Chapter 36: DD2 Chapter 030 – Execution

The Monster was born tall. Hulking in size, it physically loomed over the crowd of humans whose form it mimicked so closely. Light brown skin gave it a look that was not uncommon for a Terythian, and if it wasn’t for its unnatural height, then it would probably have been able to pass for one. Masculine in appearance, it was classically handsome, well-muscled, and had a disarming smile that did much to distract from the unnatural nature of its birth. 

It hung suspended in the air for several long heartbeats, completely nude as it surveyed the awestruck crowd standing before it. Several conveniently placed members on either side of the halted conflict immediately dropped what they were doing and knelt down on the bloody snow in an obvious show of religious deference. The realisation that agents of the church had apparently been stoking the fires of the riots on both sides was as unsurprising to Typh as it was disappointing, but it was also so very human. 

Fools one and all.

While the soldiers and protesters gathered in the square had finally stopped killing one another, the steel ranks on the stage were still giving it their best go. Flashes of light and almost explosive clashes of exotic skill-forged alloys continuously punctuated the otherwise silent square, disrupting the quiet reverie that had taken a hold of the crowd.  

“What in the Gods is that!” Xan yelled, before darting away from an Alchemic Knight’s swung glaive that went on to dismember a foreign adventurer behind her whom Typh didn’t recognise.

“Our deaths, most likely,” the dragon said dispassionately as she watched it fall gracefully through the air and land amidst the densely packed crowd that instinctively parted for it.

Lord Traylan looked at Typh with confusion in his steely-grey eyes, unsure whether to focus on her, the Alchemic Knights who were battling mere feet away, or on the ‘man’ who had just materialised out of thin air, in a process that had sucked all of the ambient mana from the square. 

Typh stood up from her knees, and he made no moves to stop her, besides from letting a wrinkled hand fall to the longsword at his belt. The dragon stepped up on top of the headsman’s block and swiftly climbed over it, ignoring how the scaffolding swayed dramatically back and forth while violent tremors ran through the creaking wood.  

“If this is some kind of trick—”

“You might want to step back,” Typh warned, ignoring the noble’s implied threat as she came to stand at the very edge of the raised platform. 

Her bare toes curled over the lip of the wood, and she savoured the feel of the rough grain against her skin. It was a small detail that she had been unable to appreciate until recently, the scaled pads of her feet in her original form, while vastly more resilient, couldn’t quite convey sensation in the same way that skin could.

Typh took a deep inhalation and tasted the scent of blood in the cold air. Her chest rose as she filled her feeble human lungs with the scent of recent death that had rushed to fill the void left by the now missing mana that the Monster had consumed.

She ran her fingertips along the surface of the thick collar around her neck tracing the delicate runes carved into the metal. It really was an excellent bit of craftsmanship; it interfered with even the simplest uses of her mana, stamina and even health. Her ability to cast spells was practically reduced to nothing by the cumbersome piece of metal. The costs of something as simple as a rudimentary light spell rapidly became unsustainable when the runes etched into its surface increased the mana cost whenever she tapped her [Sovereign’s Arcana] skill by several orders of magnitude. 

Depths take her, it had even made it challenging to stay in her human form. The usually trivially small trickle of mana that kept [Alternate Form] active had skyrocketed until it was barely met by her massive rate of regeneration.

Slowly she released the now warm air held in her lungs and smiled at the sight of it exiting her nose as twin plumes of steam. This was hardly the best escape she could have come up with, certainly not one that she wanted to preserve in the memories she intended to pass on some day. There was nowhere for her to run to, and even if there was, there were more than a dozen humans standing behind her who each stood a fair chance of dragging her back down to the earth. 

Of course she had no intention of running.

The dragon locked eyes with the Monster standing mute and uncertain amidst the crowd it towered a head and a half above. No doubt it was taking its time adjusting to the limits of a corporeal body. For an entity composed almost entirely of mana—far more so than any other creature that existed—it was weaker now in the moments immediately after it had been spawned than it ever would be again. Once it had the chance to feed on all the humans packed in tight around it, then Typh would have no chance.

