Aurelian gasped for air and held back a retch while the copper tang of blood filled his mouth. His gaze had unfocused as a result of whatever the hell had happened and he blinked desperately to clear the dazed lack of sharpness to his vision while scrambling to his feet. He had dropped his sword somewhere, and as much by instinct as by memory he started the process of summoning it immediately.
Every breath was like a sharp knife in his side, and he managed to turn to look at where the Skarnids were rapidly closing in. His awareness shifted to his own health, and he saw he’d lost almost 300 points in a single hit. Panic rose, and was almost immediately subsumed and crushed when Dragon’s Resolve roared to life in his mind. Have to… have to focus!
Aurelian fumbled for the supply pack on his back and dropped it to the floor. The top of the bag was opened quickly and he reached in to grab at the potions he’d stored inside the pack and fumbled one of the minor health bottles out.
A sudden roar filled the air and the Skarnids’ charge faltered when several savaged logs of manawood landed in front of them and promptly ignited from a stream of dragonfire. The monstrous arachnids hissed in rage and fear and skittered away from the burning barrier, though Aurelian knew it wouldn’t hold long.
I will buy you time!
Aurelian barely had enough wherewithal to register the statement before Bahamut slammed into the top of the nearest Skarnid and, after grabbing hold firmly with his platinum claws, breathed a full-force jet of flame directly against the top of its body. The creature screamed in pain and fire and went mad, its scorpion tail attempting to smash its stinger into Bahamut, and missing the dragon when he nimbly leapt aside to avoid it.
The bottle was uncapped and Aurelian downed it immediately.
Restorative energy surged throughout his body, and his already great regeneration burned with an overcharging force. His vision cleared immediately, as did the small fog over his mind, and Aurelian narrowed in on the scene before him. Bahamut was playing a dangerous and lethal game with the Skarnids, and continued to launch himself from creature to creature while doging whirring limbs and stabbing tails.
Snarls and growls of challenge echoed from the small dragon, and Aurelian abruptly crushed the bottle in his hand when worry seized hold of him. He started at the sound of shattering glass, and in that moment his hand refilled with the materialising form of his runesword. “Finally!”
With his health still ticking upward toward 500, his bleeding greatly reduced, and his concussion and broken ribs reduced to nothing and a slight fracture respectively; Aurelian let Pain Tolerance do its work and launched himself forward with a speed and rage sourced in desperation.
FLY UP!
Bahamut heard him without acknowledging him, and the hatchling launched himself off his latest Skarnid with every iota of strength in his powerful form. The downward push staggered the Arachnid slightly and the dragon surged upward. In seconds he would be free—
A swiping tail smashed Bahamut bodily from the sky and with a sickening crunch the dragon slammed into the marble in front of Aurelian.
He didn’t move.
“Bahamut?” Aurelian asked numbly.
A low, mewling whine of pain came from the hatchling’s mouth.
The Skarnids shrieked in glee.
Bahamut wheezed out a final breath, and went still.
The world seemed to collapse under Aurelian at that moment. The sound hit him like a final blow, like a gong in his soul. It was impossible to explain the sense of surreal disbelief that gripped him with the sudden intensity of a gargantuan claw. It was like Bael’tharax had taken hold of his heart, and started to squeeze. Pain, shock, denial, sorrow, grief, and more collapsed in upon him like a fountaining wave of emotion.
And yet all he could do was stand there, and stare.
“Bahamut…?” Aurelian asked in a voice that to his own ears sounded brittle.
The dragon looked small in his unmoving state. Fragile. Delicate. He appeared vulnerable and soft and precious in a way that no gem, no jewel, no thing of material wealth could ever possibly match up to. Bahamut was more than rare, he was unique. He was singular. There would never be another one of him, just as there could have never been another Bael’tharax. The hatchling was more important to Aurelian than anything else had ever been or ever would be.
There were no words to describe the profound depth of their connection.
There were no words to describe the profound depth of his loss.
