At a small camp by the road, the group of six spent their evening training like always. Well, in reality it was mostly Annabelle training with everyone else providing focus and specific experience where possible. Right now, she stood opposite Jaren at a distance and deeply focused on the archer in front whilst wearing a heavy set of leather armour with chainmail. However, even in such equipment, she easily moved her body, but such speeds hardly mattered when compared to the drawn bow in front of her.
Her eyes watched diligently, and the mote of green transformed into a river of glowing lights, wrapped around her fingers as though nestled up and tightly adjoined. Without even blinking, she watched the bowman opposite and saw how his fingers tensed, arms twitched, and the nocked arrow slightly shook. All these movements were almost microscopic as Jaren’s body hardly moved beyond his control, minute changes which occurred as the cells within could not remain completely still.
On the other hand, his eyes narrowed, aimed squarely at her padded chest but still drawing out this process to catch her off guard on possible–
He released it!
The quicker shot took a moment for her to react, fingers already off the bowstring by the time she finally raised what happened and willed the flowing green to shoot outwards and push the arrow away. Her own body pushed hard against the ground, flinging herself right as the arrow nudged left.
However, the slow reaction failed her. The blunt arrow struck her armoured left arm even with the dodge and redirection, and she grimaced at the momentary pain from that impact. At least 100 paces separated the two as well, yet she still couldn’t react to such a simple arrow, they’d been at this for well over a month now!
“It’s still too fast, how am I meant to react to that?” She called out to the other four who stood to the side, watching her rub her arm and complain.
However, Jaren shouted over to her from a distance away, reminding her, “We’re far from done with one shot, get back into position.” She could only grumble with a small pout towards the watchful four, but no one stepped in to help her. After all this time, she understood that they’d never intervene in training she needed, and she could only grit her teeth and continue.
Of course, over to the side, Mala and Korridan critiqued her actions and speed. The wizard of the group stating, “It seems her growth is finally slowing down a bit, but we haven’t even obtained any elemental nurturing substances. To think just that a mithril tier elemental could raise this weakened one to bronze tier so quickly.” As always, the wizard cared most for the data involved, interested in the process used, but still in the dark. With her noble background, she knew what questions to avoid from a young age. As an adventurer, that sense only strengthened as the lack of any official identity gravely limited what you ought to know.
“There’s still a lot of space though, he’s not even firing those arrows at half his top speed. And she needs to learn to use nature to react, but we’re not exactly any help in that regard. Well, it shouldn’t be long until her next evolution, at least as a Seedling she’ll be able to keep up with us.”
“At least we won’t have to worry about her death… I forgot just how fragile ordinary humans were.” Mala admitted her own mistakes readily, she took quite a bit of personal responsibility for almost causing the village girl to collapse for a couple days when their journey first began.
As she grew to like the attitude presented as well, Mala naturally felt rather bad for what she did. Furthermore, the colder demeanour she often put up made it seem like others shouldn’t bother her, Annabelle hadn’t exactly learnt that Mala did this out of habit from her time in the academy. Rather than speak to her, she more often went to Rebecca or Korridan if anything came up.
Darak tended to give better advice in general, but for more specific things, those two absolutely took top spot.
Naturally, as the main magic user of the group, Mala grew a bit upset that the new contractor never came to her for help. Or even just to chat as another female of the group. But she couldn’t force it, things take time to adapt to.
Just like coming to terms with one’s immense loss.
…
It must have been late summer, about a month having passed, when the whole group unexpectedly woke up to Annabelle holding a bundle of flowers and carefully laying them out into a few sets. The only reason they woke up in the middle of this was because she eventually piled up the types of flowers into piles of them, amounting to at least a couple hundred luscious and vibrant colours.
And once fully collected, she wiped the sweat off her brow and just sunk into a heap on the floor. Crumpled with her knees hugged with eyes focused on the high piles, all while she just cried.
Nothing more; nothing less.
And while Mala and Rebecca held her for a couple hours, it hardly helped much as she completely relegated herself to the flood of emotions she put all her effort into suppressing. Her heightened regeneration healed her bloodshot eyes already, but it didn’t take them long to figure out the dam of emotions broke sometime last night. When her sobs eventually quelled, she was able to tell them, “I don’t want to forget them… I’m sorry for making a huge mess today.”
With some level-headedness, she immediately apologised for what she saw as selfish behaviour. But what met her was repeated support from the whole party, most of it not as physical as long, extended hugs, but everything helped.
“It’s hardly an issue, just tell us when you need time and we can make it.”
“What about today then? Today, every year,” Annabelle replied immediately, not in the mood to think of some idiotic symbolism fit for her tragedy. She believed any day satisfied what she hoped for.
