Path of Dragons 17 - Chapter 82 - Loose Ends (Patreon)

“I’m sorry.  What did you just call me?” demanded Carmen, her hands on her hips.  She looked like she’d been through a battle of her own, with multiple burns on her upper arms.  They didn’t look serious, but Elijah forced himself to resist the urge to heal her.  Something told him that wouldn’t work out well.

Otherwise, she was incredibly sweaty, and her shirt featured a half-dozen holes.  Even her leather apron looked like it had been singed, and one half of her head sported much shorter hair than the other half.  Elijah didn’t need to be a genius to think that it had been burned off.

Still, she looked healthy enough.  She’d lost a little weight – basically all fat – which made her muscles appear even more pronounced than normal.  That wasn’t to say she’d ever had much to lose, considering she had always been quite fit.

“Um…I wasn’t talking about you.  I was talking about…well…the situation.”

“You called me a loose end,” Carmen retorted.

Elijah sighed, then ran his hand through his hair.  “Look, we don’t have time for this,” he said.  “This planet is going to become very uninhabitable in about three days.  You have to leave.  And you need to take any of your Tradesmen with you.”

“Elaborate,” she prompted, rolling her hand for him to go on.

Elijah shook his head, then described the situation as best he could.  That meant doing his best to hammer home just how powerful the Poet was. 

“If this guy’s so strong, then why is he a prisoner?”

“I got the impression that he’s here because he wants to be here,” Elijah said.  “Kind of a self-imposed punishment.”

“But the empire put him here, right?”

Elijah shrugged.  “I think it’s more complicated than that.  Anyway, I don’t think he wants to leave.  I think he sees himself as…I don’t know…kind of a last line of defense for this world.  Or something like that,” Elijah said.  He ran his fingers through his hair.  When he pulled his hand away, it was covered in ash.  He hadn’t had much of a chance to shower, given that as soon as he’d sent Kurik and Maya back to Earth, he, Illska, and Ok’tarik had set off for Agmar.

And they didn’t stop during the entire journey, meaning that they flew for almost three days straight.  Elijah could handle that kind of physical load, but it didn’t leave a lot of room for hygiene. 

When he’d arrived at Agmar, it looked much the same as it always did.  However, there was a very significant absence of ships in the area.  What was left of the fleet still hadn’t made it back, so it was largely undefended. 

That wasn’t to say it was deserted.  Most of the work-slaves – minuse the rowers, of course – were still there.  And in a pinch, they could act as fighters.  Not as well as the actual warriors among the orcs, but they still possessed the same savage instincts. 

Regardless, it didn’t take Elijah long to reach the Star Forge, where he’d found Carmen working diligently alongside the orcish craftsmen and a smattering of humans and dwarves from Earth.

“So, your solution is for everyone to leave,” Carmen reasoned.  “When will I get the chance to come back?”

Elijah shrugged.  “A year, according to the Poet.  That’s how long it will take him to repair the damage,” Elijah answered.  He didn’t mention the stuff about claiming the planet, largely because he still wasn’t sure what that meant.  Was it something tied to the system?  Or was it a different mechanism?  Maybe it was even metaphorical or symbolic.  Elijah had no idea.

But he figured he’d figure it out at some point.

Besides, he had plans for the next year, and he expected that during the execution of said plans that he would get some more insight into what was expected of him.  Until then, he would need to just play the situation by ear and hope for the best.

“A year,” she said, tapping a soot-covered chin.  “I can work with that.”

“I don’t think there’s a choice.  The Poet said that the orcs could survive, but anyone else stuck here will be destroyed,” Elijah countered.

“How does that work, though?  What makes the orcs special?”

“I don’t…”

Elijah trailed off as something occurred to him.  Until that moment, Elijah had never really considered the question of why the orcs could survive in areas humanity could not.  Specifically, the inner reaches of Orveth Kaal, an area caustic enough to count as a cultivation resource for most people. 

The orcs routinely ventured into the rings.

When the questioned had occurred to Elijah in the past, he had assumed that it was because it was their home and growing to maturity in such dense atmosphere inoculated them to the ill effects.  However, now that the Poet had given him another hint as to their natures, Elijah suspected that something else was at play.

Were they simply more resilient than others when it came to hostile ethera?  Or was it something deeper?  After all, Ok’tarik was capable of ethera and vitality manipulation that exceeded anything Elijah could do without something like Way of the Storm to bolster his abilities.

Maybe that was the answer.

Or at least the seed of one.

He wanted nothing more than to start studying them right away.  He even considered a few experiments that might give him some of the answers he sought.  However, the situation was urgent enough that he couldn’t spare the focus necessary to do the questions justice.

Instead, he just said, “I don’t know.  But he was pretty clear about it, and I…well, trust is a pretty steep hill, but I will say that I believe he’s telling the truth.  He doesn’t have much of a reason to lie.”

“That you know of,” Carmen pointed out.  “And you obviously don’t understand him very well.  Or at least you don’t have all the information.”

“Fair.  But I don’t think he’s lying about everyone needing to evacuate.”

