“You threatened me with Chaos when I was small and then brought a goddess to annihilate your home, WITH ME IN IT?!”
Spot jumped awake, springing to attention as Rath’s tirade quickly went from angry-speaking to a screaming roar. Like a shining example of man’s best friend, Spot sidled next to me as Gungnir morphed into spear form.
The monster out of every child’s nightmare laughed. “Think your fat pet is going to deter me sorcerer? That’s just another snack!” Rath spat, liquid flame dribbling from his jaws. With a haughty laugh and his leathery wings flaring out, no longer out of proportion with his body, Rath continued his rant. “I didn’t tell you this before, but another reason sorcerers are rare is because they’re a delicacy for dragons!”
I didn’t like that glint in his eye. Or the way his serpent-like tongue licked his lips. Talk about my paranoia being right. I took another step back, mentally reached into Gungnir magical storage space, and took the limits off the generator turning the flow as high as we could handle. Spot started growling, putting his big head in front of mine. I sent a thought plan to my faithful companion and he began creating bone armor to cover his front. Ivory plates grew across his shoulders, down his snout, and streaked down his neck and back.
“Your shards of Sorcery will add to my own power. Its nascent life will help me to recover from that cursed child god that ruined me. And I’ll gladly take that lovely source of mana you created!” Rath gloated, taking a ponderous step forward and started to inhale. That last step of his had a bit of a limp to it. I watched where the scarred tissue restricted his movement.
“WAIT, wait!” I hollered, playing for time. “How in the world did you get down here?” Grasping at straws was the only thing I could think of, anything to distract him and give me just a few seconds to think of something, anything to shift this perilous seesaw of a situation in my direction. This hideout is located directly underneath a river and I put an escape hatch from the river to here when crafting my hideout. My justified sense of caution forced me to place an emergency valve with a panic-based conditional enchantment within my wards.
Perfect.
“And how the hell did you find me?” I kept on, slowly sliding back a bit more to put Spot more in front of me. “And why eat me now when I could be so delicious later?”
“I’m a dragon. We can shapeshift.” He snapped, derision dripping from his voice as he took another step forward as we took one back. “It’s almost a pity. An ignorant sorcerer with so much potential, but I can’t let you mature and be a threat to me. The ones with grimoires are such a pain that they’re not really worth it. And finding you, that was easy, the remnants of your magic are purer than ley lines. I could smell that uncontaminated deliciousness through any gateway.”
Filing those tidbits away for later, I kept my focus on surviving. Making it through the day comes first, unfortunately. The pursuit of casually thrown about esoteric knowledge can wait. I reached out and twanged the mental link to Kong, telling him to get to the area near the river ASAP, my magic forcing him to pick up the pace. I fired off a series of thoughts and images to Spot, my haphazard plan that may give us a chance for survival, and Gungnir listened in on that as well. I called on my Sorcery and poured my will into conjuring a ten-foot thick wall that was eight-feet high and twenty-feet wide in front of me.
Turning like a rat with its tail on fire, I sprinted my ass to the other side of the cavern to get as far away from Rath as possible while still drawing on as the ridiculous power supply from Gungnir. Spot leaped over the wall with a howling snarl and tackled Rath in the neck just before he unleashed his flame breath. The collision knocked Rath’s head upwards where the flame spewed onto the ceiling, scorching the stone black. Some of the rock melted and dripped to the ground with a nasty hiss. Gungnir flew up and began condensing a bright chaotic bolt of energy pointed at the escape chute, which I activated.
The panic enchantment opened at my . . . well . . panic. My frightened bumbling tripped the hatchway open and a mix of mud and good ol’ Virginia river water began spewing down. Gungnir added to the bedlam, blowing the opening wide with repeated blasts of energy until the whole thing completely open. Even more water gushed down like a waterfall and Spot disengaged from where he was getting knocked around by Rath.
