Draith
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Chapter 89 - Light Hunting
🕑 Added 2025-04-30 14:00:42 +0000 UTCWith the glider working, Inertia and I were soon circling above Fang, just outside Verdant Point. The noonday sun made it easy to make out the huge impact the new Shaper was already making. She had nearly a hundred people working on the north edge of the valley where the shape of a dozen rough rectangles had been knocked out.
I didn't have much time to inspect her work before Calbern set off, headed towards the wyvern peaks, Tresla safely ensconced within the right eye socket.
Inertia and I both adjusted course, moving to follow. The route we followed was one I wasn't certain I could've walked. Calbern spent nearly as much time launching Fang as he did, winding up or down steep cliffs.
Despite his incredible driving, getting the last twenty miles to the wyvern peaks took him nearly five hours. The terrain was just that rough. Inertia had needed to land twice to help them move forward, and once to replace something.
I stayed in the air the entire way, thankful they hadn’t needed me. Restore Form was a nice upgrade over Minor Heal, letting me clear the fatigue, though I kept it to once an hour to make sure my mana stayed mostly full, which meant the flight grew unpleasant several times.
As evening fell, we reached the foot of the wyvern peaks.
Just in time for the awakened wyvern to greet us, its roar shaking the mountains. Inertia roared back as we turned to face it.
It… and apparently its twenty followers.
Something weird was going on.
We'd been keeping a watch on the wyverns. Inertia had even made a couple passes over to count them. There should've been forty wyverns spread across all five peaks that were the wyverns' territory, total. I doubted the awakened wyvern had somehow gathered half the other wyverns as support.
Knowing that Calbern and Tresla weren't going to be much use on the ground, I swung down, letting the same rope I'd used to tangle Red Beard's mount dangle behind me.
Calbern caught it as I went past, his weight noticeable, but not so bad Soar couldn't handle it. Then I swept towards where Inertia and the large wyvern were fighting. I adjusted course at the last second, flicking Calbern forward.
Well, attempting to.
Instead, I only kinda sent him in the general direction. Thankfully, Calbern adjusted, swinging the rope around and under the wyvern before swooping upward. I detached the rope before I could get entangled. With one final hop, Calbern landed on the wyvern's back, driving enchanted pitons into its flesh. Before it could react, he'd already used the rope to secure himself to its back where it couldn't reach.
After that, I moved to engage one of the supporting wyverns. Yet when I blasted it with a half strength lightning bolt, the spell carried straight through it.
It only took me a couple seconds to realize it was an illusion. Inspecting the other wyverns around me, I realized it wasn't even a very good one. The quality was perfect. And that was kinda the problem. The wyvern I’d attacked had a very distinctive jagged scar running down its face. As did several of the nearby wyverns. There were four distinct wyverns, and each of them had four illusory copies that followed their every movement.
Figuring out which was the original was only a little tricky, since the illusions never worried about running into each other while the actual wyverns would try to dodge everything.
Still, every time I lost sight of one of the originals, the illusions proved their worth, since I'd have to figure out which ones were the real ones all over again.
And I didn't have infinite mana to check.
I did my best to keep them distracted, hoping that once Inertia and Calbern had dealt with the awakened wyvern it'd cause the illusion to fail. There was no reason to think each of these lesser wyverns had somehow awakened the exact same cloning skill. Had no clue why the big one wasn’t using it on itself though.
Pride, maybe. Wyverns were related to dragons, even if only distantly.
I managed to nick one of the wyvern's on accident, Soar tearing into its side as I moved past. I'd thought it was an illusion, and the impact sent me wobbling. Still, considering the wobble was all I had to deal with, the wyvern had clearly had the worst of the impact, since it was struggling to stay aloft.
Wasn’t proud that my best hit on them had been an accident.
Trying to do better, I got so caught up in trying to down a wyvern on purpose that when the illusions suddenly disappeared, I jerked to the side in surprise. It had taken less than a minute to make the illusions vanish.
The awakened wyvern had vanished too. Calbern was still standing on its back, attacking seemingly empty air, drawing forth blood and viscera with every strike, ruining the effect somewhat.
When it turned towards the ocean, I almost yelled at Calbern to jump clear. While keeping it from attacking us had been our primary objective, the whole reason we'd brought Fang was so that we could bring its body back with us.
Also, I didn’t want Inertia to have to attempt to fish him out of the coastal waters.
Calbern seemed to have similar thoughts as he undid the rope keeping him secured to the back, wrapping it around his wrist. Then he used it as a brace as he jumped forward, stabbing across the rough area that should’ve been its head. Another roar shook the skies, causing Soar to tremble.
At the sound, the three uninjured wyverns turned and fled. Only the one I'd nicked with my wing stayed. While Calbern and Inertia continued their fight, I led it back towards Fang. Then I led it past. If it was going to follow me, I might as well let it do the work of getting it back to where it could be harvested easy.