Carmen shook her head, then turned her back on Elijah.  For a long moment, she stared at the Star Forge in the distance.  It glittered like a tiny galaxy contained in a simple anvil, with dozens of orcs orbiting it as they went about their tasks. 

“Fine,” she finally said.  “I’ll gather my people.”

With that, she set off to do just that.  A few of the other Tradesmen reacted poorly, their responses ranging from stunned silence to arguments.  Carmen showed her leadership capability in each instance, tailoring herself to the situation.

In the meantime, Elijah considered his next step.

Time would be short.  He knew that going in.  But if everything went even remotely well, he would have enough time to do what needed to be done.

With that in mind, he left the Star Forge behind and quickly found Illska.  She’d refused to go into the orcish city, instead waiting outside.  As she did so, she glared at the nearby orcs as if she was ready to destroy them all at the slightest offense.

Maybe she was.

Elijah didn’t care.  She was more than capable of restraining any murderous impulses she might feel, and he trusted her to do just that.

“I don’t like it here,” she muttered, pacing back and forth on the edge of the cliff into which Agmar had been carved.  “They make my scales itch.”

“Whatever.  I need you to do something,” Elijah said.  Then, he explained his plan.  The first step was for him to go back and fetch Fungee’s landmass.  He intended to drag it toward Agmar.

“Why?”

“That’s how my spell works.  If I want to transport other people, I have to be in a dolmen.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier just to take Carmen and her people back there?”

“Not for me. I can move a lot faster on my own.  Even when I’m towing that big rock,” Elijah said.  “In the meantime, I need you to take Ok’tarik and head to the gate near the core.”

That was his plan.

Once Carmen and the rest of Earth’s crafters had evacuated Orveth Kaal, Elijah intended to finally cross over into Silvara.  Was it the best plan?  Probably not.  However, he thought it was absolutely necessary if he was going to accomplish his goals. 

He’d gained a lot of levels during the extended battle, and while he hadn’t really acknowledged his gains – and there were some significant ones – he knew that his time as a demigod wasn’t going to last nearly as long as he’d expected.  If he wanted to advance his cultivation before getting there, he needed to get started as soon as possible.

And Silvara offered him an opportunity to do just that.  Elijah couldn’t pass that up, especially when he’d been given what amounted to free reign for a year. 

Could he have used that time more productively? Maybe.  He could have retreated to Earth and scoured the knowledge base for how to claim an ancestral world.  However, Elijah had never been much for that kind of research.  He could do it, but he found that he usually had better luck solving problems by looking inward.

That meant cultivation.

Even then, a year might be cutting it kind of close.  Thankfully, Elijah had spent quite a lot of time working on his mind.  Apparently, guiding the growth of Fungee’s satellite colonies was a great for preparing his mind for the final push, especially when he did so with that explicit goal in mind.

It wasn’t the primary purpose, but it had definitely been part of his plans.

At the end of the day, Elijah wanted to reach the next tier of cultivation before he ascended to deity.  That meant advancements in mind and core.  He didn’t take any of it for granted, but he felt almost certain he could accomplish the former.  The latter was a little less assured, both in terms of method as well as setting.

The reality was that advancing his core was the energy-hungry aspect of cultivation, and there weren’t that many places suitable for such an endeavor.  On top of that, he’d not given the actual method a lot of thought.

That would need to change.

So, as he raced across Orveth Kaal in the Shape of the World Serpent, he did just that.  He also pushed himself to his top speed, which was a rarity.  He didn’t worry about dodging predators.  Instead, he simply outran them, using Dimensional Leap whenever it came off of cooldown.

Like that, he crossed the intervening distance in less than a day.  Considering that the same journey in the opposite direction had taken him three days, that was quite an accomplishment.

But that was the easy part.

Now, he needed to use a new ability he’d gained at four-eighty:

World Tether

Bind a landmass.

Only usable in the Shape of the World Serpent.

Size of the tether dependent on ethera attribute.  Strength of the bond dependent on soul cultivation.  Cooldown determined by mind cultivation.

Cooldown: 6 Months, 1 Day, and 3 hours.

Elijah had gained another ability evolution opportunity at level four-seventy, but he hadn’t had time to go over his options.  He’d given them a cursory glance, but he knew he would need a lot more time to make the right choice.  However, World Tether was one of the few instances where he gained an entirely new ability.  Most of the time, he was only given the opportunity to evolve previous abilities.

Which told him that World Tether was a foundational part of the Shape of the World Serpent’s toolkit. 

To date, that form had been almost purely meant for travel, and in that respect, it did precisely what it was supposed to do.  It was fast and agile, and it gave him the ability to move through the void.  For most forms, that would be enough to justify its inclusion in his list of forms.

However, world serpents were creatures that began life as deities.  Elijah had seen one in the void, its entire length coiled around a massive planet it had dragged into that space between realities.  To put it lightly, the world serpent was no normal beast.

It made sense that World Tether would be part of its toolkit.  Elijah suspected that the word “landmass” was doing a lot of heavy lifting, and the second he’d read that description, he’d thought of dragging planets around.

Like Gorveth.

Either way, he wasn’t quite ready for that.  Instead, he would start with Fungee’s landmass.  To that end, he used World Tether for the very first time.