In no time at all, a few more days passed, with Akevorax heavily focused on acquiring more mutations. The sheer quantity of ice cream and sorbet seemed to finally draw attention from those at the top though, but no further master tiers bothered him over the next few days. Furthermore, his massive quantities of air-dropped food slightly lowered the intense competition for the sweet substances.
But only to the point where fewer beasts killed for it, and it became a commodity for the intelligent ones as they stored away this stuff due to its relative rarity. This stuff just fell from the sky randomly as well, who knew where the hell it actually came from, or if it would last into the long-term.
And only now had the first mutations begun to rise up… Akevorax always made sure to quickly kill and extract the corpse before anyone could spread this information though.
In some cases, he even got there just as the evolution began and quickly suppressed the emission of mana. But only ever doing this when the stronger gold tiers evolved, meanwhile no one really cared for the disappearance of evolving steel tiers. Unfortunately, he began to notice a rather annoying pattern even after several evolutions.
Qualitative upgrades happened extremely rarely, not to mention they depended on ‘available’ options.
A bird could not grow scales, so they were far more likely to receive candied beaks or talons. Lizards, snakes, and insects were therefore the best options to receive enhancements to his scales. Unfortunately, those creatures don’t tend to form a major part of frozen ecosystems. And he really didn’t want to wage war on another insect colony, it just didn’t interest him.
The most common evolutions were changes to their internals, forming new flavours of ice cream of new ‘additions’ which added new textures to his insides. To list the changes in these regards:
Coconut, almond, peanut, melon, cherry, mango, milk, frell, malkive, and blue crackshot ice creams…
Mango, lemon, raspberry, blueberry, and critan sorbets…
Multiple brownie types, salted toffee, thin wafer biscuits, cookie dough, chocolate chips, and some sort of gooey syrup in a jelly ball.
His internals didn’t even make sense as far as ‘living’ beings went, clearly the only internal organs which actually mattered were his heart, aura sack, and stomach. Thinking about it, his liver, spleen, and pancreas only existed in shape. By all means, he was closer in existence to pure element creatures, another form of mishaps who were somewhat successful even though their bodies revealed a glaring weakness.
Still, that was all the cosmetic and flavourful changes made to Akevorax these past few days… But today finally changed things a bit.
Because he collected several more evolved beasts, and two of the gold tiers gained completely new upgrades!
One of them was a scorpion with freezing cold venom, which both shut down the liver and froze your body at the same time, and the other a large cream-skinned frog. Rather reminiscent, in fact, as he obtained his gummy tongue from a frog… He needed more poisons again too.
That simple reminder caused him to sigh loudly and say tiredly, “It really can’t keep up with me, hopefully these two are good though.”
First the scorpion, of which he cut off its tail, specifically its tip which had been converted entirely to chocolate. In terms of size, the scorpion stood at about a metre long, its giant tail curved up as always and thick pincers reminded him of the crab from so long ago. Overall, it kind of matched his own body when shrunken, but to the full-sized dragon, it was like a human staring down at a small dog.
Akevorax crunched down on the solid chocolate tip, splitting the dense candy and enjoying the intense sweetness. He was tempted to melt the chocolate, but in fear it ruined the bloodline, he swallowed it promptly and immediately felt a burning pain flood his own tail.
After literal years his body was finally improving!
“Such an inefficient method, no wonder it took me forever to get any evolutions. Mutating mithril tiers should make things far better though… This is actually starting to hurt as well,” Akevorax said without a hint of pain in his voice. When he took a brief glance towards the heated tail, the wafer scales already shattered or peeled away, revealing the flush of ice creams within, the sight a complete mess of colours and flavours. However, he didn’t dare touch it as the regrowth finally came.
From a burn much like intense exercise, he now squirmed as though something caught his tail in a small inferno. From the ice cream, a new layer of similarly golden scales sprouted, connected tightly to the rest of his body, but towards the tip he noticed changes.
Streaks of brown chocolate on the tail’s sides, as well as a thickening cone of it at the very tip. With every second, this chocolate tip transformed into a literal spear, further points jutting out to act as barbs and brutally tear open a wound when retracting. And the effects hardly ended there as ‘fins’ of chocolate began to grow down his tail’s length, each of them surprisingly flexible, but when supplied with mana, they instantly hardened into blades.
He hadn’t even checked the Nexus messages, but could tell that if he wished, the bladed chocolate fins could be detached, but the effect of this remained unknown…
Was it a further accumulation of his poison-related abilities?
Still, just the barbed spear tip amounted to a pretty amazing weapon, multiple spells existed to enhance dragon tails, and this tip gave a method to make better use of them. After all, while the wafer-scaled tip could penetrate objects, it wasn’t the sharpest object… And for the actual ability.
[Venomous Chocolate Tip: Mana may be used to generate a supply of venom within your tail’s hollow space, from which the tip may be detached inside an enemy’s wound to ensure a constant supply of venom into their bodies]
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[Chocolate Fragmentation Blades: The chocolate fins may be fired off from your body and will explode on contact, sending sharpened fragments in all directions at high speeds relative to inputted mana]
Two far more niche abilities, but stabbing something with his tail was far easier to manage over licking them or using his breath on them. Not to mention, due to the small amount spread by individual thorns on his tongue, they weren’t too effective against equal-level opponents unless pushed directly inside their bodies. The former of these two abilities directly eliminated that concern.
As for the latter… Well, he’d have to test it. But that’s not all…
He still had a second body here!
