Jabari and Cathy stayed on Redbeard’s ship while Ellen, Julie, Lasse, and Adam sailed towards the island where the feral Rasal lived. They hoped that if they were quick enough, the slug dragon wouldn’t shoot down their airship, and it helped that it was currently focused on destroying the island in a blind rage.
Still, Adam could tell how terrified they all were of their mission.
Although he had accepted the frankly absurd challenge of killing Rasal by himself, the others had been quick to assure him that they’d co along, though they had agreed that Jabari and Cathy were better off staying behind, beyond the range of the monster. Ellen had acknowledged that it was deeply unfair for Adam to do all the work, especially since she was hoping to pick up a parasite for her patron quest, but based on the lody emanating from her, she was clearly having second thoughts.
It probably would’ve been better if it was just Lasse and
who went, Adam thought, but he still didn’t trust Julie to stay out of trouble if he left her behind, so it had been hard for him to tell Ellen not to co along either.
Since it’s a slug, I think Lasse’s barrage attack with a frost arrow from his Magical Quiver is going to be the best way to proceed. And because the slug dragon is so big, I really need to aim my attack well.
Adam had already woven three separate Heart Lance spell constructs, wrapping the first two around his forearms and the third around the base of his tail. A lot of flesh and blood had gone into their constructions, and he’d realised that if he combined the Heart Lance with the spiral that he’d used to accelerate the needle’s attacks, then he should be able to get a seriously powerful result.
Given the way that Golden Loom, Golden Tailor, and my blood and flesh magic interact, I feel like my current setup is way stronger than Warder. Though the main benefit is that it’s less singular in focus.
They landed on the far side of the island, furthest from where they’d seen the giant dragon. Everyone was eager to get off the airship, afraid they would get shot out of the sky, but Adam made sure they tethered it properly. After all, if they had to make a quick escape, he wasn’t confident he could transport all four of them with his magic alone.
Ellen made a sound as Adam peeled the flesh off of the ship’s underside and floated it out into the air in front of him. He wasn’t able to carry all of it, and to avoid completely eroding their trust in him, he didn’t fuse the excess flesh to his own body as a ans to transport it. Still, he felt like he wasn’t fully geared-up for the fight, even with his extra capacity allowing him to wield more material than normal.
As they travelled inland, heading towards the sounds of destruction, Adam shaped the flesh in various limb-like constructs. One was like a wing with extra-tough skin that he intended to use as a shield, while the other two were like arms made entirely from muscle, tendons, skin, and claws.
Maybe if I wrap my flesh magic around a skeleton I can achieve even more power, he thought.
The trees on the island were quite tall, and in so places there were structures high above, anchored into the bark and strung between them. It seed that the past inhabitants had been more industrious than he’d expected, though they clearly didn’t have the ans to cross between the islands, which was good, since flying cannibals sounded terrifying.
Before long they reached the section of the island that’d been bombed to hell by the Golden Fortress’ attempts to kill the feral slug dragon, but they stuck to the treelines as they didn’t want to expose themselves.
From their lodies, Adam could tell they were all terrified of the dragon, with Julie being the one whose rhythm was the most discordant, no doubt thanks to their encounter with Mast-Chewer. It didn’t help that the feral beast’s thrashing grew louder and louder as they travelled between the dense trees, and soon enough both Ellen and Lasse’s lodies matched Julie’s. Fear of the unknown was often as strong, if not stronger, than fear of the known, particularly in those prone to wild imaginations.
Then suddenly, the sounds died down.
They shared glances, but Adam held up a hand, telling them to be quiet.
Lasse withdrew an ice arrow from his quiver, nocking it to the string of his bow. He’d agreed with Adam’s assessnt that freezing the slug dragon would be the safest way to proceed.
If only I could track the damn dragons or parasites, Adam grumbled internally. But they had no blood and thus no lody, which really just raised a lot of questions about Interim Island’s true nature.
I don’t even know if slugwhales’ bodies are considered flesh or not. Their biology makes no sense to .
With Ellen out in front, her shield held at the ready, they cautiously proceeded in the direction of the last sound they’d heard from the feral beast.
It was deathly still for the next five minutes, but then they started to notice a new sound. It was like paper being slowly ripped apart. Over and over, the sound repeated itself, and it grew louder as they quickly neared its source.
Suddenly, the trees simply ended, leading to a clearing made by the rampaging dragon.
In its centre lay Rasal.
