Chapter 31: DD2 Chapter 025 – Lover

Typh categorically did not have a handle on this. 

Academically she knew that when it came down to a duel between a melee classer and a mage, that the caster typically held the advantage for as long as they could maintain a safe distance. The moment that was over, the mage would usually die a fairly abrupt death, typically one with lots of screaming while they were brutally hacked apart by the melee classer’s weapon of choice. This Alchemic Knight seemed to be a fan of a large two-handed axe, and after their first brutal exchange had cost Typh both of her hands, she had quickly reverted to a more traditional form of combat, one where she primarily ran away.

Of course, Typh was not a typical mage—technically speaking, she was a noble classer even if all of her skills were mana related—and so when she ran from the knight, she did so with style. The dragon flew through the cavern at truly ridiculous speeds, especially considering its limited size, while she rained down countless destructive spells on her foe and narrowly dodged the arcs of force that were hurled back at her. She also had to contend with the walls of the chamber themselves, and the dragon was all too aware that a single collision would likely take her out of the fight. If the impact didn’t do it then the glowing blades that liberally filled the air would no doubt be reoriented to bisect her long before she could recover.

These green arcs of force emanated from the knight’s axe-head and raced through the air only a heartbeat slower than she could dodge. Her massive intelligence stat just barely managed to let her recognise the imminent threats and yank her body out of the way with a twist of will so sudden that her hairpin turns threatened to cause her to black-out from the rapid changes in acceleration.

She responded to this aggression with mana-bolts, blades of hardened light, rays of fire and plain old concussive blasts that blended force and heat in every contrasting ratio that she could think of. After seeing the Alchemic Knight emerge time and again, unscathed and unblemished from the kinetic explosions that shook the cavern for minutes at a time, whilst somehow ignoring the searing flames that had literally melted the very ground the armoured figure trod on, Typh had just about given up hope that she could win this fight conventionally. It was only the fact that the knight actually made the effort to dodge her attacks that she felt it was worth continuing her approach, as she played her part in their battle of attrition. 

One she was definitely losing.

Just maintaining the speeds required to stay aloft, and out of harm’s way, was a constant drain on her mana supply, let alone her health, which steadily trickled downwards, and not just from the painfully throbbing stumps where her hands used to be. Her brain felt bruised inside her skull and her joints cried out in agony at every abrupt turn that threatened to tear her apart. At this rate she would run out of health long before she did mana, and that wasn’t even accounting for the intermittent spells she enhanced with [Artillerist’s Empowerment] which drained both of her precious resources, but doused the knight in magically persistent dragonfire.

Typh knew that if they closed again she would probably die. It had taken every ounce of skill that she possessed, and more than a little luck, to have escaped with such relatively minor injuries from when she had first met the knight head-on. Her hardened aura that had been bloated with mana until it took on the form of golden scales had been torn apart like wet paper by the knight’s superior offensive skills. While she could commit even more of her arcane reserves to supplement her defences into something that could withstand more than one attack, it didn’t solve the problem that the combat classer was simply better than her.

Better trained, better stats, better gear.

Typh was finally paying the price for her hubris. She could have augmented her abilities with the magical equipment in her hoard, or even just made an attempt to acquire such things with the ample amounts of time and money that had passed through her fingers. She could have learnt how to fight as a human, rather than just trying to mimic her draconic form whenever it came down to committing physical violence. And she could have ranked up her class a long time ago, and subsequently earned herself the raw mental stats she now needed to squish this pesky human like a bug.

Typh had done none of these things, she had her reasons, ones that even felt right in the moment, but ultimately it came down to her preferring to mope around like a love-struck idiot instead of preparing for the fights she now couldn’t avoid.

Arilla had finally, irrevocably rejected her. Typh could feel the loss of her former lover, the gaping emptiness where the connection between their classes used to be. She was alone again, utterly alone, and while there were countless people who were depending on her to live through this fight, it was a fundamentally different feeling having responsibilities that kept you going, rather than a singular unyielding drive. 

Did she really care if she won? Was her commitment to Tamlin, Halith and the others enough to push herself so hard when the results seemed almost pre-ordained?

