65 (II)
Puppeteer
Please, the wind dragon begged inside of her. Memories flowed through the wind dragon. Too many memories even for her to process. The shadow dragon appeared in many of them. Sir Orchid—the quiet member of this band of traitors. Too bad it couldn't guess its own fate.
“Hallo? You alright?” The shadow dragon flew close. Uva made the wind dragon feign weakness.
“I think she broke something in me,” Uva said through the dragon, clutching her head.
The shadow dragon came close. “What? Let me—”
Then, she was on him, driving her clawed thumbs through his red eyes in an instant. Inside, Sir Hallo—the wind dragon—wailed in despair as he felt his thumbs sink deep into the eyes of his brother in arms. NOOOOOO!
Uva ignored the dragon screaming within her mind in favor of listening to the one shrieking beyond it. The wind dragon wasn’t the strongest of its band, but it did have speed in spades. And that speed was hers. Hers to use as she accelerated into the shadow dragon, driving it across the sky and sinking her thumbs in deeper.
Please! Please! the wind dragon wailed. It couldn’t struggle. She'd removed that function from its mind. So all that remained was the begging and the pain.
The shadow dragon thrashed under her grip, stabbing blindly, but their proximity and the pain it was in made the attacks ineffective.
Despite this, the shadow dragon wasn’t the only one that was breaking. Uva felt the wind dragon’s mind snap inside her, breaking apart around her mana strings. The actions she was forcing on it were driving it insane at an alarming rate. Without choice, the wind dragon descended into madness. But Uva staved that off as well, pulling away trauma with her strands.
Puppeteer of the Formless Strings > 102
“Hallo! Stop!” the shadow dragon cried. “Why-why!”
I can’t! Hallo screamed inside Uva. But the shadow dragon couldn’t hear, and she wouldn’t tell.
The shadow dragon dropped its spear as the wind dragon’s claws sank in all the way. Whereupon Uva had the wind dragon channel electricity via its Aeromancy. The shadow dragon let out a howl of absolute agony as lightning blasted through its skull. The insides of the shadow dragon’s eye sockets fried and combusted, its brain faring little better.
Brother! I’m sorry! I can’t… You monster! Monster!
The wind dragon was sobbing inside her, but Uva’s sympathy for these enemies was at an all-time low.
The shadow dragon twitched a few more times before it went still in her arms. The wind dragon screamed. Uva pulled her thumbs out and tossed it aside, where it spiraled towards a burning forest far below. Now, it was time to—
A large part of the wind dragon’s mind broke
from the act. It spasmed in midair, and suddenly, Uva found herself burdened with controlling a dragon’s unfamiliar physique herself. The problem there was that she lacked the proper experiences and memories, considering a good number of them just dissolved. It wasn’t a clean ego hollowing, like what Shiv accidentally did to the Greater Demon. This was the start of a complete collapse, and Uva was losing control of this new and alien body. She fought to maintain control.I want to die… I want to not exist…
Since the wind dragon couldn’t resist her, it instead rushed head-first toward madness.
Wonderful, Uva snarled as she struggled to manage more and more of this alien body. Existential horror and despair splashed against her, but she broke those thoughts before they could ever drown her. She was going to need a new traitor dragon to wear soon. One with an intact ego. She would probably need to focus more of her mana on blunting the trauma from her next target. This was a good first lesson.
Tentatively, she removed a few of her tendrils. Controlling the dragon didn’t feel much more difficult. As she removed half of her strands, she still felt stable, but her influence over the dragon was rapidly fading.
Maybe I could break multiple minds and simply broadcast orders into them using the mana strands. Have them fight autonomously on my behalf…
She’d find out soon.
Uva extended her strands, then, and left her mana spread out over the land. The umbral wilderness was a mess of dense trees and swaths of wasteland. She needed something to—
She felt her mind brush something. A mind that was impossibly resilient and hard, with several others closing in. Shiv?
More of the dragon’s sanity collapsed, but she directed it to channel a gust of explosive wind with a flex of her mind. She had a direction, now. And a purpose. She was going to find her team, and they were going to finish the rest of these dragons off.
This had been a brutal fight. Uva had come closer to death more times in the past few seconds than she had for entire years during her early career. And she almost broke her own mind again. But the System rewarded this. The System loved conflict, and it also loved strugglers. And from the moment Shiv came into her life, her struggle grew immense.
And Uva loved it.
Hold on, she thought as she tore across the horizon. She saw Shiv and Adam standing in a crater. Three other dragons closed in on them. Three new vessels to choose from.
