Chuuh - Shhhh

Chuuh - Shhhh

As Tilly’s senses came back to him, a sound that he hadn’t heard in what felt like decades centered him back on the present. He blinked away stars, realizing that he was wearing an actual face mask. In shock, he took another reflexive breath in, and the achingly familiar sound of a shuddering inhalation vibrated through his respirator, followed by the hissing expulsion of that same breath.

The sound reverberated through him, grounding him and his wounded soul profoundly. He had faced death countless times in his past life… always while wearing this gear. The sound of his respirator had formed the backdrop of every fire he had ever fought, and to hear it again, especially in such a high-pressure situation brought a level of solidity to his soul that he had not known he was missing.

‘Kindle… what is going on?’ He sent, looking down through his crystalline visor to see that he was wearing a full set of fire gear. Except instead of the classic yellow and tan coloring he had worn his whole career, the whole set was dominated by a glowing blue and white coloration. He unconsciously shifted his shoulders, feeling the straps to an honest-to-god Airpack pulling against the motion, making its comforting and ever-present weight known on his back.

The tone of Kindle’s replay was just as awestruck as he felt ‘I have never been bonded as a summon before, but in one of my past lives, I voluntarily bound myself into the form of a sword. For a time I was one of the greatest weapons on the plane. Those memories returned to me in the rivers of liquid metal, and I knew our bond would allow me to do something far greater. So yes, I supplied the catalyst for this form, but it was your heart that shaped it.

“HELL YES!” Tilly exclaimed out loud in reply, looking up from his new armor set triumphantly, beyond pleased with what was probably his favorite power upgrade to date.

As if the physical utterance was all it took to pull him back into his current predicament, Tilly realized that time had not, in fact, been frozen during his transformation. Shifting into this new form had released an immense amount of energy, knocking Longtooth dozens of yards away and giving Brokenridge a moment's reprieve. But as Tilly adjusted to his new armor, the dragon king had oriented himself on the new attacker, fire blazing in his mouth and eyes as he pulled in an enormous amount of breath.

‘Crap,’ Tilly thought, registering all of this a split second before a bar of plasma the size of a train tunnel exploded from the dragon’s mouth, hitting him dead on.

In that instant, he was returned to the same bright burning plane that had accompanied his armor’s transformation, but just like before, the radical heat of the environment caused him no pain…

In fact, as the breath attack continued to wash over him, he noticed his HUD coming back online, taking on a much simpler digital read-out form on the inner surface of his mask. Under the otherworldly heat of the dragon king’s bright purple flames, his Health and Mana were actually rising.

A wave of what could only be described as smug satisfaction radiated from Kindle, and Tilly’s eyes shot to the last and new line on the facepiece read out of his HUD.

Air Remaining: 92%

And there it was, whatever advantages this new armor set gave him… he needed to make them count before his air was up.

Somewhere beyond the scope of the attack, Brokenridge let out a roar of fury at Tilly’s apparent demise, and seeming to want to grind the point home, the dragon king continued to pour out his fury on the spot where Tilly had appeared to have been destroyed.

‘Any hints on what I can do in this thing’ He sent urgently to Kindle as he burst forward into a sprint, running through the comically long breath attack toward the gaping jaws of their unsuspecting enemy.

‘Flame and heat can only aid you now, and whatever substance is sustaining this form on your back can be used to further increase the potency of your attacks.’ She replied, more in tune with his line of thinking than ever in her new form.

Her answer raced through him as he reared back with one of his hatchets mid-stride and shoved as much Mana as he could into the attack. He felt [All or Nothing] activate, and then an increased tug on the “Air” on his back flooded through his regulator, hyper-charging the attack. He cut it off after only using twenty percent of the tank’s capacity and released the attack.

Unfortunately, the dragon king’s considerable lungs emptied at the same instant as his throw. Even at almost point-blank range, with all of his force behind the throw, Longtooth reacted to the threat with uncanny speed, snapping his jaws shut in an instant, shielding his more vulnerable mouth with a row of Tilly-sized teeth.

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The boom of another explosion went off as Tilly’s hyper-powered Blue Flame Strike, further multiplied by his weapon augmentation, slammed into the dragon king's closed mouth.

Tilly was flung back, sent careening through the sky, as the sounds of his target's fury, and the reply of his companion’s laughter echoed from the mountaintop in equal measure. Tilly had a moment of panic as his careening flight took him further and further from the battlefield, toward the mists, before Kindle’s voice interjected, ‘There is more…’

He felt something in their form shift and another burst of energy flooded his body from the tank on his back. The augmented flame raged through him, bursting from his shoulders and forming two flaming wings. Completely out of his conscious control, they flared out, arresting his flight. They beat powerfully once, then twice, bringing him back around and allowing him to alight back on the ground at the edge of the mists.

‘We can FLY?’ He shouted internally

‘Of course, I would never allow myself to take such a crude form without some of my grace bestowed upon it!’ she clucked in reply.

