grinned.

It was a perfect shot.