Path of Dragons 18 - Chapter 26 - A Teaching Moment (Patreon)

It didn’t take Elijah long to identify the culprit.

She wasn’t particularly conspicuous, of average build and equally mediocre looks.  She’d also dressed to blend into the crowd, with an outfit that did nothing to call attention to her.  The only reason Elijah knew that she was the one to initiate the attack was that his counter left her briefly unconscious, having fallen to the floor due to the backlash.

The crowd parted as Elijah stalked forward.

A few people muttered, obviously frightened by his expression. 

And rightly so.  Anger wasn’t really the right word for what he felt.  Instead, that simple emotion had been infected by much more complex feelings.  Like frustration.  Resignation.  Resolve.  The amalgam produced something wholly different than simple anger.  Something simultaneously stronger and more controlled. 

Something that, from the outside, was frightening to behold.  Inside, Elijah was pure ice.  That allowed him to quickly assess the situation, and what he found was potentially reprehensible.

Before he settled on that conclusion, he needed to be certain, though.

He focused not on the woman who’d fallen to the ground.  Nor did he pay attention to the other two women who knelt beside her, obviously distressed by her collapse.  He didn’t even acknowledge the matching necklaces they wore, though he’d already catalogued them – and the curious ethereal signature they put out. 

Instead, he locked eyes with the man standing over them, both physically and metaphorically. 

Elijah had met him before, though it had been long enough since that meeting that he’d all but forgotten the man.  The only reason he remembered him at all was because he’d interrupted his friend’s wedding. 

Vinnie Santoro was an impressive-looking man, and he clearly wanted everyone to know it.  Unlike the three women at his feet, he was dressed to be seen.  He wore a light blue suit with white snowflakes dancing up the sleeves, a matching fedora, and a pair of shoes that glistened with both light and ethera.  In his hand was a diamond-tipped cane that looked a little heavier than it had any right to be, suggesting that it could be used as a weapon.

Around him flowed white ethera, dropping the temperature enough that those around him filled the air with misting breath. 

He was at least eight inches taller than Elijah, with the broad shoulders of a man who took fitness seriously. 

“Vinnie.”

“Hart,” the man responded with a smirk.  “Fancy meetin’ you here.  You finally decide to grace us mortals with your presence?”

“Something like that,” Elijah answered.  Then, he smiled – a cold and predatory expression that made even Vinnie flinch.  “You know, I remember a party not so different than this.  You tried something similar.  Do you remember that, Vinnie?  Do you remember what happened?”

Santoro’s brow furrowed in anger, though he maintained control.  “I remember you sucker punching me.”

“Is that how it happened?” Elijah asked.  “I recall it differently.”

“Things change,” Santora pointed out.  He still spoke with the same rough accent he’d always used, though he had clearly made some effort with his speech patterns.  Probably in an effort to be taken more seriously.

“And some things stay the same,” Elijah countered.  “Are you the reason she attacked me?”

He didn’t even look at the woman, but he sensed her all the same.  She was frail.  Not exactly starved, but obviously not well.  His initial impression was that she was thoroughly average-looking, but upon closer inspection, Elijah revised his assessment.  She was actually quite pretty, in an innocent sort of way.  However, hard living had clearly robbed her of some of her looks. 

Drugs, maybe? 

Starvation, certainly. 

Ill treatment.

The list probably went on and on, and Elijah didn’t need to be a genius to recognize the source.  Vinnie had always been a terrible human being, and Elijah had heard enough stories about him to suspect that he was the reason the woman looked so rough around the edges.

The same was true of the other two women, though they had developed a stringy, muscular appearance that reminded Elijah of starving wolves.  Both were obviously dangerous, even if they clearly weren’t at their best.  It was the difference between a professional athlete and a primitive hunter.  Both were capable of incredible feats, but the latter’s desperation and motivation could drive them to greater heights.

“She is mine,” Vinnie admitted. 

“Yours?”

“Did I stutter?” the man demanded.  “Mine.  As in, she belongs to me.  If I wanted to, I could snap her neck right here and now, and nobody could stop me.”

“You really think that?” Elijah asked.  “You think I can’t stop you?”

“I would like to see you try,” Vinnie stated.  “I’m not the same man I was before.  I’m better.”

“Deity, huh?” Elijah asked.  “Congratulations.”

“I see you’re still lagging behind, though,” Vinnie pointed out.

Elijah shrugged. “I suppose I am,” he admitted.  “Doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and take a blatant attack.”

Vinnie laughed. “Kill her, then.  I won’t stand in the way.  There are plenty more just like her back home.”

“Plenty more…”

The implications drove right to the heart of the matter.  So, he knelt beside the woman and asked a very simple, yet extremely impactful question.  “Are you a slave?”

She didn’t answer, except to flinch away from him.  But one of her handlers gave the subtlest of nods. 

That was all Elijah needed to hear.

He pushed himself to his feet, then ran his hand through his hair.  A second later, he let Hidden Authority fall away, exposing his Antlers of the Wild Revenant.  They erupted with green fire, vibrant and flickering.  Before anyone could respond, Thorn sprang to his hand.

“What –”

Elijah never let Vinnie finish his question.  Instead, he marshalled his Mantle of Authority, wrapping it around his spear.  It obeyed him more quickly than it ever had before, a benefit of his advance in mind cultivation.  His soul wound so tightly around Thorn that, had anyone the senses to observe it properly, they might have wondered where one ended and the other began.

Inside the weapon, the fungal spores came alive, merging with Elijah’s soul, enhancing it as they did so.  It was at that point that Vinnie managed to catch up to the situation. 

