Chapter 13: DD2 Chapter 007 – Fatigue

The Terythian Inquisition nominally answers to the King or Queen of the day, who sanctions its continued existence and diverts the necessary funds from the Crown’s treasury in order to help fund it. In practice though, the Inquisition was very much its own beast. With the rolling change in leadership that occurred with every royal election, early on in Terythia’s history the decision had been made that, for the country to prosper without the aid of Epherian might, it needed an organisation that could think in the long term as agendas tended to radically shift along with the dynastic name of the current ruler. Over the intervening centuries the Inquisition had steadily accumulated high-level classers of all stripes who took far fewer risks than their adventuring counterparts and tended to live much longer as a result.

Given that the individual members tended to come from noble stock, they were politically savvy enough to ensure that their organisation not only survived, but thrived, with the Inquisition growing in wealth, land and influence to rival the most powerful of Terythian dynasties. Naturally, there had been numerous attempts to curtail the institution’s steadily growing power, but Kings and Queens who turned their eyes towards reining it in tended to have accidents and were soon replaced with far more agreeable monarchs. This trend hadn’t gone unnoticed by the noble houses and had eventually been accepted as part of the cost of a free Terythia.

For all of its faults, the Inquisition had never once tried to use its considerable reach for anything other than preventing civil wars and peasant uprisings, although there were rumours of course, that it was involved in much more. To hear Arilla describe it, and with his draconic perspective to fill in the gaps, it didn’t take much to figure out that the Inquisition likely acted as a covert branch of monster hunters, albeit one more concerned with political stability than coin. A lot of their more esoteric activities could be easily explained if you accepted that they were hunting creatures like him, those few foreign species that attempted to hide and prey on humans within the bounds of Terythian civilisation. At least, that was what Typhoeus believed from all of Arilla’s talk of the Inquisition periodically putting entire towns and cities to the torch just to snuff out a particularly elusive murderer.

The dragon quickly decided that he would be avoiding their request to talk to him like he would an invitation to dinner from a particularly randy goblin with a vocal passion for scales.

“You know that I can’t go back?” Typhoeus stated, feeling oddly sad by the realisation.

“To Rhelea?” Arilla asked after a long pause, her voice sounding almost fragile when she mentioned her home city.

Typhoeus didn’t need to see her face—which was admittedly still obscured by her helm—to know that she felt bad about leaving the slums to not-so-gentle ministrations of Traylan soldiers. Realistically there was nothing that either of them could do about it, not without committing to far greater amounts of bloodshed. He wasn’t even sure the mob he’d left trapped in his spell hadn’t turned on the similarly immobalised guardsmen the moment they were released.

Wisely he decided not to bring this up to Arilla.

“Yes. I’ve been having enough trouble dodging adventurers. If half of what you say about this Inquisition is true, then I’ll return to pick up Tamlin and then we’ll depart Rhelea for good.”

“You’re still serious about that? Teaching him, I mean.”

“Of course, I’ve never had an apprentice before. I can’t be abandoning him already—any more than I already am I suppose,” he commented.

“You couldn’t bring him with us to Traylra,” she said protectively.

“I know that,” he scoffed. “If I had my own way I wouldn’t bring you, and when did you figure out that’s where we are going?”

“It’s literally the only thing of note on this road before the border. Besides, where else is a Sovereign Dragon going to go for answers other than a city famously ruled over by another dragon?”

“I’ll give you that,” he conceded.

“How long do you think it will take us to get there in all this?” she asked, gesturing to the snow still falling from the sky that covered the Old Road like a thick white blanket.

“No more than a dozen hours. I imagine that we’re far enough away now. Stand back a good few feet; I’m going to change here,” Typhoeus said, quickly shrugging out of his clothes and hastily folding them while his teeth chattered. The thought of turning back into his much more weather resistant form was the only thing that kept him going as he quickly stepped away from the road in the nude, yelping with every frigid step, the snow coming up past his knees.

“Wait!” Arilla yelled, her arm outstretched in an apparent panic.

“What? I realise that it’s been some time since you’ve last seen me naked but can we move this along? It's exceptionally cold,” he shivered.

“You can’t change,” she declared firmly, frustrating him with her vagueness.

“What do you mean, I can’t?” he asked quickly, still shivering in the snow.

