Path of Dragons

One moment, Elijah was striding across a meadow and through a big, blocky doorway, and the next, his bare foot touched down in something warm, wet, and squishy. That alone would have been bad enough – especially when it got between his toes – but what made it even worse was the horrid stench that suddenly enveloped him.

“Oh, God,” he muttered to himself as he tried not to gag.

He was markedly unsuccessful, especially when he had the chance to truly take in his surroundings. Before him stretched a wide body of water, from the center of which rose a steep edifice topped by a menacing wall. The water itself wasn’t an inviting or placid lake. Instead, it was a seething moat, below the surface of which writhed something Elijah’s instincts told him was absolutely deadly.

That water was also the source of the horrible stench tickling his nostrils. For a moment, Elijah had difficulty placing it; it was like rotten eggs mixed with vomit and hot garbage. But after only a few seconds, he recognized the smell for what it was.

“Sulfur,” he sighed, though he knew there was more to the smell than that.

It was an odor usually associated with swamps, but after a brief look around, he discounted that possibility. The lake – or moat, really – notwithstanding, the area was incredibly arid, with very little in the way of vegetation to be found. Instead, large, rocky pillars jutted up from the ground, twisting high into the sky, which was discolored by a setting sun.

Beneath Elijah’s feet was mud, or at least he hoped that was all there was, considering that, across the expanse of roiling water, Elijah saw a wide grate from which flowed some sort of disgusting sludge.

The moment he realized that the area was inhabited, he shifted into his scaled panther form, then embraced Guise of the Unseen. And it was just in time, too, because only a few seconds later, a loud screech filled his ears before a wide shadow fell over him. He looked up to see an enormous, winged creature soaring a hundred or so feet above his position.

At a glance, it looked like a bat, but there were two issues with that assessment. First, even if his perspective was a little skewed by the distance, he judged its wingspan to reach at least thirty feet. Maybe as much as fifty. And that would make it ten times the size of even the largest bat back on Earth.

But that was within Elijah’s experience. He’d seen plenty of oversized animals, so he knew that his concept of proper size wasn’t really relevant in terms of identifying creatures. After all, he only had to remember the size of the crabs on his island to confirm just how much larger things could get in his new world.

In any case, he was far more concerned with the second problem with his initial identification. He was no chiropterologist, but he felt confident that bats weren’t supposed to have horns. Of course, that could have been a mutation, too. He’d seen hares with horns back on his island, so who was to say that giant bats couldn’t have them as well?

Elijah watched as the enormous, horned bat glided toward one of the jutting towers along the wall, where it landed. Just before it passed out of view, he caught a glimpse of something big and bulky upon the creature’s back, but he had neither the time nor the visual acuity to identify the rider.

Only once he’d gotten his bearings did Elijah bother to read the notification he’d received upon entering the tower:

Welcome to Reaver’s Citadel, Level One. To advance to Level Two, complete the task before you.

The Reaver’s Citadel was obviously the keep positioned at the top of the plateau in the center of the lake. Elijah read the next notification:

Task: Reach the dungeon and defeat the Warden. Optional: Rescue the prisoner.

The moment Elijah read that there was an optional goal, he knew he was going to try to accomplish it. Largely, that was because he knew that the towers graded performance, and the system created rewards based on that. For instance, he’d gotten an S grade for completing the Keledge Tower, and his reward had been the Shard of the World Tree, which Nerthus had claimed was a treasure the likes of which shouldn’t have existed on such a newly integrated world.

And Elijah certainly wasn’t immune to the call of cool, new equipment. His rings had already proven useful – though he’d belatedly realized that leaving his name the same on his false identity as the listing on the Ladder had probably been enough to out him as more than he appeared to be – so he figured that any new rewards would probably be just as beneficial. And if he was going to get a reward, he preferred that it was as high quality as he could get, which meant that he needed to not only conquer the tower, but he needed to do so in a way that the system recognized as extraordinary.

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So, he needed to complete the optional task. Of course, he’d have probably done so anyway, just based on the way it was phrased. And the environment. He wasn’t sure what sort of people might live in such a place, but he suspected that they wouldn’t be a welcoming bunch – especially with a name like Reaver’s Citadel, which was quite evocative in all the wrong ways.

So, it stood to reason that any prisoner of theirs might just turn out to be Elijah’s ally.

Or maybe he was completely off-base, in which case he’d need to reevaluate as he progressed through the tower.

In any case, he couldn’t afford to stand around doing nothing. So, after getting his bearings, Elijah decided to circle the moat in order to further investigate the situation. A few feet from the water line, there was a sharp rise of about five feet, so Elijah crested that and looked around a little more.

Most of the terrain was much the same as his first impressions had indicated. However, in the distance, he saw a few squat structures standing next to a long bridge that stretched across the water and to a yawning gate built into the base of the plateau. Deciding that that was probably the easiest way in, Elijah stalked forward.

Even with Guise of the Unseen masking his presence, he took great care to use the natural terrain to his advantage. He flitted from one rocky outcropping to the next, and as he did so, he was reminded of the American southwest. Specifically, he thought of the time he and his family had visited the Colorado Plateau when he was only a teenager. There, he’d gotten his first taste of the desert, with its huge rock formations and arid climate. The area surrounding the Reaver’s Citadel reminded him of that, though the terrain bore a deep red color he’d never seen from an Earthly landscape.

