Tilly was locked within a vortex of competing forces as the pressure of the outside realm buffeted his soul. The passage of time, greatly diluted by the Facet-empowered mists, crashed in and swamped the entire area in a violent rebalancing of the fourth dimension.
The experience took him outside of his body and he watched himself age days in a matter of moments. Then it was over, and in a blink of an eye, he was back in his body, whatever time he missed fully suffused through him, body and soul.
The pressures keeping him aloft abated and Tilly fell to the ground, feeling spent and refreshed all at once. Nearby, he felt Kindle pull free from their combined form, flapping away tiredly as she retreated from the field of battle, her energy spent. Their bond was stronger than ever and he could sense just how draining the Phoenix Fire armor form was for her.
‘Thanks for saving me, girl. Again.’
‘Thank me by finishing this; our work has only just begun.’ She sent back tiredly, along with a view of several more scenes of combat playing out on the other peaks.
‘Wait… how long has it been?’
That last warning from Kindle hit him like a bucket of ice water, baptizing him fully into the present. His eyes snapped to Brokenridge, who was stumbling away from his sire and shaking his head free of the strange experience. Many of his wounds had scabbed over, but at his sudden movement, they were beginning to tear afresh and weep blood once again.
This was nothing compared to Longtooth, who had experienced the System-enforced timeline reconciliation much more brutally.
Just minutes ago from Tilly’s perspective, the creature had stood almost seventy feet in the air, a robust paragon of strength and domination. But under the weight of untold millennia, his posture had stooped and his muscular girth had become hollow. The flesh around his extremities flapping around like sacks of wine, swinging from loose folds of skin.
The transformed dragon king stumbled away drunkenly from the recent brawl, his own wounds long since healed to scars as time immemorial came crashing back in on him.
Seeing how dramatic those changes had been, Tilly pulled back up his Debuff explanation and timer, hoping to get a better sense of how long had passed since he had moved through the mists.
Status Effects: Severe Soul Wrent
Soul Wrent: Your soul has suffered a severe injury and is at risk of irreversible damage. The effectiveness of any Aural and Will Abilities will be set to 10% normal strength for the duration of this Debuff.
Warning, your soul is close to dissolution, guard your will and protect your core, for it cannot take any more pressure or stress until it is fully healed. One day, 12 hours remaining.
Sure the loss of his soul was concerning, but the loss of five days hit Tilly harder and he had to fight to stay focused on the current battle as he waited for Kindle to bring back word of what was happening on the other peaks.
This whole plan had hinged on getting to the Contested Lands first and gaining an immense advantage on the field before the arrival of the enemy’s full strength… Now whatever advantage they had was all but gone.
Tilly’s eyes lit up in renewed anger as he considered the incredibly selfish dragon king before him. The dragon seemed almost pitiful as he fought to regain his bearings. A quick internal check confirmed that all of Tilly’s titles were back online and his Celestial Bracelets of Substitutional Might had fully reset timers.
This was looking more and more like the perfect moment to kick a guy while he was down.
He keyed up [All or Nothing] and was about to activate the Bracelets to flip his build to an Intelligence emphasis when he heard a growl hit him from his periphery.
“No, human. He is mine,” Brokenridge coughed out, bleeding from numerous tearing scabs.
Longtooth’s head tilted to the side as if those words and the challenge they represented anchored him back to the present, pulling his attention back to the fight. He swung his neck around and set his milky white eyes on the much younger dragon, baring his teeth in hatred, “And so you resort to cheap tricks? You would orchestrate the end of our dominance on this plane?” the dragon slurred, his focus sliding around Brokenridge in an attempt to zero in on the challenger.
“Enough talk, Longtooth. It is time we ended this.” Brokenridge growled, shooting forward without further preamble.
Longtooth responded with a croaking roar, diving at the smaller opponent with a ferocity undimmed by the supernatural weathering his body had just undergone.
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They collided together one last time, Brokenridge feeling the majority of the impact as their bodies crashed into one another. Even having to tank the brunt of Longtooth’s charge, the smaller dragon more than made up for it with attacks that blurred in their intensity. Tilly’s bent knees and raised weapons slowly straightened as he watched his draconic companion literally tear his sire apart.
Longtooth attempted to put up a fight, but the weight of Epochs had robbed his form of much of its speed and strength. Where he had easily overwhelmed his progeny earlier in the fight, he now found each of his attacks too slow to hit the vitals he attempted to target.
Instead, Brokenridge ripped through the dragon king’s immense form, rending weathered skin from atrophied muscle and cutting deep into the remaining layers underneath.
With a final roar of fury, Longtooth snatched one of Brokenridge’s legs, heaving mightily to throw him off. The smaller dragon was flung into the distance, landing heavily on the other side of the mountaintop. His ferocious movements had worsened many of his still-healing injuries, and despite having done the majority of the damage in that last encounter, copious amounts of boiling dragon blood were flowing freely from his eviscerated form.
Yet his sire had fared far worse in the exchange. The ancient dragon swayed on his feet, his body a ruin of torn flesh and gaping wounds. Tilly could hardly understand how the thing's body was holding itself together at this point, and yet the dragon slowly straightened from his crouch, eyeing his progeny across the intervening space with something that might have been respect.