“Come back, snack!” Rath screamed, one of his wings bleeding profusely from where Spot had stripped a nice long strip of flesh. Spot’s bone armor sported several scorch marks and the surrounding flesh was weeping from the dragon’s fiery breath. Spot retreated to me as the cavern began filling up with water. The burn marks covering his armor and a huge chunk of missing flesh from his shoulder began to regenerate. Rath reared back and then forward, vomiting a huge fireball in our direction.
“My territory now, bitch!” I screamed back, calling on my Water Sorcery and taking control of the environment that was rapidly shifting in my favor. The water, now several feet deep from the pressurized waterfall in front of me, sprang up from the floor and extinguished the fireball.
“Magic water beats fire, paper, and rock!” I taunted, a bit higher pitched than I would have liked. Gesturing in front of me with my hand, I shoved a tidal wave at the dragon blasting him into the far wall. The environment completely favored me at the moment.
“Boss, you’re way more badass in the water.” Gungnir said, the awe clear in its voice.
“I know.” I wheezed, my mind churning at light speed. “And I plan on taking full advantage of it.” As the water kept pouring down, I checked with my Water Sorcery instincts - yup, I could breathe underwater. Hell yes. The water was ten-feet deep and quickly getting deeper.
I grabbed Spot, who was starting to doggy paddle as it was just deep enough for him not to walk with ease, and extended my water breathing influence to him as well. Looking back at Rath, I kept up the raging current against him, pinning him to the wall for the moment.
His yellow eyes were full of rage. Every time that he opened his mouth, I blasted water into it to disrupt any means he had to reach me from over there. Rath managed to get his back legs on the wall and dove into the water, a dragon missile intent on me being a snack. The cavern was fully underwater at this point and I used that to shove Spot up the hole in the ceiling and mentally ordered him to get to shore but to stay near the new opening in the bottom of the river.
Using Water Sorcery to move faster in the water than Rath, the eddies and swirling water with conjured pebbles danced with my will to foul the movements of my attacker and irritate his eyes. I threw every trick in the book at him. Arms of mud snagged his limbs and icebergs stabbed into vulnerable spots while random whirlpools yanked Rath off course. All the while, I kept freezing broad swaths of water into ice around me and Rath to keep us apart until I finally felt that Kong was near the river.
The newly reconstituted Rappahannock was more than fifteen-feet deep from where the surface of the river was down to where the hole to the top of my cavern opened up, which put us right sixty-feet below the surface of the river as my cavern had a decent ceiling.
Pulling deeply on Gungnir’s reserves, I pulsed out an omni-directional pressure wave from myself while holding Gungnir and shot towards the surface, turning as much water around me in the cavern to ice as I could in that instant, and when I cleared the tunnel, I began plugging it up with ice, making it thicker by the second. The gap froze over with harsh blue and white ice.
I needed to put the self-serving lizard in his place. I freaking trusted the scaly bastard and he was just stringing me along, feeding me knowledge and keeping me somewhat safe so that he could eat me at a later date. It wasn’t until he almost died, incidentally by my ignorance, that he decided it was dinner time.
But now, I had just the right wicked idea. It also helped that this overwhelming fear that I was feeling was making me more focused than I had ever been before. Handling a fire breathing dragon is no walk in the park, and one wrong move would see me in the bottom of his stomach in way too many pieces.
Total humiliation would be possible, just had to get Rath in a horrible position, which is where Kong would come in. I mentally forced that giant Ape to stomp out into the river. He was large enough that his head was barely over it from where he stood.
I checked that Spot was paddling around me. He looked a bit more ragged as he’d vomited up the water that he had inhaled when my influence left him due to distance. Re-extending the ability to breathe water to him again, I then shared that ability with Kong as well and sent my plan in a burst of mental images.
Rath’s head slammed into the thickening plug of ice down below blocking him from leaving the cavern. He can’t breathe underwater. That much I’m sure of. And the act of trying to break through magically reinforced ice on limited oxygen will weaken him - if he manages to break through at all. If I’m lucky, he’ll just pass out. Another slam caused a huge crack in the ice and I couldn’t keep up as Rath started tearing at it with his huge claws. Fuck.
