“Where is it?” the voice exploded up the mountain, cutting through Tilly’s core like a thousand shards of glass, “The Key is mine by right. Give it to ME!” the dragon king roared. Almost as soon as the weight of his words finished crushing Tilly, the giant of a dragon exploded upslope with a speed that defied everything Tilly understood about physics.
Brokenridge roared in defiance as one of his three remaining miniature stars burst with power. Channeling that added force into an attack, he launched himself at the dragon king, not hesitating in the least to meet his much larger opponent head-on.
They met in a thunderous clash of bone and claw, like the sound of two rams butting heads, if the rams were as large as city buses. Despite the disparity in size, Brokenridge slammed his sire to a stop right before he met Tilly, fully arresting the larger dragon’s attack. Meanwhile, Tilly drunkenly stumbled to the side, barely keeping his feet through the metaphysical onslaught that had accompanied the dragon king’s return.
Trying to get out of the way of the gargantuan roaring melee that was playing out in front of him, he jerked into a messy dive, shifting his armor set back to its basic form. He stumbled away as he rolled back to his feet and his armor returned to normal. Every physical boost he could get his hands on right now mattered and judging from the echoing scream still coming from his soul, he wouldn’t survive another contest of auras.
Boom
Clack
RAAAWWWRR
The sounds of the primal contest just behind him washed over Tilly, shoving him to the side like waves from a fast-approaching tide as his mind spun, searching for any way he could help. He hadn’t felt this helpless since his first days on Nephesh, and as he sprinted out of direct range of the ferocious melee, he cursed the impotence of his unbalanced build.
Not that his chances had ever been great for being anything other than a distraction in this fight with all of his trumps already spent, but a dark part of him had been hoping this foe would at least show some signs of Corruption. Not that he wanted their foe to have influence on something so powerful but at least then Tilly’s flame-based attacks would have had a chance to do some damage. But no… none of his senses had picked up any hint of infection after he had made it through the mists.
After he had booked it around a hundred feet, he whipped around, drawing both hatchets, and attempted to spot some opening in the twisting contest of scale and tooth that he could use to affect the current fight.
Longtooth had made full use of his greater size to maneuver Brokenridge to the ground and showed all of his already red-stained teeth as he bore down on his opponent, searching for the neck and a quick brutal end to their fight.
Both combatants had already suffered multiple bites and rending claw injuries in the time it had taken Tilly to get clear of the conflict. But like a mature grizzly bear, the dragon king was at a distinct advantage in this sort of exchange. His greater layers of fat and muscle had reduced most of the damage Brokenridge had inflicted to shallow wounds. Brokenridge was clearly already much worse off.
Even as his sire lunged for the kill from his superior position, Brokenridge activated the second to last of the bright points of light hovering between his horns. He roared along with the action, instantly releasing a jet of plasma so bright that it temporarily blinded Tilly, and pushed even the dragon king’s considerable weight off him and into the air.
Hoping for an opening, Tilly desperately called upon [All or Nothing] and was about to pour all 55% of his remaining Mana into a thrown strike, hoping to stack the title with his hatchett’s imbued power, Dragon’s Fury, adding onto Brokenridge’s surprise attack…
But the basso sound of laughter reverberated across the mountaintop, causing Tilly to hesitate as Longtooth shrugged off the attack that had hit him center mass. Launched into the air, he unfurled his enormous wings and beat them powerfully. The place where Brokenridge had hit him was glowing hot, but did not show any actual damage, and Tilly reluctantly released the pattern for his burgeoning flame attack… It was obviously going to be a waste of Mana anyway.
“Hahaha. Perhaps I should thank you, Whelp. It does feel good to stretch these wings after so many centuries. Now where were we? Ah, yes… I believe you wanted to test your flame against mine.” He boomed, pulling back his jaws in a predatory smile as his multistory building-sized chest ballooned.
Brokenridge glowed silver, activating his serpentine dodge Ability, even as his sire released a bar of plasma five times the width of the attack the dragon king had just tanked. Tilly’s stomach dropped, as even with the enormous boost to Dexterity his ability offered him, Brokenridge was unable to fully dodge the sweeping strike that Longtooth laid down on the area. The dragon was plowed into the ground tearing a furrow even in the incredibly strong Dragonglass mountainside.
Tilly’s instincts screamed at him as the attack's focus swept in his direction without warning, like a fast-moving portal to the solar-flare surface of the sun. Moving before he had even fully registered the shift in the attack, Tilly dove behind a fortuitously large pile of dragon bones, which thankfully blocked out most of the attack. But even vastly reduced, the air around him started to spontaneously combust as the heat of the Dragon king’s continued focus turned Tilly’s immediate environment into a crematorium.
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His armor shifted to its sun salamander form, further insulating him from the heat. But even with multiple layers of resistance to fire and heat damage, he still felt his skin begin to blister under the insane power of the attack. His over two hundred Endurance was pushed to the limit as his Health began to drop.
Then he heard another roar of defiance, and the attack was suddenly cut off by the sound of another bone-jarring impact. Tilly slowly straightened, stumbling from behind the now melted barrier of dragon bone to see Brokenridge locked in another melee as the pair crashed to the ground. The younger, smaller dragon was by far the more aggressive of the two, landing two or three strikes for every one of his sire’s… but it was a losing strategy.
Every advantage Brokenridge typically had against his enemies… hell, every advantage Tilly usually had, was rendered moot by the Dragon king’s fire-aspected nature and extremely resistant natural defenses. Every weapon Brokenridge had, the dragon king seemed to have more of.
