Despite feeling like hell, I’ve got to step up into the ring as it were. My throat feels like hell from constantly expanding and contracting my organ. Ugh, my breath weapon organ. So glad no one else can hear my brain right now. I have to keep exhaling and alternating breath weapons constantly. Not to mention how wobbly my limbs feel between the beatings they’ve taken, and all the runecrafting and SP expenditures today.
So, these ancients, sure, are a bit imposing, and sure, I’ve got nothing left in the tank that can deal with them without risking really stupid things—where were you going with this Reggie? Uh. I can’t remember. What I wouldn’t give for some sort of superhero power like self-cloning, or friggin’ super-speed. Razzafrazzin’ speedsters. Leave speed to the speedsters Reggie. I’d love to! But I’ve gotta keep wrecking my own face, or legs, or whatever, to get where I need to be, when I need to be there. I think you’re off on a tangent bud.
Well, I suppose you’re right. Me. Oy vey. Cracking under the pressure much? You could say that. Or cracking under the foot of these five ancient dragons taking turns stomping me. Ow, ow, ow. Mjolnir sails in out of nowhere, clipping two of them in the jaw, bowling them over like dominoes, tipping them all away from me save one, whose stomp I roll out from under. Thanks Te. I needed that. I mean, not that five minutes of being stomped to within an inch of my life, but seeing ancient dragons topple like dominoes due to a casual Mjolnir toss when you aren’t even looking this direction.
Ugh, so stupidly badass. I need to step up my game to get on her level. Am I jealous? No, I’m freakin’ in love! I just wanna moon over her bein’ so friggin’ awesome. She’s out there, trading away blows with some colossal monstrosity that looks like some kind of gargantuan millipede in a shining crimson exoskeleton. It’s got like a billion spears for legs, horns the size of a city bus, antennae that look like they could signal space, and it seems to be exhaling a cloud of poison.
What sort of kaiju monstrosity monster factory shenanigans is Terrorzin up to having crap like this? Whatever radioactive brew is churning out these monsters has only one setting: absurd. It’s like he just went to a random name generator, smashed it a few times, looked at the first line, and said sure, let’s make that. Well, more likely, “Hey you, underling, make this for me,” or something. Bluh. I’m too tired to roast Terrorzin silently mentally right now.
For a bit, I’d thought about maybe worrying about Teuila possibly inhaling the toxic gas, but then I remembered a few things. Firstly, she’s got her otter lung boost, so she could probably fight while holding her breath for half an hour if she really needed to. Secondly, she can breathe water, and create infinite water now, with certain runic clip enhancements. So she could literally just keep casting water into her own mouth or throat or nose or whatever.
Where oh where has my little knife gone? Where oh where could it be? Oh Mindfire, won’t you come home to me. Seriously though. Where the hell does it go when it disappears for twenty four hours? Oh man. Smacking my forehead, I realize I should just tie the sufferin’ thing to my wrist, and use it constantly. Know why? Because psychic damage isn’t subject to the size-difference damage reduction that all these crazy kaijus and enormous ancient dragons and whatever other nonsense have. Blargh! I’m such a dink!
Now I kinda wish I hadn’t linked its enchantment to the bandolier to free up the roundsheath. Though, the creation and warp strike abilities of the roundsheath have come in handy. Then again, Mindfire had its own warpstrike ability that seemed repeatedly usable, based on the assassin trying to gank me with it in Vorzhog’s keep. Did you really just use the word gank Reggie? Eugh. I don’t know why, but it leaves a fowl taste in my mouth. I shoulda said shank. For some reason, despite being remarkably similar words, with—in this context—remarkably similar meanings, at least that one doesn’t make me wanna blow chunks.
Oh man. What would these dragons even do if I just started horfing because of my own mental monologue? Like, would they try to avoid the spatter? Kind of a ridiculous thought Reggie. I know, I know, but you know me. We try to weaponize anything and everything our mind comes across, and add it to our toolbelt. Always snagging new tools. Yeah. You’re such a tool. Hey. Snrk. Okay. I deserved that. Reggie. Mhm? Remember one of your most common, most fatal flaws? Which one? I’ve got quite a—ow. I’m guessing that one. Distractibility.
Coughing, I drag myself out of the rubble of this ruin that I crashed into when this Thunderer ancient blasted me sideways. Now they’re all waltzing up to me in a semicircle. Shaking my head, I sigh and just give them a weary look. As they posture with dragonfright, I lose it to a fit of the giggles. I really shouldn’t. I’m baked out of my mind—erm, not like, stoned baked, like cooked—and my muscles feel like they’ve been through a paper press. Still, I strive to expand my Honoris Causa as large as I can in order to take them on. I’m only something like, maybe *maybe* at the very most, possibly close to a seventh of their size.