Brokenridge shook off his many injuries, standing to his own full height to cast his baleful gaze back at the creature responsible for the possible end of his kind. As the two opponents beheld each other from across the mountaintop, Tilly noticed Longtooth’s eyes clearing for some indefinable reason, his vision focusing on his heir as some of the old bitterness fell away.
“Now you see what I have done to protect our place on this plane. You have contested my right to lead, as is your right; and now we decide the future of our kind’s legend,” the king wheezed out as his life leaked onto the ground around him.
“Our future was in our people, not in whatever it is you built on top of this mountain. You forgot your purpose… But my heart remembers. Our legend is not limited to the memory of lesser races. Your time is over, but our people will live on.” Brokenridge replied through gritted teeth, barely able to remain standing.
Longtooth nodded once, finding a strange level of contentment with that answer here at his end. The giant dragon then began to inflate his chest slowly, taking in air for one last attack. Brokenridge’s lips pulled back in return, revealing something not too distant from a smile, and responded in kind.
Tilly looped his hatchets, resting his hands on their heads as these two creatures, some of the last of their kind, chose to end their contest in the most dramatic way possible. He was hopeful that the battle would end in Brokenridge’s victory but, even if it looked like that might not happen, he knew he couldn’t intervene at this point. The terribly proud creature had claimed the finale of this fight, and Tilly knew that if he took it from him, the tenuous bridge of their burgeoning relationship would shatter under the offense.
Both dragons finished forcing air into their damaged chest cavities at the same time and for a moment the entire scene was still. Even Tilly held his breath, the tension of the moment pulling his eyes into slits of worry.
Torrents of flame burst forth from both gaping jaws, racing toward each other and colliding in front of the damaged throne. Longtooth’s considerable size and undiminished magic reserves allowed him to produce another immense quantity of purple flame, exploding from his mouth in a river of fire that was easily thirty feet in diameter by the time it met Brokenridge’s breath attack.
As they met, the differences between the two abilities were made stark in their contrast as Brokenrige’s azure bar of plasma no bigger than Tilly himself burst through the center of Longtooth’s attack. The purple flames were hardly slowed as they continued on their path and crashed into Brokenridge, who leaned into the attack as his own ability drilled through the center of his sire’s. The much more concentrated attack cut through its center until it pounded into Longtooth’s open maw with the force of a freight train.
Air rushed past Tilly as the two conflagrations met and vied for greater fuel, conjoining into a brief, multi-colored inferno. Then the dragon king’s breath attack ended abruptly, his teeth clattering shut from the force of Brokenrigde’s attack.
Longtooth stood there, aged, but proud for a few moments more, his head a smoking ruin as Brokenridge’s flame continued to incinerate it from the inside out. Then Brokenridge cut off his attack, burnt and swaying, but watching with some satisfaction as the tyrant of his people collapsed, dead.
Just like that, Brokenridge, covered in a network of recently recauterized wounds, became the new king of the dragons. Tilly rushed over to the dragon who had begun to take shallow wet breaths, “Hey, are you ok? What can I do to help?” He shouted as he ran over.
Brokenridge cast a bleary exhausted eye at Tilly’s approach. “Claim the jewel, you fool!” he growled before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he collapsed as well.
Tilly cut a sharp turn in his run, angling back toward the damaged throne and the fallen Facet. The sounds of Brokenridge’s breathing came in shuddering gasps as the multiple instances of abuse he had put his body through stacked on him now that there was nothing left to fight.
He slid to the floor as he spotted the jewel, blinking in and out of existence amidst pieces of shattered bone. Without thinking, he reached down and grabbed it, sending howling energy raging through his Mana Pathways as his hand wrapped around the object of extreme power. Time started to blink in and out of focus as his position on the mountain and even the cosmos was called into question by the potential to Change stored within the ancient source of power that now flooded his veins.
Reacting almost instantly, Tilly dropped the Facet what he thought was a moment later. But as he looked up, he grimly noted that the sun had dropped even further in the now visible sky.
Even worse, he could no longer hear Brokenridge breathing…
Urgently, he reached toward the jewel once again, this time stopping just short of touching it, and allowing himself to feel its surroundings. He relaxed his hold on his Mana and felt it wanting to reach out to interact with the mysterious object.
Letting it guide him, he sent a pulse of fire into the jewel and received a bracing, energetic reply. His notification icon, which had started flashing as soon as Longtooth died, went crazy and Tilly cut off the mental mute he had on the log.
Congratulations! Your party has defeated the dragon king in combat. You have Leveled up! Your Title [Savage Dominion] has triggered, augmenting your experience reward.
Tilly raced through the level-up notifications, finally reaching the line he needed.
Quest Complete! You have defeated the dragon king and assisted Brokenridge in claiming his throne, would you like to accept the Patronage of Origin’s Breath?
Warning, doing so will result in drastic changes to the lands your Faction has laid claim to, this power is linked to change and upheavals, and accepting its authority in your Faction will have unpredictable consequences.
Accept Patronage? Yes / No
Tilly mentally selected “Yes” and for the second time that day, time and space exploded out from the jewel like a howling wind as the natural order of Nephesh was once again rearranged by its influence.