As his head broke through the ice cap and then through the surface of the river, I propelled myself backwards, conjuring ice all around Rath and his head - anything to slow him down. I tried to keep the ice around his mouth solid, but it was no match for the power of an enraged dragon, so I did the next best thing. I manipulated the water to stay around his head, like a cat with its head stuck in a sealed fishbowl. The river answered my call, continuously blasting his nostrils and mouth anytime he managed to shake just a bit free.
Rath crested the water like a magnificent salmon, just in time for Kong to jump up and sucker punch him twice, once right in the belly and the other a hammer fist, knocking the reptile straight back down into the river.
[What’s the plan boss?!] Gungnir hurriedly asked across our mental link.
I narrowed my eyes. [I’m going to drown this lizard till I get what I want.]
Spot swam down and latched on to Rath’s tail and began paddling the other direction to keep Rath underwater while Kong dove under to bear hug Rath’s neck from behind. It was awesome, my very own shitty B-movie playing out right in front of me. A mini King Kong choking out an ancient dragon that wanted to eat me, with my own tank sized dog playing tug-of-war with the dragon’s tail, and me twenty-feet away, using Water Sorcery to rain on the dragon’s parade.
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Magnificent.
“I tell ya what,” I said, standing on top of the water and shaking my head. I glanced at Gungnir as my weapon bounced around in the air. “That dragon sure can hold his breath.”
It felt like hours before he finally passed out even though I knew it had only been a few minutes. The whole time I was supporting my two giant beasts with my magic, providing healing when needed and making sure that breathing air and water wasn’t a problem, all the while keeping that pesky water bubble permanently on Rath’s face so he couldn’t get any air. When the enraged dragon did finally pass out and go limp in the water, I propelled myself closer and used Flesh Sorcery to check on him, making sure that he wasn’t dead.
Normally, if a being is conscious or has a lot of magic, I can’t seem to use my Flesh Sorcery on them unless I manage to overpower them or they are willing to be healed/manipulated in some way. The instinctive aspect of Flesh Sorcery hinged on freedom or bodily autonomy forcing me to work with the individual’s natural state of being, unless I overrode it with serious power. It’s like there’s a natural barrier to invasive magics. I had to force a binding on Kong and take a lot of time and care to make Spot become a familiar before I had free rein to use Flesh Sorcery. And Norn was very confused and in a state of chaos from the Ripple when bound him. Plus, he’s a bird with a literal birdbrain.
Rath was an ancient dragon. I didn’t have a chance in hell to dominate him like the other two. This simple fact made it so that I was going to have to do something really messed up to solve this issue.
[There might be a way around that though] I thought, getting close to the comatose dragon while being very conscious of how big he was compared to me. I conjured a flat stone plate and shaped runes of sleep, exhaustion and energy draining, then put it in my pocket unactivated.
Next, I had Spot drag Rath to the shallows and then had both Spot and Kong secure him as tight as possible, then I used Water Sorcery to pull the water out of Rath’s lungs so that he wouldn’t die while I worked. Keeping to my standard tactics, I conjured stone all over Gorgorath’s massive form creating a cocoon until only his eyes, nose and a bit of his neck showed. Placing runes all over the stone coffin as the base for my enchantments allowed me to create something that could hold him for a minute or two, then I placed my newly enchanted sleeping plate on Rath’s head.
Looking over my work, I’m glad that I had Spot and Kong as my insurance. Conjuring a huge double-sided ax proportional to Kong took no time at all. I shaped enchantments of strength and endurance on the shaft and then put runes of sharpness and durability up and down the humongous blade. Then I made a giant hammer for him as well complete with its own set of enchantments. Taking a few minutes, I poured power into the sleeping plate and Kong’s new ax.