If they’re Wolves, Great Danes, and Saint Bernards, my Honoris Causa is a chihuahua’s snout even after expanding it as far as I can. Worse, I’m already bad at fighting in my own normal body with no training. I have no idea what sort of martial arts applies to fighting dragons as a dragon. Well, even if I had an idea, I’d still lack the training. Also, I’m pretty sure that no martial art teaches you how to take on someone as comparatively large as a luxury cruise ship.
Could we sit in retrocognition and just map three-d modeling and choreograph fighting maneuvers? Well, not with my Honoris Causa up. That’d tear my skull open from the pain, if I recall correctly. I just remember telling myself to do it sparingly at best, and only for very short moments. I can’t recall why though. My brain’s really fuzzy, and I’m hoping it’s just because of all the hits to the head I’ve taken today. Well, I mean, concussive blunt force trauma resulting in cranial hemorrhaging wouldn’t be great either.
Come on Te, come on. I see you sheltering in your Honoris Causa, powering up another Mirage Flash. Use this one to disappear. Come on love. I know you can’t hear my mind right now, due to the psi-blocking circlet, but you can’t keep risking open engagement. I know how wild and powerful you are, but also how amazingly intelligent you are, even if you goof off a lot. You’ve read the situation, you saw the spectacle of me showing up and getting attention. Come on babe, you’ve got this. You know what to do.
You don’t have counters to various spells and abilities that might be leveled your way. And, we’ve got a rescue to finish, before we’re both too depleted to complete it. Hm, depleted to complete it. Sounds like the final bar in a sick rap. Pft. What do you know about sick raps Reggie? Absolutely nothin’. Say it again y’all. Wait. What’s a war good for? Absolutely nothin’. Why does that sound familiar?
Rattling my skull, I try to return to my senses, and return those to the present. Leaving my Honoris Causa mostly ethereal, I snag every bit of enchanted-looking equipment from the corpses around me with my tendrils or telekinesis. What doesn’t seem useful in the moment, I chuck into an interdimensional sack. What does look useful, I use to try to buzzsaw limbs off of ancient dragons by equiping my tendrils, doing a wrapping maneuver like chucking a grappling hook, then tugging like the string on a top. The key word here being, “try.”
Anything that stands up to that kind of punishment, and actually does damage, I’ll keep using. Anything that doesn’t, well, these ancients now have some toothpicks stuck in their elbows and such. I’m certain it can’t feel pleasant. Eugh. I shudder at the idea of a metal object, sliver sized, stuck in that soft spot near the ulnar nerve. Oh, huh. How do you make a pissed-off ancient dragon laugh while fighting them?
Smirking and shaking my head at myself, I don’t want to finish the joke, but I can’t help myself. The same way you do everything else. You tickle their funnybone. Or in my case, you simply appear small and helpless, and like your own techniques are so haphazard, that they’re hazardly to yourself. Which, okay, sometimes they are.
Boom! Teuila’s Honoris Causa has disappeared, and is replaced with a gaggle of falling flunkies. The falls are punctuated by about fifteen more booms, and Terrorzin’s forces going flying. Ooftah, I’m bowled over as a sonic breeze flies by like a ballistic missile, winking at me. I knew we were on the same wavelength. Heavens and hells I love that woman. She virtually vanishes in a hurricane of wind and rain, afterimages of her slowly fading from the battlefield.
Alright Reggie, just try to survive a little bit longer. Then get the hell out of here. Genre senses are screaming another shoe is about to drop. And it’s a big one. You thought the klaxon warning was bad last time? This is every ship in the shipyard keeping their foghorns on blast. Regardless, I continue my rampage, trying to keep attention on me. Well, if there’s one thing Reggie Shellcracker is good at, it’s pissing people off.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Don’t looks so smug you ancient aardvarkian acolytes. Really Reggie? Shut up, I couldn’t think of an assonant or alliteration. I know. I’m you. I know you know. Then why don’t we both agree to stop being pedantic, and—. Both? Ugh. Reggie, take a ten year nap when this fight is over. Yeah, you got it pal. Anyway, I will be out of safe SP for the day from having to pop my Steely Body spell repeatedly to weather blows from these ancients. I’ve got a few ravenports and wormhole warpstrikes left, but I need to keep attention on me, not disappear while evading danger.
