Aurelian gasped for air and held back the urge to vomit, all 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 once he managed to take ahold of it. He opened the secured top of the back quickly, and reached in to grab at the potions he’d stored inside the pack. Lights danced in front of his eyes from his concussion, but he managed to fumble one of the minor health bottles out.
A sudden roar filled the air and the Skarnids’ charge faltered when several savaged, essence-leaking 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! Bahamut declared boldly.
Aurelian barely had enough wherewithal to register the statement before Bahamut swooped down atop the nearest Skarnid and, after grabbing hold firmly with his platinum claws, breathed a full-force jet of flame directly against its carapace. The creature screamed in pain and went mad, its scorpion tail attempting to smash its stinger into Bahamut, and missing the dragon when he nimbly leaped aside to avoid it.
The potion bottle was unstoppered quickly, 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 dodging slashing limbs, snapping pincers, 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 jerked at the sound of shattering glass, and in that same moment his hand refilled with the summoned return 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 of his latest Skarnid victim with every iota of strength he possessed. 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.
Aurelian’s ears started to ring the moment that the last wheeze escaped the dragon.
The sound hit him like a lightning strike, or like a gong against his soul. It was impossible to explain the sense of panic 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, fear, 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.
He appeared vulnerable, soft, and precious in a way that no gem, jewel, nor thing of material wealth could ever possibly compare 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 rage.
Mad laughter echoed from an unknown location, and a deranged, dissonant sing-song voice called out to him. “Little dragon died, died, DIED!”
Aurelian jerked as if struck, and his body rocked on its heels at a sudden surge of reality. The ringing in his ears reached a crescendo, and then abruptly abated. All that remained was his own heartbeat, pounding in his ears. Bahamut wasn’t dead, he knew that, and yet the hatchling was unmoving—and something primal, vicious, and wholly dragon-like within Aurelian’s soul awoke at the sight of his soul bond’s condition.
Aurelian started walking toward the dragon robotically.
While he did, his eyes turned to face the chittering Skarnids.
The arachnids seemed frozen by his gaze, and Aurelian felt as if something else were looming behind his gaze. Something immense, and ancient, and powerful enough that the Skarnids as a collective seemed frozen in place. They were corralled, momentarily, by the simple animal instinct to remain still in the face of an insurmountable predator.
Aurelian let a low snarl leave his lips, and the Arboretum thundered under its force.
The Skarnids chittered pathetically, and Aurelian was able to reach Bahamut unimpeded—and to kneel down long enough to uncork another healing potion, and tip it down the little dragon’s throat. He was breathing, if barely, and Aurelian felt the warmth of his little body.
“Rest.” he said softly. “I’ll cover until you’re ready.”
No answer was forthcoming, and Aurelian’s eyes moved back to the Skarnids when he rose, and the grip on his runesword tightened until the leather and metal of its hilt creaked ominously in his grip.
Red aether-lightning, discharging from his mana channels, arced across the blade.
“You did this,” he accused the arachnids. Grief surged within him and twisted, shifted, and morphed.
It mutated. It evolved. It hardened into something sharp, cold, and hot.
His friend, his bond, his partner, the other half of his soul.
It was their fault.
“YOU DID THIS!”
Aurelian barely noticed the overlaid thunder of Bael’tharax’s voice.
Heat. Fire. Rage.
Aurelian’s Core turned incandescent as he stared at the Skarnids before him.
Magma boiled out of and across his Calamity Core, and its crimson storm burned with an inner flame that refused to be sated; roaring like an awakening forge of power within his mind’s eye. It erupted inside of him like a rising volcano, and Aurelian took hold of it, grabbing at it like a titan taking hold of a mountain—and with Dragon’s Resolve reinforcing his own personal Intent, he compressed it.
His feet carried him forward as he worked, while mana cycled furiously within him, and with every step forward his Soulforce thundered. The Skarnids remained frozen. The laughter, once so superior, had cut off with a strangled hiss of disbelief. The undead had halted in their tracks, as if even they were petrified by terror.
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Aurelian cared for none of it.
Outwardly he marched forward to a beat only he could hear, and internally he wove furiously, and with the silent urging of a presence that was not quite with him—but projected along him, like the illusion and manifestation of a will ancient beyond time. Bael’tharax was with him, he knew, but only as an echo of himself.
Aurelian could not rely on the Dragon King for true intervention in his situation.
Intimidation was the limit of Bael’tharax’s projected capabilities.
True justice would have to come by Aurelian’s own hand.
Waves of mana and brilliant threads of platinum Soulforce came together in his Core like rivers of light and sound, creating an internal concerto of rising melodies and symbiotic harmonies. A song of force, and power, and life twisted together with the violent intensity of a primal’s awakening, and Aurelian directed it all toward a goal he understood nothing about, but felt to be right with every fibre of his enraged being. His Soulforce began to throb within him, to seethe and tempest, and Aurelian seized hold of power which he could suddenly see around him.