“Half the classers in Terythia are looking for you, not to mention more than a few from Lintumia and Tolis! There are mage circles keyed to dragon’s blood, roving patrols on bronze rank horses, all waiting for a dragon sighting. You cannot change.”

“I’m not worried about that. I’ve been dealing with adventurers for years.”

“Not like these you haven't. The bounty—my bounty has changed things,” she admitted with a blush. “There’s a steel-ranked team in Rhelea led by an adventurer named Cordamo the Slayer. He claims to have a skill that lets him track any creature he’s encountered within a hundred miles, but he might have been exaggerating or underplaying his strength.”

“Can you get to the point? I’ve never even met this Cordamo, or any steel rank humans for that matter,” he asked, before conjuring a small fire to warm himself as he waited for Arilla to finish.

“You haven’t, but he already paid a bard to write a song about how he kills you. In the song he finds your trail off some dragon’s blood left behind on a fallen knight's sword recovered from the ruins of the Traylan estate,” she explained.

“Well fuck,” he slumped, before he turned around and quickly went to retrieve his clothes. Pretending, as he got dressed, not to notice how Arilla’s eyes lingered on his body. “I don’t suppose next time you could warn me about this sort of thing before I disrobe?”

“I honestly thought you knew, and in my defence you slip out of your clothes exceedingly fast,” she smirked. “At what point are you going to start wearing armour anyway? You’re a level 49 Mage now; you’ll need that and a staff if you want to look the part.”

“I told you I’m not going back to Rhelea, not for long enough for it to matter. Looking the part has fallen considerably on my list of priorities, and depending on what we find out in Traylra it might slip off entirely,” he said wistfully, still not entirely comfortable with the idea of giving up on human civilisation.

Typhoeus looked down at his body, now thankfully clothed again, and marvelled at how well it fit him. He knew about the mistakes he had made in crafting it, but he had since grown attached to his overly large chest and hips. Top heavy or not, it felt right. Sometimes it felt even more right than his real body. He knew that the sensible thing—assuming that he decided to run away from his responsibilities—was to cast aside Typh and try again, using [Alternate Form] to forge himself a new body, one that would stand out less, but the thought of abandoning his favoured form filled him with dread.

“So these steel ranks, how many are there in Cordamo’s team?” he asked.

“Typh, you seriously can’t be considering fighting them,” Arilla responded, a disbelieving look in her hazel eyes.

“I can take them,” he boasted, sounding somewhat less certain than he would have liked. “With an ambush it would be easy.”

“No, it wouldn't. I get that you hate walking and that you may be at the very peak of iron rank, but steel always beats iron and you know it. You were having trouble with mid-iron teams when they were prepared for you. If a steel rank one finds you, you’ll die.”

“Fine. Where does that leave us?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“Walking through this,” she answered, nodding towards the large expanse of virgin snow extending out to the horizon. “Traylra is what? Two hundred miles away? Why do you think I packed so much?”

“I just thought you wanted to flaunt your newfound wealth.”

“Typh…”

“Depths take me, two hundred miles…” he sighed. “I’m going to get blisters.”

“That’s what you’re worried about?”

“I’m mostly worried Erebus will kill us both and gift my corpse to my siblings. But sure, blisters are a close second.”

Arilla laughed at that and it was a beautiful thing. “The shadow dragon, Erebus is its name?”

“His name, yes,” he corrected.

“Sorry, that was rude of me. Do you know him well? What’s he like?”

“He’s a cowardly, aberrant, paranoid little bastard. He’s also towards the end of his sixth tier of power—sorry, silver rank—with all of his class slots filled. So in the event we piss him off for any reason it’s safe to assume he’ll kill us both before we can apologise.”

“Well shit. Do we have any better options than that?”

“No. He might kill us, he might not. Everyone else I can think of who would know what is wrong with the Wards would definitely murder us outright rather than talking to us.”

“I still don’t like this plan,” she confessed. “It feels like your usual blend of reckless insanity.”

“Well, you’re welcome to wait for me back in Rhelea,” he offered, not a particularly big fan of it either.

“What kind of Dragon Guard would I be if I let my patron go and get murdered while I was snuggled up in my armchair two-hundred miles away.”

“A shit one. But in your defence, it is a very nice armchair.”

“I know it is,” she said smugly. Typhoeus could practically hear the grin in her voice.

