A grand monastery hidden away in the mountains housed a rather select population. Here, besides the thousands of priests who dedicated their lives to a god, years spent on prayer and upkeep of the majestic location, a grand centralised building housed the most important object of the entire religion.
A peach tree. Its branches laden with blossoms of white and pink, flowers which existed perpetually with the exception for one day in far too many years. But that day was still far away.
Instead, Great sages quietly lined up in the room and dared not to look at the tree directly, nor the faithful gardeners who maintained and cared for its existence. Just fifty of them to be precise, and all of them understood why exactly they stood here, not that any regretted their decisions. At the time all evidence pointed to it as a correct option.
If they’d been right, then no one would’ve cared… But their bet actually failed. Horribly at that.
An elf appeared in front of the tree, the same demigod who came to momentarily chastise the Great sages on that day months ago. He looked around, disgraced by the events, and said, “You all know the problems your attitude has caused. You were clearly never bound by contract as well, if you stepped aside once new evidence came to light, then no argument against you could possibly remain. Now look, we must treat them as friends of excellence and appear to have allied with the eternals.”
Even if young by standards at their level, many of these elves lived for at least a century. They swallowed their pride and critically considered what this demigod told them. However, a few weren’t as ‘wise’, as one sneered as they shouted from the group of fifty, “We all recorded the deals, why are you pinning this false charge on us?!”
A branch on the peach tree tussled gently, with this, a single white blossom fell to the ground. As it floated, the eyes of all fifty shook, but on contact with the marbled floor of this monastery, it sat there… A faint breeze blew over it and the white flower dispersed to dust.
The Great sage who spoke collapsed to the ground, his body visibly aged from that of a young man, rapidly sapped of his vitality until only a fragile, wrinkled husk remained. It could not support its own life at this point, and died as the weak heart gave away.
“Power can be given, but it may also be taken. Passiveness is not neutrality, that is the crime today. Now we must decide in what way to resolve this matter. Neutrality… Or War,” the demigod’s deliberately threatening words told all 49 of them what either case meant. In the first place, those who consumed the peach tree’s fruit existed as rapidly disposable soldiers.
Calling the peak existences in this very room ‘soldiers’ was a bit disingenuous, but if they died all the same, it hardly mattered.
* * *
Stuck in the enlarged cave with his five friends, Icy sat on an array with a grey glow. In no world could he advance to a Formed soul as described by the manual in this short period of time, but the time so far helped him grasp just how the next transformation worked and what it meant exactly. The knot of veins surrounding his soul was called the ‘Elemental Domain’, just a specific name given to this first step. Meanwhile, the second step compressed them into a single object referred to as a soul construct, and the wall of elements which resulted from the crude technique used by many fell into this category.
Anyway, to avoid long ramblings, he required the use of an array as the knot of veins tightened into a heart around his soul. A tedious process once more as it required excellent anatomical knowledge to create a fully-functioning organ for entry and exit.
How long would that take?
Like he possibly knew… just the method to grasp all those veins and compress them took the past couple days to learn.
While most of the group just meditated or rested during their time here, some still left the cave for whatever reason. Raccelline hated the atmosphere and either trained outside or travelled with Mala, while Jaren simply needed space. That left just Darak and Korridan, of which the latter quietly focused on strengthening his Mind.
As another potion ran out, he opened his eyes slightly and addressed Icy calmly, “Have you decided on what to do about armour or weapons then? You didn’t set any limits on the battles, so almost everything is on the table.”
“If they want to play that game, I’ll crush them. Mala knows the scrolls we took from those banks,” while his similarly ambivalent reply lacked strength, both men knew the list of resources well enough.
“You still have those arrays in storage. Why waste the scrolls?” Darak, also focused on his Mind’s growth, mentioned another of Icy’s methods.
And the dragon replied, “Too many of them have similar levels of knowledge as me.”
Those pre-engraved ones were just too simple and weak in the end. While they outputted a considerably useful mithril tier power, all these top dragons could identify weak points in seconds. Especially Pritaslo, she and Mala often butted heads on a purely intellectual level. No clear victor appeared as well, Mala lost in alchemy whilst she simply could not contend with the human’s speed of research.
However, Icy failed to understand why such a dragon talked to Jaren just as often, especially since he never seriously conversed. Her repeated failures to gaslight him probably had a part to play in it.
