Path of Dragons - A LitRPG Apocalypse (BOOK TWO ON KINDLE SEPT. 2)

Elijah wanted to just swallow his instincts and use the dark elves’ teleportation network. Every rational thought in his head screamed at him to do just that. He ignored them, and not by choice. He suspected that if he submitted to their teleportation, something terrible would happen. Maybe by his hand. Maybe from some unforeseen circumstance that he could feel but not understand.

He couldn’t risk that.

Almost literally.

When he considered going back and just teleporting, his instincts came alive, wrapped themselves around his mind, and forced him to turn away from the notion. Could he have overcome them? Certainly. But given his experiences, he decided that it wasn’t worth it. After all, in the past, his instincts had been proven valid more often than he cared to admit.

That was how he found himself exiting the illythiri fortress of Nathûn and continuing on his way. As far as he could tell, the way would be quite long. Normally, such a journey would be the work of months. However, Elijah expected that he could manage it in a fraction of that time. Partly because he rarely had to worry about dangerous wildlife, but also because he could move much, much faster than any normal person.

With that in mind, he decided to push himself a little harder than he had on the journey from Hafnarfjörður to Nathûn. The first week passed without incident, and he encountered more of the same. However, he was soon confronted by a vast sea. According to the map he’d gotten from the dark elves, the preferred route sent people around the edge of the sea, and to a higher tunnel that bypassed the body of water, but Elijah decided on something different.

He plunged into the water, shifting into the Shape of the Sea and paddling out into the open sea. The water was fresh, so it reminded him more of bodies of water like the Great Lakes. And given the scale he’d discerned from the map, that was a good approximation of the size. As such, the sea featured its own tidal cycle, massive waves, and appropriately sized native creatures.

They all steered clear of Elijah. The drakelon form was a true leviathan, more than fifty feet long and weighing dozens of tons. That nothing wanted to mess with the massive dragon-turtle was, in a word, understandable. Certainly, if Elijah had encountered something like it in his travels, he would have gone the other way.

Still, despite his haste, he couldn’t help but appreciate the environment. The sea itself was nothing unique. Just a massive body of water, with all the appropriate features for such an environment. There were fish and reptiles, mammals and even aquatic insects. Elijah was particularly interested in a species of long-legged bugs that skittered across the surface like water striders.

They were also nearly a dozen feet long, with appropriately sized bodies. Thankfully, they also seemed mostly docile.

In most places, the cavern’s ceiling was more than a mile distant, but there were a few locations where it hovered only fifty or so feet above. That gave Elijah a good look at the glittering ore that comprised the stalactites. Woven between the sedimentary layers were glowing bits of crystal that cast the whole cave in permanent illumination. From a distance, those stalactites almost looked like stars.

In all, it was a peaceful place – at least for Elijah. If he’d been slightly smaller or even a little more vulnerable, he might not have thought as much, though. In the waters below, a constant war for survival persisted. Aquatic beasts hunted one another, fought for territory, and, in some cases, attacked others simply because they could. It was a brutal reminder of nature’s most savage aspects.

Survival was not guaranteed. No matter how powerful you thought you were, there was always something bigger, stronger, and more vicious just waiting to make a meal of you.

Thankfully, none of them wanted to mess with a drakelon.

After Nara had revealed the name of the Shape of the Sea’s form, Elijah had done a little research, purchasing a guide on the creature’s history. And he was unsurprised to learn that they had originated on one of the planets controlled by the Empire of Scale. However, over the many millennia, the giant dragon-turtles had spread to many other locales.

At their most powerful, drakelons were true kings of the sea. Some had been known to reach absolutely gargantuan sizes, stretching to a length of more than a quarter of a mile. Commonly accepted was the idea that, like goldfish, they would grow to a scale fitting their environment. So, on Earth, which was actually quite a small planet in the multi-versal scale, one would never reach that size. However, on their native planet, which was at least ten times the size of current Earth, they could keep growing without those sorts of constraints.

But no matter the size, most creatures would avoid a fight with a drakelon. Very few possessed any sort of magical abilities, but their massive size, strength, and durability was more than enough to prevent any natural predators from forming.

To Elijah, that made perfect sense. Turtles weren’t exactly at the top of the food chain, but once fully grown, they had only a few natural predators. Clearly, draconic version had taken that to an extreme.

Even so, Elijah didn’t take his safety for granted. The journey across the sea took two days, which was a testament to its size. In the Shape of the Sea, he could reach an estimated speed of around two-hundred miles an hour. Maybe slightly less, but the combination of his massive size and prodigious strength meant he could move very, very quickly.

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That meant that, on the low side, the lake was somewhere between five and ten thousand miles wide. Only when he’d done the math did Elijah realize that his initial estimate of its size was incredibly far off-base. It was closer in scope to the Pacific Ocean than a simple lake.

Once again, Elijah was absolutely floored by the scale of the new version of Earth. Was it truly the size of Saturn? Or was it even larger? He wasn’t equipped to make that determination, but he could now understand why his map had suggested a different, more circuitous route that would have taken him much closer to the surface.

By all rights, it would have been much slower, though. Cutting across the sea had shortened his journey significantly, but there was still some way to go, though the region on the other side of the sea was mostly unmapped. Still, the dark elves had enough information and experience to intuit the route.

