For a long few moments, Elijah floated in the green-gold, viscous liquid of the spider’s hemolymph. His flippers waved back and forth as he studied the arachnid’s ring-like brain. He could feel the electricity pulsing through it, riding its nervous system toward other ganglia scattered throughout its body.

  He knew that what he was about to do was a bad idea. At best, he would throw everything into chaos, which he hoped would give him an opportunity to escape. At worst, he would send the spider careening off the edge of the landmass and into the abyss. He would die soon after.

  But he was banking on two factors to prevent the occurrence of that eventuality. The first was that he knew he wasn’t nearly powerful enough to truly affect the spider. Instead, he only wanted to finish breaking the spell created by the now-deceased larva. At present, the spider’s brain was sluggish, the currents of electricity driving its function so glacial that he could easily follow them with the naked eye. That wasn’t right.

  But the second factor working in his favor was that he had no intention of sticking around once he was finished with his task. Hopefully, he could escape the creature’s innards and be on his way before things went truly bad.

  In any case, Elijah didn’t see how he had much choice. The blue dragon was still out there, and the only reason he hadn’t continued his attacks against Elijah was because he couldn’t affect space within the enormous spider’s body. Perhaps if the difference in level went in the spatial mage’s favor, he could have managed something like that. But as it stood, he couldn’t even push past Elijah’s natural defenses against ethereal intrusion, much less those associated with the far more powerful spider.

  But the second Elijah broke for the exit – which was one landmass over – the blue dragon would be free to resume his attacks. Even if he failed to directly injure Elijah, he could continuously displace him, preventing his escape. And that would kill him just as easily as removing his heart or other vital organs.

  No – Elijah was stuck.

  He needed to follow through with his plan and change the scope of the battle. Anything else, and he would fail.

  So, he swam forward until he felt the run-off from the brain’s natural electrical current coursing through him. Then, he shifted into his dragon form and began casting Lightning Domain. He didn’t release it, though. Instead, he built it for almost thirty seconds. The spell nearly burst free, but Elijah managed to hold it for a few more seconds before he opened his mouth and let it loose.

  Lightning spewed forth from his throat in great torrents, slamming into the closest ganglia and arcing through the knotted flesh. It passed into the ropy tendril, speeding toward the next ganglia. And the next after that. In the three seconds Elijah managed to keep the stream going, it made multiple revolutions around the ring, scorching away the remnants of the larva’s control. It also tore through the scar tissue, leaving healthy flesh behind.

  But Elijah knew good and well that such a scouring couldn’t come without significant pain. That only added to the electrical pulses flowing through the ganglia.

  The spider shook with a massive seizure, and Elijah was thrown away. He tumbled through the hemolymph, spreading his tree-branch wings to slow his progress. He still slammed into the massive, page-like lung formation with enough force to disorient him. Thankfully, his draconic body was incredibly durable, so he only picked up a few bruises – inside and out.

  No broken bones, though.

  He tucked his wings and swam forward. The current fought against him, frying him with a massive dose of electricity. Knowing he couldn’t endure that much damage, Elijah shifted into his drakelon form and used Wild Resurgence. Despite the influx of attributes, the chelonoid shape was much easier to heal.

  Even so, he couldn’t keep up for long.

  He needed to escape.

  The seizures continued, though now that his form matched his environment, Elijah managed to make much better progress swimming against the current. It still took him long minutes to reach his destination, which was the esophagus. He followed the muscular tube downward, all the while, trying desperately to resist the current pulling and pushing him to the rhythm of the spider’s seizure.

  At last, he reached the esophageal lumen – the opening that led back to the sucking stomach. Already, he could see the issue. The current was much, much stronger, and to the point where it dwarfed what he’d experienced in the Abyssal Glassworks. Fighting against that was nearly impossible.

  But Elijah’s other options of escape were even more difficult. He could have simply bored his way through the various layers of exoskeleton until he breached the carapace. That would take hours, though, and it was further complicated by the fact that he would still be fighting against the powerful current of the hemolymph. No – that was impossible.

  The other option was to go straight down, following the nerve bundles that connected to the legs. He could escape via the thinner chitin in one of the joints. But that would take just as long, and he didn’t think he had that kind of time on his side.

  The esophagus was the most direct route out. He just needed to muscle up and make it work.

  He plunged into the esophagus, paddling for all he was worth. But he immediately knew he’d chosen the wrong route.

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  The sucking stomach worked in pulses, which meant that Elijah soon found himself moving forward in spurts. Each scramble was countered by a backslide, which ground his progress to a stalemate. He could only move so far and so fast, and the stomach continued to pull him back the way he came.

  What’s more, he could feel the pressure of it constricting his durable body. His time inside the spider was limited. If he didn’t escape soon, he would be crushed beneath the weight of its inner body.

  Just as his body began to flag, he felt something unexpected.

  Lightning Rush had just come off cooldown.

  Had he been fighting that long? Obviously so. Still, it was a surprising turn of events. What’s more, it opened up a possibility he hadn’t expected. Even as his flippers beat against the current, Elijah pushed Soul of the Wild to its limits. It was just enough to give him a sense of direction outside.

  The spider had recovered from its seizures, and it had reoriented itself in roughly the direction of the other landmass. Elijah’s mind whirled with calculations – he’d never been great at math – as he estimated distance and trajectory. It was rough, and it would be close, but he suspected it would work.