A frog with a pair of red, ruby eyes. However, not red naturally, but because they’d been transformed into cherry-flavoured boiled sweets! Akevorax didn’t hesitate to pluck out the two large, round balls and swallow them whole. Both the eyes were far smaller than his gullet, and instantly dissolved once they touched his stomach.
Now, a great question. How does it feel to have your eyes replaced entirely?
Not great; not horrible.
The pain itself was about the same as his tail’s change, but the dreadful part was how his eyes turned to mush and fell out of his head. And not just the eyes, but the ice cream optic nerves which connected both to his brain. Situated with that reality, he didn’t even raise his voice for this process, Just sat there with both eyes held open to reveal a pair of holes which led to an ice cream brain.
Thankfully nothing came to bother him in the prymite egg.
Soon enough, from the empty sockets, a film of red began to coat the insides of the holes, more like a viscous sauce than a hard candy, but the film quickly thickened into a hollow sphere before filling in completely. However, unlike the frog’s spherical eyes, his continued to transform, from a pure sphere, the outward surface gained a bevelled face. The design instantly caused it to gleam with a brilliance like rubies or diamond, and naturally surging mana within it implied their power well enough.
[Amplification Reflector Eyes: Mana may be supplied to create a plane perpendicular to your direction which reflects most pure energy attacks, furthermore, any successfully reflected attack is enhanced up to double its original power. Do note, this requires the plane to possess up to twice the mana required to block the attack in the first place]
“That’s incredibly powerful… Are there really no limits on it Nexus?” His question echoed in disbelief that a mere gold tier granted eyes with such an incredulous ability. The answer to his worries came right after though.
[Attacks which utilise great runes cannot be reflected or enhanced. With Origin Force you might be able to block or deflect it at most]
He hadn’t even thought about that yet, but it provided him with an incredible wealth of defence already. Mana frankly meant nothing to Akevorax. For years now, he completely spat all over the words ‘mana requirement’ as the sheer quantity available to him beat out most master tiers with ease. However, that didn’t exactly mean he could supply the eyes with so much mana in an instant, and he quickly tested out the ability once to see if his other worry held true.
When supplied with enough mana for an Intermediate true spell, his red eyes lit up with a bloody glow and formed a garnet crystal wall. Just half a second later, this wall crumbled into a fine powder of red gemstone, but soon completely dispersed as the mana completely ran out.
In other words, it could only reactively appear, otherwise the opponent could just delay their spell and hit him immediately after.
The description also quietly ignored the problem with it taking about 30 seconds for his eyes to recover between activations, or it triggered a strange pain in them. Normally, these side-effects happen as a natural warning from the body, telling its brain that using something will damage that body part.
With his pocket watch, this ability could very easily reflect an Adept true spell, enhance it, and instantly kill the attacker, as they never anticipated a strengthened version of their own spell to hit!
But only for the first time, as soon as they understood this ability, it wouldn’t work again.
Akevorax thought about it for a few seconds and said with a shrug, “It’s still just an easy way to deflect spells in the end, just means I take less damage.” He didn’t need every body part to grant an overwhelming ability, in the first place, he never actually used his scales’ ability since its effect utterly failed to help meaningfully.
As he quietly sat in the egg, Akevorax felt a faint sense of unease propagate throughout and immediately pulled out the pocket watch and orb, the two soul armaments ready to activate at first concern. Merged with the spirit as well, he leapt just outside the stone sanctum's containment to activate his Elder eyes and look around. Unfortunately… By the time the ghostly lights appeared, it was too late.
He barely pulled out the silver liquid armour to protect his head in time as bright, red light completely swept away his vision.
The tunnel downwards instantly lit up as a column of blaring flames gushed into it as a concentrated beam of heat and fire. Snow melted and boiled instantly, the normally freezing mountain range quickly heating up to room temperature in seconds. All the while, this sudden attack pummelled him, trapping his body against the prymite egg, dreadful heat destroying his scales and melting him rapidly. In fact, the speed was so great that his body simply could not out-heal it…
But he didn’t have to do so.
A snake of condensed mana split in two and entered his eyes, the flat plane in front of him suddenly cut off the flames which blared down on him for a single second and granted him some time to relax.
In that time, he escaped by hiding in the snow on his side and throwing down a pre-engraved array. With this mithril tier one, designed to protect against fire element attacks, he could finally take a breather and react to what attacked. He didn’t even have to activate the Elder eyes to focus on the surface and see exactly what attacked him. Specifically, Akevorax found his mana sense worked best this time, and located all the foes and what exactly attacked him.
Unbeknownst to him, a large group of wizards up above somehow set up an array without his knowledge and attacked him when he hadn’t expected it.
“But just a bunch of Mature wizards? Guess I get to test something out,” arrogance sprouted on Akevorax’s face as he commented on the measly cast sent to kill him. Had the eternals already gathered this group, or was it just a bad chance as the humans wanted his dragon heart?
It’d been a while since anyone tried hunting him… Well, he did need some more humanoid bloodlines. Unbothered by the situation, Akevorax carefully observed everyone’s positions and soon found the array location without a hitch. It wasn’t even that overly crafted like the one he broke in the ruins. Any Origin Force at its critical junctions would instantly break the array! As for how to reach it… Well, teleportation right into the enemy’s heart worked best at these times.
Only their annoying mithril tier array bothered him. Once destroyed it’d be a bunch of humans for easy pickings.
Akevorax cast the teleportation spell with a shit-eating grin, ready to meet the group of unknown humans.
He really looked forward to trying out this advancement in his education.