Gnawing on my lip, I try to figure out the right course of action. I’m not really strong enough to take down ancients without magic, without the Worldstorm. As much as my tendril buzzsaw is pretty handy and likely painful, there’s nothing sharp enough and long enough to equip the tendrils with to actually saw off an ancient’s limb. Despite evading as best I can, I’m still struggling here, struggling hard. Trying to apply principles of judo—at least, that’s what I think I’m trying to do—I try to maneuver incoming attacks away by leveraging their own force against them.
I’m more outmatched than a toddler trying to box the heavyweight champ of the world. It’s a rough job, but somebody’s gotta do it. Pft, snrk, snort. I don’t mean boxing toddlers. That’s horrible. Haha. I mean using rotational momentum, and manifesting physicality and tangibility only at my extremities for combat.
Doing so, I repeatedly trip up my foes or send them skidding on their faces to my real body’s side which has to leap the hell out of the way. This only works because of the intangibility of most of my form, that still somehow lets me gain leverage as if it were tangible. I have no freakin’ clue how the physics work on an Honoris Causa. I’ve just gotta roll with it.
I’m up against creatures that are two to ten times the size of a titanosaur. Maybe larger. It’s hard to estimate, since I’ve never seen a titanosaur. Also, because it’s hard getting a clear estimate on the size of creatures whose head is about the size of your entire draconic spirit form. Still, I feel like I’ve been dancing with these ancients for minutes upon minutes. Possibly even closing in on an hour. I’m getting absolutely pounded out here. I don’t think there’s an unbroken bone in my body. I feel like a walking bruise. Every bit of me is as excruciating as every other bit of me simply existing. And I’m pretty sure I’ve been being sniped by some gunners, because I’m pretty sure I feel bullets floating around in me in random places.
You’d think you’d notice yourself getting shot, right Reggie? Well apparently not, when all your nerve endings are on fire, and your skin is half baked, and you’re being repeatedly tossed about and trampled by ancient dragons. Still, somehow, these suckers aren’t looking great anymore. I mean, not that they ever looked great in a conventional sense. I just mean, it looks like I’m starting to wear ‘em down a bit.
More and more horde has showed up, and chips in with the occasional spell or ranged weapon or whatever. I mean, they tried to join the melee fracas at first, but their own allies would accidentally smash ‘em flat, or I’d use them as shields against ranged weaponry and breath weapons. So, y’know, they wised up eventually. Let’s see. Teuila slew probably five foes per strike of her mirage flash on average, when counting her other maneuvers. Uh, three hundred twenty, plus another, uh eighty, oh, four hundred, duh, because it’s five times eighty strikes. And that’s just during the period that I was here when she was specifically charging and using Mirage Flash.
Okay, so five k as the first assault against us, Te probably dropped five hundred easy over here. I melted a few thousand between my first and second, and third Shellcracker Satellite Slams. I mean, not just those three maneuvers, but the time I was soloing around all of them. Like dropping Wistenzlia peak on a few of them, or before the plasma balls showed up, or a kilometer east of here when I thought I’d provide a distraction for Te. All in all, if Terrorzin brought forty k forces, he’s probably getting closer to thirty two, maybe even closing in on thirty k, which is huge for night zero plus day one. But this pace is untenable.
I’m fairly certain his next assault on our chokepoints is going to be more creative, and be ten thousand of his forces at once. Then if that one fails, he’ll bum rush the hell out of us with twenty thousand forces, and everything at his disposal. That’s going to turn into a three day brawling retreat. On our part, not his, obvee. I hate this. I hate thinking of lives in terms of numbers. I hate just trying to ignore that every person here had a story. Maybe they were a brainwashed fanatic, maybe not.
Think we should try offering mercy over here Reggie? Are you kidding? I’m getting my ass handed to me. They’d laugh it off like it was nothing at this point. Of course, they don’t know I’ve been using them to have an easier time stalling without dying to a billion spells and bullets and claws and everything else. It’s way, way, way easier to take a bit of a trouncing to put on a show, against a few foes, even big ones like these, especially with judicious use of my Steely Body spell. Though I think that’s off the table at this point.
Alright. I’m going to have to pull the ultimate in disrespect. I’m gonna read a book while we fight. I kind of have to, in order to survive. This Steely Body cast has to last me for a while, so I need to focus on evading. Doot doot doo. Levitating the book near me that I got from Al’pa’ca—the Grimoire Tempestas Nox Infinitus—I try to focus on its energies just enough, so that in an hour, it’ll pump me full of a hundred or so SP. Oh yeah.