She wished that she had a better idea of the numbers who had died during the long week and a half of rioting, if only so that she could more accurately gauge how strong it was. The ambient mana in this age was a drop in the ocean compared to what it was before the Great Wards were established. The Monster should be far weaker than she feared it was, even if just one of the steel ranker deaths at the hands of the tainted knights was enough to ensure that it was measurably stronger than her. She tried not to think about how many of the high level knights and adventurers had already fallen in the rapidly unfolding battle behind her. 

“No more stalling,” she whispered.

Typh stopped fighting the collar and let her skill fail, the runes flashed bright blue for almost an entire second as they signalled their own demise.

The metal violently ripped itself from around her neck. The thick band of skill-forged steel exploded outwards into thousands of razor sharp fragments that flew through the air embedding themselves deep into nearby stone, wood and flesh. The rags that she had worn during her last days of captivity followed a mere fraction of a second later as Typh’s form blurred and she once again clothed herself in the golden scales of a true dragon. 

Name: Typh

Species: Sovereign Dragon (True)

Age: 54

HP: 4980/4980

SP: 4980/4980

MP: 5330/5330

Strength: 125

Dexterity: 80

Vitality: 100

Intelligence: 180

Willpower: 145

Charisma: 113

Class: Young Adult Sovereign Dragon - Level 199*

Sovereign's Arcana - Level 194

Sovereign's Aura - Level 195

Sovereign's Body - Level 199

Sovereign's Breath - Level 188

Sovereign's Perception - Level 180 

Alternate Form - Level 50

Class: Sovereign Magus - Level 58

Sovereign Magus’s Abjurations - Level 50

Sovereign Magus’s Empowerment - Level 50

Sovereign Magus’s Guidance - Level 50

Sovereign Magus’s Levy - Level 1

Sovereign Magus’s Reservoir - Level 50

Traits: Runt

Typh stretched out her massive wings and shuddered with delight at the rush of power that came with her original body. While she loved being a human, the sheer differences in physical size and stats made the sudden transition to a dragon’s majestic form a heady, almost euphoric experience. Draconic instincts that had been muted for so long flared to the forefront of her mind, just as so many of her doubts, fears and drives faded to the background. A low rumbling growl of anticipation escaped from her throat causing her stunned audience to flinch back in fear—for there was no missing the killing intent in her voice. 

The visual confirmation that Typh truly was a dragon appeared to be too much for some to handle and numerous people wisely turned and fled from the market square. The majority of the humans remained standing stock-still, apparently in shock from the chaotic changes that were occurring all around them. Every living soul knew that something momentous was occurring, and whether or not they still trusted the steel ranks to protect them, it appeared that they were destined to witness what was about to unfold.  

The pristine scales along her serpentine neck glittered gold and silver under the late-morning sun as she craned her horned head out over the increasingly alarmed crowd. Her long claws bit through the thick wood of the already precipitously leaning scaffolding and the ailing structure promptly buckled beneath her gargantuan weight. Her wings slowed her descent as she glided down to the ground to the sound of crashing wood and cries of panic. 

The moment her claws touched the ground she opened up hard. 

Lances of hardened, superheated light, empowered with [Sovereign Magus’s Empowerment] and aimed by [Sovereign Magus’s Guidance] raced out of her in curving arcs that hammered the Monster in a series of successive blasts. Each spell cost her hundreds of mana and health, dousing the creature in dragonfire, which caused the stone beneath its feet to boil even as concussive blasts scattered bystanders and splattered molten rock throughout the open space. 

She continued to cast offensive spells, as she layered her aura over her scales and unleashed a great gout of [Sovereign’s Breath] directly on the Monster, rushing towards it on four bounding legs. She barely had to move as her huge self had grown to simply occupy most of the space that separated the two of them.

