Chapter 40: DD2 Chapter 034 – Pinned

Typh awoke to darkness, silence, and a crushing weight pressing down upon her. The realisation that she couldn’t see with either her mundane or her skill-enhanced sight caused a spark of panic to ignite in her chest. She tried to move, to pull herself out of the all-encompassing black she found herself in, only for her limbs to respond with a near-total lack of sensation. A pervasive numbness had enveloped her body, and the material constricting her was so very cold. Even though she couldn’t feel them, she flexed her wings and thrashed her tail to try and break loose, and when that didn’t work she scratched her claws against the indistinct walls of her prison, and roared her defiance. 

Her nails promptly broke against stone, and her roar immediately devolved into a series of choked gasps when rock dust filled her lungs. The pain that followed was largely muted by the cold, and while she would never call it pleasant, it was extremely reassuring. It meant she wasn’t dead yet, and that was a marked improvement on her initial fears. 

Typh allowed herself one deep, shuddering sob as she remembered the agony of the spell that had ripped its way through her chest and the certainty of her own imminent death. The memory of her scales tearing and her lungs cooking was one she could do without, but it was a part of her now, and like so many other past traumas, she was stuck with it. When her breathing finally calmed down, and she was feeling a little more secure, she stuffed the unpleasant thoughts and feelings deep down where they couldn’t hurt her anymore.

“I am powerful. I am a dragon. I am alive.”

Mumbling her mantra through dry, cracked lips, Typh carefully traced the limits of her prison with fingertips that trailed blood in their wake. She realised then that she was effectively trapped in an ill-shaped coffin made from the sharp stonework of the building she had fallen through. Lying on her back and unable to move, that original spark of terror quickly threatened to return and spiral out of control.

“I’m still alive.” 

It was an obvious statement, but she felt better for saying it. Her mounting fear stalled out by the simple fact that she had faced a Monster and lived. She certainly hadn’t won, but slaying it before it could grow into its power had always been a long shot. Surviving the attempt, however, was a victory in and of itself.

The severity of her injuries had forced her to switch bodies. Whether that was down to her subconscious instinct to survive causing her to abandon the failing form of a dragon, or if it was just the very nature of her recently ranked up [Alternate Form], she didn’t know, but the result was still the same. Typh was trapped, buried beneath tons of worked stone that had collapsed all around her when her draconic bulk fell from the sky. If she was any less magnificent, then her situation would be little more than a protracted death sentence, carried out by either her thirst, the cold, or the crush injuries distributed throughout her body. But Typh was powerful, and something as trifling as a multi-story building pressing down on her chest wasn’t going to stop her for long.

The air she breathed was thin, stale, and filled with so much dust it had already made her choke. Typh briefly consulted her status screen and frowned when she saw that her health pool, while not low by any means, was far from full, and not getting any better with time.

With a point of mana spun into a simple spell, her world was illuminated in bright golden hues that revealed a large piece of rune-etched stone less than an inch away from her face. There was no space to turn her head, and the mana saturating the material made it impossible for her to see through it. Though what little she could see was enough to show her that while her human body was damaged, it was for the most part intact. She did need to escape from her prison before her injuries worsened, or what little air she had left was all used up, but she had a few moments of relative safety to pause and take stock of her situation.

When she tried to look beneath the lies and see her true status, that mote of stalled panic burst into a wildfire. She could feel her dragon’s body coiled in on itself where it dwelled in that ethereal space created by her skills. Her other half slumbered, or perhaps it was more accurate to say that it hovered a mere hair's breadth away from true death. Her ability to retreat into her frail human form was the only thing that had saved her, the injuries she saw—the mutilation suffered—made her siblings' worst abuses seem like a kindness by comparison.

Any remaining thoughts of triumph at facing a Monster and living died on the vine while she surveyed the damage done to her dragon body. Broken bones, torn scales, a severed wing, and a chest cavity that really wasn’t supposed to give such good views of her charred insides. Typh looked away with a pained grimace.

For all intents and purposes, she had died.

Had she not chosen to further separate her two selves that were split by [Alternate Form], then the damage from the Monster’s spell would have carried over when she swapped bodies and slain her outright. Fortunately, she had, and while reverting back to a dragon would kill her immediately, right now her human self was fine. She still had access to her magic, and she knew from past experiences that her other body would slowly heal while it remained in its quasi-ethereal state. Until then, she just had to make do with human limitations. Typh tried not to focus on the fearful possibility that she would be trapped in scaleless skin forever, but as soon as the thought crossed her mind, she felt her species class—grievously injured as it was—snort with derision. She would recover, just not today, probably not even this month, which left her with the increasingly urgent problem of what to do about the building currently on top of her.