Reggie Shellcracker. If you’re good at one thing, it’s pissing people off. The looks on their faces is priceless. Imagine the gnat you’ve been stomping on and trying to squash, burn, blow up, poison, slash, stab, and just all around kill for minutes, maybe going on an hour, whips out a book, and starts reading while messing with your face with their puny breath weapons.
Hm, that’s right. It’ll grant me the muscle memory of one spell from within its pages, for the rest of the day, or until I focus on it for an hour again. Chewing my bottom lip, it’s a bit too hard to do pros and cons of all the spells in a giant spellbook right now, so I’ll just pick one at random. Here, this one’s fine I g—I guess. Create Undead? Really Reggie? How the hell was I supposed to know which page I was flipping to at random! Gimme a break! But since I focused on it first as a choice, I’m locked in due to the magic of the tome.
Guess we’re gonna turn some of Terrorzin’s troops back against him, in the sickest way possible. Eugh. Let’s see, details of the spell, something something tier, something something SP, and. Oh heavens. Oh no. Hahaha. Oh man. My broken buggy arse inability to use Rayileklian magic, “the right way,” strikes again. So, normally a sorcerer or wizard has maybe twenty SP, maybe. Y’know, a couple-dozen at most.
The spell lets you, hahaha. It lets, hahaha. It lets you sink half your current SP into it, to boost it by orders of magnitude based on how many SP that ends up being. Now, to be fair, if I cast it after this burst of recharge, it’s “only” going to be fifty SP dumped into it. Snrk.
Let’s see, uh, powers of two, hm. Two, four, eight, Sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four. Five, five and half-ish orders of magnitude? I don’t mean like, five digits, that’s ridiculous. I mean like—Reggie. Are you going to start a zombie apocalypse? What? No. I—I don’t think so. Like, even if I casted it first thing after a nice long nap, when I’m at my max SP, it’s only going to drain up to two-fifty-six of my SP, and provide up to uh… three to the…seventh power. I blink a few times as I do the math. Like uh, two thousand undead… I guess.
Look, that’s only even if they all fit within a ten foot radius, well, fifteen if I get creative, because I can enhance it with the metamagic from The Platinum’s robe. Somehow I don’t think Bahamut ever intended that particular metamagic to be used to widen the radius of corpse-to-undead conversion. Eugh.
But also, yeah, no, I’m sure they don’t have propagating necromancy bites or anything. Besides, if we did accidentally start a zombie apocalypse here in the Spine of the World, in Terrorzin’s domain? We could literally just box off the valleys, cause some rockslides, maybe blow up some mountains, and they’d all be trapped, if we didn’t want to just deal with ‘em. Anyway, my point was, that it’s only like, three, six, twelve, twenty-four, forty-eight animated bodies. And there’s that limit on the radius it can effect, so even if I had like a thousand SP to blow, it’d only do so much.
My mind sorta shuts down from all the punishment my body’s been taking. The horde is more and more emboldened. It takes every fiber of my being to keep them off my back, and keep any spellcasters from getting any bright ideas. I think the ancients are getting bored of batting me around, and annoyed that I just keep coming back for more. I really need to learn some higher tier offensive stuff.
I should honestly fly into each of their noses, walk up their sinus pathways. From there, I should start carving my way to their brains, using combinations of breath weapons to toxify, freeze, fry, and explode my way through their sinusial pathways or whatever. But Illy just socked me in the jaw only a couple hours ago now, for flying into an ancient’s mouth. So I’m trying to be a little less brazen, in case she’s watching the scrying feeds. I don’t want to give her a heart attack.
Have… I seriously been at this for over an hour now? A rush of energy from the tome fills me. A hundred SP, whew, that’s like, two’ish Steely Body spells, or two create undeads, since I now temporarily have the skill to cast that spell. Did Te finish the rescue op, and need to leave? I’d understand if she couldn’t pick me up for some reason, and I had to get myself out of the danger zone, but she would have at least contacted me through the scrying comms. Huh, speak of the—well, angelic Valkyrie knight.
My heart sinks as I hear Teuila’s hushed, hurried, frantic voice patched in over our scrying feeds as she pleads, “Airhead!? You’re not gonna like this! I don’t know if I can get them out of here alive. I, I mean, they’re, them, they, they. I don’t know if they’ll live if I get them out of here. But, but there’s more than one. I can’t just leave them! And, and there’s something else too. Like, like some sort of wiggly energy rip in the air. Reggie? Reggie what do I do?”