“We’re going to be walking there forever, aren't we?” he complained.

“With our stats it won't be more than two or three weeks, assuming that the snow doesn’t get any worse,” Arilla said, practically begging the System to throw some disaster in their path.

“You know, If we get stuck in a blizzard now, it’s your fault.”

Despite Arilla’s careless words tempting fate, they did not in fact get stuck in a blizzard, although, given what had befallen them instead, it might have been preferable.

Typhoeus lay flat on his back staring up at the canvas ceiling as he willed himself to move from his comfortable resting place. Snugly sandwiched between two layers of fur-lined leather, the thought of venturing out into the biting winds and thick flurries of snow did not appeal to him in the slightest.

He could feel it as it hammered away at his barrier. The spell still connected to his deep reserves was liberally taking small chunks of mana away from him with every passing second that he remained inside the tent. The beast outside was half mad in its desperate desire to please its dungeon, sent out like so many others to hunt for levels in preparation for the coming storm. He was half-tempted to flex his draconic aura to scare it off, but if Arilla was right about the steel ranks, and the mage patrols, then doing so would be as good as inviting them to come share their fire. A probable death sentence as much as he didn’t like to admit it. He could always try his luck outrunning the adventurers as a dragon. They certainly wouldn’t follow him inside Traylra’s tall walls—not unless the humans had a team of silvers up their sleeves—but it wasn’t worth the risk, not when he could just be patient and walk.

So instead of chasing away the continuous trickle of magical beasts after their blood, Typhoeus begged the System for more than thirty minutes of sleep at a time. That and the mental strength to climb out of his warm bed so that he could kill their latest would-be-predator.

Unsurprisingly, the System did not provide.

“Typh, it’s your turn,” Arilla grumbled from the other side of the tent, her voice as heavy with exhaustion as he knew his own to be.

“Already? I just got the last one,” he groaned into the comfortable leather.

“That was an hour ago, you’re forgetting about the Winter Wraiths I killed.”

“Fine, fine, just a few more minutes,” he moaned, despairing at his unfortunate reality as he clung to the last vestiges of sleep.

“How much mana will a few more minutes cost us?” she asked.

He checked, wincing as he watched his mana trickle down before his very eyes.

Name: Typh

You are reading story Dragon’s Dilemma at novel35.com

Species: Human

Age: 19

HP: 461/480

SP: 17/480

MP: 4428/5300

Strength: 48

Dexterity: 48

Vitality: 48

Intelligence: 160

Willpower: 142

Charisma: 99

Class: Artillery Mage - Level 49*

Artillerist’s Abjurations - Level 49

Artillerist’s Empowerment - Level 49

Artillerist’s Guidance - Level 49

Artillerist’s Reservoir - Level 49

Artillery Mage - You have caused great destruction with the simplest of magical spells. As a result, you are given the option of further strengthening your ability to commit wholesale carnage with your ranged spells.

+2 Vit, +4 Int, +1 Will, +1 Cha, +3 Free Stats at each interval, [Mage] tagged.

*This class is at its level cap, you must rank it up to absorb more experience.

Artillerist’s Abjurations - This skill improves your effective intelligence by this skill’s level for all protective spells and wards that you create. Additionally a portion of the damage normally blocked by effects benefitting from this skill may be stored and released as a distinct attack with a reduced effect equal to 0.1% of the original attack per skill level.

Artillerist’s Empowerment - This skill allows you to expend an equal amount of health and mana in order to add this skill’s level to your intelligence score for determining the potency and finesse of your magical effects. If the spell or mana effect includes a moving payload, upon impact, the target will suffer as if hit by Sovereign's Breath with 1/10th of the original spell’s cost to fuel the secondary skill. Additionally, while your MP is full, your MP regeneration will instead regenerate your HP. The amount added by this skill is capped by your vitality.

Artillerist’s Guidance - This skill provides limited course correction, guidance, and scrying effect for all spells fired up to a range determined by (intelligence + skill level) * 10 feet. Course correction is limited to 0.1 degrees per skill level for every foot travelled.

Artillerist’s Reservoir - This skill allows you to imbue objects and your aura with a mana supply separate and distinct from your own. This mana can be recalled at will and used to power your auras’ active effects or to give imbued objects and auras a velocity and direction powered by its own external mana reservoir. Stored mana exceeding 10 * this skill’s level will dissipate naturally over time.