And just then, the last bits of the wind dragon’s mind crumbled away, leaving Uva to fly its body without any context or practice. So she did the best thing she could. She glided. But that mostly became a directed fall as the earth sped toward her at an alarming rate. She struck the ground not far away from her team, and though the wind dragon briefly lost consciousness, Uva was still aware, and Uva wanted out.
She flexed every fiber of her mana outward, not bothering to untangle herself as she emerged back into the real world in a blast of Psychomancy and brain matter. She stepped and winced as she realized her right leg was still fractured. Adept Toughness was better than nothing, but even with her new protections, she wasn’t nearly as durable as Shiv or Adam with his ridiculous armor.
“Apologies,” she said, taking in her boys. Shiv was nothing more than a transparent outline now, and Adam had a new arrow nocked. It seemed like they went through some transformations as well. In her periphery, she saw two dragons move—and she speared them with every thread she could immediately muster. Jets of mind-rending trauma were injected out through her strands, and both the Biomancer and Sir Tarlow went down screaming. “Couldn’t quite reach the Jealousy. I had to findanother body to wear.”
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One of her threads passed through Adam and Shiv. The Young Lord was terrified of what she just did, but Shiv—
“Holy shit… that was hot,” he muttered internally, enraptured by the sight of her striding out from the dragon.
Uva gave a slight smirk. Her dear brute was an easy man to please.
***
Shiv was torn away from staring at Uva when the colossal axe-bearer roared and charged. He saw several of Uva’s strands slash into the axe-bearer’s mind and—
“He’s completely mad!” Uva cried in surprise.
“Yup!” Shiv said as he launched himself forward before the big bastard could smash into either of his more fragile allies. Shiv knew just how hard the big dragon could hit, how fast it was while raging. And so he adapted his strategy. He crouched low and crashed hard against the dragon's chest, charging it from an angle. Shiv felt himself get driven back like he was an insect trying to hold back an avalanche on a frozen slope, but he twisted his gravitic field, and he cut hard with his dagger, slashing at the back of the dragon’s legs.
His blade crashed against the dragon, further empowered by his gravitic field, but to Shiv’s surprise, the cut wasn’t merely sharper or harder. No. The trembling power within its edge passed through the insides of the dragon as well. The beast cried out as Shiv sensed his slash start against skin before it swam through flesh, bone, and artery. The dragon had Adamantine Adaption as well, but it hadn’t been hit in a while, and Shiv’s blade held simpler qualities. Blood spurted out from the axe-bearer’s left leg as it crashed down. But Shiv didn’t let it grind along the earth in peace. No, this big piece of shit knocked him out and kept beating him. With a flare of anger, Shiv stabbed through the dragon’s ribs and lifted it over his head before dropping it on his knee.
A cloud of blood burst out from its back and one of its ribs snapped as it was folded over its much smaller adversary.
But the axe-bearer’s Berserk Skill was still active. It barely noticed the pain, and its lashing tail hit Shiv in the side. He drained some momentum and managed to stabilize himself—only for the dragon’s massive hand to pin him against the ground. Shiv sliced a finger and then ripped the entire digit off. The dragon punched him. Shiv felt his right shoulder fracture. He snarled and squeezed out of the dragon’s hand. His Silhouette was still active, and it punched nothing but dirt the next second.
At the same time, a dozen dimensional arrows tore into existence and crashed into the axe-bearer’s legs. A massive series of blasts washed over Shiv. The axe-bearer cried out as it lost its left leg entirely. It took a step forward, only for more of Adam’s Veilpiercers to hit its wings, right ankle and both hands. It crashed down into the dirt, and Shiv held it down before dragging his blade across its throat and launching his bone drills into the back of its head.
Deepest Edge > 54
Silhouette > 51
Gravitic Wrestler > 117
The dragon’s Adamantine Adaption stopped Shiv from fully slicing its neck open, but it still wounded the beast badly. Blood gushed out from its severed scales, and Shiv pulled back on its neck with a roar. If his blade couldn’t do the work, he would finish the job with his hands. Adam helped him by firing shots into the dragon’s open neck wound, disrupting its adaption further. The axe-bearer coughed as it tried to throw Shiv off, only to take two Veilpiercers in both eyes. That sent the beast reeling, and Shiv secured his entire field around the dragon’s neck as he pinched the dragon’s exposed arteries and pulled them out.
An entire jungle of veins and arteries was torn out from inside the dragon. Adam shot those too. The axe-bearer crashed down on its knees, but it shrugged hard, and Shiv nearly got thrown off. With a shout, he cast Adam’s wounds into the dragon, and its Magical Resistance rattled, stunning it briefly.
“Shiv!” Adam’s voice cried in his mind as Uva connected the three of them again. “Expose the wound!”
