She observes with rapt attention as he moves in weird ways that seem to break all kinds of universal laws. He withstands forces that can crumble stone to dust as he is doused with a constant stream of dragon breath. There is obviously something going on with his skin, as the grey and dull complexion she can see between gouts of fire, darkness, and lighting is not a look he usually sports.
The bright sun reflecting off his shining and metallic body is also something new. She doesn’t even bother keeping tabs on the dragons that are being beaten up, so focused is she on observing the small man. Surrounded by beings tens, hundreds, and even thousands of times his own size, he swings between scaled faces containing eyeballs larger than his head. Dragon after dragon falls from the sky, the connection with the rigid construct controlling them broken by brute force.
Then one of the brightest shining threads starts moving, and Re-Haan holds her breath. The fight with her revered ancestor is anticlimactic. Instead of having an epic duel to the death, the small man merely snaps the tether controlling the enormous being and takes control. Then Re-Haan has the sudden urge to both scratch his eyes out and criticise his looks. In her foggy state of mind, she isn’t sure why or how, but the current way he stands, his complexion, and his feeling, in general, feels immensely aggravating to the trapped dragon in human form.
Then a group of capillaries, at least twice as bright as the one controlling the ancestor, thread themselves into being. Bright lances of meaning and data shoot up and around Re-Haan, shooting down from the intricate weave of branch and limb in a rather festive display. Re-Haan feels anything but festive, though. She had managed to catch glimpses of the outside world now and then, but she failed to catch wind of any of this. How and when did this insidious system she made in a sudden bout of grief and anger entrap more of her ancestors?
Like monsters rising from the grave, dragons slough off metres of snow. Scaled bodies that dwarf the earthen colossus of the All-Dragon, woke from his slumber a few months earlier, move jerkily. An entire rainbow of glassy-eyed and silent behemoths rise, the white mounds she previously thought mere mountains resolving themselves into dragons. The smallest one over two kilometres in length, true worry seeps into her heart for the first time.
This worry evolves from a silent gnawing to a simmering gut roil as she observes the preparations her own brain deems necessary. Following the most optimal paths that logic can dictate, the white branches of her very own management tree orchestrate a blockade. She can see the logic behind each action it takes, and it makes her sick.
Taking control of all the dragons in order to prevent loss of more life is indeed a positive net sum when only taking lives saved into account. She has regretted her impulsive actions of creating a large process with a single focus since seconds after creating said process. The loss of her uncle might have been a devastating blow to her, but Re-Haan has had plenty of time to look at the situation through the perspective of hindsight. And she knows that enslaving the entire Flight using her own cultivation base might have been a bit of an overreaction.
Then Re-Haan’s gut clenches once more. Even now, her physical eyes are still looking at the sorry sight of two dragon corpses. Even now, she can’t tear her eyeballs away from the miserable-looking dragon that basically raised her. His silent demeanour and his love of books – now carelessly scattered on the ice. Never will she…
She tears her mind away from the things she can’t change at the moment and instead tries to focus on the present and future. She observes with growing worries as the dragons that formed the ring Drew broke through are nearly abandoned to their fate, their branches dimming to obscurity. The pillar of light around Re-Haan blazes to light with different strands turning luminescent. Calculations flit through her brain, too fast for her conscious self to see.
Then follows a true piece of dragon acrobatics. Re-Haan manages to catch enough glimpses to understand what the general plan is, and its ruthless optimised efficiency make her sick to her stomach. Instead of actively engaging the perceived threat coming her way, her management system now decides to use Drew’s unwillingness to kill needlessly against him. Every single dragon on the north pole starts flying towards her, slowly forming a ring around the place where she is sitting still.
Each long and sinuous body contorts in complex ways, stretching joints until their breaking point and twisting necks into pretzels. Using the age-old ancestors as building blocks, an impressive wall is made from coiling and extremely vulnerable dragon flesh. She knows that the ice below is saturated with supermassive junk, and thus the managerial tree around her knows this. There is little fear of cracking the ice with too much draconic weight, so a truly complex and bizarre ballet plays itself out around Re-Haan, encasing her and the glowing tree in a massive dome of dragons that are all stretched to breaking.