The dragon pulled on the ancient knowledge she was born with, and dived deep into her inherited memories where she searched for what she needed. Like always it was a dizzying swim through the deepest depths of her mind, and when she returned, she did so with a confident smile on her face. Unlike her stunted true body, her ancestral knowledge had yet to fail her when she needed it. 

With a liberal torrent of mana worked into a new, yet familiar shape, her stone coffin melted around her. The liquid rock drained into the cracks beneath where she lay, and her prison widened until she had enough space to sit up comfortably. The stonework above her trembled and shifted with the sudden change, prompting the fear that the mass of stone above her would plummet down and crush her like she had once pulped that tainted knight. 

Everything became too real, and she was forced to stop for a moment to hyperventilate in the dusty air.

A near death experience will do that to you. Typh felt her frayed nerves cry out for a reprieve, for her to lie back down and try to extricate herself later when her wounds were less fresh. But that was just fear talking. She had already lost time, System knows how much, and without her in the sky, things in Rhelea could have only gotten worse. There would be time for introspection later, but right now she had work to do.

The Monster in the city above wouldn’t stop until everyone in it was dead, and that included her, whether she remained buried alive or not. Arilla was still out there somewhere, and depending on how much time had passed, the city might have already been sealed with a camp forming to the west. Typh needed to go and take her place, but System help her, she still wanted that Monster dead. Her class still egged her on, even though they both knew that to face it now was death. She wondered if this was what humans felt like all the time without a species class to moderate their urges. Every draconic instinct she had left screamed at her to run, yet in her heart, the System’s magic pushed her back into a battle she had already lost.

Fortunately, her time spent playing at being human had given her a lot of practice when it came to resisting her baser urges.

Standing up, Typh exerted her will on Creation, fuelling the changes she demanded with her ample mana reserves. The stone above her melted like water, and golden supports of solid light held the remaining rubble in place as she ascended swiftly through the collapsed building on a circular platform made of magic.

She emerged into the open air, and her floating disc continued to rise for a dozen or so feet, while the mountain of fragmented stonework, now denied her steadying presence, buckled in on itself. The winter winds whipped at her bare form while the sun hung low in the sky. The moon was already creeping into visibility with all its green menace, and Typh couldn’t help but grimace in disgust. She looked around at the burning city she had come to feel almost at home in, while tentacled monstrosities raced through the streets unimpeded. The only obstacles that slowed the horrors down were the masses of dead that lay sprawled out wherever there was paved stone. 

The dragon let out a low and tired sigh.

“I’m going to need to find some clothes…”

***

A looted corpse or two later and Typh finally felt ready. She’d been forced to kill the tentacled horrors whenever they crossed her path, and while she was worried about letting them get close to her now that she didn’t have her draconic form to fall back on, they still remained well within her capability to destroy. She meandered through the streets of Rhelea, dawdling as she killed the Monster’s spawn and scoured their foul stain from Creation with intense blasts of heat and light. Her steadily improving mood was only soured by the large bloodstains that ruined her otherwise outstanding dress. She was tempted to do something about that, but as much as she wanted to take advantage of the chaos to add more garments to her hoard, she couldn’t quite justify spending the time trying on clothes while the city died all around her.

Having just finished off a score of marauding beasts trying to gain entry to a barricaded house, the dragon paused. The faintest hint of a disconcerting melody caught her ears and jolted her from her thoughts. Typh turned her back on the fearful faces that peered out from behind the shuttered windows and followed the song. It sounded almost like it belonged to one of the Monster’s spawn, and yet the discordant noise clearly came from a violin. It was a quandary that she was far more inclined to investigate than killing her way through the endless horrors while she worked up the courage to do what came next.

The melody came from nearby, although it was hard to tell exactly how close it was given the notes' tendency to fade in and out of Creation, reverberating off of walls that did not exist. It was just like the creatures’ cries, and for that reason she couldn’t ignore the possibility that she was walking into a trap. Then again, the Monster should be far too young for that type of cunning. Typh hustled towards the source of the music, running down an abandoned street where she passed through a small stone archway and into a courtyard unlike any other.

Horrors lined every surface, filled every space. They were packed so tightly together that it was like standing before a sea of ink—if ink had eyes and teeth. Each and every one of the aberrant creatures was motionless, waiting transfixed as their mismatched gazes focused on a single point at the far side of the courtyard where Eliza, Typh’s one time mortal foe and drinking buddy, played the violin with her back against the wall.