As he slowly approached what he soon recognized as guard houses, the light began to fail. Dusk took hold, and Elijah got his first glimpse of the creatures who called the Reaver’s Citadel home.

The pair of humanoids guarding the bridge were both at least ten feet tall, and their body types were reminiscent of power lifters – all solid, heavy muscle beneath a layer of fat. More importantly, they were clearly not human. With jutting tusks, bald heads, and huge, pointed ears, the creatures were most appropriately labeled as ogres. Perhaps they were actually members of some other species, but Elijah could think of no name more suitable for the hulking humanoids.

Both ogres wore pitch black, metallic armor that looked more like cast iron than anything else. However, Elijah had enough sense to suppose that it was likely far more powerful than mundane iron. At the very least, it would be as strong as high-carbon steel, and that was if it wasn’t magical in nature. If it was, Elijah really had no gauge for what to expect, except that he didn’t want to find the limits of their equipment.

Instead, he skirted around the guard houses, avoiding notice as he continued along the edge of the moat. The smell continued to be an issue, but he ignored it as he circled the moat. By the time he’d reached his original position – or a close approximation of it – night had fallen, but he’d found nothing else of note.

So, as far as he could tell, he had two options.

The first was to try to sneak past those two guards, cross the bridge, and enter the citadel that way. He had no idea what was on the other side of the bridge, but he suspected that he’d find more ogres, at the very least. There was a good chance that there were other defenses as well, though he couldn’t speak to what form they might take.

Which led him to the other option, which centered on him crossing the moat and slipping through one of the grates and into what he hoped were drainage tunnels. They looked like they were large enough to accommodate even his guardian form, so Elijah didn’t think he’d have any issues fitting.

But still, that wasn’t his first objection to that option. No – that distinction belonged to the smell. That, coupled with the sight of that sludge slowly oozing out of the tunnels, gave him a good idea what was going on, and he could confidently say that it was absolutely disgusting.

Perhaps it wasn’t meant for sewage. Maybe his nose had fooled him on that front. But he didn’t think so, and for that reason, he shied away from what was obviously the optimal path. With that in mind, he found himself crouched approximately twenty feet from the two ogre guards.

That close, they looked even larger and far more menacing than they had from a distance, and Elijah’s eyes kept flicking toward the huge battle axes they wore strapped to their backs. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that, with their obvious strength, the creatures were more than capable of bisecting him with a single blow.

He crept close, taking one careful step at a time. With Guise of the Unseen, Elijah felt confident that he wouldn’t be seen – especially at night – but he knew it was far from perfect. If he put one foot out of line, he would be seen. Fortunately, he had ample experience sneaking around.

As it turned out, his confidence was entirely misplaced.

The moment he came within ten feet of the guard house – and the pair of ogres stationed on either side of the bridge’s entrance – a blindingly white light erupted into being. Suddenly, Elijah felt his stealth being stripped away and exposing him to the hulking ogres. For the longest of instants, he stared at them, and they stared right back at him. Then, confusion turned to rage, and without any more warning, the closest ogre ripped the axe off its back and leaped forward with a bestial roar.

Elijah’s instincts had been honed by much worse circumstances. In the Sea of Sorrows and the Primordial Jungle, he’d often had to deal with ambush predators, so his reaction to the charging ogre was completely intuitive. He crouched low, then dodged to the side just in time to avoid the descending blade of the ogre’s axe. The miss threw the creature off balance, opening it up for a counterattack, but Elijah had no intention of getting into a straight fight.

Instead, he used the opening to gather his wits and dash away. Both of the ogres roared angry challenges, but Elijah paid them no attention. Instead, he raced along the terrain, dodging behind rocky protrusions at every opportunity until, at last, the white light faded. But even then, he didn’t slow.

He kept running well after the reactivation of Essence of the Wolf told him that he’d exited combat. In fact, he circled the moat, racing across the terrain for miles along the circumference of the roiling body of water until, at last, he felt his safety was assured. Only then did he let himself slow to a stop.

Elijah knew how fortunate he was to have escaped. Perhaps he could have defeated the ogres, but he knew it would have been a pyrrhic victory. Doubtless, that blindingly white light had been an alarm, of sorts, and like all alarms, it would have brought with it some sort of response. It wasn’t difficult to imagine that, if he’d stayed and fought, he would have quickly been buried under a mountain of bulky ogres.

No – retreat had been the right choice.

But now, if he was going to accomplish his task, he only had one available option.

Once he’d caught his breath, Elijah shifted back to his human form and, after using Eyes of the Eagle to look at the nearest grate, muttered, “I really don’t want to do this.”

He didn’t have much choice, though. So, he took a deep breath, getting a nose full of the foul odor in the process, then settled in to regenerate his Ethera. Once his core was completely full, he renewed his enhancements, then switched to his guardian shape.

What it lacked in stealth, the form made up for in sheer durability. The scaled ape form had one other thing going for it, and that was the fact that it was much better suited to swimming than the predator form.

Shaking his head, Elijah loped forward and waded into the water.

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