Korridan gave a simple answer to that, “That’s fine then. On the 5th of this month every year, we’ll give you any time you need to remember your family and friends.” It didn’t really need to be said given they all agreed with it, but the formal announcement helped soothe her somewhat.
And quite literally from a sudden breakdown in the early morning of a seemingly random day, the event preserved across years appeared in their tight-knit group. This closeness also finally found its way to Anna, who felt somewhere in between an outsider and part of them all for so long now.
Oh, and she got along with Mala a lot better, but that follow-up could wait till a time far in the future.
* * *
After the series of tumultuous, and absolutely socially upsetting, events, Akevorax just stayed within his cave all the time. While the elders all offered better places to stay closer inland, he saw no reason to move after the party of six already modified this place for their own convenience.
Mala just didn’t want to set up her lab again too, it took a few hours to pack and unpack it all safely.
And with the utter insanity revolving the dragonstone now over, the group simply lived there for another month without any stress. It helped that Akevorax spent all his time outside with younger dragons that actually respected him for his power, although the sheer number of dirty looks he received left him an unreformed dragon. Perhaps that needed a better explanation…
He began to gather bloodlines from just shy of 389 master tier dragons now, it just required a couple months more to complete this extreme collection process.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The blood bags served him well in the end…
Even if he did still want to kill them quite a bit. That bloodlust never really died out since their teeth gritting attitude continued as well.
As for the dragonstone itself, Akevorax left it untouched in his dimensional storage this whole time. While he absolutely survived upon its absorption, he wanted to maximise its effectiveness since he’d never receive another chance like this. Of course, the dragonstone’s effects were never explicitly given!
Akevorax improved his lower bounds as the stone granted an improvement into every domain of a dragon’s body. Soul power, mental space size, physical power, defences, heart transformation, mana density, and even a slight upgrade to the Mind palace’s bricks. That last one in particular very rarely happened, but these all just listed minor effects of the dragonstone. Little boosts that certainly accelerated a dragon’s growth, but hardly changed much.
How could it be called a ‘dragonstone’ if it lacked an effect only usable by dragons?
The stone directly improved a dragon’s bloodline. And the words here mattered unbelievably, as far too many mixed up evolutions, mutations, and improvements.
This improvement targeted the Draconic portion of his bloodline and enhanced that to an incredible degree. However, unlike the Draconic evolution options he received in the past, this improvement ignored any desire to transform the body into flesh and blood.
Rather, it granted a unique transformation to that dragon. A fact which few races outside knew of, and instead many believed these sudden changes came about due to extremely high-level growth or special evolutions. The dragonstone formed the basis on which clan lords grew powerful enough to hold their own against demigods; what possible group could possibly want such a secret exposed?
All of this aside, Akevorax still didn’t feel ready after his month of efforts and stood to leave the cave once more. Before leaving, he gave a notice to the few people still inside as he expected this trip would take a fair bit of time, saying casually, “I’m heading back to the Evelard range to pick up a few things. Should I stop anywhere on the way back?”
Darak replied to him as the only one available to talk at the time, “You’re heading back to grab all the giant bones? Try not to cause any issues in Remelo. The kingdom’s been on higher alert these past couple years… And buy some Redshire berries while you’re there, Mala and Jaren love them.”
He fortunately didn’t have to explain anything since they perfectly understood, which just left the matter of Raccelline.
If he knew where she currently went.
Akevorax bounced the idea back and forth a bit and said, “If she gets upset, tell her I’ll bring back cake. Or a chocolate ribbon if she’s on the angrier end.” Knowing her tastes well enough, he planned for both cases just so the four adults didn’t have to deal with a young girl throwing a tantrum. While her preferred cake varied constantly, the ribbon was a long, thin pastry shaped into a flat ribbon with a cream filling and chocolate coated exterior. Somewhat like an eclair, but messier and more expensive.
Nothing else needed an explanation, so Akevorax flew out from the cave and removed his shrinking magic. With an infusion of mana to stop countless shockwaves emanating outwards, he flapped the sticky wings with all his might and flew off towards the horizon.
It was probably only after about ten minutes of flight when Akevorax finally spoke to himself, “Isn’t this going to take two days at this speed?” While he indeed threw some vaguely correct numbers together, even if taken as poor estimates, it came to about one and a half days of travel time, just rounded up for convenience. If he included collection and bone hunting that could easily go up to three days.
Ah, not to forget about the need to stop by and buy snacks.
Fortunately, when combined with spells, his travel time reduced to about one day. And he could then depend on the Auric spirit to further halve the journey, as its use more than doubled his flight speed… He could also speed up a fair bit by throwing more points into Agility, but he actually had some common sense.