Typh was struck by how loud it was, even with her ears protected by both her anatomy and her high vitality score it was deafening. So many magical attacks had been fired in such a short space of time, and each one had cracked the air with a mighty boom. Every human below pewter was clutching their head with pain as they retreated away from the growing carnage where the Monster stood. She spent over half of her reserves in the opening volley, and her hardened aura consumed much of what remained in order to form an extra set of scales as she closed-in to fang range. 

Typh had not been indiscriminate in her attack, but neither had she been overly concerned about the collateral damage, for in her mind, the humans populating Rhelea’s market square were already dead. When her spells had splashed over the Monster’s unmoving form they had shaken the ground and kicked up a fountain of displaced earth and molten rock which went on to claim the lives of anyone standing too close to the creature.

Despite the burnt and fragmented corpses that surrounded it, the Monster remained frustratingly intact. Its once flawless skin was fire-blackened and cracked, revealing weeping red flesh underneath. Its right arm was little more than a charred stump that had broken off above the elbow, but considering the quantity of mana she had already expended, it was a very poor return for her efforts.

With her more than respectable dexterity score and the short distance that separated them, Typh completed her charge long before the dust had begun to settle or the ground had stopped shaking.

Still, with its one remaining arm, it lazily turned and stopped her in her tracks.

Silently, without even a grimace it bore through the pain of its burns—presuming that the creature was even capable of feeling such a thing—and extended an ashen arm out in her direction. 

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Faster than her eyes could follow and to the sound of its own cracking skin it backhanded her.

The almost human-sized hand hit her below the chin and forced her head up in the air exposing her neck. Typh’s jaws snapped shut, and her fangs that still glowed white hot from the fires that had passed over them rattled inside of her skull. The instant that her head was forcibly turned upwards the monster lunged forwards and grabbed her by the throat.

She was a one-hundred-and-ten foot long dragon from tip to tail, and the monster was no larger than eight feet tall and it had her in the palm of its hand. Even if it had the strength score to do such a thing, it didn’t have nearly enough mass to stop her momentum. At the speed she was going she should have been able to overpower it, and failing that, she should at least have been able to knock it from its feet. A steel rank couldn’t have done it, not without anchoring themselves to the ground with some kind of skill, but that was Monsters for you, they didn’t play by the same rules as everybody else.

Around her throat her aura cracked. Spidering fault-lines spread along the translucent layer of mana scales that were layered atop her real ones made from keratin and bone. Typh fought hard to breathe around the comparatively small hand that appeared to so effortlessly compress her windpipe while the surviving humans in the now much thinner crowd watched on with mute horror at the sight of what many of them still perceived to be an angel pinning a dragon.

Typh was by no means done; a clawed forelimb swept down to cleave through the Monster, but her sword-length claws met unexpected resistance when they barely sank into its superdense flesh. She struggled, craning her curving neck to bring it closer to her talons as she raked them back and forth across it time and again. She continued to cast lances of light that hit at point-blank range showering them both in debris, but when the smoke cleared the damage was minimal. Tainted blood welled up from the wounds she inflicted and trickled down its body, before coming to a stop and receding back inside the Monster. 

Before her eyes, the damage she had inflicted began to heal. Charred flesh became new, the broken stump of its right arm sprouted fresh bone which was soon enveloped in muscle, veins and skin. The deep rents she had carved into its chest fused shut faster than she could make new ones, and the fingers around her throat flexed.

Immediately her defensive aura shattered, and ashen fingers dug into her neck, crumpling the protective scales as it secured its grip and threw her through a building facing the square.

The runic reinforcements carved throughout the foundations designed to help support the building didn’t make it any more comfortable when her massive bulk crushed through the lower floors of the structure which then promptly collapsed on top of her, all six stories of thick warded stone and furniture.

That hurt, although maybe not as much as the failed charge had hurt her pride. As she lay there buried under the weight of the fallen structure there was the temptation to flee—to run away while she still could. But as she shifted the rubble atop her back, and clawed her way back to the surface, for the first time in her life, her species class spoke to her with clarity about something completely unrelated to her hoard.

Kill it.