We were nearly to Verdant Point by the time the wyvern seemed to calm itself, about to turn away. Which forced me to zap it with a minimal strength Lightning Bolt.
It roared in outrage, barely singed by the weakened spell. I lured it closer to the settlement, flying low over the broken rocky terrain. Then I blasted it with a weakened bolt, provoking it into diving at me.
As it dove, I pulled up and hit it with a full strength Lightning Bolt. To my surprise, its tough hide stood up to the spell, leaving it only lightly singed. Its body did lock up though, which was enough to doom it. It crashed into the rocky ground above Verdant Point with a pained roar, smacking, bouncing and twisting in ways that weren’t normal for any four limbed creature.
Unable to even lift its head, it only took me a minute to finish it off. The mangled body left me unhappy. I hadn't wanted to put it through so much suffering.
Once I passed word to the nearby Tethered sentries, who'd spotted me getting chased down, I took off back towards where I'd left the others.
By the time I got back, Calbern was once more driving Fang, this time, higher up the mountain. Inertia was perched atop a still invisible mound, a single foot on what I was assuming was the awakened wyvern’s throat.
"It has submitted, master Perth," Calbern said as I landed nearby.
"Inertia keeps growing her collection," I said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Good work."
"Just so," Calbern agreed, tugging at the rope wrapped around its limbs. "Though I fear she will not get to keep this one. An excellent catch for such a light hunting trip."
"Weak," Inertia rumbled out, gesturing to the still struggling invisible wyvern.
"Inertia means that its likely too weak to survive much longer," Tresla translated from where she was standing just above where the blood pooled. Blood that seemed to appear from nowhere. "They weren't gentle."
"Yeah, I saw that," I said even as I started unstrapping. "We weren't planning to keep him alive anyway."
Inertia nodded, leaning forward and driving her fist down. A wet squelch let me know she'd found something soft. A second later, blood started gushing out.
"Wonder if we should put that in buckets," I said as I watched the fluid coat the cliff below us.
Inertia tilted her head, looking from me down to the flowing blood, before slowly nodding her head.
I pulled the sole bucket Grivis had left in the pendant, placing it under the flow. I wouldn't risk putting the full bucket into the pendant. Unlike the ring, it didn't have full stasis. Things could end up spilling. Discovered that with a bowl of soup I'd put inside. It hadn’t exactly made a mess, but I’d been forced to extract the soup and bowl separately, and the soup hadn’t been summoned into the bowl.
Once the bucket was full, I placed it in my ring, though not before I sealed it with a stone lid.
It took several minutes for the wyvern's invisibility to fade. Which likely meant it was dead. The torn open throat reinforced that idea. Only after the blood had slowed did we begin the arduous process of loading it into Fang's trailer. Calbern would be taking a much longer route back. Inertia and I would take turns checking on him, but it would take him roughly three days to get the body back to Verdant Point.
Was no way he could take the shorter route we’d used to get there, not with a fully loaded trailer.
For the night, we camped in the shadow of the highest of the wyvern peaks, far enough away from the body not to have to deal with the worst of the smell, but close enough we could keep scavengers away.
The ocean to the east almost seemed to reach up to the sky as the sun rose the next morning.
"Do you ever wonder what lies beyond the edge, master Perth?" Calbern asked as I joined him.
"More of Ro'an, I'd imagine," I said. "Or the other worlds, maybe."
Calbern shifted his gaze upwards, looking at a star roughly forty-five degrees above the horizon. "I suppose they are, aren't they."
"Is that one of the other worlds?" I asked, squinting at the distant dot.
"Indeed. That is Pel'or, also known as the midnight star," Calbern said, a sort of reverence in his voice. "Sel'ta, the midday star isn't visible right now, but as I understand it, it is also one of the four worlds your vision mentioned."
"Huh. That's… a little weird, don't you think?" I asked, turning away from the bright light of the rising sun.
Calbern arched a single eyebrow in response. "Compared to what, master Perth?"
"I… ha, fair," I said, shaking my head. I barely knew the basics of orbital mechanics from back on Earth. What any kid might've learned in grade school and whatever I'd picked up from Youtube. I'd never been a flat-earther, but my entertainment had been more escapist than educational when the old man had still been around.
When I’d had time for it, anyway.
My gaze shifted west, to Verdant Point, then even further, to the bulk of Mount Aeternia. Even from so far away, with Eagle Eyes, I could see the changes we were making. The ropeways of the Tethered especially stood out.
And they were just the start.
I looked down to the bundled up form of the wyvern. Another bundle of wealth that'd help fund our future.
Then my eyes shifted upward to that distant world. Back on Earth, humans had gone to the moon, with nothing but science and engineering. How high could we go with magic at our backs in addition to rocket fuel.
Maybe Morgath Starforge had the right idea.
Comments
Jason Hardman
TYFTC! I note there's an extraneous word in the following sentence: I detached the rope go before I could get entangled. -> the rope before I could get
