BOOK 9: CHAPTER 43: OSCAR'S PLIGHT

As it turned out, the giants were extremely poor – at least in terms of loot. Aside from a pouch with a couple of silver ethereum, Elijah found nothing of note. Their weapons, which seemed so magical before, were low quality, and without any spells running through them, they lost anything that made them special.

The bodies themselves were likely valuable, though Elijah found the idea of harvesting them a little distasteful. They weren’t human, but they were close enough that he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. That didn’t mean he didn’t examine them, though, and what he found was biologically fascinating.

Both were flesh and blood, but they also incorporated inorganic material into their forms. For the fire giant, that meant rock and boiling blood that very much resembled lava. For the other, the non-biological bits were made of ice or half-frozen water in his veins. How it all fit together, Elijah had no idea. Maybe ethera bound it all into a functioning whole. Or perhaps they were like chitons that had iron-infused teeth. Or glass sponges that built their skeletons out of silica.

Whatever the case, they were interesting, and Elijah wanted nothing more than to study them further. However, he had neither the time nor the equipment to do the job properly. So, after a cursory inspection, he shifted back into the Shape of Venom, adopted Guise of the Unseen, and headed toward the origin of the dense ethera.

He knew that he would find a Primal Realm at the center of it all. The packet Sadie had brought back from the Summit made it clear that there was one nearby, and the effects on the environment as well as the presence of the giants supported that notion. So, he remained on the lookout for anything out of the ordinary; after all, he had no interest in getting dragged against his will into another Primal Realm.

Along the way, Elijah kept one facet of his Mind focused on Soul of the Wild, which turned out to be a valid precaution because there were dozens of clearly aggressive creatures in the area. They all seemed to follow the theme of their environments – an unsurprising but still distressing development.

In the fiery region, the most common oddities were worms the size of boa constrictors that were composed of rocky segments bound together by pure fire. In addition, he saw wolves with blackened and cracked skin that radiated so much heat that they distorted the air around them. But the strangeness wasn’t limited to those couple of beasts. There were dozens of other animals that had adapted well to the environment.

The same was true of the icy area, though with the adaptations flipped to frost and cold.

In a lot of ways, it was quite beautiful. Nature had always adjusted to its environment, and the areas around Primal Realms were no different. It had happened in Hong Kong and on Chimera Island, and though Elijah couldn’t help but see those results as a twisted mockery of nature, the same could not be said about his current location.

They didn’t feel perfectly natural, but there was enough there that Elijah wasn’t entirely turned off from it.

Perhaps he was making progress in his perception of what was and was not natural. Or maybe there was something fundamentally different about the situations. He wasn’t certain which it was – or if it was somewhere in between – but he did find it very interesting.

In the background, he continued to work on his Soul cultivation. Even with only one facet of his mind working on it, he was making great progress. Soon, he felt that he’d be ready for the next step, though that would need to wait until after he found Oscar and figured out why the man had asked for his help.

As it turned out, it wasn’t that much longer before Elijah felt a surge in ethera that pushed the atmospheric density to a much higher level. It felt like he’d stepped over a threshold, and if he hadn’t known better, he would have guessed that he’d set foot inside the Primal Realm itself.

But there were no notifications. No quests. Just more energy in the air. So, Elijah settled on the belief that the Primal Realm was either stronger than the others he’d encountered or it had simply been allowed to spread unchecked. Neither explanation was comforting.

After a few dozen more miles, Elijah caught a whiff of something familiar. In the Shape of Venom, he had all the senses of an apex predator, and as such, he could track reasonably well by scent alone. So, he couldn’t ignore it when he crossed paths with an aromatic trail that he recognized as one of Oscar’s pack.

He followed it for a couple more hours until it joined with a host of other familiar trails. It didn’t take a genius to infer that the pack had reunited and had begun to travel together. That made tracking them that much easier.

He soon found evidence that Oscar’s path wasn’t quite as peaceful as Elijah’s. Not surprising, considering only one of the dogs was equipped with a stealth ability. Oscar had chosen the Tactician archetype, so it wasn’t out of the question that he could help his pack travel unseen, but that was an ability he’d yet to display.

And given the number of bodies along their trail – fire giants, rock worms, and other aggressive creatures – it was a fool’s hope to believe Oscar had any such ability.

The trail of carnage did allow Elijah to speed up, though, and his haste only increased when he found a couple of large pools of blood that smelled human. Soon, Elijah was bounding across the terrain, leaping over lava flows as he endeavored to cover as much ground as possible.

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Only a few miles later, he found what he’d feared.

Oscar and his dogs were engaged in a furious battle against five fire giants. The two in front – a pair of rottweiler mixes named Jackson and Sophie, if Elijah remembered correctly – kept the giants’ attention, while two more hung back, ethera swirling around them.

Though they were all injured, they wasted no time in attacking. As the two defender dogs kept the attention of the giants, Freddy lanced in from the side, biting one of the giants’ hamstrings. At the same time, another dog – a mutt – came out of stealth and barreled into that same giant’s back and destroying its spine.

It flopped to the ground, fire erupting from the wound as Oscar leaped into action, burying his hatchets into the creature’s skull, killing it instantly. He paid the price for the attack, though – and soon found himself tumbling across the terrain after taking a vicious backhand from one of the other giants.

