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61. Forged in dragonfire
🕑 Added 2022-07-17 23:46:16 +0000 UTCMy eyes paused at the enormous form of the dead, red dragon. I mentally moved Delta's Infoscope using her tether and scanned the massive creature. There were brilliant currents of magic radiating away from the beast - its scales shimmered with magrad from within.
The creature was a furnace of power... power that I could use to save my friend!
[Help me bring Kliss to the Dragon!] I ordered, fighting the urge to pass out.
[Why?] Delta asked.
[It's full of magical power... power that we can use to help her!] I barked.
[Ah... I see...] Delta mulled.
We grabbed the pale, broken body of Kliss, dragging her towards the dragon and set her against enormous ruby scales. I placed my hand atop Kliss and another on the scales of the unmoving beast.
"What are you trying to do, mortal?" Vovan hissed, wrestling my tether with the divine-thread. "Let go of her soul!"
[Delta, load up the 'Monster to Human Modify-Converter',] I ordered.
[What?! But... okay,] my sister replied, falling silent in understanding.
"You think that you can stop us?! She belongs to Equality!" Vovan growled at me.
[Hold her body,] I ordered.
Delta's spider-silk arms made from a thousand ants working together clamped down on the body of Kliss controlled by Vovan.
The forest around us burned. The thick, black smoke was making it harder to breathe with every passing minute. The rain poured down hard, blurring my vision.
I shifted all of my Mindspace's resources to computing the Converter, slotted it into my skills set and maxed it out as much as I could.
Delta's all-scanning threads pushed deeper into the dragon. Its neck was broken, but there was still an unbelievable amount of mana in its crystalline heart - nearly two million of it. According to the Infoscope, the beast core of the arcane monstrosity was akin to a gargantuan mana battery from which the dragon drew power to cast its firestorm spells... and was still casting a truly abyssal spell on the area and a healing spell on itself!
The dragon didn't simply fire rays of inextinguishable fire, it was also responsible for the broiling thunderstorm that was still hanging above us. The dark, thick clouds likely hid its presence in the sky and allowed the creature to hunt and destroy Imperial magitek skyships. The dragon's core was also slowly healing the beast's broken neck - if we left it alone, in a few hours the leviathan would awaken and return to its hunt.
The [Modify-Converter] I loaded into my skills was a Modify spell created long ago by Delta. She had never gone through with using it because according to her nothing in Skyisle was awesome enough for her liking - she wanted a very powerful monster for her body. Also, the Converter required an absurd amount of mana as it needed computational power to convert everything - bones, organs and flesh from a monster to a human.
The biggest reason why she still didn't go through with it was that Delta loved her Infoscope, spell-body far too much to give it up. If she fully merged with a monster, it would be a lot more difficult for her to scan everything with ease. In magic, just like in real life form was tied with function and Delta's body was a spell the function of which was identifying the world with incredible precision.
It was the reason why she had stuck to using the ant-operated, silk-bound, armor-plated construct.
When the Converter maxed out its level, the first thing I did was modify Kliss' soul, fusing, merging it to the monstrous soul that was pulsating inside of the dragon's body.
A million mana vanished in an instant, pulled from the crystalline-organic core of the red dragon. The divine, gold thread that was choking my friends soul and pulling her away into the darkness of the void of the Astral Ocean let go of Kliss.
I pulled all of the stats away from Delta through my absolute tether to her, leaving her with zero points. Time slowed to a crawl my mind accelerated and I dove into the Mindspace. The soul of the dragon was powerful and ancient, but I hacked away at it with Soul-Devourer, modified it, converted it into power and purpose.
I had no regrets in tearing apart the monster's soul - an abomination like that Dragon that had turned people on the skyship into charred bones did not deserve to live.
It took hours from my perception, but a mere second had passed on the outside as Kliss' soul fused to the soul of the dragon, becoming something completely new and beautiful.
With a primal scream of terror, Vovan fell silent forever.
Just like the Vow that was hanging on Delta, it could no longer recognize Kliss as a human, could no longer wrap itself around her soul. Same thing had happened to Frenny - her construct already disrupted and silenced by the necklace turned gray and perished forever, gold color leaking away from it.
I knew that the Vows had been powered by the human souls that they were on.
The three vows on me vibrated angrily, but I ignored them. They belonged to me, they were my three little puppies that I had been training and carefully modifying for eleven months using Ivan Pavlov's conditioning techniques. I fed them power and silenced them with the Vow breaker when they disobeyed me. The three Vows were still mindless, but they had a small degree of consciousness, likely copied from whatever the Omniscience was. Alien Astral Ocean consciousness that I was guiding towards a new future - towards them obeying me and not the other way around.
Another million mana burned away as I destroyed the dragon's excess mass, compressing and relocating everything was useful. My hands pushed the half-body of Kliss deeper into the corpse of the Dragon, fusing the architecture of the human into that of a monster - creating completely new life. The crystalline-organic core of the beast moved into the chest of my new construct.
"You're welcome," Delta commented from beside me. She was guiding the flesh-converter, assisting my progress. "Without me working on this amazing spell for a decade, Kliss would totally be dead now, you know. She better be thankful when she wakes up. If... she is even Kliss. Not sure what the dragon-soul-merger will do to her perception of self..."