The day of the first challenges finally arrived. And with the time limit he imposed just around the corner, everyone pretty much knew that a month amounted to almost nothing at their ages. If they failed to beat Icy a month ago, they’d have failed today as well, so the dates changed nothing. No matter the situation, they just gave it their all.
And the first to come up was none other than the sapphire dragon herself, Pritaslo, surprisingly.
…
When Icy flew over to the lonely mountain’s peak, an ownerless mountain with a clean and stabilised peak to maximise the number of spectators, hundreds of dragons already accumulated in a dome. Meanwhile, Pritaslo stood ready, and Kalmiktar hung in the air not too far away, his turn came right after Icy recovered from this battle.
The younger dragons, those who showed no reviled emotions to Icy, flew closest as their weaker eyesight meant any distance lost information. However, those stronger all flew a good distance away, and while quite a few could not care less for the dragon of ice cream, many of them held hatred in their eyes for simply no reason. If not hatred, then contempt or disregard. A mishap was an affront to the bloodline of dragons, and almost no race would willingly celebrate the existence of one.
Unless their power outweighed all others of their age… But none of them cared about that, willingly ignoring such an idea.
Why did they come then?
Just for further proof that he couldn’t possibly have killed the progenitor.
As he landed at the mountain’s peak, he found that a flattened section of land existed for convenience, the highest point not too far to his left. Meanwhile, Pritaslo opposite now stood up and readied herself, as two spellcasting dragons, Icy knew better than give her any time. Furthermore, her sapphire scales provided excellent defence amongst mithril tiers.
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About as tough as the manticore’s dragon scales. Not easy, but not too difficult either. However, this battle was more than just bodying a single dragon as Kalmiktar and formerly-second-rank awaited him. No one else really deserved the time to think about it, but he absolutely didn’t want to make them too wary in advance. So he thought to just purposely weaken them all slightly.
And by ‘all’, Icy really meant everything.
The pocket watch only accelerated him at ten times the speed at most, and his orb only weakly blew through individual scales, struggling to penetrate any further. The other two armaments played no part, thankfully, but that didn’t stop Icy from purposely walking into attacks she secretly laid down.
From the moment their fight began, the two dragons just paced around one another, seemingly cautious, but Pritaslo secretly released some sort of spell from the base of her feet. Likely some sorts of mine, Icy constantly watched them with his mana sight, while they emitted no fluctuations he still saw the mana concentration itself. Furthermore, it now explained why her scales contained such a ridiculous amount of energy.
Previously he assumed that she picked an evolution related to storing concentrated mana in her scales, but the revelation of these mines brought to light their use.
Finally, as she filled about half the flattened area with mines, mana concentrated in her throat and Icy began his attacks. The orbs cracked dozens of scales, purposely targeting broken ones to penetrate through, and his body sped up as the breath finally came. It released a sparkling mist that attached to anything solid, large gemstones grew from the ground and even forced their way through earth and stone. A bit… painful, if he were to comment.
However, the boosted speed easily evaded the spray of glitter and his Auric spirit danced around her, a spell escaped her lips in Draconic, one that Icy recognised as an Adept true spell, not only that, but one which attacked the soul specifically.
Without the Elemental Domain, he never dared to take it head on, but this was a spell cast through mana in the end. Not a real soul spell, and so he ignored the cast for his own, none other than Attrian’s Mental Collapse. Icy purposely held back here, as none of these young adults finished their latest building for an Adept mind palace. He saw no reason to demolish so much work.
His spirit popped out momentarily to enhance the spell as it finally formed, but in the process, Icy fell onto the ground and onto one of Pritaslo’s mines.
She realised this and aimed to take advantage of the momentary shock such damage would cause…
How could she in the wake of an enhanced spell though?
The flood of psychic elements sent her reeling, and a fragile Mind receded into the palace for protection. Walls cracked, crumbled, and even toppled. The gemstone mine which formed her mental space rocked back and forth as an earthquake struck it. Nothing collapsed, but she simply stood still in reality, dazed by the damage and destruction.
Meanwhile, Icy with a blown off leg, his full size body sneering at the explosion of a limb, prepared the Adept true spell, Crystal Weathering. A dark and earth element spell which excelled specifically in the breakdown of anything crystalline, even with an effect against the crystal bodies of powerful master tiers.
Not that it had a good effect, but it did something!
“I surrender. Please cancel the spell,” Pritaslo regrettably shouted as soon as the psychic destruction on her Mind palace ended. She already felt the collapse of all her scales, while they’d survive several minutes, her chances of failure rose exponentially with every second.