“A few hundred maybe,” he answered, knowing full well that he couldn’t afford the loss.

“How much have you got left?” she asked again, likely too tired to remember that they had the same conversation half an hour ago when it was her turn, and half an hour before that when it was his.

“I’m down to four-point-four-thousand, although it will drop down to four-point-three in a minute or two.”

“And your external?”

“Long gone.”

“Then get out of bed; you’ve got work to do,” she commanded gruffly before immediately falling back to sleep.

“Fine, but I… Oh forget it, I’m too tired,” he grumbled as he crawled out of his sleeping bag fully clothed. A lone pang of regret formed in his heart when he looked across the canvas-covered floor of their tent to see Arilla sleeping in her own separate one, so close, but so very far away.

He threw on his coat, careful not to trip on Arilla’s many discarded pieces of armour, or to perform any kind of action that would otherwise waste his meagre stamina reserves as he stepped out into the biting wind and thick snow. The heavy snowfall was already up past his waist, having piled up high against the canvas walls of their tent. It was only through a clever bit of warding that it could hold up to all that weight. It was just a shame that with all the snow on the ground, he couldn’t create anything to ward away the beasts, not without bleeding himself dry or wasting a literal fortune in silver long before they even got to Traylra.

They had tried his obscuring wardposts on their first night on the road, only to be rudely awoken when a Dread Sycther had torn its way through their tent. The enchantment held in the circle of stone pillars had failed the moment the first one was buried underneath the snow and the violent calamity that was the Scyther had soon followed. He could make larger posts that would rise high above any potential snowfall, but the amount of mana involved in such an arcane construction would be easily detectable to anyone with the right skills.

An ear-splitting trill filled the air and Typhoeus felt a solid fifty mana evaporate from his reserves as the golden barrier surrounding their tent shook and flickered. His spell automatically drew upon his well to maintain its simple function under the beast’s continuous magical assault.

“I have not slept in a week,” Typhoeus warned the creature, half-hoping to evoke some kind of sympathy from the beast which only clacked its man-sized mandibles in response.

The Giant Frost Worm looked down at him from the other side of the golden dome that protected the tent before it unleashed a tightly focused beam of blindingly white energy. The focused ray of cold aspected mana was emitted from the worm’s maw and quickly impacted his arcane barrier, where it caused thick sheets of frigid ice to form around the trailing point of impact. Typhoeus’s mana reserves dropped noticeably as the jagged shards of mana-infused ice formed and then pushed against his spell.

Typhoeus twisted his will and [Artillerist’s Abjurations] shot out a similar beam back at the giant worm from his glowing barrier. The second ray of white light cut a deep swathe through the thick snow drifts that in turn sprouted their own spikes of jagged ice. He bent the beam with [Artillerist’s Guidance] so that it curved, hitting the creature at a surprising angle which caused it to recoil, if more from shock than pain. The dragon strongly doubted that the much-reduced attack was able to penetrate its thick hide, or particularly bother it by exposing it to sub-freezing temperatures.

Frost worms were one of the more unpleasant creatures to wake up during the long winter months. Twelve-thousand pounds of muscle and hardened bone plating made them a fearsome sight to behold for the average adventurer. The sixty-foot long worm was covered in magic-resistant scales, giving it a pale blue colour which was offset by the thick, hardened plates of shock-white segmented bone along its back. A large pair of pincers covered the sides of an extendable lamprey jaw, and a single malevolent eye. Its ever-present trill directly attacked the minds of anyone nearby, and if that wasn’t enough it could shoot a fairly lethal freeze ray out of its mouth.

Of course Typhoeus was not an average adventurer, and to him, this particular frost worm was just an unwanted obstacle between him and maybe another half hour of uninterrupted sleep.

“If your dungeon is watching, tell it to fuck off and leave us alone. There’s easier prey on these roads than me,” he threatened, well aware that mana-resistant scales were a long way away from mana-proof ones.