Typh looked down at her recently amputated wrists and sighed. The sad sound that followed was hitched and unnatural as the air raced past while she mentally threw herself at a ninety degree angle halfway through the exhalation. More pain and HP loss followed, the jerky zig-zag motion of her unending flight allowed her to narrowly escape another untimely death from the Alchemic Knight who raced across the molten earth beneath her.

The dragon narrowed her eyes at the human whose misfortune it was to try and slay her on today of all days. She looked through the slit in their helmet’s visor and studied those black empty pits with disinterest before she decided then and there that killing them would make her feel better—if only for a little while.

“You shouldn’t have waited here alone,” Typh warned.

“You shouldn’t have come at all, Classer,” the Alchemic Knight responded, breaking their self-imposed silence with the oddest choice of words.

Before the noble dragon could dwell on that, she was forced to weave through the air erratically while light exploded around her. The knight’s arms blurred as they swung their axe in a wild flurry of strikes, each swing emitted a ghostly arc that cut through the air and headed right for her at truly alarming speeds.

The quantity of mana that Typh kept in her clothes dipped again and her ballistic flight abruptly turned at another stomach churning angle, causing a swarm of black spots to momentarily appear in the corners of her vision. She intercepted some of the attacks with her own curving spells that cancelled one another out amidst a blast of heat and golden light, but the majority of the swerving arcs of immaterial sharpness went on to hit the roof of the cavern behind her. 

Where they impacted, they sank deep into the rocky ceiling and carved out large grooves just shy of twenty feet in length that penetrated far deeper into the stone than Typh would’ve liked to acknowledge. By now the roof was scarred in overlapping layers of crisscrossing lines that went surprisingly high into the rock above. They were miles below the surface of Rhelea, lost beneath a warren of ancient tunnels, although Typh had an inkling that they were fairly central. Each missed strike from her spells or the Knight’s axe made the entire chamber tremble as the air filled up with scalding rock dust, falling stone and glassed earth. Lacking anywhere but the cracks in the ceiling above and the small handful of narrow tunnels leading out, the room was starting to get unbearably hot and Typh realised that the time was coming for her to bring things to a close.

The knight must have thought the same thing as they abruptly changed pace, leaping up through the air like Arilla so often did. A torrent of ghostly arcs flew from the edge of their axehead that fluttered out in front of their heroic leap. Again Typh spent mana to dodge, racing out of the path of the skill blades in the air, whilst she fired off more mana intensive spells at the knight, hoping to at least send them back down to the ground where they belonged. The sky, or rather ceiling in this instance, was her domain, and she was ruthless in defending it. 

The dragon splurged her mana and sent a massive barrage of glowing bolts outwards, curving in all directions. Between the Knight’s inability to course-correct without ground to stand on, and [Artillerist’s Guidance] allowing her spells to turn back around should they miss, the successive impacts were deafening.

Of course the knight emerged from the blast largely unscathed and on an unaltered trajectory—although their armour might finally have suffered some minor dents, but Typh didn’t care about that minor victory. 

She had already won. 

Typh dodged the swings, nearly snapping her spine with how suddenly she pulled herself down by the shoulders and to the side with a large pulse of mana through [Artillerist’s Reservoir]. She assigned herself a horizontal velocity and threw herself to the other side of the chamber just in time for the first of the rocks to start falling. For when she unleashed her barrage of manabolts at the Knight, she had sent the bulk of her spellfire up into the cracked ceiling.

The ceiling that had remained mercifully intact, despite the countless ravines carved in it by the Alchemic Knight’s errant strikes, finally began to fall. Each ghostly blade launched from their axe had gone on to penetrate for several meters, each new cut layered on top of those that came before, creating an uneven blanket of fault lines that extended up towards the surface of Rhelea. The only reason it hadn’t collapsed long before now was because Typh had been using [Artillerist’s Reservoir] for something other than personal flight for a change. She had discreetly been holding up the entire roof of the cavern and all the loose rocks above it with her draconic will. 

Until now.