That was all they had time for as the dragon king came barreling toward him, shooting overland at hundreds of miles per hour to pay back the affront of Tilly’s last attack.

“How dare you!” He roared, freely bleeding lips pulled taunt above blackened teeth in a rictus of hate.

Tilly brought his weapons up, knowing there was no way he could match the dragon king’s charge, but unable to think of an alternative in the half second he had before the creature hit. He eyed his rapidly refilling Mana and planned to attempt another strike even as he tried to tank the hit.

Then at the very last instant, Brokenridge crashed into his Sire, knocking the charge off course and tearing into the side of his distracted opponent. The wind of their passing almost knocked Tilly off his feet, and he quickly spun, eyeing his dropping air readout on his HUD, desperately trying to come up with some fresh options.

So far, he knew that the “Air” in his tank seemed to supercharge his Constitution and Wisdom to some extent, and in this form, any fire or heat he experienced added to that boost… But none of that solved his current problem. He needed a way to deal some serious damage, and so far the dragon king had proven to be insanely resilient to all of their attacks.

Brokenridge tore several large gashes into his sire’s side before the dragon king turned, retaliating with vicious snaps of his jaws, aiming for Brokenridge’s freely bleeding throat. A realization hit Tilly as he jumped forward into a run, his body moving ahead of his thoughts.

His flames may be doing very little damage against the dragon king, but Brokenridge was completely immune to them, just like Tilly was immune to Brokenridge’s breath attack. That meant that Tilly needed to keep spamming fire attacks while they were locked in this struggle, giving his companion every advantage he could before it was too late. His vastly increased Mana regen pushed above 50% right as he arrived at the pair as they ferociously vied for dominance. He leapt into a dive, shooting for a fleeting space between the two apex predators, and activated Flame Expulsion+, hyper-charging it with half of the remaining “Air” from his tank.

Blue and white flames blasted out from his center as his air readout dropped to 22%. The attack washed harmlessly over Brokenridge. No. That wasn’t true. The flames actually cauterized some of his worst bleeding, buying the gravely wounded dragon a little more time.

The opposite seemed to be true for Longtooth. As he was knocked up into the air by the miniature bomb going off near his center mass, all of his collected shallow wounds worked against him, creating gaps in his flame resistance, where the ember feature of his Ability went to work, embedding themselves in the wounds and burning merrily stacking a damage-over-time Debuff.

The dragon king roared in pain mid-air, but the exclamation was cut off as Brokenridge lunged up from the ground, taking advantage of the momentary distraction to leap up and snap his jaws around his sire’s throat. The roar gurgled to a stop as the pair crashed back to the ground near Tilly and he rushed in, looking for any place he could to shove his hatchets in and do further damage.

But the dragon king began thrashing wildly in Brokenridge’s grip and Tilly's charge was slammed aside by the flailing of the dragon’s tail as he struggled to break free.

Physics saved Tilly from any serious damage as his extreme Endurance, paired with the fact that he was airborne meant that most of the energy of the collision was transferred through Tilly as velocity, launching him away from the conflict and directly into the bone throne.

He smashed into the structure, multiple points on his skeleton taking on hairline cracks from the impact as he groaned and rolled back to his feet. His armor set rapidly began working to repair the damage to his body as it pushed his Mana and Health back up at an incredible rate.

Air Remaining: 11%

‘Shit,’ Tilly cursed to himself as he reoriented on the fight in time to see Longtooth rip free from Brokenridge’s hold in a spray of blood that, while painful, didn’t actually look life-threatening. Tilly was about to dive back into the fray when he felt a distinct throbbing from above him and some instinct caused him to turn and look up at the crystalized Facet locked into place above the throne.

He felt it as the dragon king’s focus shifted entirely from his current fight to Tilly and his new location. Several pieces of information clicked into place as Tilly finally saw a way out of the downward spiral this fight had been doomed to from the beginning.

“No!” The dragon king roared as Tilly jumped up to the top of the throne’s back, and urgently started to hack away with enflamed strikes at the pieces of dragon bone holding Origin’s Breath in place. The Scorch markings all along the structure flashed dangerously as Tilly did his best to break the Facet free.

He felt the dragon king bearing down on him, desperate to stop his actions before a weakened roar of defiance sounded out one more time. Brokenridge somehow found the strength to interpose himself between his sire and Tilly once more. The sound of their impact and Longtooth’s answering bellow of frustration boomed from right behind him and he continued to slam his weapons into the jewel’s bone casing again and again. Finally, one of the bone tips shattered and the Crystal burst free in a thunderous crash of light and sound.

A furious roar contested abortively with the sound of a howling cyclone of wind as the contained energy of the Facet was released, dispersing the time disrupting mists in an instant.

Multiple timelines detected, System-enforced Chrono - Reconciliation in effect.

The words ran across Tilly’s HUD as the winds of time rushed in from the outside and buffeted his body and soul.