Path of Dragons

Elijah’s heart nearly stopped as the memory of a hundred little delays came rushing to mind. Perhaps his reaction to Alyssa’s death was understandable, but he’d wasted a lot of time pointlessly trekking across the wilderness. In the aftermath, he’d spent weeks wallowing in apathy that still hadn’t entirely lifted. And as a result, he’d put one of the few people he actually cared about in danger.

Lucy wasn’t usually at the forefront of his mind. She wasn’t family. But he’d loved her once, and those feelings hadn’t completely faded. At worst, she was a friend, and at best, she might one day be something more. However, over the years, he’d adopted the habit of pushing her from his thoughts, and because of that, her situation – and that of Seattle – was the last thing on his mind.

Now, he was going to have to deal with the consequences. Even as he pushed himself to his feet, his thoughts drifted into a dark place that he’d most recently visited in Valoria. If something had happened to Lucy, he was going to tear the ones responsible to pieces.

Isaiah rose, urgently saying, “She’s fine. I should have led with that. They haven’t attacked yet.”

“But they are, right? How do we stop it? When are they doing it? And –”

“Right now, they’re holed up in their headquarters,” Isaiah answered. “Or the important ones are, at least. They call it the Adventurer’s Guild.”

“If you know where they are, then why haven’t you already taken care of it?”

“They’re too strong,” the man answered, standing and placing his hands on the edge of the desk. He leaned forward, continuing, “We’re not all as powerful as you are. We can’t just walk into a city and destroy a group of seasoned adventurers. My people had all they could handle just defending this place. Assaulting their headquarters will be much more difficult.”

“You know their levels? Do they have anyone on the ladder?” asked Elijah.

“No. The core group – five people, plus the leader, Bruce Garret – are only a level away, though. They’ve each cultivated their bodies to the first stage as well. Bruce has everything but the core at the first stage,” Isaiah explained.

“You sure do know a lot about them,” Elijah noted. Although, that should not have been terribly surprising. After all, Isaiah had already demonstrated that he could read Elijah’s status like a book. It stood to reason that he could do the same with the other people in the city.

“My entire class revolves around information gathering,” Isaiah responded. “I have very limited combat capability.”

“I see.”

Elijah’s initial reaction was to simply head to this Adventurer’s Guild headquarters and start killing people. However, if Isaiah was as good at gathering information as he claimed, perhaps there was an advantage there. So, he asked, “What’s the plan, then? Do you have a layout of the building? What about defenses? Detailed information about the enemies?”

As it turned out, Isaiah had all of that and more. He produced a list of the fighters inside the building – most were in their forties, but there were a few on the verge of entering the power rankings – as well as a map, which detailed potential points of ingress. On top of that, he said, “I can disable their defenses, too.”

“What kind of defenses are we talking about?”

“They call it an array,” Isaiah explained. “It’s like an artificial domain. If you have the key – one of the pendants they give to members once they satisfy certain requirements – you’ll be unaffected. However, if you don’t, it’ll decrease your physical attributes by as much as twenty-five percent. Less based on the Ethera attribute.”

That didn’t seem so bad, but Elijah had no interest in losing that many attributes. So, he was more than willing to let Isaiah do his thing.

“More importantly, I can guide you,” Isaiah stated. “Make sure you don’t step into a situation you can’t control. They have a few stealth operators, and some of their guards can avoid detection as well.”

“But not from you?”

“I see everything,” Isaiah responded.

To Elijah, that sounded a bit like his domain. Perhaps that was the benefit of Isaiah’s class, like he’d claimed, but Elijah expected that there was something else at work. After all, it had taken quite a lot of work before Elijah’s domain had taken hold. Regardless, with what he’d seen, he didn’t have any trouble believing Isaiah’s claims.

“Here,” Isaiah said, pulling a small device from his pocket. “Put that in your ear, and I’ll be able to talk to you.”

“Uh…there might be a problem with that,” Elijah said, noting that, in his bestial forms, he didn’t really have ears – at least not in the shape that could accommodate the tiny earwig Isaiah had offered. Instead, in his draconid form, his ears were nothing more than small pits on the side of his head. In his lamellar ape form, they were much larger. He’d not noticed the orientation of his ears in his Shape of the Sky form.

But then again, perhaps it would work like his clothing or other equipment and transform with him, so, he just took the earwig and said, “But let’s hope not.”

Then, he slipped it into his ear.

“Would you like my assistance?” asked K’hana.

Elijah shook his head. “No. The alliance is too important,” he said. “I don’t want to risk you getting injured.”

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That was only part of the reason. Elijah intended to use Guise of the Unseen, which would be impossible of K’hana was tagging along. Also, when he was inevitably discovered, he didn’t want to have to worry about keeping her safe. For better or worse, he didn’t really fit into most groups. Instead, he was far more comfortable fighting alone.

One day, he’d have to work on changing that. At some point, he knew he’d encounter a situation he couldn’t tackle alone. The issue was that his class was built on versatility. What made him special was the fact that he could fill multiple roles at once. Groups, though, were built to take advantage of highly specialized combatants. So, if he ended up in one of those parties, he’d be relegated to being a worse version of whichever role he was assigned. It would take time and training to overcome those issues.

But it was neither the time nor the place of that.

After getting a brief rundown from Isaiah – and refusing to let one of his teams accompany him – Elijah set off. Most of the journey was undertaken in his human form, but when he approached the territory claimed by the Lakeshore Adventurers, he ducked into an abandoned building, ensured that no one was looking, and shifted into his draconid form.

