A leg the size of the Washington Monument crashed down on an abyssal, spearing it through its open maw. The dramatically tapered tip tore through its back, and as the thicker part of the leg followed, it ripped the abyssal apart. Its screams echoed for only a moment before it went silent. What was left of its body twitched a few times as the spider’s leg lifted. The abyssal slid down, dropping to the ground with a wet squish.

  The spider never even noticed the thing.

  Elijah watched it, a mixture of awe and terror flowing through him. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen such a spider. He’d seen something similar when he’d first arrived in the Broken Crown. Back then, the enormous arachnid fought against one of the powerful demi-god dragons, but it didn’t fight alone.

  Instead, it was surrounded by a massive swarm of wasps.

  Though Elijah had no idea if this was the same spider, it was close enough that it didn’t really matter one way or another. Belatedly, Elijah realized that he’d stopped moving.

  “Thief!” screamed someone from afar. Elijah barely had time to react before something hit him with enough force to knock the breath from his lungs. He went flying across the terrain, shattering rocks with every skip until he finally came to a rest more than a mile away.

  Even as he shook his head and rolled over, he was cast in dense shadow.

  He reacted without thinking, lashing out with Lightning Domain. Dense arcs of electricity slammed into the descending dragon, eliciting muscle spasms in his wings. They snapped out, slowing it just long enough to allow Elijah to roll free.

  When the dragon hit the ground, the impact sent out a powerful shockwave that nearly knocked Elijah from his feet. By that point, he’d already begun the transformation into his dragon form.

  “Selfish beast!” roared the dragon as he wheeled around. He didn’t charge, though, and that gave Elijah a moment to study his latest foe.

  The dragon was obviously male, though Elijah had no idea how he made that distinction. Regardless, the creature was equipped with glistening blue scales that seemed to twist the air around them. He was also much larger than Elijah, clearly having achieved demi-god status.

  But the enemy dragon wasn’t that far into that stage, which gave Elijah some hope that he might survive the encounter. Still, he knew he had no chance of killing his new foe. The gap was too wide this time. Even a simple glance told him that much.

  “What did I do to you?” Elijah snapped, having completed his transformation. He held himself low to the ground, his branch-like wings held close to his body. The leaves danced in the still atmosphere. The stance wasn’t so different from a cat waiting to pounce.

  “You took it for yourself!” the enraged dragon growled, throwing his wings out wide.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The Worldseed! Do you know what we could have done with that?!”

  “Not really.”

  “Selfish,” the blue dragon spat, pacing to the side. Elijah mirrored his movements as they faced off. The battle continued all around them. “This is how empires fall.”

  “Not my empire,” Elijah said as calmly as he could. Still, the accusations cut deep because, at the end of the day, they were true. He was selfish, at least when it came to self-improvement. He didn’t care about dragons as a whole, and as a result, he had no loyalty to their institutions.

  He might’ve had the body and core of a dragon, but in his heart, he was still human. As a result, his loyalty was to his family, his friends, and his home planet – in that order. Dragons came much later.

  Besides, he was inside a Primal Realm. None of it mattered, even if it felt like it should.

  Either way, Elijah’s statement sent the blue dragon into a rage. His ethera swirled, and suddenly, he appeared next to Elijah. The other dragon’s long fangs pierced his scales a second later, ripping through his flesh and tearing a hunk of meat away.

  Elijah dove forward, leaving a trail of blood behind. Wild Resurgence filled him with vitality, slowly mending the damage. Stopping the bleeding was quick enough, but true healing would take a lot more than that single spell.

  The blue dragon’s ethera surged again, but this time, Elijah was ready for it. The second he felt it, he pushed his Mantle of Authority out. The enemy popped out of nothing a few feet short of another attack. Elijah followed his Mantle with Lightning Domain. Electricity hit the creature, singing his scales and causing involuntary muscle spasms.

  Elijah pounced, his Mantle still extended as he targeted his foe’s wings.

  The other dragon recognized what was happening, and he managed to wrestle control of his body from the electricity-induced spasms. His tail lashed out, smashing into Elijah. And considering the blue dragon was much higher level – and a lot bigger – Elijah went flying backward.

  His wing was sliced in half a second later.

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  He screamed as something went right through the relatively lightweight wood and leaves alike. An instant later, another cut appeared in his side, cutting through his ribs. Then another. And another after that. It was like he’d been thrown into an invisible woodchipper.

  He flopped to the ground after only a second, his entire body having become a mass of bloody scales and meat. He raised his head, a tendril of blood extending from the end of his snout to the growing pool beneath him. But even with one eye having been sliced to ribbons, Elijah could see the remnants of the spatial field through which he had just passed.

  Hundreds of tiny rips in the fabric of space hung in the air, only visible because of his blood dripping from them.

  And on the other side stood the blue dragon.

  Elijah wanted to bite his face clean off. He rose, one of his legs almost entirely severed. That, along with the missing wing, was the worst of his injuries, but the others were nearly as extensive. Barely a few seconds had passed, and he’d already been pushed to his limits.

  “Space,” he growled.

  “Of course,” the blue dragon spat. “Do you know nothing of your own people?”

  Elijah straightened, though not without difficulty. “Not my people,” he stated. “Not really.”

  Then, he unleashed the Eternal Plague he’d been building from the moment he’d faced off against the blue dragon. It had only been a short time, but Elijah hoped it would be enough.