A single attack on the wall of entangled dragons is sure to reap massive casualties. Re-Haan starts fighting again. She has given up a thousand times by now, the speed at which she is crawling combined with the minuscule amount of thinking capacity she has access to allows her to do a lot of single threaded thinking. She went through the same process over and over again. First, she railed against the cage she put herself in. Then, she tries pleading, sabotage, shifting some numbers here and there. Finally, when she failed to do anything productive at all, because error checking processes correct any changes she made – and her suggestions are always seen as ‘less than optimal’ – she’d give up again.
Not this time. This time, half of her race is intertwined in a blockade that is purposely built to break with maximum casualties. Ancient ancestors that have been awake for longer than she has slept are about to die, if she doesn’t do anything. She both hates and admires the ruthlessly efficient way in which her very own despotic cultivation base makes decisions. Yes, this might cause the loss off over half of the resources named ‘The Flight’, but that chance is so low, it’s negligible.
Then Drew arrives, and she sees him take a single look at the tightly strung and wriggling wall of bodies and bones encasing Re-Haan. “Damn girl,” she hears him say. “This is a fresh kind of fucked-up. Using your own kin as a… No, she knows I’d never… Then what about the trash dumping?”
Re-Haan and Drew both look upwards at the spinning circle of cloth. Moving swiftly, the blurry haze of white is interposed between the ground and each falling star, bouncing the smoking and glowing items to the side.
“Not what I gave that thing to you for. You really do need punishment.” And then Drew is gone. Although time is going a hundred times slower for Re-Haan, and although over a hundred pairs of eyes are trained upon the man, he disappears all of a sudden. The only thing that’s left where he stood a black hole.
The rigid tree around Re-Haan bursts into life. The massive wall of scaled flesh surrounding her is swiftly disassembled, dragons uncoiling at speed. Breath attacks are readied, wings are stretched, and teeth are bared. At the same time, the first gout of flame reaches the hole, shot from the dozens of metre wide maw of the biggest fire ancestor, the ground to the side of Re-Haan bulges upwards.
Drew bursts from the ice, a rather sickly pallor to his face. Not saying a single thing, Re-Haan sees him appear in slow motion. She might be experiencing life a hundred times slower than usual, yet Drew is moving twice as slow as usual at most. She barely has time to register this new development as his shining fist slams into the side of the white tree. Cracks are patched over quickly, flowing branches and threads strengthening the glowing bark.
Yet before the last crack has faded, Drew’s foot smashed through, whipping around like a snapped spring. The shattered fragments of the glowing qi construct fade into nothingness, the sharp edges leaving red cuts in Re-Haan’s body before they fade. Then follows a fist, which gloriously knocks a few teeth loose from Re-Haan’s mouth. As a result, she slams against the inside of the glowing trunk, opposite Drew’s forced entry. Blood sprays from her mouth and Re-Haan watches with muted fascination as her
bloody teeth tumble through the air.
Then Drew’s foot once again swoops around, his frame bending in impossible ways. A few more teeth are smashed free, and Re-Haan thinks that this is all moving a bit fast. Even at a hundred times slow motion, Drew is moving nearly too fast to see. She slams against the inner trunk again and barely has bounced back when Drew’s other foot slams into her head a second time, delivering the third blow of this one-sided beat-down. White fragments of bark splinter-free, and Re-Haan bursts free from the prison of her own cultivation base.
“WHA TOOF YOU FO LONG?” Screaming through bloody lips, Re-Haan turns around the moment she is free from the shining trunk. She lands and continues her tirade. “AN ENFIRE MONFH? IF FOOK YOU AN ENFIRE FUKING MONFH?”
“A bit busy, love,” Drew mumbles through closed lips. He hangs inside the flickering tree as cracks develop from the two splintered openings in the trunk.
“Fhaf’s no excufe. Here, lef me helf, you fucking basfard.” Patting herself down, Re-Haan steps back into the slowly dissolving tree, keeping tabs on the many, many branches shooting at the pair with high speed.
