BOOK 11: CHAPTER 58: CHAINS

“The Red Tyrant’s work. Impressive, is it not?” asked Dolo, one of his arms on his hip. The other had been severed during one of the previous battles. When it had happened, the tetradrak had been only a little distraught, mostly because he wasn’t looking forward to the cost of having it regrown. He was even considering simply replacing it with a crafted prosthesis, which was much cheaper and had the potential to be quite useful.

It wouldn’t be a real arm, though.

In any case, Elijah wasn’t thinking about regrown arms or prosthetics. Rather, his attention remained focused on the sight before him. After more than a month of travel – during which they’d fended off dozens of attacks from Vespirans – they’d finally reached the end of the continent.

To Elijah, it was more like finding the edge of the world.

The continent ended in a steep cliff, at the bottom of which was nothing but the unrestrained abyss. According to Dolo, the planet itself had broken into a number of giant pieces, and they were only held together by massive chains that stretched between the now free-floating landmasses.

Elijah found himself staring at one such chain.

Each link was dozens of miles long and almost as wide, making them look more like ferric mountains than anything else. They also glistened with so much ethera that simply looking at them gave him a headache. Whether they were true creations or conjured constructs was a mystery even to Dolo, who took their presence for granted.

It was not his first foray into an excised world, after all.

Most such worlds were incapable of holding themselves together against the force of the abyss. Not only were there beings out there that could crack a planet open like an egg, but much smaller and less powerful creatures often burrowed deep, usually in search of the planet’s core, weakening the structure along the way.

“Do any excised planets survive?” Elijah asked, still staring at the massive chains.

Dolo answered, “There are myths and legends of some that have. But they’re just that – stories. There’s no real evidence. Not for the likes of us, at least. Perhaps you’ll one day reach godhood and find out for yourself!”

Elijah could only nod. Apparently, it was a well-known standard that people couldn’t survive the abyss until they’d reached the deity level. As with planets surviving excisement from the World Tree, there were rumors of some lower-level people having made it, but those myths were entirely unconfirmed and almost universally discounted as fanciful fairy tales.

Still, he couldn’t help but wonder what was out there. Back on Ka’arath, which he’d visited during the Trial of Primacy, he’d seen abyssal monsters the size of buildings. Even then, he’d known they were well beyond his capabilities to combat. But would he still think as much if he were to meet them now? He’d grown so much since then. Almost an entire tier of progression. Surely, he could now stand against such creatures.

Soon enough, Elijah’s reverie was interrupted as the army began to move. Everywhere he looked, he saw evidence of the battles they’d fought. Missing limbs. Scars that no amount of healing could treat. Persistent sickness from wasp or spider venom. The list went on, and the state of the army was much diminished from when Elijah had first seen them.

The problem wasn’t that the Hive’s forces were that much stronger. They weren’t. Instead, their power lay in numbers. There were just so many of them, and they never stopped coming.

According to Dolo, that was their primary tactic. Rarely were forces comprised primarily of vespirans themselves. No – most of their swarms were composed of more bestial creatures and drachnids. And as such, they were almost entirely expendable. The Hive would simply throw one swarm after another at their enemies until their foes either surrendered or were entirely overwhelmed.

The dragons were stronger, but attrition often won out.

And when they were sufficiently weakened, the vespirans would send a force strong enough to break them.

At times, Elijah wondered if their true goal wasn’t simply to kill as many dragons as possible. If they reached the world core, then that was just an added benefit. Such was the depth of their hatred for dragons.

It was mutual.

For his part, Elijah was one of the few members of the army who’d escaped the many battles unscathed. He’d taken plenty of injuries, but nothing he couldn’t take care of via his healing spells. He hadn’t even been forced to use Unchecked Growth, which told him that he was one of, if not the strongest individual member of the lower army. 𝘳ἈℕՕʙËs̈

The High Army, as the force of demi-gods were known, were still much stronger than him. But he was gaining ground with every kill, and he’d already gained two levels, taking him to two-twenty-nine. Soon, he’d gain a new ability, and given how close he was to his next class evolution, he expected it to be quite impactful.

But that was a little ways away. From his experience, the nines – as in two-twenty-nine – were particularly brutal in terms of leveling requirements. It would take thousands of kills to push through that bottleneck. Even Dolo had confirmed that it wasn’t just his imagination, either. And it would only get worse as he grew more powerful.

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The trip across the chain was illuminating.

Never before had the abyss been so close. It reminded him a little of when the barrier had fallen on Ka’arath. However, he’d suspected, even then, that what he’d experienced was a watered-down version of the real thing. Now, it felt as if he had confirmation of those suspicions. Because the corruption, which hovered only a few hundred feet away from the chain, was more potent than anything he’d ever experienced.

It wasn’t just power, either. Nor was it as simple as a perversion of nature. Those factors were present, but it went much deeper. There was hunger. Anger. Frustration. It was as if the abyss was a living thing that wanted so desperately to spread, to consume, to devour everything in its path.

But even that didn’t tell the whole story. Even if he wanted to personify it, the abyss was a force, not an entity. Whatever hints otherwise were just his subconscious attempts to give it context he could understand.

More than anything, though, Elijah found that corruptive force disgusting. It ran counter to everything he held dear. And for once, all three aspects of his being – dragon, man, and Druid – were in full agreement.