  Thousands of blue dragonflies filled the air. A full third of them never made it through the spatial field, but two-thirds of a lot was still enough to cause quite a few problems. They fell upon the blue dragon, their color blending into his scales. Most of their attacks never made it through his thick natural armor, but Elijah’s solution to that problem was to create a bigger swarm.

  They concentrated on the blue dragon’s softer tissues. His eyes. The membranes of his wings. The pits that functioned as ears. The more delicate underbelly.

  The enemy countered by teleporting the dragonflies away. It was an incredible show of ethereal control, but Elijah didn’t take the time to appreciate it. Instead, he threw himself into the air, bounded higher with Cloud Step, and cleared the spatial field. He fell upon the blue dragon, his Mantle of Authority extended.

  He bit the base of the creature’s skull, latching on with all the power he could muster. At the same time, he used Nature’s Claim. Via Soul of the Wild, Elijah could feel the spores sprout into mushrooms within the blue dragon, but then, after another surge of ethera, they were just gone.

  A second later, another’s will slammed into his Mantle of Authority. It wasn’t a competing soul. Rather, it was just an overwhelming wave of ethera that drowned his soul in sheer power. He resisted, but it only took a moment before his mantle flickered out like an extinguished candle.

  Then, suddenly, he was somewhere else.

  He didn’t know what had happened until he realized he was falling – and straight at the spider’s bulbous carapace. Up close, it was even larger than he’d supposed. Each leg was at least a mile long, and its body was more than half that wide. To call it enormous was missing the point entirely.

  It was just too big to exist.

  But Elijah was less concerned with the spider than he was with the thousands of wasps, drachnids, vespirans, and mind-controlled dragons surrounding it and crawling across its back.

  And he couldn’t stop his fall. Not with one of his wings gone.

  Elijah rapidly shifted, taking on Shape of Spores. At the same time, he was assailed by hundreds of wasps, each one sinking their hateful stingers into his body. Thankfully, the shape was more than capable of dealing with any amount of venom they could inject.

  He used Cloud Step, hoping to win free of the swarm and resume his fight with the blue dragon. But every time he tried to escape, he found himself once again teleported and reoriented.

  The implication was obvious. The blue dragon wasn’t going to let him escape, and he was more than willing to use his powers of spatial manipulation to ensure that Elijah had to fight the wasps.

  So be it.

  Elijah fell upon the spider’s back and immediately went to work. His first target was a drachnid that had the unlucky distinction of being only a few feet from where he landed. He launched himself at the creature, tackling her and burying his horns in her chest. A second later, he’d ripped her arm out of its socket.

  She screamed – because of course she would – but he didn’t hear it. Instead, he was too busy throwing out one instance of Nature’s Claim after another. He didn’t discriminate. He didn’t hesitate. He simply piled them on.

  Outside of his dragon form, the contents of his core went much, much further. The resulting spells and abilities were far weaker, but at the moment, Elijah didn’t lack punch. He needed staying power.

  Mushrooms erupted from backs, and spores filled the air. But it wasn’t enough. So, Elijah activated Mycelial Regrowth and Throne of Spores. His ruined back – where his wing had been attached in his dragon form – mended in a second, and more importantly, his ethera refilled rapidly.

  At the same time, acres of tendrils exploded into being. Those fungal roots wasted no time in wrapping around his enemies and constricting them. The enemy fought back, ripping the tendrils apart. However, in doing so, they only filled the air with more yellow spores. In turn, those infected everyone else.

  Elijah kept fighting as his body returned to perfect condition.

  He grabbed a wasp with both hands, then ripped it in two before bounding off a Cloud Step and tackling a hovering vespiran. The creature clearly hadn’t expected him to go airborne, so he was entirely unprepared when Elijah grabbed hold of his abdomen. He sank his claws deep into the chitin, his weight sending the enemy plummeting to the spider’s back.

  They hit with a crash, but by then, Elijah had already torn the vespiran’s wings free.

  He was in his element.

  He didn’t hold back.

  And droves of the enemy died by his hand. Some fell to the spores, but that was rare. They weren’t designed to kill. Instead, they were meant to weaken, and in that respect, they accomplished their goal. Even the giant spider, inundated by the atmosphere of spores as it was, staggered.

  Elijah kept going until his tendrils dissipated, leaving piles of dead bodies behind.

  There were more, though. So, he shifted into the Shape of the Scourge and used Phantom Shift. Together, he and his six semi-illusory clones attacked everything in range. He also summoned Lurking Swarm, and the conjured crystalline spiders leaped upon anything in their path.

  The spreading toxins overwhelmed many more of the enemy. Elijah only needed to nick his foes to inflict Spreading Plague and Ethereal Sepsis upon them. And with Phantom Shift obscuring his true location, he felt almost untouchable.

  He wasn’t.

  Because that damned blue dragon kept targeting him and fouling his progress. Each time he shifted Elijah in one direction or another, he ended up taking a few hits. They weren’t enough to overwhelm Wild Resurgence, but Elijah knew he needed to deal with that blue bastard sooner rather than later.

  Never was that clearer than when another massive earthquake ripped through the area, nearly splitting the landmass in two and detaching it from the nearby chain. The world was falling apart, and unless something changed – and soon – Elijah would be thrown into the abyss.

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