CHAPTER THIRTY -THREE
Bonds 2
The fist hits my cheekbone, and I let it sink in part of my face. I don’t see the uppercut that follows. My rattling teeth get no rest, and her third punch loosens a few of my upper front teeth and an incisor. Then follows a rather sexily executed kick, and I feel several of my teeth pop free. I intercept the other foot going for my groin, as I do have my bottom limit, after all. And the limit is my bottom – both front and back.
I make sure to remember which teeth are mine when a sweeping kick cracks my jaw. Two of my molars land near a few of Rhea’s chompers, so I make sure to keep track of where they land. I let the kick that follows crack a rib and block another fist going for a strike beneath the belt.
“No dick punching, that’s just not coo-” Interrupted by a haymaker snapping my jaw shut, I barely prevent myself from biting off my tongue. I flop onto the ice bonelessly, the impact with the unyielding cold ground-rattling my bones.
“An entire month,” I hear a low whisper. “You left me in there for an entire month?”
“Now, see. I was under the impression that you-” The kick that sends me spinning skywards again also breaks my nose. I’m sure that I must make a rather pretty sight right about now. A bloody and bleeding figure of a man, spinning rapidly while my nose produces a gorgeous spiral of red. “That this was all under your own volitio-”
My downwards descend is halted by a rather well-placed knee in my stomach. Gasping for breath, I’m dropped to the ground. I keep my core clear, no matter how much I want to call upon certain aspects of strength and resilience. I stand up slowly, twisting my nose in the correct position with a sickening popping sound that hurts both mentally and physically.
“I spent decades in that shithole, you know. My piece-of-shit cultivation base decided it knew better, so it went and did all of this useless shit.” Huffing with anger, Rhea is staring me in the face. She is looking as pretty as ever, probably even more so now that her cheek is slowly turning blue and swelling, along with the streaks of blood running from her mouth. I ignore those unbidden thoughts for now.
“Right. So, the next time you stroke my cheek melancholy with a tendril of your cultivation base, it means that I should assume you lost control to your own enlightenment, and your power base has gone rogue? By the way, should we do something about that?” I point upwards, to the flickering and mutating tree of light that still has many, many tendrils of glowing fiber connected to the dragons around us. I managed to erase the trunk of the ethereal three by inhaling the massive amount of qi present, but the upper network of branches has eluded me so far. Also, my cultivation is having trouble with the enormous amount of alien qi, so I’m feeling pretty shitty.
“Drew Liam…” I wince as she uses my full name. Not a good sign at all. “That was all I could do to prevent you from being assimilated in the network. It took me immense amounts of effort to prevent that tendril from taking over your brain.”
“Well, you broke the promise,” I reply petulantly. “And so what? It’s not like that’d have been the first time I’d be mind-controlled. I got free every time so far.”
“What promise? And no, you wouldn’t have been able to escape. I contro… It controlled the Flight through genetic handles.”
“The promise to stay in realtime. I’ve got withdrawal symptoms up the ass, you know. And you haven’t got my genetic information. Also, I made damn sure to erase any form of ancestral control or backdoor exploits from my own genetic code, thank you very much.”
“You didn’t break that one?” Rhea falters as she brings a slender hand to her bloody mouth. “So even when you… That was all realtime? Just now, also?”
“Of course. Breaking promises can be done, but you better be damn sure to have a good reason for it. Advancing while you are burdened and held back by regrets and bad karma like that is nigh impossible.”
“No, no, Drew. You are changing the subject again.”
“You are the one who brought up the geneti-”
“Well, YOU LEFT ME IN HERE FOR AN ENTIRE MONTH, YOU COCKSTAINED ASSWIPE!”
And here she comes again. I keep my eyes open, prepare myself, and try to counter her moves. I’ve got loads of experience in hand to hand combat, have practised all kinds of fighting techniques, and somehow or another, my disappeared heartcore still gives me a very decent combat instinct, but I can’t see through her moves. Each action she takes seems rather mundane and slow, but despite the fact that she is barely enhancing her body, all her attacks slip through my defence.