‘Kindle!’ Tilly shouted mentally through their bond.
Typically, the connection was instantaneous, if not occasionally strained by distance, but now as Tilly urgently reached out to his bonded phoenix, it felt like their connection had been reduced to a trickle of its normal flow, the information slowed down inexplicably, like trying to suck a milkshake in through a straw.
‘I don’t know how well you can hear me, but we are running out of time!’ he sent, his message layered with impotent frustration and simmering rage at his helplessness.
Before he had entered the mists completely, she had briefly shared that she was on her way, and was bringing new power to the fight, but then they had cut off as the mists thickened, and Tilly didn’t think he had time to wait any longer.
After another second that felt like an eternity as he watched Brokenridge slowly get torn apart, Tilly received a broken reply through their connection, ‘Almost … There…’
The dragon king successfully maneuvered behind Brokenridge as the smaller dragon left one of his wings partially extended in an attempt to stop the shift. Longtooth batted aside the block and chomped down viciously on the smaller bones running through the sensitive appendage. A brutal snap accompanied the attack, followed by an enraged roar from the smaller dragon as he ripped the wing away from his sire’s jaws, losing one of the appendage’s joints and accompanying muscle in the process.
Brokenridge lunged away, turning to face his sire with a snarl as his damaged wing hung limply to his side. He was now a bloody canvas, fully displaying the carnage of their primal contest and while the dragon king mirrored the younger dragon's blood loss, he was far less affected by the many lacerations and bites that had torn deeply into the thick layers of his fat and muscle.
Longtooth sauntered forward confidently, “Now you will tell me how your pet got his hands on a Celestial Key, and in return, I will end you quickly,” he growled out easily through his bloody-toothed smile.
In reply, Brokenridge coughed wetly, before growling out, “Your ease has made you blind, you old fool. How is it that you cannot see?”
The dragon king’s eyes flashed in fury at that response, and a purplish glow surrounded him, even as Tilly spotted the barest twitch of satisfaction from Brokenridge's jaws. The dragon used his last power burst from their pillaging of the Perfected Golem Faction, to supercharge his own attack, bursting in silvery brilliance as he met his sire’s charge again in a deafening collision of meat and bone.
Tilly’s knuckles turned white as he squeezed the hatchets…
He was all out of tricks. Physically he was mostly fine, only having lost 20% of his health in that last attack but spiritually, he was a wreck. Even the thought of activating anything outside of his normal Mana Pathway Abilities sent shivers of wracking pain through his center. No more special items on his belt, no more superlative Titles to activate.
He was… stuck.
He was forced to watch as creatures far above his power level crashed into each other again and again, sending sprays of boiling blood and roars of fury into the air.
Longtooth ripped out a particularly large chunk of Brokenridge’s layered muscle over his jugular, and while there was no spray of arterial blood, Tilly was sure that his companion would not last much longer… as wily as the dragon had proved to be… he just didn’t have an answer for the dragon king’s superiority in every area of their contest.
All of Tilly's impotence and all of his frustration poured into the flame surrounding his core, urging him forward even though there was no hope of his affecting the outcome of this battle.
It just didn’t matter anymore. Whether or not it was stupid, he couldn’t stand by and wait any longer.
And so with a howl of fury, Tilly sprinted forward, charging into another hopeless situation without even a thought for his own survival… just as he had so many times before.
His bellow of attack went completely unnoticed by the clashing titans, his paltry second-tier Dexterity pushing him forward at unimpressive speeds as he lept the last thirty yards or so with both of his hatchets raised above his head.
He might only be a fly on the back of their opponent, but he was going to do his damndest to be annoying as hell.
‘I’m here!’ Came the sweetest words Tilly could have ever imagined. Mid-air, he felt more than saw Kindle burst through the mists, bypassing its defenses by nature of her link to both previously accepted entrants.
Moving at almost ten times Tilly’s own speed, she dove down toward them like a meteor, and Tilly barely had an instant to register her vector of attack before she struck.
She hadn’t dived in to unleash some surprise attack against their shared enemy… No, her flaming form shot directly at Tilly’s unprotected back. Before his split attention had any space to even wonder at her actions, he registered a lightning-fast blip of a thought as everything happened at once.
‘Trust me.’
Then, hitting simultaneously with Tilly’s pointless double-bladed attack on Longtooth’s back, Kindle’s flaming form… plunged into him.
Not just into his physical form, merging with his skin and armor on a fundamental level… something about the dual nature of her flames allowed her immense and immediate access to his core. There was only a moment’s hesitation before he relaxed all resistance, giving her full access to his soul and she flooded him with the heat of the distant stars.
A roaring conflagration exploded out from his center in response to their sudden and violent merging, replacing all sound and light with white flame. His core shuddered under the pressure, but as the white flame bathed his network, he found their influence warm and supportive, rushing through all of his strained and damaged soul space and shoring it up, burning away the lingering muck of spiritual pain suffusing the deeper places of Tilly’s soul after the Fey King’s aural attack.
Amidst the almost comforting explosion of the intense fiery energy, Tilly felt a strange notification float to the surface of his consciousness, as his physical and even spiritual form was reforged in a supernova of heat and flame.
Congratulations: New Armor Form Detected!
Your Legendary Growth Type Armor and Summon Bond have combined for a world-first unique ability: Phoenix Fire Form.
Warning: This is a world-first Ability and as such will have to be tested for powers and limits to be established.