His Spirit burned with transcendent fury, and with a newfound clarity that could make gods fear, 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 and mentally muted.
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 an imagined sphere of prismatic light within his solar plexus.
Platinum bands exploded into life, urged on by the familiar pressure of Bael’tharax upon his soul, and wrapped themselves around his shining Core while the light within it turned ferocious and chaotic. Aurelian compressed it tighter, and tighter, and tighter still until that raging ocean of power was bound by the bands of energy, each of them so perfectly aligned 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 within the air that seemed to be both the most 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, and shoved away as before. He was too focused.
The Skarnid closest to him abruptly let out a warbling shriek…
…and then its head, suddenly, exploded in a spray of chitin, ichor, and grey matter.
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 with resonance at his actions, 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.
In a moment of distant clarity, he suddenly realised something.
The Skarnids’ heads hadn’t detonated.
They had been crushed.
Their brain matter, ichor, blood and eye juices had been squeezed out of their chitinous skulls when they had been compacted down to the size of a golf ball within seconds. The undead, while this happened, were frozen as if in an uncomprehending reverie. The Skarnids which remained, still held at bay by the magnitude of presence clinging to Aurelian like an immense cloak of both alien and familiar Soulforce, chittered fearfully.
Aurelia barely had enough mana to cycle, and so he didn’t.
Instead he let out a sigh of acknowledgement, and 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 pincers; dodging around the snapping bone-claw and cleaving through it, and then several more limbs, with a sudden reversal of his weapon and stance that took him to his left side.
The resulting imbalance sent the monstrosity smashing down against the marble face-first in a spray of dark blood, and viscous fluid, and a keening screech of agony.
Aurelian barely paused to take note of the chitinous creature’s flailing state, and instead thrust his left palm forward in front of its massive, hideously ugly head.
“Firebolt!” he snarled.
It depleted his mana down to almost zero.
Aurelian couldn’t find it within himself to care.
If it had shrieked before, then after his spell the Skarnid wailed.
Corrosive blood and corrupting ooze spilled from its severed limbs while it scrabbled helplessly against the stone. Under the torrent of focused flames, the arachnid’s face bubbled and melted, its eyes burst and exploded, and its skull deformed as Aurelian poured his remaining mana into a more sustained stream of fire. By the end, the Skarnid’s head resembled a melted wax caricature, 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, buoyed by another's, 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, 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 predatory grace. His armoured hand reached out and tapped another mote of mana while the tail passed, and then his palm lightly slapped against 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 into its clumsy warding blows. He sliced apart its left pincer, pivoted away from a desperate slash of its right side and remaining pincer, 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, not that.
They were intended to hurt. He wanted to make them suffer.
He wanted them to understand what Bahamut had suffered.
Aurelian felt as much as sensed a Skarnid leg scything for his side, and instead of dodging 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 Arachnid.
Its deformed eyes stared back at him with fear.
“My turn,” he snarled through blood-stained teeth.
His Runesword hummed through the air and the Skarnid’s brain matter fountained upward when the weapon bisected its chitinous skull.
The Leeching power of his blade helped him ignore the consequences of his stunt.
Aurelian turned to the final two Skarnids, one near-dead with its guts and viscera trailing along the ruined marble, and the other not far behind. He paused only long enough to check his mana, turned, and started walking away toward the undead.
The blue bar of energy 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 pain of his soul brother?
Fury sang a thunderous dirge in his prismatic soul.
His Soulforce touched something ancient, outside and away from him, and it recoiled in shock. Aurelian felt disbelief, denial, and terror emanate from something nearby and separate—something twisted, corrupted, and wrong.
His heartbeat thundered in his ears.
The vibration and rotation of his compressing Core trumpeted a jubilant song of power, one that filled him with vigour. His wounds, for all that the System screamed at him, meant nothing to his singularly focused mind.
Aurelian pointed his left palm behind him toward the dead Skarnids.
He exhaled, and let the mana cycle to his palm as Tarixi had taught him.
“Firebolt,” he said from between clenched teeth.
The Skarnids exploded in ignited piles of saturated essence.
Aurelian’s eyes settled on the growing ranks of undead, all of them poised as if caught on the edge of some invisible barrier.
For a moment, he thought he could almost see the poisonous green and black strands that tethered them to… something. It was a moment of existential awareness that surprised him, and yet felt strangely right. He could almost taste the wrongness of those ropes of power, and where they were connected.
To their master. To their source.
He registered the connection, and then dismissed it.
That was for later, after he finished what had to be done.
As he approached 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. In their legion of eyes, unblinking and ancient with remembered hatred; something stirred that might have shocked, surprised, or even intrigued him were he not so incandescent with fury.
His lips spread into a predatory smile when the oddity registered at last.
The undead, Aurelian realised, were afraid.
He laughed, and it echoed as a dual-timbre thunder of sound.
The puppeteered skeletons flinched back as one.
Aurelian charged.