He'd considered simply flying in and dropping onto the roof of the building, but he chose the less bombastic path. As satisfying as it would have been to take that route, stealth was both safer and more tactically sound.

Once he was cloaked in Guise of the Unseen, Elijah crept out of the abandoned building and crossed the block or so to the territory controlled by the Adventurers. Once, the region had been on the waterfront, but now that everything was desert, new buildings spilled out into the area that had once been Puget Sound. Encircling the territory was a concrete wall that reached fifteen feet in height.

That was new. Elijah had only seen the area from afar, but he felt certain that he would have noticed such an obstacle. Regardless, with his attributes, it was easy enough to vault to the top the edifice, though he did feel a slight tingle as he crossed the wall walk and leaped down to the other side.

That was the defensive array, he knew. Thankfully, he was immune to its effects due to the pendant he’d gotten from Isaiah. So, he continued forward, passing between buildings and keeping to the shadows as much as possible. He knew that wasn’t strictly necessary – Guise of the Unseen was more than enough to hide him from most people – but old habits died hard.

Like that, he slowly made his way through the district, noticing that there were quite a few noncombatants in the area. Night had already fallen, but it wasn’t so late that the streets had emptied. There were children about as well, suggesting that at least some of the so-called Adventurers had families. What about the men and women he intended to kill? Did they have husbands and wives waiting for them at home? Children? Brothers and sisters?

Often, Elijah skated past the implications of all the deaths he’d caused. It was easy to cast them as faceless enemies. But the reality was that the impact of those deaths didn’t end when Elijah had moved on. They all had people that cared about them. People who depended on them. Their lives would be changed, and probably for the worse, because of Elijah’s actions.

It cemented the notion that he needed to be more judicious with his power. Killing people was easy. Sometimes incredibly so. Restraining himself would be much more difficult, especially when he felt justified.

Of course, reality didn’t care about moral quandaries, and the fact of the matter was that if he didn’t do something about Bruce Garet and his Adventurers – and the people of Mercer Mesa – they would hurt someone he cared about. And Elijah’s brand of “doing something” usually involved copious violence. He simply wasn’t equipped for political maneuvering or the like, and even if he was, that had already proven ineffective. After all, that was supposed to be Isaiah’s area of expertise, and he’d already admitted that he couldn’t do what needed to be done.

No - Elijah knew he was going to have to kill a lot of people. And as a result, he would create widows, widowers, and orphans. It was an unavoidable aspect of any battle, and as unpalatable as it was to consider, Elijah knew it was necessary.

So, it was with a murky conscience that he arrived at the Adventurer Guild’s Headquarters. It was a large, squarish building that was a few blocks away from the old shoreline. At five stories tall, and constructed of brick, it was a remnant of the old world that had somehow survived events that had torn most of the other buildings within the city down. More importantly, it was guarded by dozens of combatants, all arranged in groups of five, with most of them patrolling the surrounding area.

Elijah watched from the shadows, observing the patterns. All the while, Isaiah spoke in his ear, “There are two points of ingress you can use. The first is the side door. It is guarded, but only lightly. It’s the riskier of the two options. The second entrance is on the roof, and it would require you to climb the fire escape. That route has been rigged with traps that I can’t deactivate from afar.”

“What kind of traps?” Elijah asked.

“They’re called ethereal claymores. Just like claymores from the old world, they explode, sending shrapnel to tear the victim to pieces. However, instead of being powered by combustion, they’re powered by ethera. We think someone in there has a skill to make them deadlier, too,” Isaiah explained.

“What about the walls?” Elijah hissed. He didn’t even know where the device’s microphone was, but Isaiah had already proven that he could hear him just fine.

“What about them?”

“What if I climb them?” Elijah asked.

“Uh…one second. Yeah. That should work,” Isaiah said. “If you can do it.”

“It’ll be fine,” Elijah said. Like his old mist panther form, the draconid shape was made for climbing, but even as a human, he wouldn’t have had any difficulty. That was the benefit of his high attributes.

With that plan in mind, he stalked forward, and with the assistance of Isaiah’s constant input, was able to avoid the patrols. According to him, they each had at least one member with a skill similar to the Guard Sense referenced by the soldiers in Valoria. It wasn’t enough to see through Guise of the Unseen – so long as he was careful, at least – but he didn’t want to push his luck.

As a result, covering those hundred-or-so yards took about twenty minutes, but eventually, Elijah reached the building’s far wall. The night was overcast, so it stood in dark shadow that he hoped would keep him concealed. So, without further ado, he leaped, digging his claws into the brick and vaulting from one handhold to the next as he climbed the building. Unfortunately, it made a little noise, but he’d timed his climb so that no one was close enough to hear it.

And just like that, he reached the top and climbed onto the flat roof.

There were four guards up there, too. Positioned one to a side, each was armed with binoculars and heavy crossbows, but their attention was entirely focused on the area around the building.

Elijah stalked forward, and when he approached the first, he used Predator Strike before attacking. However, he didn’t use his normal skull-bite attack. Instead, his claws found the woman’s throat, silently ripping through the tender flesh. He caught her as she fell, then lowered her to the ground before going after the second. That man fell, just like the first sentry. It was the same with the remaining two, though with the last, he indulged his instincts and crushed the man’s skull.

“Alright. I’m going in,” Elijah said, approaching the door that would lead him into the building below. But just as he opened the door, Isaiah shouted something that was quickly lost in the sound of an explosion. Elijah’s vision turned white as he was hit by a shockwave that sent him tumbling across the roof.

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