With [Sovereign’s Perception] she navigated her spells through the thin ravines conveniently carved into the cavern's ceiling and used [Artillerist’s Guidance] to just barely make the necessary turns. From her large volley of spells, each individual bolt was guided by her impressive intelligence score and penetrated deeply. Many missed their turns and exploded  prematurely amidst waves of force, but they only cleared the way for more bolts which went on to impact at several discrete points in the stone up above at the precise moment that she gave the rocks holding everything together an entirely new vector and velocity.

One centered right at the mid-air knight who couldn’t effectively dodge.

The chamber rumbled once more, and all hell broke loose. The pieces of stone that she had so carefully infused her mana into shot out at blinding speeds towards the knight. The human predictably twisted out of the way of some, only to be overwhelmed by the sheer quantity and size of the massive chunks of stone that then hammered them into the ground for a fraction of a second before the entire ceiling then collapsed on top of them. Literal miles of rock and ruin crashed down atop the knight as, steel-rank strength or not, the weight of Creation above crushed them to a fine paste.

“Amateur,” Typh said disdainfully, thinking of half a dozen iron-rank teams who had put up more of a fight than them.

Levels, gear and expertise were all well and good, but humans were dangerous because of their imagination, and this Alchemic Knight’s was severely lacking.

*Congratulations on defeating a level 206 Queen’s Alchemical Knight, experience is awarded.*

*Congratulations on defeating a tainted creature. For your service to the System, additional experience is awarded.*

*Congratulations, Sovereign Magus is now level 51.*

*Congratulations, Sovereign Magus is now level 52.*

...

*Congratulations, Sovereign Magus is now level 57.*

*Congratulations, Sovereign Magus is now level 58.*

*Congratulations, Artillerist’s Abjurations has reached level 50. You must rank up this skill to progress it further.*

*Congratulations, Artillerist’s Empowerment has reached level 50. You must rank up this skill to progress it further.*

*Congratulations, Artillerist’s Guidance has reached level 50. You must rank up this skill to progress it further.*

*Congratulations, Artillerist’s Reservoir has reached level 50. You must rank up this skill to progress it further.*

Typh had only been half-heartedly following her System prompts when she read that one line and felt her blood run cold. 

Tainted creature...

She turned back around to face the giant pile of broken rocks that now obscured the better half of the chamber. Stone dust filled the air and threatened to choke her frail human lungs as she set herself down on the still soft ground, unwilling to risk the mana on anything frivolous while she readied herself to fight yet again.

Time passed and nothing happened. She eventually ended up cursing her own paranoia for the System had been unambiguously clear that she had killed it.

Typh felt her heart race as it threatened to rip itself out of her chest. Her body flexed instinctively as if to attack with the claws and fangs she no longer possessed. 

“Oh this is bad, oh so very bad,” the dragon whispered to herself while she tried to get her rising panic under control.

Tainted creatures meant exactly one thing. 

Monsters. 

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She wasn’t ready to fight one, not even close, and for them to have extended their influence so far so quickly, she didn’t understand how it was possible. There were no Monsters currently on Astresia, were there? And even if there were, she should have decades before they expanded far enough to begin corrupting the environment with their very presence.

“None of this makes any sense.” 

Her words were barely audible over the crunch of still shifting stone all around her. Typh felt herself begin to spiral into despair as she held her head between her knees and clenched her eyes firmly shut. It wouldn’t save her, only one thing would.

Knowledge.

She needed to find out exactly what she had stumbled onto. Why an Alchemic Knight had gotten mixed up in all this, not to mention how the humans managed to block the tracking spell that she had laid into the wooden coaster she had given Tamlin; both questions needed to be answered, and quickly. She cursed Erebus for not handing over the information she had requested while she tried to think through the implications.

Her tracking spell wasn’t a particularly hard bit of magic to overcome, but to do so relied on an understanding of certain arcane principles that humans simply lacked in this particular age, or at least, were supposed to. That left her with two unsettling possibilities; either the humans were far more advanced than she had given them credit for, or perhaps more concerningly, something with access to Monster flesh and runic knowledge that was supposed to be possessed only by the council races was giving the humans in these tunnels help.