I ignored her snidely commentary, preoccupied with my work. Her Infoscope fractal superstructure had now fully relocated from the ant-operated body and was inside of the chimera body myriads of scanning threads observing every cell, every atom of our new creation, functioning as my omnipresent eyes.
The dragon's bones formed a new human figure.
Delta's converter was set to make the resulting human the same age as me - thirteen.
The corpse of the dragon melted from within, deflating. I now knew why the Empire prized these beasts so much - their flesh was absolutely packed with magic. The scales of the dragon were truly unique, they collected magic from the environment to grow more of themselves rather quickly. Each red dragon-scale was an incredibly unique crystalline-organic structure that was soft and hard at the same time!
I reshaped all of the dragon's organs, made them smaller to fit into a human frame.
I converted the crystalline-organic scales of the dragon, fused them into Kliss' new hair, burning the excess to power the Converter. A bit of the darker scales went to replicate her freckles. I forged even even smaller microscopic crystalline-organic structures all over her skin, giving it a very distinctive orange-red tint.
The dragon's eyes became the gold-tinted eyes of the girl in front of me. I weaved the magic-seeing spell and parts of the Infoscope into them, so that she could see the currents of magic.
For my final touch, I adjusted the soul, added defenses to it against Vows. Even if someone forced Kliss to declare a Vow, it would not be able to tie itself to her - she would be free of divine influence! I also made her soul's threads more malleable, rearranging them to work far better with the System and omnicode, integrating parts of Modify into it. The new soul I was forming would not be that of a human - it would have no limitations of skills.
Kliss' System access would be truly unique, limitless. With enough practice she would able to reshape soul-threads into whatever she wanted, making her own stats!
The System confirmed my effort with a new window and a congratulatory musical Tu-du.
[Life-forger stat gained for creating a completely new species - the Chimera!]
I wanted to do more, wanted to make Kliss invincible, indestructible - wanted to coat her entire exterior in crystalline-organic scales. Alas, the dragon's old body had completely ran out of mana, leaving a discolored, completely empty husk.
I glanced at my own stats and saw that my own mana had dropped to zero.
"Delta!" I yelped.
"On it," my sister cut the connection between us.
The Mindspace flickered and dimmed, falling apart as my body shut down, completely drained of magic.
___________________________________________
[Kliss Eliza Cessna]
I awoke to pain. PAIN.
My entire body felt wrong, mangled, twisted up. I tried to move and discovered that I couldn't. My arms and legs felt like they weighted a thousand Imperial magisteel bars. I couldn't even open my eyelids - they were too heavy to move. A bewildering, bright blue window flickered in my view, woven from minute white sparks.
I recognized the Soul-Song. Except it wasn't a song. It was... visual, perplexing and... absolutely nonsensical.
None of my stats made any sense. What in Equality's name was a Chimera Stripling?
Why were all of my stats at zero? Where in the Astral Ocean did my Soul stat go?!
What happened to my skills? Where did my two Vows to Equality go?!
"Jeez, you weigh a ton," A feminine voice boomed from somewhere nearby, nearly deafening me. "I'd recommend losing some weight, but then again your bones are exceptionally dense now.”
"HDfmmmfn," I tried to reply. I could barely move my tongue. It felt too small and unresponsive like the rest of me.
"Tongue-tied eh?" The girl asked, her voice far too loud.
"Fjfmmncc?!" I mumbled.
"It'll pass once your core gets more mana into it," the voice added.
"Wfho rrrr uuuu?" I was able to slowly, painfully form something akin to words.
Something pulled one of my eyelids back. I let out a wail. There was too much detail in view, too much light, too many colors were competing for attention. My mind refused, failed to process what I was seeing.
"I am Delta. You two idiots are VERY lucky to have me," the blurry figure commented. "Very lucky indeed. Burning to death wouldn't be fun at all."
"Whrrr mmmm aiii?" I croaked.
"You're in Skyisle, Kliss. I carried you and Dante from the firestorm, since he ran out of mana like an idiot trying to add too many things to you from the Dragon."
"Shhhkiiiilleee?" I mumbled. "Whrs drwnngon?"
"You're the dragon now," Delta said.
"Imm ree Drwwagnn???!" I ground out.
"Yep," Delta replied. "Congratulations!"
"Pfffff...Wzzzatttt?!" I gasped, sputtering.
"The Skyship you were on was attacked by a dragon," Delta said. "You died when the ship crash-landed into the side of a mountain."
"I dghhhdd?!"
"Yep," Delta. "Totally dead. Toast. A magisteel beam took your legs right off."
I choked. Not having legs was going to suck. I had spent most of my parents' estate funds on buying land and barely had enough money for a ticket back to Skyisle. Buying new magitek legs was going to be…
"Don't whine," Delta added. "Dante made you new legs. New everything, really. He used a spell I've been working on for myself on you."
Dante made me a new body?!
"I really wish you just stayed in Cessna, Kliss," Delta's tone became laced with ice. "You're undoubtedly going to be… a big problem."
