CHAPTER 365 – DRAGON FIGHT IV
The wador made no comment regarding Tom’s unshakeable confidence in the humans. There was, he guessed, no skin off its back. Its preferred outcome was probably everyone in the battle killing each other.
Back in the fight Clare took the opportunity presented by the giant’s clumsiness to flee. Not clumsiness as such Tom corrected himself. This was the impact of Tom’s fate spike making itself known. The giant’s ankles had been tied together but given its literal superhuman level of agility that shouldn’t have been sufficient to cause it to fall.
“The power of your companions surprise me. They hid their capabilities well.” There was grudging respect in the wador’s voice.
While roaring in frustration, the giant pushed itself up. A complete lack of apocalyptical flames consuming the area was confusing. Rahmat’s skirmish had been assaulted in seconds. This one was louder and had stretched longer. It made no sense that this one had avoided her notice. He checked on her with a lightning-fast glance over his shoulder. She had grounded herself and the regular explosions had ceased. Finally, it looked like the wound was taking its toll and affecting her.
It was only the shortest of glimpse because he was unwilling to take his attention off the wador for any length of time. Despite the slight opening Tom had given it, the wador had not moved. It, too, was content to wait until the dragon died for good.
There was an abrupt explosion in the giant’s good eye. Not an arrow this time, but a darting Chaos Bolt had been responsible. It manifested as a series of arcane spinning blades that were strong enough to tear through the eye membranes.
The giant had been rendered blind without a single human death.
It was dying to the host of stinging humans who, for brief periods were capable of fighting way above their rank.
Out of nowhere, Phil appeared.
He charged in and his fists slammed multiple times into the knee that Evelyn had already struck. Major abilities were being channelled because with each blow blood sprayed outward for metres. The blonde man was screaming what looked like obscenities with each strike. Tom wished he was closer so he could have heard what was being said.
“Revenge,” the wador leader sniffed next to him. “Driven mad for revenge. Your race is not unredeemable, there is honour in that.”
The giant shifted its good leg, but the knee that Phil had been striking gave way completely under the slight extra pressure and the giant, face planted, once more. Tom’s robbing it of fate was altering the trajectory of the battle.
In response, Phil stopped fighting and spat on it. To Tom it was a completely unreasonable reaction. When your enemy fell down, you used that opportunity to hit it harder to reduce the chance of it getting up again. This pointless display of dominance, this need to insult. It was alien to him.
“I wonder what the giant did to him,” the wador said.
Tom didn’t answer. He had no desire to spend time chatting or speculating about gossip with it.
The giant started to push itself up and Phil retreated.
He scampered away utilising a movement skill to open up distance between him and the dangerous person.
It stood and ignored a series of insignificant chaos bolts that headed toward it. It had clearly adjusted to the spells and now recognised when they were a danger versus when they were little more than a feather duster. The magical missiles struck multiple spots on the giant’s body and all of them bounced off apart from one that left an orange-coloured section.
Apparently, it had become a paint bomb instead of an eldritch horror.
Another one of Everlyn’s arrows flew in and struck the injured knee.
It was ignored.
The giant might have technically been sightless by this stage, but it acted like it still had vision.
Its stare turned to rest upon Phil. Then it hopped at him, taking care to put no pressure on the broken leg. The single movement carried it a full bus length.
The New Zealander’s eyes widened in sudden worry.
Another hop left it just out of range, but that apparently large amount of space Phil had created had been wiped out effortlessly. .
Phil realised the predicament he was in and tried to run, but the giant had momentum. It hopped again and got within range.
It swung.
The weapon pulsed with a green energy that Tom had not seen before but was clearly one of its skills and the already terrifying fast club accelerated to be even quicker than usual.
It slammed to a halt as Phil raised a single hand and created a shield much like Clare’s. The indecision between fight and flee left the New Zealanders’ face as he realised the latter was unachievable.
He charged forward to target the good leg having calculated that if they disabled that leg as well it was game over.
There was no arrogance in the giant’s actions. It clearly had Phil’s measure, but it also respected him and was fighting the human like Tom would against a creature that was weaker than him but still capable of hurting him if he was careless. An aggressive caution and it saw what Phil was trying to do and hopped backward to deny him the damage and its club swept low, throbbing green once more.
Phil’s hand snapped out, and a shield was created but this time the green glow shifted to aqua at the last moment.
Fear flooded Phil’s face and the club instead of being stopped kept going. Phil who was far lighter than the tree limb was tossed in the air. The weapon shone continuously green for a few moments as it got behind Phil to stop him flying off into the distance, then back to the other side because it hit him too fast in the other direction.
Six quick bumps all of them into Phil’s shield was needed until the human’s position was stabilised. He was at waist height to the giant who then proceeded to bounce Phil on top of its weapon like you would do with a tennis ball on a racket.