For a moment she allowed her mind to drift to some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories that Erebus was so fond of; elves in disguise who puppeteered the greatest of human follies from the shadows, but even they would stop far short of messing with the tainted.

“Arilla…”

Typh had sent her off to fight by herself, thinking the steel rank was the greatest threat in these tunnels. The thought that the warrior could be faced with tainted humans of her own without Typh’s aid immediately ran through her mind as she sprinted towards the tunnel her former lover had taken. The dragon pushed mana through the stone and willed a boulder that had fallen to block the entrance to move to the side, but as soon as she did, even more began to fall. 

The room trembled and stone audibly groaned all around her, and the dragon realised just how unstable she had made the entire underground complex.

She would have to go around.

***

The dragon raced through the tunnels on wings of incandescent light whilst the walls shook and stone continued to fall from the ceiling. Any thoughts of conserving her mana had long since been abandoned in favour of urgency as she hurried forwards towards her destination. 

Towards Arilla. 

Her imagination ran wild with fevered fears of what-ifs and might-bes while she inched painfully closer to where she believed the warrior to be. Her circuitous route through the failing tunnel systems grew ever longer as more and more passageways through the earth collapsed from the aftershocks of Typh’s battle with the tainted Alchemic Knight. 

She had little time to marvel at the wonders on display. The dragon blazed past forgotten shrines and ruined architecture perfectly preserved through the ages only to be destroyed in her frenzied wake. Her mana was hot and wild, her aura unconstrained and free, as she jetted through occupied lairs and bestial haunts, scorching the earth behind her in her hurry. The few creatures too slow to get out of her way could only cower or begin to give chase as the noble dragon flew past with images of Arilla trapped on all sides by collapsing ceilings and hemmed in by tainted knights, urging her on. 

It was all too much to bear. 

After minutes of sustained flight Typh finally emerged into another large cavern, dusty and exhausted. This chamber was wider than the one before, with a large runic array that covered every available surface, filled with pungent alchemies that made her nose feel unpleasantly fizzy. Five large cages crammed full of dishevelled children lined the room, all of the doors were open and orphans were slowly spilling out, where they milled around the hall staying well clear of a single corpse by one of the cages. 

Thankfully not Arilla’s. 

Upon further investigation it was not a pleasant sight, but corpses rarely were, especially those ripped open by human hands. Fortunately its viscera smelt clean of corruption, so she was able to dismiss it without any further thought.

The whole area reeked of blood, fear and, strangely enough, hope. Typh was immediately tempted to go find Arilla; the strong scent of her blood was unfortunately easy for her to detect as it vanished down a long hall with Tamlin, and several dead things in tow. But first she knew she had to stay. Arilla was alive at least for the moment and it was imperative that she study the runic array in front of her. 

It had blocked her, and with its swirling runes it was decidedly not created in the humans’ usual utilitarian style. Children wailed and immediately looked to her for guidance from the moment she had appeared with her wings of golden light that she had since dismissed. Typh cursed Arilla for leaving so many children unattended even if they were relatively safe. The tremors that intermittently shook the cavern caused screams of fear, and more than a few of the children were investigating the alchemical mixture crammed into the etched runes, or worse the passageways leading away from the relative safety of the hall.

“Everyone, stay still and to the side. Once I’ve studied this array, I’ll take you to safety,” Typh called out, her mana amplifying the volume of her voice. While some orphans listened and promptly moved to the side, the vast majority of children ignored her in favour of gathering around her and tearfully demanding to be taken back to the surface.

Typh was at a loss. The urgency of her need to understand what it was she had interrupted conflicted with her preference to keep the children safe. Ultimately a compromise was reached, a series of large walls of golden light, slowly moved through the cavern and forced the children into a corner where they would be out of the way while Typh worked. The dragon got down on her hands and knees and she scurried about inspecting the choice of runes and reagents that were involved in the construction of the magical script.

It was ultimately a very powerful lens, a focusing array designed to funnel and concentrate mana into a very specific point. Concerningly, this array was not designed to work alone or even to focus the mana here, but somewhere much closer to the surface. By her count there would have to be another, much larger array for the spell to work as intended, but where would there even be space for such a thing?

Was there another cave somewhere filled with more cages?