Ethera swirled, encasing his body in white armor.  It had clearly been modeled after ice, given the jagged appearance and frigid cold it emanated.

Elijah didn’t care.

He thrust Thorn forward.  The leaf-shaped, crystalline blade slammed against the armor, not even chipping it.  A sound like a ringing bell echoed through the entire space as a shockwave swept through the crowd.  The closest to the clash fell to the ground, while even those at the outer edges of the room felt their clothes fluttering.

Vinnie grinned, obviously pleased that his armor had fouled Elijah’s attack.

He had no idea that the spear wasn’t really the weapon of choice, though.  He discovered that an instant later when Elijah’s soul exploded forward.  To Elijah’s metaphysical senses, it looked like a tree branch, though one sharpened to a weaponized tip and covered in claw-like thorns.  But it was also as flexible as any vine.

With unerring aim, Elijah directed his soul through Vinnie’s defenses, meager as they were.  He’d obviously neglected his cultivation, probably focusing only on body and core.  Even that lagged behind what Elijah would have expected from someone at his high level.

While he might’ve advanced those aspects, he’d clearly only done the bare minimum to achieve an upgrade.  That was just as obviously the wrong choice.

He screamed as Elijah’s soul ripped through him, shredding everything it touched.  His flesh spurted blood as it was cut to ribbons inside his armor.  His soul collapsed in on itself, and his core ruptured in a hundred different places.

And that was just the first contact.

Elijah intended much worse.

He fed ethera into his soul, and that branch grew exponentially with every passing nanosecond.  One moment, it was as straightforward as a spear, and the next, it had sprouted a thousand branches inside Vinnie’s body.

Elijah flexed.

The branches waved. 

And Vinnie collapsed.

Elijah refused to stop, pulsing more and more power into his soul.  It was overkill.  He’d spent the past few years fighting dragons, the worst among them far more advanced than Vinnie could ever be.  While he’d clearly put a lot of effort into leveling, he had neglected some extremely important aspects of his development.  He wasn’t just a paper tiger.  That would be giving him far too much credit.

If he’d stopped to consider it, Elijah would have acknowledged that there were plenty of powerful people on Earth.  Many could put up a decent fight against him.  But Vinnie?  He just wasn’t one of them.

That no one had stepped up to stop him already should have been a mystery.  But at the end of the day, he was a useful tool for whoever held his leash.  And his status as a deity probably kept most people from challenging his authority.

Or maybe there were other political reasons he’d not been dealt with.

Whatever the case, Elijah wasn’t beholden to any of those reasons.  He didn’t care about the political ramifications.  He wasn’t concerned with who ultimately controlled Vinnie.  Instead, his mind had narrowed onto a single track: punish the man who’d repeatedly pushed his buttons.  Kill the man who had obviously abandoned societal norms by enslaving the young woman who’d engineered the mental attack on Elijah.

Elijah pulled the branches of his soul back, then with a mental flick, forced them to surround Vinnie’s core.  Once it was wrapped in a tight cocoon, with fang-like thorns embedded into the metaphysical source of the man’s power, Elijah forced his soul to churn. 

It ripped the core apart, piece by piece, like he’d attacked it with a thousand chainsaws. 

Vinnie stopped screaming.  He couldn’t muster the control to force out even that articulate of a sound. Instead, a quivering groan was all that escaped his throat as he collapsed into a boneless heap, flopping around as Elijah attacked the very essence of his power. 

It lasted far longer than was comfortable.

Ten or fifteen seconds was a long time when someone was being tortured in front of hundreds of people.  Elijah refused to let up, though.  Not until the problem that Vinnie represented was entirely gone.

And when the man finally went entirely limp, his eyes staring ahead into nothing as flecks of drool escaped his mouth, Elijah’s only real thought was that he should’ve done it much, much sooner.

After all, Vinnie had come looking for a fight at Lamar’s wedding.  He’d even forced Elijah’s friend to flee Philadelphia and resettle elsewhere. 

“Damn,” said Atticus, who’d followed Elijah across the room.

“He deserved it,” Elijah stated, finally retracting his soul.  Then, he knelt beside the woman.  He reached forward, but she flinched away.  That was probably warranted, given what Elijah had just done.  He didn’t intend to hurt her, though.  In fact, he didn’t intend to touch her at all.  Instead, he wrapped his fingers around her necklace and snapped the links. 

A small explosion of ethera tingled against Elijah’s fingers, but it was barely noticeable.

He looked to the other two women.  “You want me to do the same for you?”

They nodded, and Elijah did just as he’d offered.  Their expressions as well as the changes to their posture was all he needed to know that he’d done the right thing.  Relief was a poor word for it, but it was the only one Elijah could conjure that came even close to doing their demeanor justice.

Elijah flexed, crushing one of the necklaces into dust.

They weren’t powerful items, and they’d used cheap materials.  That they could so effectively enslave anyone was a surprise.  A real mystery, and one he intended to investigate.  The other two necklaces, he stored in his Arcane Loop.

“Elijah.”

The voice cut through his thoughts and stabbed him directly in his heart.  Not because it was Sadie’s voice.  That was part of it, but it was mostly because of her tone.  The judgement, the resignation, the familiarity – it all contributed to a pang of guilt and sadness he couldn’t quite overcome.

He turned to see her standing nearby.

She didn’t wear her armor.  Instead, she had attired herself in simple, wide-legged pants in flowing white and a tight-fitting tunic that left her arms bare. 

She looked good.

But then again, she always did.

More importantly, she looked disappointed.  That too was a familiar expression when it came to her dealings with Elijah.

“Hey, Sadie.  You look good.”