Typhoeus raised a slender arm, almost snug in his winter coat, and skimmed just enough mana from the top of his reserves to fill a single mana lance. The bolt of hardened heat and light formed as it always did with a minimal amount of effort. He then sent the familiar spell careening into the worm’s single eye at speeds that even his own couldn’t track. With an intelligence score of 160, and a fourth tier arcana skill backing it up, the golden lance raced through the creature’s eye with little resistance. A fountain of gore ruptured out from its vapourised orbital socket staining the snow as the lance burrowed through to the back of its skull where it dramatically exited, leaving behind a large sizzling tunnel of freshly cauterised flesh. The animal finally stopped its annoying trilling, and fell limply to the ground where it kicked up great flurries of snow while it spasmed in its death.

*Congratulations on defeating a level 29 Adult Frost Worm. Experience is awarded.*

*Your class is at its level cap. Rank up to claim further experience.*

Typhoeus sighed at the waste of experience, mana and effort, but his fatigue betrayed him by turning it into a long yawn, which in turn transitioned into a bout of coughing when a gust of wind blew snow into the back of his throat.

“Depths take me. I hate this weather…” he complained between coughs.

It was early in the morning of the seventh day of their journey, and Typhoeus hadn’t slept consecutively for more than half an hour in that entire time. With their stats the first few days hadn’t been so terrible, but now he was practically dead on his feet. The near constant stream of low-level encounters ensured that neither he nor Arilla were able to get any meaningful rest.

Arilla, with all of her vitality-boosting skills, was actually holding up better than him. Her much larger stamina pool kept her relatively sprightly while he just wanted to lie down and die. If things didn’t get better soon, then he would either have to turn back into a dragon and hope that Cordamo’s bragging was just that, a brag, or resign himself to the indignity of being carried while they marched down the Old Road in knee deep snow.

Typhoeus was about to return to their tent to crawl back into bed when he noticed something that had been stirred up by the Frost Worm’s collapse. Pulling his thick coat even tighter across his chest, he walked through his golden barrier and over to the disturbance.

It quickly became apparent to him that it was a body.

A corpse belonging to a young man lay frozen in the snow where a large bite wound could be seen adorning his chest. It had obviously bled for a long time and stained his trousers red before it iced over with the human subsequently dying from either the blood loss or the cold. The mystery corpse was dressed appropriately for the weather, although his armaments were severely lacking for anyone intending to travel this stretch of Old Road so close to the Dragonspines at this time of year even if the local dungeons weren’t acting out.

Indulging in his curiosity, Typhoeus took the messenger bag off the corpse. The satchel felt uncomfortably resistant to being manipulated as the leather itself was frozen solid, but with a little mana turned into flames that was hardly a serious impediment. Inside the satchel was a frozen apple which he happily devoured, a roll of drachma wrapped in twine, and a single letter, sealed in wax that the dragon didn’t hesitate to rip open.

It was hard to understand, not just because he considered himself to be barely literate, but because he was so tired that the words practically swam across the page. It took him several attempts just to read the message through from start to finish as he kept repeating the same short stretches of text whenever he let his focus slip, but eventually he got it.

To Head Clerk Gautier of Rhelea’s Adventurers Guild,

Don't you dare throw this message in the trash you licentious piece of shit. I know we have hardly seen eye to eye over the years, but this is serious and goes beyond our personal issues.

Cawic is in trouble. You know we've always had enough retired adventurers in our little village to take care of ourselves, but this winter is different, the monsters are acting different.

Since the winter snows first started to fall, we have been beset every night by a swarm of monsters that attack with numbers and a coordination that is decidedly unnatural to see outside of a dungeon. The retired adventurers who usually protect our village from such threats are steadily being worn down and there have already been losses. Soon we won't have enough swords to man the walls, let alone investigate, and given the season we can't even evacuate the children.

I know that after the last message I sent that you probably want nothing to do with me, and the feeling is mutual, but we need your help. Please Gautier, if you ever cared for me at all, send adventurers who can handle mid pewter threats as soon as you can before the winter snows make such a journey impossible.

Kalle.

The body was frozen solid making it near impossible to accurately date it, but the winter snows hadn’t been blowing for all that long, meaning this messenger was sent south at some point in the last month. Cawic, wherever it was, still stood a decent enough chance of surviving. Of course, for how long that would remain to be true, Typhoeus could only guess.

“Well shit,” Typhoeus said, resigning himself to his inevitable future. “Arilla, pack up the tent!” he yelled. “We’re moving!”

The dragon had a village to save, a village with beds, stone walls and maybe even, System willing, a bath.

And Typhoeus loved a good bath.

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