Typh quickly dismissed the thought. She strongly suspected that the secondary runic circle would be on the surface, but that was only a well educated guess. Thinking on it further, she decided that it shouldn’t be too hard to find. The ritual would have to be very large, much larger than this to contain the flow of mana without a rupture. But where could it be, and how could they possibly afford to create such a thing without anyone noticing?

She cast her eyes over the runes in the room, ignoring the tiny fists that fought against her arcane barrier while [Sovereign’s Perception] picked apart the few identifiable scents in alchemical mixture daubed liberally into the runes. Her nose wrinkled with the conflicting urge to salivate and vomit. The vital organs of more than a dozen different species native to the Dragonspines, sapient one and all, made up the majority of the substance, but more relevant than that, she knew it was expensive. It must have cost a small fortune to create this array, and for the matching one to be even vaguely economical it would have to be etched in something far cheaper and thereby larger.

Like whatever they use to carve runic wards into Rhelea’s walls.

“Oh…”

Her head cocked to the side and she looked up at the ceiling, wondering if the solution could be so simple. Humans warded their cities’ fortifications to hold in the mana for easier passive levelling; it would require frighteningly little modification to enhance that effect by making it compatible with the working in this chamber. What little additional rune-scribing would need to be done, could so very easily be slipped in amongst all that construction that was occurring around Rhelea’s inner walls.

“They’re trying to spawn a Monster,” she said to herself, knowing it to be true. 

Looking around at the sea of childrens faces behind her glowing barrier and smelling the pungent fumes of human alchemy, she was unsure if it was enough to do the trick. She didn’t really know how bad of a state the Great Wards were in, but basing it off what she had seen in the Traylan vault, the mana poised to be released in this ritual circle couldn’t be too far off. 

A single shudder of fear ran through her when she realised that she was effectively kneeling over an arcane bomb that would handily kill everyone in Rhelea.

Thank the System that Arilla had stopped the ritual before it could start. Still it was frightening how close it had all come, even now they weren’t out of the woods. So long as the runic array remained intact Rhelea was in grave danger, even without the orphans to help fuel it, enough mages working together could still activate the magic or failing that, just one person could do it provided that there was sufficient bloodshed on the surface. 

The whole thing needed to be destroyed.

It was entirely possible that Rhelea couldn’t be saved, that the rot was too set in. Any society willing to murder this many of their own children for whatever they had been individually promised wasn’t really worth saving in her opinion, but to stand back and let the humans destroy themselves would doom the rest of Creation as well. 

That and Arilla was probably off chasing whoever was responsible right now; it wouldn’t do to let her efforts be in vain. Typh allowed herself to chuckle at that, finding the levity much needed as she rose to her feet and took a break from her studies to walk over to the centre of the room where the altar was located.

“Hold! We have you outnumbered and outranked. Release the children!” the voice was clear and commanding, spoken with an almost regal tone that left little room for misunderstanding. The unmistakable power of a high-level skill was present in each syllable of every word, and it alone was enough to send a pit of dread hurtling through Typh’s stomach.

She turned around, unsure how precisely she had been taken by surprise, but then upon seeing a squad of six steel ranked knights and a seventh even higher levelled noble all standing by at the ready with their weapons levelled at her, she realised that it didn’t really matter. 

These humans’ armour looked noticeably different to that of the alchemic knight she had recently slain. Their full-plate was noticeably thinner, enameled in red on black, and displayed an unfamiliar symbol of a stylised ‘I’ on their chests, rather than that of the Alchemists Guild’s flask that the tainted creature had borne. They smelled clean—as much as humans ever did—and she highly doubted now she was looking for it that she could miss the pungent stench of corruption.

She was outnumbered, outlevelled, and her trick with the collapsing ceilings was unlikely to work twice. Running was still an option, but she was a Sovereign. She had a duty, and if she wanted to carve out the rot that infested Rhelea, she was going to need help, higher levelled help.

Taking a risk, Typh dismissed her barrier spell and released the children to get lost at their own leisure. The dragon raised her stumps high in the air and with a smile she said the two most difficult words of her life.

“I surrender.”

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