A significant part of her psyche grinned with vicious anticipation whilst the rest of her screamed in abject horror. She burst from the wreckage of the building, which she idly recognised as housing her former cell, and charged once again towards the Monster. Her claws dug deep into the fractured stone as she bounded towards it, a blur of golden motion and violence. Spells and dragonfire cascaded from her open maw causing the few humans who remained in the square to shield their eyes from the intensity of the light.  

In the short time she had been buried, the Monster had managed to regenerate most of its skin. This time when her volley of spells hit it along with her powerful breath weapon, they crashed into an arcane barrier that had sprung up protectively around the creature. Waves of heat, kinetic force and magical golden flames parted around the translucent black scales that mirrored the ones Typh had previously employed in her own defence. The Monster’s return volley of dark lances composed from the same stagnant mana forced her to prematurely abort her charge and take to the skies to evade its hurtling attacks.

The bolts didn’t yet curve to follow her through the sky, and with her dexterity enhancing her speed Typh was able to avoid almost all of them. The spells that missed her continued to follow predictable parabolic arcs where they went on to impact distant parts of Rhelea with muted booms that rang out across the city. 

As she flew, a human, priest tagged and in full religious regalia, cautiously stepped forwards from the cowering crowd. He risked his life with every shaky step he took towards the Monster, flinching backwards as every inky-black spell was unleashed and every golden lance smashed unerringly into the creature’s arcane barrier. The noise must have been deafening, the thunderous beat of Typh’s wings, the near continuous crash of spell against shield, the still ongoing battle of steel ranks that had only just collapsed its first building facing the square. Yet despite this, the human persisted, getting close enough to the Monster that his skin blistered, and the fabric of his clothes singed around the edges from the heat of Typh’s spells.

“Angel! We have prepared for your blessed arrival!” the priest yelled, his words raised loudly to be heard over the din.

“Arrival...” the Monster replied slowly, its tone lacking inflection as it turned to face the priest, not pausing once in its continued assault against Typh, or even attempting to move from the same spot that it had spawned above.

“Yes of course, I—We—We could not have foreseen that the dragon would get loose or harm you so, but I had no doubt that you, an agent of the gods, would overcome the monster's paltry attacks!” the priest bellowed confidently even as the ground buckled beneath him, and stone dust propelled by the shockwaves assaulted his eyes.

“Monster,” it said again slowly and then with a smile it repeated itself even louder than before. “MONSTER!”

The priest took half a step backwards for the first time looking concerned, but it was not enough. Not nearly enough. From between the cracks in the Monster’s still healing skin, inky black darkness coiled out. 

A tentacled creature studded with thorn-like protrusions and far too many irregularly shaped eyes leapt forwards, impossibly large considering its origin. It crossed the distance between the Monster and the priest in a heartbeat, still growing, the size of a pony when it hit. The horror’s thorned tentacles ripped their way through the priest without even slowing down as it continued to move at speed into the fleeing crowd only for more screams to follow. 

“MOONNSSTTEERRRR!”

The Monster roared at a volume that shattered what little intact glass remained in the square and made every set of ears within half a mile bleed. The impossibly loud shout occurred despite the countless tentacled horrors that rushed out of all the Monster’s orifices like a dark flood. Spilling out in all directions like an inky wave of darkness that quickly sundered human flesh wherever they met.

Those still fighting on the wreckage of the scaffolding did not stay out of it as the carnage commenced. If any Alchemic Knights still survived, they had made themselves scarce and Xan, along with the remaining steel ranks, raced to the centre of the square, their adamantine and steel weapons bared as they began cleaving through the ever growing mass of horrors that separated them from the Monster at the center.

Typh circled the square raining down her destructive spells as she watched. The steel ranks cut a beautiful wedge through the spreading dark that was rapidly expanding from the centre of Rhelea as people finally ran in terror. Each steel rank carved tentacles from oily flesh, and generally had no problem tearing the individual horrors apart.

It was an admirable effort, but Typh knew that it wouldn’t be enough.

