Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 78 - Weathering the Storm (Patreon)

Illska’s massive ethereal blade fell.

And for a second, the world stopped.  It was as if Orveth Kaal had simply had enough.  Not surprising, given what it had endured.  The area directly affected by the battle wasn’t particularly large, especially when considering just how large the ancestral world was.  What did a thousand or so square miles really matter when the planet was the size of Earth’s sun?

However, Elijah had enough insight into what lay beneath the world’s apparent structure to recognize that it was being attacked on two fronts.  The first was what anyone could see – spiderwebbing rifts tearing across the atmosphere, sheering through landmasses and pouring the void’s corrosive essence into the air. 

That was bad enough.

But it was nothing compared to what was happening beneath the surface of normal awareness.  Elijah could barely sense it, but what he did feel was enough to make him worry for the planet’s future. 

Rightly so, too.

After all, Orveth Kaal wasn’t a normal planet.  It had once been shattered and set adrift in the abyss, where it had remained for who knew how long.  Only when the Seekers – draconic Explorers from the Empire of Scale – found it had anything changed.  They, along with many other Tradesmen and space mages within the empire had worked tirelessly for many years just to start the process of bringing it back from the abyss.

That had established it as an ancestral world.

The system had set conditions for its ascent, establishing the century-long cycle that saw demigods performing maintenance while the deity trial focused on exterminating the orcs. 

It was a good system, but one poised on a razor blade.  If anything went wrong, the whole thing could collapse.  And that wasn’t even considering what would happen if someone like Kirlissa stepped in to change things.  The whole balance would be skewed, and the system would withdraw its assistance.

That would send it back into the abyss.

Or worse, tear it apart and let the pieces drift off into the void, never to be seen again.  Forget reestablishing it as part of the Empire of Scale.  It would be gone forever.

Alone, neither of the two wyrms could destabilize the ancestral world.  However, together, they had enough power to do just that.  Not as deity dragons, but as wyrms?  They were far more powerful than they should have been, given their tier of progression. 

And that was before Elijah had stepped in and stoked the fires of the spatial storm.  It was also before Illska’s attack, which alone was enough to break worlds.

Until that moment, Elijah had questioned his sister-in-law’s power.  Everyone else said she was a peak deity who would one day transcend the system.  Yet, he’d never really seen evidence of that potential.

Now, he did.

He very, very much did.

The world held its breath as Illska’s ethereal blade – a mile tall and half as wide – fell upon the wyrm’s head.  The blue-scaled former dragon summoned a spatial storm to block the blade, but Elijah used the storm under his control to absorb some of the attempt’s energy. 

Not a lot, but just enough weaken it.

Illska’s blade slashed through it like it wasn’t even there.  Meanwhile, the wyrm panicked like a trapped animal, trashing and screeching.  Not physically, but with her power.  Spatial rifts echoed from her body, slicing through the air and widening to admit more of the void into the atmosphere.

In response, Orveth Kaal’s atmosphere boiled.

Somehow, Gunnar managed to land another shot.  This one wasn’t the spectacle he’d already issued.  Instead, it was just a normal shot to the wyrm’s eye.  Barely a distraction for her, really.  But it did clear that hurdle, garnering just enough of her attention – for only a blink – to let Illska’s blade land.

At the last moment, the wyrm flickered, shifting a few dozen yards to the left.  Illska’s blade still hit with the finality of a nuclear bomb.

Elijah saw a brief flash before he – along with the storm he’d summoned – was swept away by a massive shockwave.  He didn’t really see the blow so much as he felt it, like the echo of a cut that tore his soul to shreds.  As he tumbled through the air, he pushed his Mantle of Authority to the fullest extent of its capacity, his branches arcing out for miles all around.

That stabilized his immediate surroundings.

And yet, that was nothing compared to the devastation he saw when he finally arrested his own momentum and looked upon the carnage wrought by a single blow from Illska’s blade.

Half of the wyrm was simply gone.

And the other half looked as if it had been mangled by a blender.  The once-pristine scales had darkened to more of a navy blue, as if they’d been scorched by Illska’s blade.  Her head remained intact – at least to the extent that it had survived Gunnar’s barrage – and she continued to roar in defiance.

Even as bits of her body rained toward the distant core, she summoned one weakening spatial storm after another.

Elijah used Way of Storms and corralled the storm Illska had dispersed.  Through force of will, he slammed the disparate parts back together and commanded it to attack the faltering wyrm.

The storm obeyed, snaking out tendrils of ocher mist to wrap around the enemy.  Hornets buzzed and attacked her suddenly exposed innards, while Cloud of Decay seeped into her veins.  They pulsed a disturbing orange, sending poison throughout her decimated body.

Meanwhile, Gunnar continued to fire one shot after another in a staccato rhythm.  No single shot should’ve done much damage, but he had a knack for finding just the right spots, as if he could sense the wyrm’s mounting weakness.

Perhaps he had an ability for that.

Elijah saw Illska fall, but he couldn’t spare the time to rescue her.  She had told him that she would be weakened, but she’d assured him that she would be fine.  He decided to trust her, even as her limp body fell through the atmosphere.

However, Elijah also recognized that, for all the damage they had done, it wasn’t enough.  At that very moment, spatial bands snapped out of the former dragon and wrapped around the falling pieces of meat.  An instant later, they were back where they belonged, slowly merging with the rest of her body.