“He is dead.” The wador declared. “An honourable death.”
The giant was smiling now. Each of the hits only sent Phil half a metre into the air, but the consistent pressure was fracturing the shield and something about the process had him trapped.
Alarm crossed the blond man’s features. The very familiar shape of the teleporter artefact they all had appeared in his hand.
“No. Magic Negate.” The giant rumbled, removing one hand from his club and pointing it at Phil.
The artefact did nothing. Phil was concentrating on it desperately. It was glowing brightly, but the magic was not activating.
From the other side of the zone, Tom heard the restart of the booms and whomps, which was he suspected the last gasp of the dying dragon.
The giant grinned just like it had when it was mocking Tom. Phil bounced once more, but this time as he went up the shield didn’t crack and reform. Instead, it shattered.
Bright green exploded from the club, and it sped impossibly fast into the opening the broken shield had given it.
There was a faint boom noise and Phil was turned into a red mist.
The giant stood both triumphally and not.
It was badly hurt. A significant part of its shoulder had been literally eaten by that first bolt. Its left thigh had a barrel sized depression in it that was almost a metre deep and its right knee was a mess which had turned the leg unusable. It was struggling but not yet dead and its first destroyed eye was nearly rebuilt.
A fifth arrow flew and exploded after penetrating deep into the almost healed eyeball. It was blind once more.
Another one of his crowd control golems had reached the right position because a purple line linked it to the giant and Tom felt a bit foolish as he realised why Clare had insisted on tier six or above restricting spells. He had wondered about that as it had felt like overkill for the insects and wador, but those had never been their target. They had always been intended for the giant.
With the purple leash linking them, the energy started flowing across to the giant. Tom recognised it because he had done a test run. The spell was called Overwhelming Gravity and could be sustained for three minutes.
The giant looked in the direction of the golem. It frowned and swayed on the spot. He could see veins starting to pop on its face as it struggled against the pressure Tom knew it had to be under. It clearly recognised the threat the golem represented, but it likewise lacked the strength to go after it.
“Ants,” the word was forced out of its mouth. “You’re nothing but ants.”
The energy continued to flow across to the giant.
It fell with a crash that sent earth flying in all directions. The giant was heavy enough by itself, but having that weight increased by ten times took it to an entirely new level.
More Chaos Bolts were peppering it.
About half remained unenhanced, striking with only tier one or two strength and as a result they did no damage, but the other half packed a greater punch. One caused deep burns, another summoned blood drinking vines and all the enhanced ones wore down on its resilience and the whole time the purple link flowed with power, holding it in place.
Excluding the dragon or wador intervening, the result was inevitable.
Tom glanced her way. She had given up on trying to kill anything and looked like she was about to fall at any moment. She, he realised to his shock was now attempting to crawl to the exit.
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“Unbelievable! The giant has lost.”
He smiled. Against the odds, they were going to triumph. The dragon was about to die, the giant too and all that was left to deal with the wador and one had served itself up to him. In a moment, it would attack and then learn how deadly his Black Dodge skill truly was.
“But you won’t get to celebrate.” The wador told him. “Look at the dragon. Witness its death and then we’ll fight, and I will punish you for your cowardly attack.”
“It wasn’t cowardly I had no control.”
“You knew what you were doing and did it, anyway. But we do not need to smell agreement here. I honour you for this plan. Watch her suffer the death she deserves because she was not honourable. Only evil creatures strike downward. Appreciate the results of your labour.”
His regular connections with the wador via the True Dreams told him that the offer was genuine. He focused exclusively on the dragon. Her drooping head, drunken steps… the way her wings hung uselessly at her side. She was dying, and she knew it and was trying to leave the trial. Probably in an attempt to deny the rest of them the benefit of winning the race.
It was on brand for her to be evil to the end.
She collapsed two steps from the portal.
“She’s not dead yet.” The wador said simply.
The wador was, of course, right. With an immense effort, she pushed herself to her feet and then threw herself at the portal. It was the last action of a spiteful creature, and her eyes rolled up as the energy expended by the desperate movement cost her all of her remaining life force. The effort was not enough. She had barely got off the ground before she was falling again, and she came to a stop just in front of the portal.
Her eyeballs were turned upward with half of her eyes completely white and the rest were bloody veins that were never supposed to be visible. Her chest was not moving, and the aura that made her feel more real than everything else was gone. Dead or unconscious, Tom wasn’t sure, but probably the former.
She lay there.
The majesty and threat she had possessed in life had vanished. A dragon corpse was all that was left. Remains, Tom thought that were probably worth a fortune. Once they cleared the zone of the remaining wador opponents, they could harvest it, and the sale of those parts might be worth more than their final rewards.