Mad laughter echoed from an unknown location, and a deranged, dissonant singsong voice called out to him. “Little dragon died, died, DIED!”
Aurelian jerked as if struck, his body rocked on its heels at a sudden surge of reality, and his eyes rose to face the chittering Skarnids. “You did this.” He whispered. Grief surged within him and twisted, shifted, and morphed. It mutated. It evolved. It hardened into something sharp. Something cold. Something hot. His friend, his bond, his partner, the other half of his soul. It was their fault. “YOU DID THIS!”
Heat. Fire. Rage. Aurelian’s Core turned incandescent the second he saw the Skarnids before him. Magma boiled out of and across his Calamity Core. The red storm burned with an inner flame that refused to be sated. It erupted inside of him like a rising volcano, and Aurelian took hold of it. He grabbed at it like a titan taking hold of a mountain, and with Dragon’s Resolve and his own personal Intent he compressed it.
His feet carried him forward even as he worked, even as mana cycled within him, and with every step his Soulforce thundered. The Skarnids had gone still. The laughter had cut off with a strangled hiss of disbelief. The undead had halted in their tracks. Aurelian cared for none of it. Outwardly he marched forward to a beat only he could hear, and internally he wove frantically.
Waves of mana and brilliant threads of platinum Soulforce came together like rivers of light and sound, creating a concerto of rising melodies and symbiotic harmonies. A song of force, and power, and life that twisted together with the violent intensity of a primal’s awakening. His Soulforce began to throb within him, to seethe, and Aurelian seized hold of power that he could suddenly see around him.
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His Spirit burned with transcendent fury, with a power that could make gods fear, and he pierced the veil between the physical and the aetheric. His eyes burned. Tears of blood lined his cheeks. The System screamed at him.
It was ignored.
His left hand rose, and Aurelian cycled mana like a great river toward his fist at the same moment as he pushed his core more and more tightly together. The magma and the storm and the light and the shadow and other elements of its existence too myriad and infinite to count spun, warped, and twisted until it all compressed into a sphere of prismatic light.
Platinum bands exploded into life and wrapped themselves around it while the light within turned ferocious and chaotic, and Aurelian compressed it tighter, and tighter, and tighter still until that raging ocean of power was bound by the bands of energy that so aligned themselves with the colours of his soul brother’s own runes.
The power screaming for release in his left hand stretched out, searching, and connected with motes of purplish power that seemed to be both saturated and the most diffused all at once. Without understanding what he was even doing, Aurelian pulled.
A System alert clamoured to life within his mind. Then another. Then another.
They were ignored. Suppressed. Shoved away. He was too focused.
The Skarnid closest to him let out a warbling shriek… and then its head exploded.
Mana drained from Aurelian like an out rushing tide, and yet he refused to let go.
Once again he cycled his power from his root chakra through his body, past his sealed and knotted gates, and into his left palm. The sword in his right hand seemed to vibrate at what he was doing, but he paid it no heed. Aurelian pulled again, tugging on the fabric of reality in a way he could only barely understand, and once again a Skarnid unleashed what he dimly recognised as a terrified cry before its head similarly detonated.
No, not detonated. Crushed. Its brain matter and blood and eye juices were crushed out of its chitinous skull when it was compacted to the size of a golf ball within seconds. The undead were frozen as if in uncomprehending reverie. The Skarnids chittered fearfully.
He barely had enough mana to cycle, and so he didn’t. He lowered his left hand.
Aurelian bared his teeth into a rictus grin of hateful glee, and with his core blazing inside of him; he burned stamina and charged with a small whomp of displaced air toward the Arachnids.
Aurelian impacted the marble directly in front of the skittering form of a shrieking Skarnid and brought his runesword up in a vicious slice at one of its desperately striking forelimbs; cleaving through it and then several more with a sudden reversal of his weapon. The resultant imbalance sent the monstrosity smashing down against the marble face-first in a spray of dark blood and viscous fluid. He barely paused to take note of the chitinous creature’s flailing state before he thrust his right palm forward in front of its massive, hideously ugly face.