Shiv did, and as he pulled the dragon back, Uva threw something at Adam, and he caught his rapier once more. It flashed five times. Five new Adams appeared, each with a Veilpiercer nocked. They all fired as one, and a bloody chasm was blown into the massive dragon’s throat. Shiv absorbed some of the impact with his Momentum Core as he slashed the dragon’s neck three more times. Every hit made the dragon harder, but then time stopped. His core filled. And Shiv discharged as he swiped through the axe-bearer’s neck a final time, feeding all rage into the blow.
Where the dragon struck him hard and blunt, Shiv slashed precisely and fast. Deepest Edge worked in perfect tandem with Momentum Core and Gravitic Wrestler. Shiv’s hypercharged cut washed through the dragon’s already mutilated neck—and passed all the way through. Its spine parted. Its tendons split. Shiv tore the dragon’s head off its body, ripping away an entire section of scales that still clung on with a roar of effort.
When he finally came to a stop, he chucked the dragon’s head a dozen meters aside and spat on it. “I would have kicked your ass the first time if Tarlow didn’t step in.”
And speaking of the other dragons, he turned to see the dragon Biomancer crying out as the last vestiges of Uva’s form surged into its mind in the form of a few hundred translucent mana strings. A few meters away, he turned just to see Tarlow teleport, and Shiv cursed—
Only for Adam to fire a shot and send the kukri-wielding dragon crashing down to the dirt a few hundred meters away, with one arm barely hanging on.
Shiv looked at Adam and grinned. “Nice felling shot. Now. Let’s go put this dragon in the dirt.”
They reached Tarlow in seconds thanks to Adam’s dimensional rupture. Shiv stepped out from the chasm first. Adam hid behind him with an arrow drawn. A second later, as Tarlow tried to take flight, her wings splattered apart into bloody mush as the dragon Biomancer stomped over.
Faintly, Shiv could hear the dragon’s muffled screaming from within Uva. He saw a faint weaving of her layered over its mind as well. “Just what kind of Skill Evolution is that?” Shiv asked.
“Heroic,” Uva replied, making the dragon Biomancer smile at him.
Shiv grunted in surprise and bemusement. “Well. Look at you two out-evolving me.”
Adam sneered.
Before them, Tarlow gasped as she tried to rise. She turned and saw Shiv—looked at the Biomancer in confusion, and then sighed. Her left arm was useless. Her right hand clenched the kukri tighter. “So. I’m assuming you won’t accept my surrender.”
Shiv snorted. “Yeah. Think about what your commander said—I’m a surfacer too.”
The dragon stared, and then she laughed. “Strange. I survived your forces during the war, only to die to three random mercenaries here and now. The System mocks us.”
“It just wants us to fight and die,” Shiv said. “Today was both our turns.”
She nodded and noted the knife in his hands. She looked at her kukri. “Hey, little monster. How about a final round?”
Shiv nodded. And then he sent a thought to Adam. “Shoot her ass, she stabbed me in the back enough times.”
Adam loosed an arrow. Tarlow tried to move, but the Biomancer dragon turned her legs to paste, and a moment later, her arm was blown off. As she screamed and crashed against the ground, Shiv leaped forward and drove his dagger down through her skull before dragging it across her body. Tarlow barely managed a final gurgle as she was gutted from head to pelvis. But even in death, she clung hard to her kukri.
“Well,” Adam said. “That was—” He laughed. “We butchered her, didn’t we?”
Shiv grunted. He looked at the massive kukri, which was glowing—and for some reason, shrinking. “There are still a few left. The Dynamancer—”
“I have him,” Uva declared. A second later, the Biomancer’s skull exploded as well, and the dragon toppled in the dirt beside Tarlow. Uva’s face was coiled in disgust as she looked at Shiv. “His memories were vile.” That was all she needed to say. A few moments later, she turned translucent as her mana threads reached across the horizon. “I’ll try to keep this one alive. We can do some questioning and trade him to the Descenders for a boon.”
And then she vanished over the horizon in a surge of translucent mind mana. Shiv and Adam looked on, unsure where she just went, but the Young Lord sighed. “Well. She terrified me before with her Psychomancy, but now—”
“Now we’re going to destroy that gate when we get to it,” Shiv said, chuckling. He reached out and clapped Adam on the shoulder.
The Young Lord grunted. “What was that for?”
“For dragging my ass out of the dirt.”
Adam looked away and rolled his shoulders. “Well. It’s what a Pathbearer should do.”
“Yeah. Well. Thanks, asshole.”
“You’re welcome, bastard.”
And with that, the fight against what was a Lance of twelve Descender outcasts came to a close. From the distance, there came two final screams as the surviving dragons were swallowed by a newly risen Heroic-Tier Pathbearer.