Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 77 - Banes, Bullets, and Blades (Patreon)

Power.

It was a simple word, but to Illska, it had always been a concrete concept.  It represented a ladder to climb.  A goal to attain.  A pinnacle for which to reach.  And that was how she had always lived her life – ever climbing, ever reaching for more and more power.

Now, that lifetime spent striving for something more seemed almost quaint.

No one had ever told her that wyrmhood came with such steep increase to a dragon’s power.  Looking at Masasha, she didn’t see a dragon who’d failed.  Instead, she saw one that had been unshackled.  One that had broken the system’s fetters to become everything her ancestry said that she always should have been.

It was seductive, especially for someone who’d struggled for so long to find a path to transcendence.  Before she’d returned to the Vengeance, Illska had been on the verge of plunging into the core.  For months, she had prepared for what she hoped would be the tipping point for her body cultivation and the final step toward transcendence.

That would have to wait, though.

Just like she was waiting to play her part in the battle for Orveth Kaal. 

A spatial eruption sliced through the air in her direction, but she casually batted it aside with her sword.  That left another chip on the blade’s edge.  It wasn’t the first, either.  Up and down its length were more just like it, and some had even progressed into cracks that ventured toward the center. 

It wasn’t quite ruined, but it would never again be the same weapon it was when she’d entered the ancestral world.  Mano would understand, though.  He was of the opinion that if his weapons survived a fight intact, then the battle was beneath him.  Illska subscribed to the same idea, though not to the same degree.

He was never satisfied with a victory.  Meanwhile, Illska could savor her wins.

That was the primary difference between them, and inwardly, she wondered if that was the reason he’d achieved transcendence while she had not.  Some people believed that satisfaction was anathema to progress. 

Illska wasn’t certain where she fell on that particular subject, but she definitely didn’t think it was particularly healthy to win a battle, then immediately look to the next summit.  Perhaps that was the whole point.  Maybe transcendence, by its very nature, required an unhealthy mindset.

For her part, she preferred to fight hard and celebrate even harder. 

Her beloved enjoyed the aftermath as much as she did – Illska made certain of that – but in his more introspective moments, his mind would always drift.  He claimed he kept going back to the abyss because the people he’d fought beside would die if he wasn’t there.  However, Illska knew her husband well enough to recognize the half-truth of that statement.  He cared about his comrades – deeply and without reservation – but his motivation drew from a different source.

He was always looking for another enemy to defeat.  Another challenge to overcome.  The next horizon.

In that way, he and his adopted brother were incredibly similar. 

Elijah didn’t crave battle like Mano did, but he sought a different sort of challenge.  He wanted to see everything, to explore new worlds and encounter novel forms of life.  He saw the laws of nature as mere suggestions, and he would not let himself be constrained by perceived impossibility.

They represented two sides of the same coin.

At times, Illska wanted to emulate that philosophy.  She wished she could force herself to look at the world like that.  For better or worse, she just wasn’t built like that. 

If that meant she would never transcend, then so be it.

Whatever the case, she couldn’t ignore the reality of what she saw in front of her.  Masasha had not transcended, and yet, she exhibited power almost like someone who had.  It wasn’t as controlled, instead seeming mostly instinctive, but if that was possible for a peak deity wyrm, then what could the future hold for someone like her?

What could wyrmhood represent for Illska?

She shook her head.  No matter how much power was on offer, she couldn’t bring herself to truly consider that as a viable option.  As wild as she sometimes seemed, she valued her own mind too highly to give it up just for a little more power.  No – she would do things her own way, and if she failed, she would accept it.

Still, Illska could see how tempting such power – easily obtained as it was – could be.  To some, the fact that it would require a descent into wyrmhood would be a small price to pay.  Not if they’d looked into Masasha’s eyes, though.  When Illska had done so, she had seen just how little of the former dragon was left.  It was a fundamental transformation, perhaps even more complete than transcendence itself.

Even the thought seemed ridiculous, at least on the surface.  If Illska hadn’t seen it for herself, she wouldn’t have believed it.  And then, if she had seen the power it granted…

Best not to think about that.

Instead, she refocused on the fight in the distance.  It was more than a hundred miles away, but she could see it clearly enough.  She watched as Elijah erupted into nine waves of flames, each one more destructive than the last.  It was a level of power that should not have been possible for a demigod.  Most deities would struggle to display that kind of destructive potential.

He did it casually, surviving a spatial storm that should have torn him to pieces.

Witnessing it brought a significant degree of pride.  And a little jealousy, if she was honest with herself.

Then, even as an ethereal tree towered over the entire battle, merging with the swirling clouds of Elijah’s storm, Illska heard a sound like a cracking whip.  An instant later, she saw a single projectile weaving through the spatial field.  At the last moment, it burst into a hundred copies.  Then, each one of those copies begat copies of their own.  In the space of a few milliseconds, there were thousands of bullets bearing down on Masasha.

And they quivered with potential Illska hadn’t thought possible.  Not from a sniper from Earth, at least.