Where the creatures fell they dissolved into a black ichor that rushed back to the Monster along the broken ground only to re-enter its body and be reborn anew as they poured out of its inhuman flesh. The steel ranks, already tired from their battle with the Alchemic Knights, were few and the tentacled horrors were so very many. Some fell, swallowed up by the rushing dark, but most, seeing the seemingly unending tide of monstrous foes, balked.

The adventurers had been summoned to Rhelea with the promise of gold and a noble title should they kill one deformed dragon and its pewter master. They had prepared accordingly, and fighting this eldritch monstrosity was certainly not what they had agreed to. The steel rank adventurers, despite the stories, were not heroes, they knew when to cut their losses, and having already lost so many to the Alchemic Knights' unanticipated betrayal, they ran. 

Xan with her few remaining knights and Lord Traylan’s household guard stood, but without the quantity of adventurers on their side, there were simply too many for the exhausted classers to handle. The flow of newly birthed horrors swelled noticeably with every steel-ranked death, and from her vantage point in the sky Typh could see how they stretched out through the streets of Rhelea, consuming the city’s inhabitants one at a time.

The tentacled beasts were just the first to come. They reaped the mana of the System for their master with such near-perfect efficiency that even with all the recent killing, Typh couldn’t taste any energy in the air at all. If they were fighting inside of a dungeon, or amidst a field of carefully laid wards then the humans might have had a chance, but as it was, Typh with her flight was the only one with a realistic shot at killing the Monster before it grew too powerful.

She banked hard to the side. Stagnant streams of arcane energy rushed past her as the shots went wide before circling back to pursue her yet again. The Monster itself became more dangerous with every passing second as it learned how to better utilise the massive well of power at its disposal.

The dragon continued to trade more shots with the Monster, but its shields were too powerful for her spells to crack. The tide of tentacled beasts that poured out of it rushed through the streets of Rhelea essentially unchallenged, each one reaping mana to add to the Monster’s power. Until the flow of horrors was stemmed, it would grow more powerful with every passing second, and as much as she hated to give it more time to learn, she had to prioritise where she could do the most good.

Typh swept low over the city strafing the length of entire streets as she bathed them and the tentacled creatures that filled them in dragonfire. More often than she would like, she had to abandon these attack runs when spellfire from the Monster or confused citizens of Rhelea was fired up at her and she had to dodge as best she could whilst flying so low.

Where the Monster’s pet horrors were closer to the retreating line of humanity she had to be more selective with her attacks, carefully shaping her breath and resorting to manabolts, beams and blades while still ensuring that she cooked them thoroughly to prevent them from retreating back to their master. 

It was endless, she flew ever outwards from the centre of the city using [Sovereign Magus’s Guidance] to keep the pressure up on the increasingly distant Monster as she focused her attention on its spawn. Yet wherever she looked she saw people fleeing in terror only to be consumed by the countless horrors. Typh didn’t know for how long she tried to keep this up, or how many people she saved, or how many she had inadvertently killed. Her spells were hardly gentle to those standing nearby, and she had to be thorough when targeting the tentacled abominations. 

But despite her best efforts it wasn’t working.

When she soared high above the city to assess the state of things it looked grim. A network of inky darkness stretched out from the centre of Rhelea, like a pulsating spider web that crossed bridges and infected all eight sections of the large city. There were holdouts of resistance here and there, places where adventurers had cut their way through, or high-level classers had banded together to defend, but it was clear that victory wasn’t coming. 

Still, she had done some damage, the network of darkness while large was tattered. There were numerous gaps where fleeing civilians ran through, desperate to escape Rhelea as they headed towards any one of the four gates where queues formed when too many people crammed through too tight a space.

Her mana was low, but surely the Monster’s had to be as well. While it didn’t play by the same rules as her, it did have limits, and they must have been taxed by what it was doing. When she cast her draconic eyes back to the square she could only see Xan still fighting—the other steel ranks had either died or fled—the abnormal human having managed to actually close with the creature while tentacled darkness spilled out all around her. 