It took them three days to reach the halfway point, where they finally camped. No one expected an attack, largely because the abyss was just as harmful to the vespirans as it was to the force of dragons.

“That’s one thing going for them, at least,” Dolo remarked after revealing that bit of information. “They might skirt the line of becoming devourers, but they have never crossed it.”

Elijah had felt something similar. His disdain for the Hive came from the dragon within. His instincts as a Druid didn’t differentiate between them and any other creature.

“What’s the difference?” Elijah asked.

Dolo stared at him over the fire they’d built. Then, he shook his head, saying, “I do not know where you come from that you don’t know what makes for a devourer.”

“Let’s just say I’ve lived an isolated life.”

“That much is obvious,” Dolo stated. “But it is not my place to question a dragon. Even an uninformed one.”

Then, he went on to tell Elijah that devourers sought to consume everything in their path. They had no other real goals. Just to consume and grow. Meanwhile, forces like the Horde sought to do something similar, though their end goal differed. They sought to build. To procreate. To seek out the betterment of their nest.

“It is a fine distinction,” Dolo admitted.

“But an important one,” Elijah added. Reasons mattered, and not just because they drove actions. Rather, what was in someone’s heart was important as well.

Consumption wasn’t the issue. Neither was destruction. The true issue lay in the end goal. For the wasps, they consumed to build. For the devourers, they consumed to consume. If they built, it was so they could consume more. If they grew, it was so they could consume larger and more powerful things. It was their goal, their driving force, and their actions, all rolled into one. To them, it was the only thing that mattered.

In short, it was insanity.

Whatever the case, Dolo – as well as the rest of the dragons – seemed secure in the knowledge that the wasps wouldn’t attack them on the chains. In such a narrow space, their advantage in numbers would mean almost nothing. That, coupled with the fact that there were only two directions of attack, meant that such an assault was doomed to fail.

Still, the dragons set up their defenses the same as any other time they’d made camp.

For Elijah’s part, he felt confined by the small space. He wasn’t truly tired, and he wanted nothing more than to roam. To explore. To see more of what the Broken Crown had to offer.

But he couldn’t.

So, he used the couple of days they spent at the center of the chain to rest as much as possible, eat, and work on his core cultivation. Over the months since he’d established the imagery of the seed, he’d slowly refined it until he felt that it was very nearly perfect. Still, he couldn’t get it to sprout more than a few metaphorical inches.

It was like it lacked the nutrients needed to prompt its growth.

But still, he worked on it the same way he’d prepared for his last bout of core cultivation. Filling his core until it felt like it was going to burst was painful but holding it in that state for long hours was even worse. Even so, from everything he’d read about core cultivation, that was the best method to prepare to step into the next tier.

So, as painful as it was, he kept at it until they moved on. Even when they were traveling, Elijah maintained a steady cycle. He didn’t push things quite as far as he did when he was in the safety of camp, but he continued to make progress all the same.

Like that, they continued on.

And eventually, they left the chain behind. According to Dolo, their path was dictated by the so-called Red Tyrant – a transcendent dragon who facilitated the entire expedition by protecting the shattered planet from the abyss and holding it together with those massive chains. By necessity, the route spiraled and curled into a planet-sized labyrinth. Eventually, they would weave their way to the world core and complete their mission.

For Elijah, it was a very different experience than what he’d found in the other Primal Realms. And it was further proof that they were all different. The Broken Crown was far less structured than something like the Elemental Maelstrom, which had required him to complete four trials before he could even approach the Legacy of Titans which was the goal. In the case of his current Primal Realm, there was no obstacle but the environment itself and the opposing armies meant to hinder his progress.

Often, Elijah wondered if things might be easier if he just went alone.

That lasted right up until he saw the High Army fighting against a massive, mountain-sized abyssal creature. Everything about its form just looked wrong. Elijah saw tentacles, far too many eyes, gaps where there should have been flesh, and a host of screaming faces scattered throughout its body.

Even when looking right at it, Elijah wasn’t certain what he truly beheld.

The only surety he felt was that he didn’t want to fight it, and certainly not alone.

Soon enough, he was forced to battle against a much smaller eldritch monster. It went much as he’d expected, resulting in many casualties among the dragons, but they emerged victorious.

The second fight against those monsters was complicated by an attack from one of the wasp armies. They swept in, taking advantage of the distraction to inflict heavy losses upon the dragons.

One of the fallen was Dolo, who’d been pierced by so many wasp stingers that his body was barely recognizable. The brutality of it cut through Elijah’s efforts at detachment and forced him to see the tragedy for what it was.

In that battle’s wake, Elijah found himself just staring at his guide’s body. Rationally, he knew that Dolo wasn’t real. He was just a construct, piloted by a volunteer soul, that would be reborn the moment the Primal Realm reset. However, knowing that and marrying it to the grief of losing someone who’d quickly become a friend were two very different things.

Elijah ended up having to shed an entire leaf to deal with the trauma, and even when that was done, he knew he wouldn’t soon forget the tetradrak. Or the lessons he’d taught him.

But the diminished army wouldn’t wait for him to grieve. So, like everyone else, he found himself moving ever forward toward their goal.