She had seen bane weapons before. She’d been on the wrong end of them as well, and she’d barely survived.  Those experiences could never be forgotten.  That feeling of wrongness remained lodged in her mind.  So, she recognized that bullet for what it was.

How had someone from Earth gotten a dragon bane weapon?

There was no telling.

They weren’t that uncommon.  Not in the grand scheme of things.  In the Empire of Scale and among its allies, they were banned.  Simply possessing one would result in the wielder’s execution.  The maker would be killed, alongside any apprentices they might’ve taken under their wing.

Maybe their families, too.

If they belonged to a clan, then they would be punished as well. 

If anyone else from the Empire of Scale saw that bane bullet streaking across the sky, the sniper who’d fired it would be hunted down and slaughtered. 

Yet, there was no one else around.  Not that mattered, at least.  The rest of the Vyrin expedition had fled, some against their will.  The other dragons were either dead or gone, fled across Orveth Kaal to escape the amalgamation of Elijah’s storm and the spatial rifts that had splintered the world.

The ones who hadn’t were probably dead.

If they weren’t, Illska would ensure that they never escaped the ancestral world.  Because if she didn’t and word of that bane weapon got back to the Empire of Scale, the entirety of Earth would be at risk. 

She refused to allow that.  Not because she cared about the native humans or the settlers who’d come to colonize the recently integrated world.  Instead, her refusal was rooted in the fact that two members of her family called that planet home. 

That was where Elijah’s grove was.  And Saraalinisa had adopted it as her home as well.  The fact that they were there meant that Earth automatically got her protection.  Mano’leth’s as well.  And to an extent, Kirlissa’s. 

At the moment, that meant that if any other dragons saw that bane weapon being used, they would soon find themselves at the wrong end of Illska’s sword.  It wasn’t personal.  Just a matter of protecting her family.

In any case, she didn’t think anyone was around.

If they were, she’d deal with them later, because that shot was the signal that her part in the battle was fast approaching.

She embraced her core, cycling ethera through her body in an effort to increase its power.  Her self-buffs didn’t work like most.  Instead of cast and forget, she was forced to keep her ethera cycling continuously.  That gave her a couple of advantages.  The first was slightly increased potency over their more mundane counterparts, but the real advantage came from sustainability.

Because of the nature of her buffs, they used very little ethera.  So little, in fact, that the cost could not overtake her regeneration.  Due to that, she was capable of sustaining them practically indefinitely.  Certainly, she had limits.  Keeping them active required incredible concentration as well as quite a lot of pain tolerance.  However, Illska was so accustomed to it that, by this point, she barely noticed the cost.

That changed when she forced more ethera into her soul.

The power of her buffs increased two-fold.  She pushed harder.  Three times.  Then, at last, when she couldn’t eke any more power out of them, they were five times the power they’d exhibited in their natural state.

Her muscles bulged.

Her eyes twitched.

Her skin took on an ashen tone as the wounds that had persisted past Elijah’s healing finally mended.  So long as she could keep it up, she would be unstoppable by anyone but a transcendent.

Or that was what she’d always believed.  Now that she’d seen what Elijah was capable of as a demigod, she had begun to reassess that belief.  In any case, she knew that she would need every ounce of power she could generate if she was going to do her part in the coming clash.

Elijah had set the stage.

The sniper had sufficiently weakened Masasha.

Now, Illska needed to put her down like the beast she had become. 

Without further ado, she launched herself forward.  The miles between her and her enemy blistered past in a blur as she activated Unstoppable Charge.  Most Charge-type abilities relied on erecting a shield around the user.

Not Unstoppable Charge.

It manifested a shield, but not one meant to protect.  Instead, it encased her sword, feeding off its power as well as her inflated attributes.  Then, Illska used Projected Blade, which worked in conjunction with that shield to create a massive copy of her weapon. 

It was sized to slay a dragon.

Finally, she used Cascade, draining her strength and funneling it into Projected Blade.  It shimmered with increased power, its size surging to unprecedented levels.  Weakness fought against her natural strength, and though the latter came out on top, she knew what the ability meant.

A single, all-powerful strike.  All or nothing.  Once it landed, she would be considerably weakened.  Her constitution would be unaffected, but her strength would drain down to something appropriate for a demigod.

In most cases, it was a terrible strategy.  However, she’d already fought Masasha and the other wyrm for so long, and to no effect.  She needed a decisive strike.

That was what Cascade was meant for.

With every passing second, the ability compounded, multiplying the power contained in her strength by many times.  The end result was a mile-tall blade meant to sunder planets.

It would have to be enough.

When she drew close enough, she swung.

It was like swinging one of Mano’leth’s training axes.  Thankfully, Illska had plenty of experience doing just that, and she powered through the pending exhaustion.

Masasha never saw the blade descending.

Not when she was trying to deal with thousands of dragon bane bullets slamming into her side.  For once, Illska wasn’t teleported away, and on the heels of that barrage landing, her sword connected.