“Ok Kong, you’re Spot’s backup,” I said, explaining my plan as quickly as possible while using my mental links to translate as clearly as possible. I had to make sure that they understood me. “Spot, bite on Rath's neck, but don’t bite down hard. If he wakes up, just let him know you’re there, but don’t kill him. Got it?” I squinted at my dog. Spot nodded and took his place over Rath, opened his big jaws and put Rath’s neck in his mouth, his foot long razor-sharp canines placed directly over his jugular vein.
Turning to Kong, I said. “Do not harm Spot or anyone except for Rath. Your job is to hit the dragon in the head with the hammer if he causes problems, and the ax is for if he gets loose, got it? That furry fang-filled muzzle on his face should keep him from flaming y’all.” Kong bared his fangs with an evil smile but nodded.
I took a deep breath. “Good. I’m going to fix the cavern real quick and put everything back to where it was. Holler if he wakes up.”
I had to do this quick. Diving down into the new hole to my cavern, I floated there for a second and then swam next to it. I pushed back the water flowing around me to create an air bubble and mentally communicated with Gungnir who bobbed beside me.
[Hey, hold the river back from this spot, just let it flow around us. I need to get air back down there when I banish the water.]
[Too easy.] Gungnir replied, pulsing with blue light, using my Water Sorcery to force the river to flow around the hole.
I slowly lowered myself into the hole, constantly moving and banishing water as I went. Air rushed in from up above as I created a partial vacuum from banishing the water. I managed to get the whole cavern free of water in five minutes and then shaped stone stairs that started at the nearest wall and then went up to the hole. Looking around, all of my stuff (not that there was much of it) was strewn around, making me feel a bit gloomy. Doesn’t take much in this new world to wreck any semblance of normalcy.
I grabbed the disk of World Tree wood from where it sat in a sad puddle and checked it over with Nature Sorcery. It looked fine but I pumped some mana into it until it glowed a soft green. Pushing secondary priorities to the back of my mind as I pocketed the Yggdrasil node, I grimaced before setting my jaw and getting back to work. I’ll worry about this other plan later.
Climbing out of the hole and resealing it with several stone seals with ‘you-don’t-see-me’ enchantments took another ten minutes. I dove up into the water out of my tunnel and Gungnir followed, letting the Rappahanock resume its normal course over the entrance.
Water Sorcery is freaking cool. The river naturally flows around me but I’m in command of everything my magical senses can touch. Catching any kind of fish I can feel would be beyond easy, and any enemy in this domain of mine is at my mercy. This really made me want to go build a fortress under the sea.
Start my own Atlantis.
“Atlantis would be awesome!” Gungnir crowed, intruding on my thoughts as we coasted towards our prisoner. “I’d be a badass trident, and we would RULE! Get some mermaid bitties up in that underwater palace and endless sushi!”
“Cool it.” I said, strolling up on the side of the bank while drying myself off with magic. “Still got a damn dragon to deal with. I’m thinking since he’s way too old and strong to dominate, we use him. Not against the goddess since she still overpowers him, but he could be useful in other ways. I mainly need what’s in his head. You don’t get to be that old without learning tons of useful things.”
“Well, if you mainly just need his head . . .” Gungnir drawled. “Then take his brain. Easy peasy.”
I halted in my tracks. Gungnir is right. Take his brain huh? Could it be that easy? I mean, I could take his brain. His bloodline and body could make for some epic gear. What nerd hasn’t dreamed about being decked out in epic gear? That was rhetorical.
EVERY nerd has dreamed about this moment. And, my crisis of conscience had long passed on this new Earth. It was well past time that I took my rightful place and claimed that which I conquered.
Today, I, Benjamin Walker, will be a dragonslayer.
