Bath was fairly eager to make another public appearance. Thus far, he'd gotten more enjoyment from human terror and awe than he'd ever felt for seizing and squatting on a particular territory...which had been the only thing to do for the past half-billion years.
'I never regarded them as more than their fellow descendants, never saw them as more than polished extensions of their ancient ancestors.' Bath acknowledged this to himself. 'However, clearly humans have become something fundamentally different than any of Earth's other species...for them to look like so many other sapients, for them to be kursi...'
One of the reasons why Bath had decided to spend so much time building up Earth before moving on to worlds beyond was his own sense of curiosity. He wanted to further explore the intelligence of humanity and its divergence from other life. Because Bath was limited in essence-shaping ability by the sum of all he had ever devoured, he was, in a sense, also searching for the origin of his own fairly recently developed sapience. Before he'd eaten his first human, he'd been limited to the desires of all the lifeforms he'd ever consumed. He simply hadn't known anything else.
Even after he ate humans--many of them over the course of thousands of years--he didn't explore the new potential of human intelligence. They were weak; he was strong. By this point in his life, he hadn't seen any point in truly exploring the mental factor that set humanity apart. In the tangle of information that represented the human brain, he hadn't even noticed that the human mind possessed anything worth his notice.
He had only truly realized the power of intellect when he entered the Ritus gate and ventured off world. He acknowledged that exploring the stars without any sapient-like sense of reasoning would have been impossible. As he thought of his past self, he almost felt a tinge of shame.
Almost. 'At the end of the day, even with all their intelligence, I could have wiped them all out...Intelligence only takes you so far.'
Since Bath had learned from Lisa and her chip reader that no one entity had ever conquered the universe, Bath felt like this was the perfect example of the limits of intellect alone. If there was one thing in which Bath had complete confidence, it was his dominating power.
He was hovering in the air now, a small fly on the breeze, waiting for the right moment to metamorphose into an imperious dragon. He saw the battle stretching out before him, savored the way his many orchestrations came to fruition. The humans had all broken off into natural groups, each assuming a single key and complementary role, even if some could reasonably use many different combat professions at once. He was especially pleased by how well the humans coordinated with his quasi-sapients. The quasi-sapients had naturally integrated into human packs. He was perhaps more surprised at the duo off to his left: Dean and one of his jerboa quasi-sapients. They were speedy, jumped several times over their body length, dug burrows, and had hearing evolved to listen for the quiet flight of owls. Once he increased their diminutive size a notch...they became the perfect assassins.
Bath had circled around the battlefield while impersonating the form of one of his quasi-sapient hawks, darting around to gauge the area with the greatest density of Basalith residents. The space where he hovered, now, was that very space. He rubbed his forelegs together, waiting for the right moment...waiting...for the enemy to finally succumb to total despair. Bath was genuinely curious as to how the U.S. troops had managed to persevere so long in this area without fully losing morale.
Despite their impressive resolve, the enemy finally broke. Bath waited a moment, then suddenly exploded into form, his entire body forming seemingly out of thin air. He presented this process so that everyone below could see his bones emerge from nothingness, only to quickly assume a coating of muscle and finally accept a mantle of scales and feathers. After his body fully formed, he roared, an earth-shattering, deep rumble that left all present shaking in the wake of serial vibrations. It was almost as though all the still-breathing U.S. forces around him were prostrate in reverence, having been absolutely pummeled to the ground by the vibrations. The people of Basalith faired much better; some were even still standing, though all had at least taken a step or two backward.
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Bath grinned, not that the humans would perceive the slight upturning of his toothy maw as such.
"People of Basalith," Bath began, his voice sinuous and confident, "You have entered the trial of blood and emerged. You have reforged yourselves in pursuit of the Way of the Dragon, and have displayed your loyalty towards myself and the Church of the Dragon in its entirety. For your efforts, I bestow upon you all a boon of life, extending all of your life spans by five years."
Undisciplined cheering erupted from all over the battlefield. Because of Bath's gargantuan size and booming voice, most people within the surrounding few miles could see and hear him. From the time he started speaking to now, many more members of COTD had sprinted over.
Suddenly, the cries of jubilation turned to screams. COTD members suddenly began to attack one another. The only ones who seemed somewhat immune to the violence were those who had formed bonds with quasi-sapients. While they still lashed out and attacked others, both human and quasi-sapient did so in tandem, as a single collaborative unit, seemingly incapable of turning on one another.
Bath roared, this time the sound violent and dripping with destructive intent. The enemy soldiers directly around him all gasped like floundering fish as their bodies felt a wave of force powerful enough to crack the ground beneath them. They'd all been smashed, their bones shattered, their organs ruptured, blood dripping out feebly from their orifices. He flattened even his own church's members, forcing them to their knees under his gale wind's pressure in an effort to immobilize them.
'What's doing this to them?'
Bath extended out his essence tendrils, trying to find the source of the pandemonium. His eyes flickered when his essence caressed the form of a woman sprinting away. She was much too slow, obviously not from Basalith. She was behind him, having escaped his concussive voice by luck of being oriented in the exact opposite direction he had roared.
As she ran, people parted before her. He'd seen the behavior countless times as Lisa waded through oppressively large crowds. 'So, there were kursi we missed,' Bath thought matter-of-factly to himself. He quickly plucked the woman up. At the same time, he discovered a young man also parting a crowd of people to ease his escape. Bath tsked to himself; these people sorely lacked stealth.
'Not that they'd ever be required to utilize stealthy skills when dealing with normal humans,' Bath admitted with a sigh. Based off of how many people Bath was still manually pinning to the ground with root shackles, the number of remaining kursi must be high.
'I'll have to have a word with Lepochim about the reliability of his subordinates' organizational information.'
In the span of five seconds, Bath had found and captured all the attacking kursi. Snorting at the seven kursi now held up before him, seemingly in thin air, Bath stuck out a taloned finger and drew it towards their suspended figures. Then he spoke.
"Hello, little saboteurs. The Church of the Dragon rewards guts." Then, he whipped his claw in the smallest motion he could possibly create, tearing his claw through their aligned chest cavities. they all gasped, then went limp; Bath planned to resuscitate them later, off camera.
"To the governments of Earth: let this day serve as a first glimpse into the power of the Dragon." Bath whipped his wings open. "If you stand with us, you will be exalted. If you stand against us, you will be razed. I tire of war games;" a false statement, though Bath thought it sounded poignant. "You have until the end of the week." He spoke calmly, though at the end his voice resounded through the crowd, echoing disorientingly from a variety of directions.
Bath breathed in deeply, slitted lines in his neck revealing a molten, yellow glow. Then, he breathed out, a crackling flame exploding outward around him like a volcanic eruption. It first zig-zagged in the air like ephemeral lightning, then danced over essence he'd arranged in intricate, swirling curves, tracing the pattern he'd painted with oxygen-producing microbes. Black smoke complimented the bright flame, constricting and smoking over Bath's prisma-color form like a sentient, hungry mist.
Bath closed his jaws. The fire died within the space of an adrenaline-boosted heartbeat. The smoke, on the other hand, expanded, cloaking his entire form in a smoggy, charcoal black. Then, as soon as he was completely obscured, the smoke caught on fire from the bottom up, the Dragon finally disappearing in a towering curtain of flames.
Bath watched the area below, one again in the body of a fly. As he saw Lepochim, who had reached the area's vicinity a few seconds previous, he settled down into the role of observer. As he did so, he let his mind wander.
'I wonder which belligerent nation will be the next to meet Basalith's wrath...'