The feral dragon was curled around itself and it was imdiately clear that its lower half was not yet fully ford, since it had no legs nor tail, ending in a tattered ss of spongey slimy flesh. Its enormous body was dark-grey but glistened slightly. Unlike the head of Mast-Chewer and Iffen, it ended in the mouth of a lamprey, which looked absolutely horrific at such a large scale. Ringed rows of inward-pointing black teeth led to a central hole with flesh-grinding plates, and the whole mouth seed like it was designed to latch onto flesh and slurp it directly into its stomach. Unlike a lamprey, Rasal had no eyes, just like every other slug dragon and slugwhale Adam had encountered, but its body lacked the details and colour associated with their kind, since its skin was just smooth and grey. Two arms sprouted from below the head and it had a large distended belly that shifted around, even as the dragon lay still. Its skin moved and writhed as well, and it was from its skin that the sounds of tearing paper ca, as large parasitic worms the length of a human arm swam around below the surface, occasionally ripping through to taste the air before diving back down.
Adam saw what Redbeard had ant when he said that feral dragons didn’t turn out right, because besides the head and lack of a fully-ford lower body, its arms were malford. The right arm had two elbow joints and six long claws growing from the hand, while the left arm split like a branch at the elbow joint to beco two separate forearms with three-clawed hands each.
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Ellen swallowed loudly and Adam could tell she was close to throwing up. Julie shivered where she stood, and Lasse was actively fighting back his urge to run.
Adam put his hand on Lasse’s shoulder and gave him a nod.
The others noticed the gesture and tensed up, preparing for a fight.
Because of the way that Rasal was curled into itself, Adam wasn’t confident he could kill it, even though it lay still, so their best bet was to freeze it first.
He held up a hand to halt Lasse before he could lift his bow and fire the ice arrow.
“Just in case,” he mouthed and quickly drew a large Snare spell pattern onto the ground in front of them using silk and flesh magic.
Once complete, he gave Lasse another nod.
The Archer took a deep breath. Then his Barrage Master’s Coat glowed golden and his arrow shone green.
Lasse shot the arrow from the treeline and into the air on a very steep trajectory. It quickly multiplied mid-flight, turning from 1 arrow into 21 and then into over 400, all magically enhanced with the ice elent.
To Adam’s Mana-sight, it was like a solid wall of cold light-blue energy that dropped down from the sky and onto the slumbering beast.
The mont the first arrow struck, icicles erged from within the dragon’s flesh, spearing through it and splattering frozen parasites onto the forest floor.
Adam raised his right arm and moved flesh-infused silk out in front of him, forming three spiralling rings before activating his first Heart Lance spell construct.
A concentrated beam of blood, silk, and flesh fired from his beaked hand, and the mont it passed through the spiral floating in front of him, it sped up to the point that its travel across the clearing was instantaneous. The pressurised beam was thinner than before, but it sliced right through where Adam had struck, leaving a hole through the side of Rasal’s head and continuing on through countless trees. But aside from the small hole, there was no clear damage dealt.
Rasal pulled itself up despite the arrows still falling on its body and blooming to life as large ice spikes within its flesh.
“It’s not working!” Lasse exclaid.
Then a woosh ca from the direction of the dragon, travelling past them and destroying a tree.
Ellen gasped.
Lasse lifted his right arm, looking at it dumbly. Everything past the middle of his bicep was just gone.
He imdiately passed out and Ellen activated her protective bubble while feeding him one of her healing potions.
“We’ve gotta move,” Adam said.
Julie was frozen in place, even as another woosh ca from the slug dragon, slamming into their barrier and pinging off to the side.
I have no idea what it’s firing, but my flesh shield won’t do shit to stop that, Adam thought, deciding to instead launch the wing-like limb at Rasal after stepping outside the bubble for a mont.
No sooner had he retreated back inside the protective cover than another insanely-fast projectile struck and deflected off into a tree, snapping it in half. He tried to manipulate the fired-off limb, but even though it sliced through the dragon’s body, it accomplished very little. Additionally, re contact with Rasal’s flesh was enough to corrode Adam’s magic.
Ellen was struggling to lift up Lasse’s body, so Adam pushed her aside and picked up the Archer himself.
Julie wasn’t moving at all, so Ellen grabbed her by the hand, and together they all ran back into the trees while Rasal fired more of its projectiles after them, shredding the tree trunks around their protective barrier.
Then the ground started to rumble and shake as the slug dragon chased after them.
Despite missing a lower body and relying entirely on its malford arms to drag itself forward, Rasal was surprisingly fast.