Maybe I should have had a crisis of conscience. Just a small moment of rethinking my morals and how much they should affect my decision making. The practical side of me clearly pointed out that Mr. Flaming Butthole did try to eat me. And he was somewhat justified for a small part of that. I did almost get him killed with a stupid decision. I was having a hard time piecing together the two sides of Rath. On the one hand, he’d been a chill dude to relax with and handed out knowledge like a drunk librarian who’d read too many books and had no friends. On the other hand, the damn lizard can spit fire, he attacked my dog, and then tried to eat me after revealing that doing so would make him even more powerful.
Fuck.
Fuck it.
I hardened my will as I took a deep breath, resolved to make a difficult choice.
“Hopefully this isn’t a stupid decision,” I whispered. Holding out my hand, my will and determination called to Gungnir who turned into a spear as it slapped into my hand. The shaft shortened while the blade lengthened, its shimmering crystal depths glowing with promised death and power. Kong looked at me as magical lightning and fire crackled down the length of the blade in my hand. Steeling my conscience and shoving that annoying voice down a bit more, I changed my plan again as I remembered something.
I coated Gungnir’s edge in ice and said to Spot as I pointed at the dragon. “You can stop slobbering on him now. We’re feasting on dragon steaks tonight boys!” I grew two wide hollow crystal pillars out of the mud next to Rath’s unconscious body and cut blazing runes of preservation and freshness in them, then conjured one more crystal about the size of a pumpkin and began inscribing runes of will, clarity, memory, obedience, submission, chains and torture into it.
Turning to Kong, I commanded. “Remove the stone plate from that dragon’s head and put that crystal.” I gestured towards the one I just made and placed in front of Rath’s face. “On top of his head and hold it there, got it?” Kong nodded and picked it up, rolling it in his hands while keeping hold of the ax I gave him. “Do not, for the love of god, break that crystal.” I threatened.
Turning around and gripping my deadly weapon tight, I snarled. “Gungnir, let’s do this.”
“Right on!” Gungnir agreed. “Can I have its soul? I mean, you aren’t gonna use it right?”
“Sure, whatever.” I shrugged. “I need Rath’s brain and body, you take the soul.”
I stepped next to where Spot had slobbered on Rath’s exposed neck and rotated Gungnir so that the point of the blade was downward. Using Flesh Sorcery to enhance my body, I jumped up fifteen-feet straight into the air, Gungnir held high.
“NOW KONG!” I screamed at the apex of my jump. Kong ripped the stone plate off Rath’s head and quickly slapped that spot with the binding crystal just before I descended and plunged Gungnir straight through Rath’s vertebrae. Using my magical sight as I fell, I was able to determine where a weak spot was as Rath was unable to defend himself at all in his unconscious state.
Gungnir’s tip slid right between two vertebrae, unleashing lightning and Chaos mana straight down, decapitating the once great dragon. I didn’t have time to celebrate. This was a crucial moment. As soon as Kong hit Rath in the skull with the crystal, the dragon woke just in time to feel his head separating from his body. The crystal activated and sucked in the bright yellow light that was being expelled from Rath’s eyes, his memories all mine now that the meat brain was defenseless while Gungnir devoured the soul of the dragon.
“Stay right there, Kong!” I ordered as I tore Gungnir to the side of the corpse and began cutting with Gungnir. I had to do this fast. Using my Flesh Sorcery, I forced the still-living corpse to hang on the edge of life as I cut to the heart, removing the truck-tire-size organ from the body with Kong’s help and placing it in one of the hollow crystal pillars. Then I drained enough dragon blood to fill up the container completely and sealed it off.
Hustling over to the head, I could feel that the memories were still flowing. I jogged over to Rath’s backside and with one swing severed his tail. “Come here boy, here Spot!” I called, the big pup tearing the ground in his excitement. “Enjoy buddy.” I said as I kicked the tail. “This part is all yours.”
Kong hooted at me. Perfect.
I ran to the head and changed Gungnir into a small hatchet which I used to gently cut open the head, gently being a relative term. I had to hack with all my might to be ‘gentle’ with something as durable as a dragon. I had Kong gingerly pull the brain out with most of the brain stem still attached and carefully place it in the second container. After topping it off with more readily available dragon blood, I looked over the gruesome scene. The long body steamed as the leftover gore seeped out of the cavernous wounds.