For the first time in her life—at least when it didn’t come down to matters of the heart—Typh didn’t have a clue what was going on. While the dragon stood there as enthralled as the horrors that occupied the small square, in dribs and drabs, more creatures came to join the silent audience. Each ravenous beast fell completely silent the moment they were in range of the bard’s song. There must have been hundreds of them and Typh was actually a little worried there might be too many creatures for her to handle when things inevitably turned to violence.

Eliza eventually missed a note, the bow of her violin screeched when it should have sang and every horror in the courtyard lurched forwards by a number of inches until the bard recovered a fraction of a second later and the beasts were still again. A large selfish part of Typh almost wanted to leave Eliza to die, to pay her back for writing that stupid song, but the frustrating woman had just proven her worth and then some. The scene in the courtyard flew in the face of everything the dragon thought she knew about Monsters and their spawn, but she was not so stuck in her ways to ignore the compelling evidence in front of her.

Eliza could control the horrors—more or less.

Before the bard could falter again, Typh raised a small, brown hand, and searing light sprung forth. Riotous bolts of mana cascaded out from her palm, shooting as fast as she could propel them into the motionless hoard of horrors. Each chunk of hardened and heated mana tore large holes out of the tentacled monsters which then turned their abhorrent attention to her. The music kept playing, but the horrors were no longer still, and when they sprang towards Typh, she darted back out into the road. 

She was all too aware of the vulnerabilities in her human form, and she knew that wouldn’t be gifted a third chance at life. Typh’s armour of golden scales snapped into existence the moment she began to flee along the paved streets. The dragon quickly decided to stay constrained on the ground for fear of attracting the true Monster's attention while she was busy fighting its spawn.

The horde of tentacled horrors charged at her, racing across walls of nearby buildings as fast as they did the ground. Typh pulled herself backwards with her spells, her feet skating inches above the corpses that lined the street while she rained down fire and destruction upon them. Arcs of light, blades of force, every trick in her arsenal was deployed as waves of monstrosities raced at her, and she slagged the very street in her enthusiasm to destroy them.

They leapt at her, and she batted them from the sky. Fanged tentacles lashed towards her limbs, and she severed them at the root with blades of fire. When they tried to overwhelm her with sheer numbers, she responded in turn with a quantity of manabolts that shook the ground and destroyed nearby buildings with just the shockwaves from the blasts. She was perhaps being too liberal with her mana usage, but after cheating death once today she needed the catharsis, and so she indulged. Typh chained her skills together to bathe the onrushing monsters in a blanket of golden dragonfire. 

Screeching their discordant cries to the sound of Eliza’s music, the tentacled creatures were consumed by the flames even after they collapsed back into their liquid state which she then scoured from the ground.

“That was surprisingly easy,” Typh muttered, brushing down her dress, before snapping back to attention when Eliza hurried out of the courtyard. 

The bard looked terrible. Bruised, battered and bloody, yet for all of her apparent exhaustion, the woman seemed indescribably happy as she clutched her violin with fingers in worse shape than Typh’s. Eliza kept approaching Typh, and the dragon was honestly perplexed by the bard's actions.

“I don’t know why you’re getting so close, didn’t you hear? I’m a dragon, I eat pe—”

The woman hugged her. Thin arms wrapped tight around the dragon’s body and held her close. Eliza smelled awful, but Typh couldn’t bring herself to break the hug, not least because of how badly she wanted to be held. For a long series of consecutive moments, everything felt just a little bit more manageable; her recent brush with death, the long list of dangerous things she had yet to do, everything. The dragon closed her eyes and squeezed the foul smelling bard back, enjoying the feel of another woman pressed firmly against her chest.

Typh was eventually released by the jubilant bard who then staggered without her support to stay upright. Blushing furiously, the dragon cleared her throat and took a precautionary step backwards for safety.

“That was nice, but before you thank me anymore for saving your life when I had every reason not to, you should know that I’ve got one extremely dangerous stop to make before I leave Rhelea… and I could use your help,” Typh said.

Eliza didn’t say a word, instead she made some obscure gestures around her throat, the precise meaning of which escaped the dragon’s understanding.

She conveyed this, and the bard looked thoughtful for almost a full minute, before suddenly perking up considerably. She then began to tap her foot in a simple repetitive beat, and all of a sudden meaning flowed through the notes of the short rhythm.

“Okay. I’m in.”

Typh looked at Eliza questioningly while she tried to parse what exactly had just happened, but she supposed that while it was another mystery, it was hardly an urgent one that needed solving.

“Okay, you’re going to want to hang on tight. I’m fairly strong, but I will drop you if you freak out and fight me,” the dragon warned, extending an arm out to the bard which was promptly accepted when the taller woman stepped in for a close embrace.

Eliza’s foot started to tap again, and for the second time understanding passed to Typh.