There was sudden movement on the carcass as gravity abruptly won over friction and the wing that had laid on its body in an awkward position slid down and touched the portal.
The portal flared into life, and the body vanished.
“Damn.” Tom cursed. “That would have been some harvest.”
“Success.” The wador said, and that was the truth.
They had done it.
His skill had saved them from what was supposed to be a certain death. A defeat that had been planned by a subset of the GODs. Sure, they had their own GODs aiding them, but despite that the deck had been heavily stacked against them. They had won anyway. It was a heady feeling. Not only had they won they had delivered a devastating blow to one of their competitors at the same time.
The dragon’s losing their ultimate champion would have massive ramifications for the competition. The neutral races achieving one of the top spots was no longer as incredibly unlikely as it had once been. The damage this had done to the dragons couldn’t be underestimated. With the dragon dead, even if every human died, the trial would be judged an overwhelming success by any observer not factoring in Tom’s plan. But they all weren’t going to die. Some of them would hopefully survive. He would have used the word most instead of some, but he didn’t know how many of those on the other side had been killed. Humans making it to number one without Tom’s plan being effective was now a possibility.
It was an amazing feeling.
“And now you die.” The wador declared.
“You don’t have to.” Tom told it, turning to face it. “Even if you are successful, there’s no guarantee the contract backlash won’t kill you and just so you know my death won’t spare you from consequences, either. The contract limitations continue until its specified dissolve conditions are met.”
The fight against the giant was still ongoing. While it was a winning battle, it was still going to take all of their power to whittle away its health over the next couple of minutes.
He stared at those scarred, sightless eyes. “There’s no need for you to die here.”
“Your species’ success against the dragon was impressive, but…” Those disfigured eyes stared him down. It was a deliberate pause, an ominous one. “Before you die, I want you to understand that humans are not the only ones capable of planning.”
Tom’s alarms went off.
Time didn’t slow.
Instinctively he activated Crystallised Moment.
It purchased him a second to think. The wador had crossed half the distance to him and Black Dodge clearly wasn’t triggering and worse it had enhanced its movement with speed magic. There was no time to ponder the why or how his battle instincts took over.
A massive chunk of his magic was directed into his domain and then the dirt and rock under his feet. He was already connected to it, so the starting priming step had already been completed, lowering the delay. This burst just added power to the mix. A host of earth spikes exploded out of the ground.
The second of frozen time passed.
Almost faster than he could register the cat like person wove through the spikes and then it was on him. His spear bounced off its chest as Rahmat’s Power Strike that he hadn’t even realised he had been relying on, failed to materialize.
Idiot. he thought.
His threat assessments barraged him with information.
A teleport took him directly and blindly away. Another burst of warnings caused him to turn his stomach to stone.
The wador kept coming. A blow struck the newly converted Living Rock, and he tumbled backward, leaving a puff of dust and flying chips of rock behind him. He thrust the shaft of his spear up with it desperately angled to catch its plunging mouth. That was successful and all the wador could do was to half bite the wood and then withdraw to try again.
One threat vector was neutralised, but his overall position was dire. It was on top of him. Forcing him to deal with it straining downwards its jaws lunging and snapping as it attempted to get past the wood to bite him. While tom was focused on that desperate resistance its four back legs pumped, ripping into his stomach, groin and thighs.
Living Rock reinforced the area, but there was pain as its claws went through the protection and reached unconverted flesh with active nerves.
Tom didn’t let up his offense. A stone spike punched through one of its back legs. It twisted violently, and another spike opened up a slash along its stomach instead of impaling it.
More alarms screamed at him.
He phased out of existence as a claw strike that would have decapitated him by slicing through his neck went through his converted ethereal body instead.
His throat felt like it had been bathed in acid. There were internal injuries, but he didn’t have time to deal with it directly. He blasted undirected healing mana through him, and some of the damage was reduced. That injury meant its claw strikes had sufficient magic invested into them that they could hurt him even if he used his phase ability, Tom realised.
That was a problem.
Another blow at his head triggered a second lifesaving phase out reaction.
Light exploded in his brain. Memories were ripped. What was he doing? Fighting? But why? Where was pink wing? Why did he feel so sick?
On instinct, he reached for his mana pool to heal himself.
His mana… Somehow there wasn’t any available.
What was happening?
A beast was on top of him. A snarling cat. He was losing to an animal, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. The monster was too strong and fast.
He felt half his arm get torn off.
The grip on his spear slipped.
It lunged at his face. He saw teeth, lots of them.
Clarity flooded through him. All of his memories returned, but something was off. He couldn’t feel his body and he was in a white emptiness.
Words appeared in front of him.
You have died.
Tom stared blankly at the message.
This had happened before.