She wouldn’t be able to replace the parts that had been obliterated, but Elijah suspected that she could do enough to stay alive.  And if that happened, then their whole plan would be undone.

They’d put everything into killing her.

And it hadn’t been enough.

Before Elijah could think better of what he was about to do, he leaped off of a gust of wind and shifted into the Shape of the World Serpent.  Even as the storm raged above him and the world shuddered on the verge of breaking, he barged through spatial storms until he caught Illska in his mouth. 

A few moments later, he’d covered a hundred or so miles to deposit her on a barren hunk of rock that was barely holding itself together.  She was unconscious, and Elijah sensed that her core was entirely empty.  But she was alive.  That had to be enough for now. 

He turned away and took aim at the wyrm.

The other blue-scaled creature had recovered from the shockwave and was barreling back into battle.

Elijah aimed to emulate the creature.

He coiled.

Then, he shot forward.  Using every ounce of power he could, he pushed himself to a purely ridiculous speed.  One second, the wyrm was nothing but a blue dot on the horizon, and the next, she loomed over him, half of a dragon gone feral. 

At the last second, he shifted.

This time, he took on his dragon form.  His wings spread like massive branches, and he turned his head into a spear.  With antlers.  So, not a spear at all, but certainly some kind of weapon.  Even as he bore down on the wyrm, he cast all three of his healing spells, knowing just how much it was going to hurt. 

And it did.

The impact came like a bomb inside his brain.  For a second, he blacked out, but the spells did their job, sending pulsing surges of vitality through him.  Without the shield from Bough of the World Tree – or the passive shell associated with his Chausses of the Wild Revenant – he would have done much more damage to himself.  Even with them, along with his massive constitution and body cultivation, he shattered a good hunk of his skull. 

He could only hope that he hadn’t done permanent brain damage.

However, when he came back to himself, he realized that he’d done precisely the job he’d intended to.  His head stuck out of the wyrm’s back, while the rest of his body was inside her chest cavity.

It took a second to recognize that the ringing in his ears was her screaming.

Elijah once again cast his healing spells, then shifted into the Shape of the Reaver.  It was his most durable form, and what’s more, it would give him the tools to finish her off. 

The sudden loss of size made Elijah feel like he was back in the Chimeric Forge and battling through a canyon filled with writhing tentacles.  However, this time, those tendrils were strips of meat covered in wyrm’s blood.

Elijah immediate activated Bracken Crown, Mantle of Thorns, and Mycelial Army, all of which had just come off of cooldown.  Within seconds, that cavity was full of mushroom men and writhing tendrils.

And a very determined fungal reptile hybrid covered in bony stroma. 

Elijah threw himself upward, using Tyrant’s Edge and the rest of his abilities to dig through a wall of flesh to find the wyrm’s throat.  He could’ve simply lodged himself there, and she might’ve choked to death.  But he wanted a quicker end to the battle.

Or rather, he needed it.

Even inside her throat, he could feel the world steadily destabilizing outside.

And as far as he knew, there was only one way to kill a creature like the wyrm quickly.  He intended to destroy the brain.

So, he carved his way through her chest and to her snaking esophagus, which gave him slightly easier access to her head.  That wasn’t to say it was easy, though.  The muscles of the throat continuously constricted him, but the stroma created an involuntary cough that shot him upward.

He hit the roof of the wyrm’s mouth after only a couple of seconds. 

That was when he resumed his gruesome task.

Getting through the bone was the most difficult part, but Elijah was nothing if not persistent.  He was forced to activate his short-term buffs, though, including a couple he hadn’t used in quite some time.  He threw everything he had at the problem, and eventually, he was rewarded with a crack.  By that point, the mushroom men had grown to nearly fifty feet tall.  And more importantly, they took up most of the wyrm’s panicked attention.  She continuously teleported chunks of their flesh away, which only made them larger and stronger.

If she’d been a little more aware, she might have recognized that.  But as a wyrm?  It never occurred to her that all-out attack was a bad idea.

In the meantime, the other wyrm rejoined the battle, as evidenced by the sudden jostling Elijah was forced to endure.  Even ensconced in flesh, he found himself bouncing around as the two fought.

Then, at last, Elijah reached his destination.

Any other time, he might’ve stared in awe.  Or immediately set out to study what he saw.  Yet, there was no time for Elijah the biologist.  The situation needed Elijah the fungal reaver.

He plunged headfirst into the brain, his stroma having dissipated.  But he still had Tyrant’s Edge, and it cut brain matter just fine.  In the back of his mind, Elijah knew that the only reason he’d made it so far was because of how much damage the wyrm had endured.  Everything from the still-ongoing infection, evidenced by the ocher tendrils snaking through her flesh, to Illska’s devastating blow had slowly taxed her constitution and regeneration to the extent of her attributes.

In short, they’d worn her down.

Now, it had fallen to Elijah to push her over the edge.

He did just that, hacking and slashing, clawing and scraping.  He even bit her.

The organ fought back, sending electrical pulses coursing through Elijah, but his regeneration was so high – especially with Wellspring flowing through him – that he could ignore it. 

It wasn’t until he’d destroyed two-thirds of the brain did Elijah finally accomplish his goal.  The electrical pulses ceased to fire.  Ethera drained away.  And at last, she fell unconscious for the very last time.  Then, she was falling – with Elijah inside her skull.