  He just needed to time it perfectly.

  To that end, he waited until one of the gaps between sucking pulses, and he activated Shape of the Sky. The pressure nearly crushed him the second he left his drakelon form behind. But he didn’t need his bones to remain intact. Not for what he had planned.

  The second his transformation completed, he used Lightning Rush.

  He rocketed forward as a bolt of lightning that tore through the esophagus. The pull of the sucking stomach yanked against him, even affecting something as intangible as electricity.

  But it couldn’t stop him.

  However, Elijah quickly discovered that his aim was slightly off when he tore through the dense muscle fibers of the esophagus and hit the relatively weaker chitin just on the underside of the spider’s mouth parts. He felt his body break beneath the force of the impact as he broke through, only to sail through the air. Lightning faded into flesh, and he tried to snap his wings out, but they wouldn’t move.

  Elijah had expected as much, but the impact had left him a little woozy. He pushed through it, activating Shape of Spores. Mycelial Regrowth was still on cooldown, but the influx of regeneration still served him in good stead. As he sailed through the air, he reset a bad break in one arm.

  By the time the arc of his path sent him plummeting toward the ground, his bones had begun to mend – at least enough that he wouldn’t fall apart the second he tried to move.

  As he braced for impact, he took in the scene of chaos he’d left behind.

  And it was chaos in its purest form. The giant spider speared abyssals or crushed dragons and vespirans with every step. Meanwhile, it spewed a massive web of silk behind it, locking others in place. And that wasn’t even considering what it did to anything stupid enough to get near its mouth.

  The thing was the biggest, baddest monster in the area, and every participant in the battle knew that if it was allowed to remain upright, none of them would survive. They didn’t exactly attack in unison, but they definitely turned their focus from one another to the much more dangerous threat the spider represented.

  Elijah saw all of that in the brief moment it took him to hit one of the massive buildings. He crashed through the wall shell-first, then tumbled through the corresponding floor and broke through the other side. That dissipated some of his momentum, but not enough to stop him altogether.

  He went through one more building before, at last, he came to a stop.

  Behind him, the first building had begun to collapse, filling the air with a dense cloud of dust that he hoped would serve to conceal him. With no small degree of pain, he picked himself up and shifted back into his human form. Blessedly, a trio of healing spells hit him a second later, and he basked in the revitalizing wave of vitality that came with Blessing of the Grove, Nature’s Bloom, and Wild Resurgence.

  The hundreds of cracks throughout his skeleton mended, and his rent flesh grew back together.

  But Elijah couldn’t wait for the trio of spells to push him back to perfect health. That would take hours – perhaps even days – and another earthquake reminded him that he didn’t have time.

  As soon as he was ambulatory and close to fighting condition, he shifted back into the Shape of the Scourge and adopted Guise of the Unseen. Cloaked in stealth, he rushed through the broken city, dodging falling buildings and avoiding massive swarms of wasps along the way.

  More than once, he was forced to dodge enormous abyssals that were almost certainly capable of seeing through his subterfuge. But thankfully, they were far more interested in fighting the giant spider or one another than hunting for a stealthed velociraptor.

  The stray dragons were more of a threat, largely because they were far less single-minded than the abyssals. The only solace came from their comparative rarity. The dragons had already lost the war, and only a few remained. Still, those survivors were the most powerful among them, so Elijah gave them a wide berth.

  His trek through the fallen city was absolutely wrought with tension. Behind him, the battle still raged. Elijah had no idea if they’d downed the spider, and he had no intention of taking the time to find out. Instead, he kept his eyes on the proverbial prize – the chain in the distance that represented his means of escape.

  And against all odds, he reached it without further entangling himself in battle.

  He raced across it, all the while trying to ignore the creak of corroded links as they struggled to hold on. The Red Tyrant was obviously losing his own battle, and it wouldn’t be long before the Broken Crown was fully sundered.

  Elijah needed to be gone by then.

  Massive earthquakes shook the chain, threatening to throw Elijah free. He dug in with his talons, racing forward as quickly as he could manage. There were only a few enemies on the chain, and they were all going in the other direction. Not surprising. Elijah’s means of escape – exiting the Primal Realm – simply wasn’t available to them. They were all doomed, and presumably, they knew it. They just wanted to take as many of the enemy out before the entire broken planet was swallowed by the abyss.

  Elijah could almost respect that single-minded devotion to slaughtering the enemy.

  But for his part, he was far more interested in his own survival. So, he kept his head down and Guise of the Unseen active. He reached the end of the chain – and his sanctuary – nearly a day later.

  The next landmass was small, and the point of his arrival was only a few hundred miles away. Elijah raced across the broken terrain, pushing himself to his limit. The nearness of his goal lent him speed, and he covered the ground far more quickly than he ever could have expected.

  In fact, he was going so fast that he only had a second to react when he sensed the spatial field in front of him. He leaped high, springing off of Cloud Step to gain even more altitude, but even then, he felt one of the spatial rifts slice through his tail.

  He flipped, blood spewing from his injury as he sailed over the cleverly-laid trap. His talons thudded to the ground a moment later, and he saw his adversary step out from behind a jagged pillar of rock.

  If he wanted to leave the Primal Realm, he’d need to go through the blue dragon first.

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