The lack of pain anywhere in his body and when he went to reach for his skills, there was nothing.
Dead?
He was dead, again?
But…
He stared at the incomprehensible words.
Memories of the chaotic last few moments rose unbidden.
The wador had been so fast and Black Dodge had done nothing…
And this…
You have died.
The words had not changed. They contained the same message. But he couldn’t die. There was so much he still had to do and how could he have been killed when everything had been going so well. The two main threats had been eliminated it didn’t make any sense.
But…
It was not a prank. The systems, or GODs or whatever maintained this moment had cheated. They had changed his mindset to make it impossible to deny the reality. There was no comfort of self-delusion here.
The words were real, and they were Truth with the capital T. Undeniable, undisputable… he had died.
The wador that he was supposed to defeat easily had destroyed him instead. The entire fight and the proceeding moments flashed through this brain. That last thing it had said to him.
‘Humans are not the only ones capable of planning.’
They had seen what Black Dodge could do and probably noticed how much he relied on that time dilation.
And they had adapted and found a way to negate his strengths and left him helpless.
If he had a body, his cheeks would have reddened.
There had been a dream when he had been designing the shield golem. A perfect defensive shield that had made a random fighter a hero right up until it had failed. It had been breached by a specific frequency of energy and rendered useless. He had thought it had been supporting the shield idea, but it hadn’t. It had been warning him about his overreliance on a single skill.
Preparation, his signature talent had been what had defeated him.
And that True Dream had warned him.
And he hadn’t realised it…
And now he was dead.
The conscious acceptance of his state was a signal, and the words in front of him changed.
Your patron goddess has deemed for you to have lived an exceptional life and as a reward you may direct the terms of your reincarnation.
Would you like to be reincarnated into a sapient species.
“Yes.”
Do you wish it to be a terror, neutral or good species.
That was an easy answer. “Neutral.” Terror was something he would never consider and the good species, in his opinion had something wrong with them. They had a flaw in their psyche that put other species or activities first like the chosen and inventor, respectively. He did not want his new life’s development to be forced down such a path.
Do you wish your potential within the species to be low, middle or high.
“High,” he answered without hesitation and wondered who the hell would go for anything else.
Someone who wanted an ordinary life, Tom thought after a moment’s consideration and given his last forty years of struggle he could see the appeal. Surviving and growing had been exhausting, but that challenge was to be embraced, not avoided.
Do you wish opportunities to achieve power to be infrequent, normal or frequent. Note opportunity goes hand in hand with suffering.
“Frequent.”
More opportunities to grow were something he couldn’t turn down.
Do you wish your circumstances to be impoverished, standard, or privileged?
He considered that question for a little longer than the previous ones. Ultimately, his desire was to be strong and starting from an impoverished background could prevent that courtesy of malnutrition and the poverty spiral. Privileged in its own way was probably just as bad. Luxury was wonderful, but it did not lend itself to gaining strength. It was why he had avoided most of his system room functions.
“Standard.” He said, hardly able to believe that he was voluntarily giving up a chance to be reborn as a rich noble or equivalent. Then he remembered his death and the cause of it. He had died because of his failure to think things through, and he was one of the champions of humanity. It was a costly mistake, and that sort of culpability should go hand in hand with consequences. “Impoverished,” he corrected. The earlier questions already provided him with a path to power.
Starting poor would be a penance for his mistake in this life.
Do you wish to reincarnate exclusively as a human?
This one stumped him.
“Um, maybe I…?”
The words wouldn’t come to him. While he wanted to be human, he also didn’t want the baggage they were probably going to face.
Do you wish to reincarnate in a biped form?
It was better. Close to human but not… “Probably… I’m not sure?” He trailed off uncertain about what to say.
Is your preference for a broken, declining, stable or ascending civilisation?
“Not broken and not declining unless the problems can be fixed.”
That answer was easy. He couldn’t imagine anything worse than being reincarnated and watching his new species decline and being unable to change the trajectory.
Do you wish to remember everything, fragments, nothing, or just have your personality carry through without specific memories? That question threw him more than anything that had been asked. The nothing option sounded like death, but everything or fragments didn’t sound much better. If he had the memories of this life rattling in his head, then what then? What would happen if he discovered the ruins of humanity or an isolated, struggling tribe that was doomed to extinction. What happened if those pieces let him realise that their suffering was his fault.
That his death too stupidity and arrogance had resulted in billions of his species being thrown into misery.
It would break him again, and he didn’t want that to happen.
“Just my personality,” he whispered. “Unless I can reincarnate as a human in the competition with full memories to help save my species. Then do that. I would love the chance to make amends for my mistake.”
There was a pause like his request was being considered. Then new words appeared.
Your Goddess wishes you a fulfilling and wonderful to life.
Everything vanished.