“I wonder if there are loads of gold tiers there now… Maybe that bird got to mithril as well.” Akevorax didn’t speak very fondly of the roc in question, but he had no intention to seek revenge against it after all this time.
When he approached land, it was a simple matter of casting some spell to grant invisibility as he flew over some coastal towns. Given Remelo’s location, he effectively had to travel half the continent to reach that highly centralised, landlocked country. On the way, day turned to night, and he only saw the mountain range as the moon reached its zenith for this day nearing the middle of summer.
Unsurprisingly, nothing about the entire place changed. He saw the central mountain as it stabbed upwards towards the night sky, and flats of snow which created a verifiable plain between mountain peaks.
Most noticeably, the unnatural bowl at the Kandir battlefield’s edge now flattened out as the wealth of snow which hung off its edge fell down into the pit but also regressed its spatial transformation. However, Fabric Weaver quickly fed back just how stretched the entire place remained after these few years, perhaps in a couple decades it would return to its original state.
Akevorax only needed a single glance with his Elder eyes to see through the entire battlefield, every bone and scrap of divinity shone in his vision. With one blank spot…
The egg of aquamarine prymite, a material which held up against the attacks of cornem tiers for a good amount of time. He could also finally take the desiccated corpses within too, given that they guarded the demigod, it made sense they equalled Cornem ranks or reached that final level, Primordius.
“So I can finally complete that annoying quest,” Akevorax said, greatly relieved by the fact.
[Please don’t forget to trigger your divinity to recreate bloodlines more as well, you really haven’t consumed enough beings on the HEP]
Rightttt… that was a thing too. He still had those Mithril rank assassin bodies in his dimensional storage, piled up in a corner since he couldn’t be bothered to prepare them. He gave a half-baked promise to the Nexus, “I’ll cut them up before I go, better to not do this around the others.”
As he looked at the snow below him, and how he’d have to shift thousands of tonnes of it to access every last bone, he wondered if a better way existed. However, in the end, he came down to the original idea, just use Snow Control to move everything quickly and non-destructively. But Akevorax’s eyes eventually drew elsewhere instead of the selection of Divine Phalanx bones he looked forward to for months now, specifically aimed at the very edge of this shrinking battlefield.
“Can’t believe you were just an oversized worm after all this time! But certainly a fast thing, practically a part of the snow as well. What the hell did it eat to evolve this way?” It felt like a shame to kill such an impressive mithril tier creature, but Akevorax’s aggression towards it only intensified as he caught sight of it personally.
This thing caused him to lose a chance to obtain proper claws! Of course he despised it!
Since he stopped the “highly immoral” practise of imprisoning beasts, the number of successful mutations dropped crazily. He couldn’t even make use of the ability whilst under surveillance from elves or dragons!
It weakened him so much to lose out on these upgrades… Surely it wouldn’t be too bad to stay a few days and just mass feed hundreds of beasts?
He didn’t even have to lock anything up! But just to clarify one worry, Akevorax asked, “Does losing my limbs cause me to lose bloodline energy?”
While the answer to this is usually ‘no’, he asked anyway. You know, like he wouldn’t have bit the bullet and began this plan either way…
[No, Undying Body does not consume bloodline energy for regrowth, but your body is naturally diffused with it. Why you care about this meagre amount with access to so many adult dragons is a better question]
That snark was never going away, was it?
Akevorax snorted at the answer but did not confirm nor deny what he read. As long as he constantly replenished the spent bloodline energy, he could indefinitely cut off and regenerate limbs… Which meant this initiated his next big project!
‘Ice cream mountain’ he jokingly dubbed it.
Throw hundreds of his cut off limbs down around the mountain all day, for a few days, and keep an eye on everything that evolved in this time. With hundreds of limbs and evolutions a daily occurrence on this mountain range with a population in the tens of thousands, he had to get at least one great mutation!
This dragonstone improvement would be astonishing.
“I should buy more cake, she’s really going to be mad,” in reality, Akevorax only sighed with the fruition of such an excellent plan. Raccelline really wouldn’t let his sudden extended absence go so easily… Probably because she knew how to put him through a wringer.
Hang on. Why was it just him she manipulated like this too?
He put the thought out of mind for a while though as a stray fact reminded him of another thing. That there was a library in the ruins on this mountain range, and with Origin Force, maybe he could go to its top floor and look at everything it held. Ancient knowledge was always valued, especially those things occasionally lost to time. The Kandir bones came first though. A few hours at most to dig them all up, as for the oversized worm in this place.
There’s no way such a beast without any soul or mental defences could survive even a weak attack. Today marked its death, just five years after he first came here…