I try slapping away the straight punch coming at me, but she manages to plant her foot in my stomach before I can register how she got through my defences. The deceptively straight punch then reaches my nose, setting the painful piece of cartilage crooked again. “Are you crawling right now?” I ask accusingly.
“No,” is the only answer I receive before my feet are swept from under me. I manage to block a swift chop to my private parts before she roundhouses me to the other side of the ring.
“This is bullshit. If you want to play rough, so will I.” Glaring at the ungrateful woman, I bring up my sword in my braincore. I deny its materialization. Instead, I call upon the brute cutting power and its ability to move swiftly despite its unwieldy size. Red flames envelop my right arm at the same time as blue crystals cover my left. I assume a low posture, allowing me to jump into any direction at a moment’s notice.
“Just accept your punishment.”
“No way. You accept your punishment. You enslaved an entire species, you psychopath.”
Rhea winces, and I use that opening to advance. I imagine the sword swinging around fiercely, applying its imaginary momentum the moment it swings perfectly forward on an upward swing. The ice turns to mist under my feet as I reel back my flaming fist. I slap her defensive kick to the side with an ice-covered left jab and smash into her gut with my glowing right hook.
I have but a fraction of a second to admire the precision with which she avoids my flaming attack before her other foot slams my head into the ice. I immediately pull myself free from the hole in the packed snow. “Fuck! How are you this strong. Are you sure you’re not crawling?”
“I said I’m not!”
“Okay then. By the way, are you sure we shouldn’t do anything about that?” I once again try to divert her rage to the true culprit here. We are still surrounded by a rather impressive amount of dragons, all of whom are still sporting a fashionable thread of light that’s sticking out of their necks. The horrific mass of bright energy that used to be the tree of Rhea’s cultivation base is hanging there conspicuously still.
“No need. Drew, answer me truly, why didn’t you get me out of that thing earlier?”
“Because I thought you were training your path or some bullshit like that. I only ever read about a cultivation base going rogue once, and that was a te
xt so ancient, it took me years to decipher the script. How come you are this strong?”
“I don’t know. I just know how to beat you with minimal effort. Why are your arms burning and freezing?”
“This is just one way in which I’m employing aspects of my sword. Why did you wake more ancestral dragons?”
“I didn’t. That thing did.” Here she points upwards. I don’t dare take my eyes off of her, though. “Where is Lola.”
“She’s fine. Didn’t want to come, I think. What is the exact premise with which you started that process?” I point upwards, but she doesn’t take her eyes off of me either.
“The deaths I saw were useless and unneeded. The Flight could win easily, they just needed to be more efficient. Why an entire month, though?”
I wince as I see the true pain in her eyes. “I… I didn’t know. You had stuff to take care of, I thought. I had stuff to take care of. And then I was sick of being alone again.” I avoid eye contact. “And I didn’t…” I stare at the small pile of dead dragons, one of them her uncle. “I…”
The conversation between us halts there. Looking at the frozen dragon, I fear that all my worst suspicions will come to pass. His entire belly is ripped open, the majority of his guts that should be inside nowhere to be seen. The back of his scaly head is also a mess of blood, brain, and bone. Putting that back together will be like reassembling a shattered hard disk drive. Sure, there will be some parts of the data intact, but in order to puzzle out all the damaged bits and bytes that used to occupy the broken areas, the entire file format needs to be understood first.
There is no way that just putting juice in a dead battery will work, right? Stuff needs to be fixed, and without a clear pattern or complete understanding, the end result will be an unholy patchwork.
I’m shaken from my dark mood as I feel someone fumbling around inside my mouth. With a rather painful twist, I feel Rhea shoving my front teeth back into my jaw. “You got those backwards. Here,” I tell her. I pull the two teeth free, turn them around, and shove them back in. Flicking my wrist, I pull Rhea’s teeth to my hand with simple applications of Will. I pry open her pursed mouth and put them back in their place, keeping the roots inside her bleeding gums until they hold.
The Dao of Magic: Book IV Page 27