“Firebolt!” He snarled. It depleted his mana down to almost zero.
He didn’t care.
If it had shrieked before, then after his spell the Skarnid screamed. Corrosive blood and corrupting ooze spilled from its severed limbs while it scrabbled helplessly against the stone. The arachnid’s face was a scorched and seared mess of bubbling flesh and burning essence, and so Aurelian gave it some measure of relief.
He thrust his blade through its repulsive skull with a wet crunch of chitinous flesh.
He tore his blade side to side for good measure and then ripped it from the dead Skarnid’s skull to face the remainder.
Three of the creatures remained, and one of them was maimed so badly it was already almost dead. Aurelian didn’t care. His Soulforce continued to spread outward like a dominating cloak of power and the Skarnids finally seemed to reach their limit. Something within their dark minds broke, and the two able-bodied creatures turned to flee.
How dare they.
Aurelian was on them like a wolf on sheep within seconds, his stamina draining precipitously while he stormed between the skittering creatures’ bulk and mass. His runesword rose and fell, singing while it did, and Aurelian tore the monsters apart.
The first of the creatures to come at him threw a vicious and almost desperate stab of its tail toward his chest, which Aurelian dodged away from with fatalistic proximity. His armoured hand reached out and tapped another mote of mana while the tail passed and then his palm lightly slapped the colossal bulb of the arachnid’s stinger.
It exploded in blood and putrescence when it was crushed under pure force.
Aurelian gave the creature no time to breathe when it reeled back and stepped in to its clumsy warding blows. He sliced apart its paired forelegs, pivoted away from a desperate slash of its right side and used its staggering gait to come up toward the creature’s flank. The Skarnid chittered desperately for aid, but its comrades hesitated. Something in their mutant brains told them there was danger in granting help.
It overrode even their pack predator mentality.
Bereft of its comrades’ help, Aurelian sheared apart the side of the creature’s body and then rolled away under a spasming sweep of legs.
The blows were not intended to kill. No.
They were intended to hurt. To make them suffer, the way he suffered.
The way… the way Bahamut had suffered.
Aurelian felt as much as sensed a Skarnid leg scything for his side and instead of doging it, he planted his feet and absorbed the impact. His armour dented, the air vanished from his lungs, his ribs shook under the impact… and Aurelian smiled viciously up at the terrified Arachnid. “My turn.” He spat.
His runesword hummed through the air and the Skarnid’s brain matter fountained upward when the weapon bisected its chitinous skull.
Aurelian turned to the final two Skarnids, one near-dead with its guts along the ruined marble and the other not far behind. He checked his mana, turned, and started walking away toward the undead. It was ticking up slowly. He barely noticed the seconds passing. The pressure of the alerts building into his awareness was a distant thing. A mountain he held at bay with barely a thought.
What was such a burden, when compared to the loss he had suffered?
Agony sang a dirge in his prismatic soul. His Soulforce touched something ancient, and it recoiled in shock. In disbelief. In terror. His heartbeat thundered in his ears. The vibration and rotation of his compressing core screamed a song of power that filled him with vigour. His wounds meant nothing. Aurelian pointed his left palm behind him. He exhaled.
“Firebolt.” He said from between clenched teeth.
The Skarnids exploded in ignited piles of saturated essence.
His eyes landed on the growing ranks of undead, all of them caught on the edge of some invisible barrier. He thought he could almost see the poisonous green-and-black strands that tethered them to… something. To their master. To their source. He registered the connection and then dismissed it. That was for later. For after.
As he stared at the unliving ranks their acid green eyes looked back at him, but where before he had seen only ancient hate and primal drive to kill… he instead saw something new. Something that might have shocked, surprised, or even intrigued him were he not so… numb. His lips spread into a dead man’s smile when the oddity registered to his mind.
The undead were afraid.
He laughed the laugh of a man already dead.
The puppeted skeletons flinched back as one.
Aurelian charged.