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“So what now? I assume you wanted more than to just cop a fee—”

With a full throated laugh from Typh, the bard’s rhythmic message was interrupted when both of their feet left the ground. The pair raced up into the sky and the wind whipped past them as they suddenly ascended into the heavens, and despite Typh’s stark warning, Eliza did indeed freak out at their near vertical rise.

***

Navigating their way back to the market square was easy, but doing so without attracting the Monster’s attention was less difficult than it was mana intensive. From behind an illusory veil atop a nearby roof, Typh and Eliza looked down on the battleground where the dragon’s execution had once been scheduled to take place. Just a single glance was enough to make Typh immensely grateful that she had chosen to predominantly fight the Monster at range.

The tall buildings that faced the square all bore heavy battle scars from the fighting. More than a few of the grand structures that used to house Rhelea’s elite had collapsed entirely, but the devastation that surrounded the battleground was nothing compared to the carnage that was ongoing inside it.

The large flagstones that used to make up the square's paved floor were unrecognisable beneath thick pulsating veins of inky blackness that slithered endlessly towards the Monster. The dark ichor navigated around deep craters and gouges in the earth in its quest to return to its creator. The aberrant creature in question was constantly backing away from the lone Inquisitor’s expert strikes. It returned her blows with immensely powerful, albeit clumsy slashes, that carved new ravines into the ground, or great notches out of nearby buildings. Xan’s entire form flowed, each attack blending into the next as without pause or reprieve. She continued to follow the Monster around in a never-ending dance of constant ultra-violence. 

In the short time that they had been watching, the Inquisitor had inflicted over a dozen lethal or otherwise debilitating strikes, yet each time, within the span of a few heartbeats the Monster completely recovered. Missing limbs, severed arteries, gruesome hacks, stabs and slashes, none of it seemed to faze the creature that seemed to view horrendous wounds as nothing more than a momentary set-back in its persistent quest to kill the woman before it.

The Monster had changed since Typh had seen it last, and while it was still nowhere near Xan’s match when it came to swordplay, rather than trying to block the Inquisitor’s longsword with its hands, it now made increasingly competent parries and ripostes with its own weapon of undulating black energy. Its conjured blade looked like a two-handed sword made from pure darkness, but Typh instantly recognised it as the same dark energy that had very nearly killed her. Whenever the two weapons met, energy scattered and arcs of lightning shot out to blacken the ground, running through both combatants, one of whom grit her teeth through the pain, while the other ignored it entirely.

From the constant sounds of battle that had echoed throughout Rhelea, the dragon had expected to see a handful of steel ranks still fighting the Monster, but there were none left now besides the Inquisitor. Whether they had already died, or just fled Rhelea, Typh didn’t know, but it was clear to her that Xan was losing. The Inquisitor’s formerly ornate runeplate was in tattered pieces, failing runes flickered intermittently as the mana running through her broken armour struggled to hold itself together. Rivulets of Xan’s crimson blood ran through the cracks in the metal alloy until it met the oozing black web on the ground and was promptly consumed. 

The Monster had grown in size as well as expertise. It was bigger now, closer to ten feet tall than the seven it had been when it was born. It still looked more-or-less human despite its size, although any hopes it had of ever passing for one were long gone by how tentacled horrors continued to spill out of its body from every orifice and temporary wound that Xan’s unnering blade inflicted upon it. 

Bloated with the harvested mana from Rhelea’s dead, the Monster recovered far faster than the Inquisitor could wound it, and despite her obscene level, she was only human, and she was slowing down.

Eliza silently grit her teeth and tried to pull away from Typh who had to actually hold the bard back from the edge of the roof they perched upon while the dragon worked her magic. 

Eliza looked at Typh imploringly while her foot tapped a short staccato beat. 

“Of course I’m going to help her. Now be patient, we’re waiting for our moment,” Typh explained.

The bard rolled her eyes, but she did as she was told. The infuriating human seemed determined to test the dragon’s patience which was causing her to idly wonder about the merits of filling her grumbling stomach.

“There!” Typh cried out a few minutes later when Xan drove her sword point first through the Monster's chest. The creature actually staggered back half a step while it looked down in confusion at the piece of rune-etched metal that now impaled it. “Eliza, if you would play us in.”

The bard did just that while she descended gracefully to the ink-stained ground on a cushion of Typh’s mana. Her bow danced effortlessly along the neck of her violin and music played. Eliza did her job well, using her skills to project the sounds of her instrument with a far greater intensity than should have been possible from such a small piece of non-magical wood.