The far side of the sea was abutted by a steep cliff made of white stone, so once Elijah climbed to the top, he took a few hours to rest. He spent the bulk of that time enjoying a cup of coffee while sitting on the edge of that cliff and looking out over the massive body of water.

It was a daunting sight, but it was also incredibly peaceful. As far as he knew, no human – or dark elf, come to that – had ever been there. The view was all his.

That brought a slight smile to his face.

But he knew he couldn’t afford to remain in place for long. So, instead of savoring the moment like normal – or taking a day or so to rest properly – he soon found himself moving on. The terrain atop the cliffs reminded him a little of Scottish highlands, which he’d never visited, but had seen in enough movies to make the comparison. Seeing windswept hills and mountains underground was a little disconcerting, but he soon grew accustomed to it.

Fortunately, the open space gave him plenty of room to shift into the Shape of the Scourge, which increased his pace by a significant degree. The difference was more than just the inflated attributes that came with the form. Rather, it was clear that it had some subtle but obvious boost to speed.

That made sense. After all, while the base creature had some traits of an ambush predator, it was obviously more like a cheetah, built to run down its prey. Its ethology was unclear; venomous creatures usually didn’t need to chase their food. Then again, the scientific principles of evolution he’d learned often broke down once magic got involved.

Perhaps someone somewhere had made a proper study of it, but for now, Elijah just took things as they were. He had no other choice, so long as he didn’t intend to spend years engaged in observation and testing.

After a while, he left the highlands behind and once again found himself within a series of twisting tunnels. That was where his map failed him, though Elijah found that he could discern the proper route by following the flow of air. It was subtle, but to him, the difference seemed obvious.

Eventually, he left the maze of tunnels behind and found himself in a swamp. Despite wanting to take a day to rest, he chose to put the swamp behind him. However, he had no intention of doing so on foot. So, soon enough, he was winging his way across the cavern, only a few dozen feet above the tops of the short, fat trees native to the area.

This time, he didn’t do so entirely unmolested.

For whatever reason, the swamp denizens were quite a bit more aggressive than the natives of other biomes, and more than once, he found himself facing off against one beast or another. The terrestrial creatures were easy enough to outpace, but when he was attacked by enormous bats, birds, or worst of all, swarms of mosquitoes the size of an adult man, he was forced to fight.

The Shape of the Sky wasn’t really built for combat, but the difference in attributes stood Elijah in good stead. Even then, the biggest difference between life and death came from his ability to use Wild Resurgence, which kept him up even when he took what would have otherwise been fatal damage.

So, when he finally reached the edge of swamp, he let out a sigh of relief.

That didn’t last long, though. Soon after he left it behind, he felt something incredibly curious. A rise in ethera wasn’t particularly noteworthy. He’d passed plenty of low-grade natural treasures during his trek, and those usually came with an increased density of ethera. In this case, though, the feel of it was what set it apart.

Thankfully, it led him in the same direction he was already going, so he didn’t need to veer off course to satisfy his curiosity. As he went, he noticed a couple of interesting factors. The first was that the vegetation grew far thicker and a lot stranger. Suddenly, vines could move of their own accord, and they did so to satisfy carnivorous impulses, dragging weaker animals into bell-like structures that closed around the struggling creatures.

Elijah shivered as he passed by a clump of those bells and sensed beasts in various stages of digestion. The unmistakable smell of rotting meat hung in the air, following him through miles of tunnels and across a couple of caverns.

The second thing he noticed was that the average level of the fauna climbed higher with every mile. Some of them felt like they approached level two-hundred, which just solidified the reason the dark elves avoided his current route, preferring the longer, winding path that took them closer to the surface.

Elijah didn’t have much to worry about, though. None of the beasts were monsters, and they certainly weren’t sapient. They were also incapable of seeing through his stealth, which was a nice change of pace. He’d begun to wonder if it had grown entirely useless, especially after the troop of monkeys had seen through it.

So it was reassuring that that hadn’t become the pattern.

After a couple more days, Elijah reached the source of the increased ethereal density. As he looked over the sinkhole, he felt a powerful updraft of hot air laced with thick energy. He couldn’t see the bottom of the sinkhole, but he suspected that it led to a particularly high-level biome. Maybe there was even a natural treasure down there.

However, Elijah wasn’t so certain. In the lead-up to his descent into the Hollow Depths, he’d done a little research, and most of the guides agreed that, for one reason or another, the deeper one dug into the interior of a planet, the more powerful the ethera became.

There were many theories as to why that might be. It ranged from the ridiculous, like when one author posited that every planet’s core played host to a powerful guardian, to more mundane, like the idea that the core itself was the source. Elijah wasn’t certain what to believe, and he’d long since decided to reserve judgement until he could investigate it himself.

But for now, he decided to eschew the distraction and move on. After all, Sadie was waiting on him. The need wasn’t urgent, but he still felt some sense of haste. So, he regrettably left the sinkhole behind, resolving to stay on task.

However, when he encountered a familiar and malevolent presence only a few days later, he realized that he was going to have to break that resolution. So it was with some degree of annoyance that he followed that sense to an uncharted cavern. The second he looked at the corrupted forest, he knew he had his work cut out for him.