However, the mont the dragon’s dark-grey body touched the large spell pattern that Adam had drawn, it was speared through by thorny vines made of flesh, with silk tied between them like fishing nets. The silk dug into its slimy body and though Rasal struggled against the snare, it was unable to break free.
It’s working!
Adam brought them to a halt and set Lasse down. His right arm had grown back, but it was pink and lacked skin, so he quickly applied his flesh magic to re-sleeve it. Since the skin was a mismatch of Adam’s own pale hue and that of the various ‘donors’, the result looked bruised and ssed up, but Adam knew it would work.
“Wake him up,” he told Ellen.
“How!?”
“Use your rosary. Once he’s awake, tell him to fire his lightning arrow. Maybe it’ll do sothing.”
Ellen let go of Julie’s hand and pulled out her Priest Relic. anwhile Julie just stood there, her lody locked up in a discordant spiral.
Adam went over and snapped his fingers in front of her face.
“Pull it together, Julie!” he shouted.
She blinked rapidly in response and then just looked at him with a wide-eyed blank stare.
It’s no use.
Adam prepared his next Heart Lance, creating another floating spiral in front of his hand. Then he stepped outside the bubble. Its golden glow was fading, so he knew that it would soon expire.
I have to hurry.
The mont the Snare wears off, Rasal is going to blast us all to bits.
This ti, Adam swept his hand vertically across the ensnared dragon, and the beam that fired managed to slice its top-half into two, like a sausage split down the middle.
He fired the next one, slicing horizontally, and Rasal’s neck, head, and shoulders fell apart, spilling parasites everywhere around it.
The Snare wore off at the sa ti as the protective bubble around Ellen’s shield.
Without any cohesion to its body, the beast was unable to move or fight back. It couldn’t even fire its projectiles. Among the ss that spilled out from within it were a lot of triangular-shaped bones, almost like shark teeth, and Adam realised this was what it was firing at them.
I don’t see the ribcage anywhere.
Where the fuck are its organs and the main parasite?
The parts he carved up were still moving as well, despite being cut off from the main body with the distended stomach and unfinished lower half. Within monts, parts of the slimy flesh started to grow tentacles to grasp the other parts, and Rasal started to pull its body back into shape.
Then a crackling arrow fired past Adam’s shoulder and struck the wriggling ss, exploding like a thunderclap. All the grasping tentacles let go of each other, and the wriggling died down, but the beast clearly wasn’t dead.
“I don’t know what else to do!” Lasse shouted.
“Let
try sothing!” Adam called back.
It has to be inside its large stomach, he thought, and prepared a Heart Lance spell from scratch, building the spell pattern in the air in front of him, and drawing on his own blood and the floating limbs to build the most powerful version he could manage.
The ball that ford in the palm of his right hand was the size of a lon and he struggled to squeeze it with his fingers to form the beak shape. Nevertheless, it fired from his hand and tore into Rasal’s main body like a destructive water hose, blasting Adam’s harvested flesh and his own blood to carve it apart.
Finally, he struck sothing solid that resisted his spell a little, and since all the flesh was blasted away to the sides, it beca visible for a mont. It was like a hardened egg made of bone, but there were small holes in its surface through which he saw a wriggling dark worm. It was the original parasite, and it had changed the ribcage of the slugwhale it had forcefully evolved, giving itself the most possible protection as it reproduced the countless parasites that ca to live inside Rasal’s flesh.
“Shoot the core!” Adam yelled to Lasse, and an ice arrow struck the bone egg, filling it with sharp icicles and tearing the main parasite to shreds while freezing it solid.
[Slug Dragon defeated,] announced their cubes.
< < Quest Completed > >
< Tainted Dragon >
< Defeated the feral Slug Dragon >
The dark-grey flesh all turned bone-white in an instant, but the parasites that were stuck inside it, as well as the ones spread across the forest floor, still wriggled with life.
“We have to get rid of them all,” Adam told Lasse as he approached.
Lasse had a feverish look on his face and Adam didn’t need the ability to read minds to know that he was in a lot of pain.
“What the hell did you do to my arm?” he asked him.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Adam started to say.
“It feels a lot stronger than before,” Lasse continued.
“I may have made a few alterations.”
“It looks like shit though,” Lasse remarked.
“If you can joke around, then you can help with the clean-up,” Adam said with a grin, patting Lasse on the back.
Then they got to work exterminating the thousands of parasites.
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