Again, the bard did the impossible. She interlaced discordant, reality defying notes in with the melody, and while the effect caused the horrors that streamed away from the Monster to pause in their frenzied rush to spread throughout the city, the towering abomination itself hesitated. 

The Monster was powerful, high-steel very nearly touching silver if Typh had to guess, although for how long that distinction would remain true she had no idea. But it was young, mere hours old, and in that short span of an existence it knew only death, violence, and the addictive thrill of feeding. When Eliza played her haunting song, she introduced it to something primal and new, something that every living creature shared some small affinity for, music.

It was a sad song, beautiful in its own right even without the extra notes, but that wasn’t the point, the point was that as it looked over at Eliza, the defenceless source of the music, it wasn’t looking up.

The grand building infused with a sizable reserve of Typh’s mana crashed down onto the Monster’s head at speed. [Sovereign Magus’s Reservoir] let her move whatever she invested her arcane energies into, and while the building was certainly large, Typh had fairly recently dredged up the runes for lighter-than-air architecture from her inherited memories, and she’d had plenty of practice hurling herself through the air. Moving a five-story building by comparison was almost boring, and while it remained relatively light, its mass and inertia were untouched by the rushed runes hastily scrawled along its exterior walls. 

The whistling sound of all that mana-infused stone racing through the air had been largely obscured by Eliza’s song. So when the stone behemoth impacted the Monster as fast as Typh’s skills would allow, the explosion was utterly deafening. The building hit the unnatural creature square on. The ground trembled and stone shattered in sharp little fragments that raced through the square eviscerating the horror’s present, and momentarily disrupted the web of inky-black-goo that fed the Monster with a stream of near limitless power.

The serenity of Eliza’s sad song was thoroughly broken by the massive impact, and the bard only survived by the virtue of the dragon’s protective magic. Before the dust could settle, Typh floated down to the ground where she joined the other two women who were standing on either side of the fresh mountain of broken stonework where the Monster was trapped underneath.

The three of them congregated atop a large piece of relatively flat stone that was scattered away from the main blast site. Xan looked rough, and she was fading fast without the adrenaline of battle to keep her going, yet it didn’t stop her from drawing a short blade which she pointed firmly at Typh.

“If you think saving my life means I won't kill you, you’ve got another thing coming, dragon, killing that—”

“It’s not dead.” Typh said quickly. “And we don’t have time for this. We need to go.”

“Then we should finish it before it can recover! If Rhelea is to be saved then that thing has to die.” Xan urged.

“Rhelea is dead. I know you haven’t left this square in a while, but the battle for the city is long over. We lost.”

“It can’t be! There has to be a way to save it. Cities don’t just fall inside a day.”

“This one did. I have a plan to take it back, but that involves both of us leaving here right now. That thing isn’t even close to death, and we don’t want to be here when it works its way free,” the dragon warned.

“You have a plan?” Xan asked incredulously.

“Of course I do, I warned you this was going to happen, didn’t I? Did you really think I was so content to do nothing but eat your fine food and spill my secrets?” Typh replied in an even tone.

The Inquisitor looked at Typh hesitantly, her stern gaze was undermined by the waves of exhaustion that practically radiated off of the injured woman.

“What happens next?”

“We leave, we regroup, and then we come back and kill this thing. Now are you coming or not?” Typh asked, holding out a hand while Eliza waited patiently to the side.

“What makes you think I’d trust you?”

“Xan, do you really have a choice? You can either come with me now, or I will kill you. You’ve already taught it how to fight with a sword, and I won’t let you feed it any further. Your level is too high for me to allow you to fall to the Monster.”

Eliza looked panicked by Typh’s sudden statement, but the dragon didn’t care, and Xan didn’t even blink. Instead the dragon returned the Inquisitor’s steely glare with one of her own. The human’s level was almost more than double hers, but from how Xan wobbled on her feet, Typh knew there wasn’t much left in her—admittedly the noble dragon didn’t have much mana left herself, but it was still a threat she would follow through on if she had to.

“You wouldn’t last one mo—” the Inquisitor began to say, but was interrupted when the collapsed building in the centre of the square began to dramatically shift, and the tension in the air rose considerably. “On second thought, I accept your offer.” 

As the rate that the rubble began to move accelerated, Typh pulled Xan and Eliza close to her and imbued the large fragment of flat stone with her remaining mana. Using her skills, she flung it, along with the three of them, to the west, up and away from the market square. Xan went limp mid-flight, very nearly crushing Typh and Eliza both beneath the weight of her armour, and steel-ranked flesh.

As Rhelea blurred beneath them and the camp on the hillside grew closer in the distance, Typh found herself becoming more nervous than she had been to face the Monster for a second time.

“Now for the hard part…”

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