That’s when Elijah acted, leaping upon the highest-level giant’s back and sinking his fangs into its neck. Venom flowed into the creature’s body, but Elijah wasn’t finished. He immediately shifted into Shape of Thorn, then activated Domain of Vines.

To his surprise, the tendrils that erupted from the ground looked like they were made of pure lava, with only bits of rock holding them together. They wrapped around three of the giants, holding them in place.

“Finish one off!” he shouted, already clawing the giant beneath him. It didn’t take the attack lying down, though. Instead, it used its long arms to grab hold of Elijah and rip him free. A second later, he was flying through the air.

Before he hit an escarpment of volcanic rock, Elijah transformed into Shape of the Sky and beat his wings against his own momentum. After halting his flight, he threw himself upward. Once he’d gained some altitude, he turned his ascent into a dive, already transforming once again.

This time, he’d decided to use pure mass.

The Shape of the Sea was not meant to fly. Elijah knew that. Nor was it really meant to thrive outside of the water. But it was also a hundred-plus-ton turtle plummeting from the sky, and Elijah felt fairly certain that weaponizing its mass was a fair use.

Thankfully, the dogs scattered before he landed.

Or to put it more appropriately, crashed into the remaining giants. He felt bones and rock crumble beneath him, but he didn’t escape entirely unscathed. Fortunately, he’d pre-cast Wild Resurgence, so it came in very useful as it mended the injuries sustained from the fall.

The other thing that came in handy was Aegis of the Elements, which protected him from the lava suddenly gushing from the earth and baking the underside of his shell. The Mantle of the Chimera helped as well.

In any case, he quickly shifted into his human form, revealing three dead giants. One had managed to escape his dive-bomb, but it had been knocked free from the point of impact by the shockwave.

But it was far from dead.

The dogs pounced, followed by Oscar, and in the next few moments, they ripped the thing to shreds with a ferocity Elijah had rarely seen from domesticated animals. It was more akin to what he might see from wolves or other wild canines – and only when they were starving.

Elijah brought his scythe to bear on the giants he’d crushed. One of them had managed to survive, though it was grievously wounded. He finished it off by severing its head, then repeated the actions with the other two. By that point, Oscar and the dogs had let their frenzy fade.

A whine got Elijah’s attention, and he turned to see that Oscar had collapsed. And it wasn’t difficult to see why. He bore dozens of wounds across his body, but the worst was a burn that covered his entire left side. His leg and arm were heavily bandaged, but Elijah could feel the unhealed wound pulsing with dense and malevolent ethera.

As he rushed to Oscar’s side, the dogs danced around, clearly agitated. He cast his suite of healing spells, and at first, he thought they would be effective. However, a second later, the ethera in his burns surged forward, warring with the vitality from his spells.

“What happened here? What’s going on?”

“Escobar,” Oscar muttered weakly. The surge of life-giving magic had briefly brought him out of his stupor, but his energy quickly faded. “Help…please…”

Elijah glanced at the dogs, and Digby let out a little whine. Jackson licked his arm, while the others crowded around Oscar, clearly distressed.

The message was clear.

“I can’t help him here,” he said. “We need to find somewhere defensible.”

Unfortunately, the combination of the climbing ethereal density and the general layout of the fiery region made that necessity virtually impossible to satisfy. So, Elijah scooped his friend up, marveling at how frail the man had become, then set off back the way he’d come.

Without stealth to mask his passage, Elijah worried that he would have to fight his way through. However, the dogs once again proved their worth when they fanned out and cleared the area of any threats. Most of the other beasts fled from their presence, and rightly so – they were all ascended, and not by a small amount. Elijah couldn’t quite place their levels, but he suspected they were at least one-fifty.

And together, they made for a formidable fighting force that was well used to working in tandem.

So, together, they slowly retreated across the burned landscape to eventually arrive at the area’s frozen counterpart. Elijah’s decision to go there was twofold. First, he suspected that the fiery ethera in Oscar’s wounds would be countered – at least a little – by its opposite. And second, he’d seen quite a few caves during his last foray through the region, and he hoped to use one of those as a base of operations.

As it turned out, it was much more difficult a task than he’d expected. Most of the caves were occupied, and not by low-level creatures. Of the ones that were not in use, many were far too shallow to offer any sort of protection. So, it took more than five hours before, at last, he found something appropriate.

The former occupant – a sizable polar bear with antlers of ice – was only a hundred yards away from the entrance, having been killed by unknown enemies. Judging by the state of the corpse, it had been dead for more than a week, and when Elijah reached its lair, its smell still hung heavy in the air.

Even though the dogs didn’t like it, Elijah regarded that as a good thing. Hopefully, it would keep any other potential residents away – at least long enough for him to heal Oscar.

During the search, Elijah had kept a steady stream of healing going, but once they’d settled into the cave, he turned it up a notch. The fiery burns still resisted, and not weakly. However, Elijah’s persistence eventually started to pay dividends, and as he saw the wounds’ slow retreat, he let out a sigh of relief.

That would buy him a little time, but he knew there was a long road ahead if he wanted to completely heal his friend. So, once Oscar was no longer in immediate danger of dying, Elijah exchanged his Mantle of the Chimera for the Cloak of the Iron Bear, then settled in to continue his labor.

As he did, the dogs alternated between standing sentry and worriedly hovering around Oscar. Their pitiful whimpers only served to spur Elijah’s efforts along.