Typh’s mana was low, but her health had recovered somewhat from its earlier abuses, enough at least that she felt that she could take a risk. The dragon pulled her wings tight against her body and forced herself to dive straight at the wide street of the Old Road that passed through the square where the Monster still stood and fought. Her mana flared as she pulled herself down at speeds she wasn’t sure she could replicate without mana let alone survive should she crash.

Sovereign Dragons had a good instinctual understanding of kinetics, and with her mana waning there was one tactic left to her that her inherited memories told her would suffice.

In her dragon form Typh was extremely heavy, tens of thousands of pounds of scales, muscle and bone. If it wasn’t for the mana that literally ran through her body at all times then she would simply weigh too much to fly. 

At the last moment before she pancaked into the ground she snapped her wings out to the side, and flew parallel to the ancient street. The membranes in her wings screamed, the tendons and muscles following suit, as much propelled with mana as they were by the wind beneath them. The Old Road was wide, but her wingspan was wider still and her wingtips crashed through the fronts of the buildings that lined the road. Sheathed in blades of mana they cut through the fronts of the houses and shops that subsequently collapsed in her wake, her speed barely slowing as she raced along parallel to the ground as close and as fast as she could.

Jaws outstretched, the ridges along her chin practically scraped against the paved stone, sending up a long trail of cascading sparks and warming her thick scales where they brushed the indestructible road. The tentacled horrors that rushed away from the square didn’t have anywhere near enough time to get out of her way as she practically skated over them. They splattered against her open jaws, skewered themselves on her teeth and filled her mouth with their vile corruption while she glided forwards on the spell-propelled momentum of her dive.

She continuously belched fire to sear the taint from her throat, and to cook those who would attempt to return to their master in ichorous form. In only a handful of seconds the Monster, once so small, now loomed in her vision. It turned, a look of surprise on its face and an oversized sword of darkness in its hands, and then she was past it. Her jaw rang with pain, countless teeth had snapped, and an arm attached to a full third of the Monster’s torso was sitting in her mouth. 

Frantically she beat her wings to gain altitude, spitting out the foul flesh as she did so. The beast was by no means dead, and they continued to trade explosive spells while she climbed, needing to gain more height so that she could repeat the attempt.

While it was almost entirely healed by the time she came around for another pass, it was clear to her that Xan had managed to get a few good hits in judging from the sword blows that were still carved into the Monster’s chest. Again she raced along the street, exhaling fire and shedding sparks while she soared mere feet above the ground clearing an ashen path through the swarm of tentacled horrors. Another high-speed collision with the Monster rewarded her with more broken teeth and another chunk of foul flesh, opening up the creature for more strikes from the Inquisitor's steady blade.

Over and over again, she charged the creature that was steadily devouring Rhelea whole. She traded pain and broken teeth for pieces of the beast that grew back a little bit slower after every successful strike. The two of them, dragon and inquisitor, formed an unlikely pairing, one that was remarkably effective at steadily whittling down the Monster slightly faster than it could regenerate. Typh didn’t envy Xan stuck fighting on the ground, a single misstep would take her out of the fight permanently. The high-steel human was fighting a creature far stronger and faster than her, while pressed in on all sides by threats she couldn’t quite ignore. It was only her perfect performance and the Monster’s lack of skill with the sword that kept her alive.

Still, it was actually working. 

Until it wasn’t.

Tyhp shot down from above the cloud cover to set up another arial charge when a line of darkness larger and more powerful than those that had come before shot up to meet her. She banked sharply trying to get out of its path, and the sudden change in tension caused the tendons in her already sore wings to strain against the load, but the line of darkness followed her. The black blade traced her evasions through the sky flawlessly, scorching the air and shattering the clouds up above.

When it hit, pain filled her chest. The stagnant energy cracked her aura in an instant and melted through her scales. Her lungs cooked and remnants of the spell burst out through her back amidst a fountain of vaporised gore. The beam clipped a flapping wing which was suddenly just gone. Her health points hit zero and this time when she fell faster than she had ever before, she corkscrewed wildly without control. 

The ground quickly grew closer.

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