In the meantime, everyone watched as Icy’s lost limb regenerated in front of their very eyes. In about ten minutes, the metre long appendage would replace itself. While far slower than the speed shown against Lostradus, this already surprised quite a few.
One would assume that such a fragile body not only possessed poor defence but similarly bad recovery, and this was the case for every other case of mishaps. However, from birth, Icy’s regenerative speeds matched a normal dragon’s, and right now, it took extreme mana control on his part to purposely slow down the recovery of this limb. The effort partially worked at best. Undying Body reflexively grasped every wisp of mana available, even as he controlled every bit in his body, the sorbet leg still sucked mana from the atmosphere where possible.
It literally possessed its own passive absorption ability! How come he never knew this?
With one battle over, Pritaslo sighed as her blue scales grew back to their original gem-like state, the process far slower than Icy’s, and flew off to join the other top dragons. Following which, Kalmiktar swooped down and took centre stage. However, against expectations, he approached Icy straight away. No one ruled out this allowance. He should have set up a rest period rather than assuming they’d give him one.
“I don’t need a battle, especially not whilst you’re faking this all. Crack my body and I surrender, otherwise I’ll wait,” he spoke bluntly with words oozing with haughtiness. Many assumed Icy weakened immensely without the help of divinity, but he already felt from those golden eyes just how far the misshapen dragon’s power went.
Not to mention, he knew better than anyone just how ridiculous it was to beat every single room on the fourth floor, even with the help of secret items to kill a challenge room, the tougher battles pushed one’s abilities to their limits.
If an enemy could break through his black, obsidian body, Kalmiktar’s loss was set in stone.
Icy released the orb with a cautious gaze, and the earthen-scaled dragon transformed to one of solid blackness. Just staring into the body with endless depth gave one a headache, and some of the dragons who flew further away huffed or smirked as they saw the requirement placed. Understanding the requirements to break through such scales, none of them believed Icy capable of such things.
“If you want to give up so easily, you could’ve just not challenged me in the first place,” Icy said under his breath, but the fact he hadn’t mumbled it allowed every dragon around the mountain range to hear. Again they rolled their eyes or scoffed, hardly entertained given what they saw against Pritaslo.
Truly, they just wanted to throw their weight around and justify this as a poor string of behaviour from the elders. Their desire to discard a dragonstone wilfully ought to be punished… And some of the stronger amongst them stood a chance of ascending to a higher position in the clan.
If not them, then at least a friend. Or a friend of a friend…
Icy’s orb rose up, gently moving upwards like a leaf raised in a gust of wind, and then it instantly accelerated. The dark orb appeared in a flash of white and smashed into Kalmiktar’s back, the colossal, full-size dragon coughed as not only had some black crystal on his back smashed apart, but the orb bore through his body almost half a foot.
One strike… And it penetrated about a fifth of the way through his body. With some further skills and spells, he could probably reduce that distance to barely an inch, but no mithril tier ever destroyed his body in this state so easily. Not even Pritaslo managed such a thing when given well over ten minutes to prepare a suitable array and fight him. Within an hour, she could easily shatter the body.
But Icy could do it here and now, slightly weakened as he fuelled that orb not long ago.
The loser of this match, Kalmiktar was not surprised or upset over the loss though. He completely accepted the damage done to his body and transformed the black crystal back to flesh. His voice contained a hint of depression as he finally said, “Why did you have to be a mishap… With your growth, even the elders might not win against you one day.”
Icy replied with a grim smile. Never before had someone comforted him in that way. Maybe a few humans had, but the fact he didn’t even remember their names revealed how little their thoughts mattered.
On the other hand, as Kalmiktar’s wings flew him back to the hovering dragons, Icy now stood on the mountain peak alone. In utter silence as the hundreds of older dragons, excited for his loss, now stood without direction. Many were angry and annoyed that their intentions could not come true. Angry at Icy for ruining them, a ridiculous logic which literally could not make sense, but still they played leapfrog to stay happy amongst themselves. Upset that he was too weak, and still upset that he was too strong!
“Will you two be challenging me tomorrow then?” Icy couldn’t care how they thought, every moment spent in those dragons’ presence now reminded him of the way he felt in this place. Every second of it made his stay here intolerable, and with so much of it, he just wanted to leave the Dragonlands more and more.
No wonder most of his kind lived remotely or in small groups. All the other races were devious, sure, but it felt so much worse to be looked down upon by his own race as opposed to random people that couldn’t matter less.