I felt elated, but also strangely morose. What exactly was I becoming? The disappearing sun heralded a new set of dangers shaking me from my reverie. Night had fallen and I wanted to get this juicy prize back to my river-bottom cavern.
Turns out that nobody wants to mess with a giant reptilian gorilla armed with an ax or a beefy tank-sized canine or even their much smaller dragon-slaying master. Beady luminescent eyes peered out of the shadows but nothing made a move.
Hallelujah, because I was exhausted.
It was bloody and exhausting work to enlarge the tunnel and entrance to the cavern over and over to accommodate my beasts, but moving the body was easy for Kong and Spot even though they had to carry the goods back up to the main entrance and then down the tunnel. I carted the large storage crystals to my rebuilt cavern and safely put them into a deep stone pit. Preserving my prizes to keep them fresh, I sealed them with runes of stasis and life so that the precious ingredients wouldn’t go bad. The remainder of the body went into a new freezer I made just for this occasion. It took up a sixth of my space, but I had plenty of room.
“PLEASE HELP ME!” Gungnir screamed as we finished moving everything where I wanted it. All of the blood from where the body was dragged had been cleaned up by Spot who vigorously licked up any speck of crimson. “He won’t shut up! Going on and on. Oh, my beautiful body! What have you done to me? Oh, hey - that was a dirty, dirty insult! I’m glad he butchered you, you backstabbing overgrown fart of a lizard!”
All I wanted to do was sleep, but I used Flesh Sorcery to wash the edge of my exhaustion away. “What the hell man?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. “Way too late for this. What’s going on? Is the little lizard giving you problems?”
“Little!?” Gungnir freaked, sparks of green and yellow flying out at random as my weapon erratically bobbed in the air. “His soul is huge!” “Takes up half the power flow to keep him under wraps, and it’s almost impossible to actually keep him quiet! I’m a piece of your soul, he’s a whole of his! A serious imbalance at play here!”
“Then drain him of power, pansy!” I cursed. “Kong, patrol the forest but don’t go too far. I don’t know what’s out there that may find you tasty. Sleep in a tree near the hollow tree, in case you’re needed. Spot! Spot! Spot?”
I turned around, looking for my ever faithful companion. My furry friend was curled up in the far corner of the cavern next to the impromptu dragon freezer. I walked over and put my hand on his leg. His limb was partially petrified. The fur was matted and gray where it stuck out from between the bone armor. Powdery ash gray stone covered him completely, like a cocoon of sorts, and parts of it looked like it was scaly. I reached out with my flesh magic, tiny tendrils running over the new carapace of my pet. As the tendrils touched it, that was it - they made no headway nor could they go inside to see what was going on.
“This is so cool!” Gungnir said, momentarily distracted from its own woes. “It’s like Medusa got in here and whacked the dog! Do you think she takes commissions?”
I started panicking until it hit me. This is along the lines of what I originally intended for my dog anyway. I realized that when I gave Spot Flesh Sorcery, he had also gained the ability to devour other things and take their strength. Since I fed him the tail of an ancient dragon, there might be some changes going on.
“Oh, that would make sense.” Gungnir interjected as he read my line of thinking. “Wonder how much he’s gonna change. I think you should do the same thing. A dragon-sorcerer would be badass. Can you imagine how powerful you’d be?” I hooked up a small mana feed to Spot’s cocoon from the big generator, hoping that a little extra pure mana would help iron the process out.
“It would be badass,” I replied, patting Spot on the leg. “But I have too much to learn before I go down that road completely. Besides, there might be some creature out there that would complement my abilities better. Although taking something from a dragon would help round me out.” I pondered the pros and cons while I took some time to get myself cleaned off from the day, then headed down the southern tunnel to the under-tree bolthole and passed out.