Path of Dragons 13 - Chapter 81 - Frustration

“What do you expect me to say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why did you even tell me?”

“I…I thought you deserved honesty.”

Elijah sighed and shook his head.  “I wish you would’ve just lied.”

“Elijah, I –”

“It’s fine.  I mean, it’s not.  You probably just ensured I’ll never get home.  Or that it’ll take another hundred years.  But I get it.  You picked the option you thought suited you and your situation best.  That it kind of screwed me isn’t relevant,” Elijah rationalized. 

Still, in the back of his mind, he wanted nothing more than to strangle Benedict right then and there.  He hated that he felt that way, but the facts were the facts.  The Dimensionalist option represented a real opportunity to get back to Earth, and he’d turned away without a second thought. 

Of course, if Elijah had looked deeper than surface-level, he would have understood Benedict’s choice even better.  After all, the man had a family to protect.  And what’s more, he’d built a life on Gorveth.  There was nothing waiting for him back on Earth.  Or nothing good, at least.  So, of course he’d choose the other option.

That didn’t make that pill any easier to swallow, though.  Not for Elijah, which was why he’d have preferred a lie.

Even so, there was a chance that Benedict’s chosen class could offer some means of escaping the excised planet.  A slim chance.  But even that was better than they’d had before he’d taken the evolution.

“I’m happy for you,” he said, reaching out to grip his friend’s shoulder.  Benedict flinched at his touch.  “Really.  This is a big deal.  We should have a party or something.”

“I don’t like parties.”

“Right.  Yeah.  Of course you don’t,” Elijah said, looking around at Druhmor.  He’d been so focused on expanding the rings that he’d neglected his clay statues of late.  As a result, vines had snaked around them, and weeds had grown at their feet.  “We should still do something.”

“It’s fine.  I know I let you down.  You don’t need to pretend otherwise for my sake.”

Elijah opened his mouth to argue, but he thought better of it.  Instead, he just said, “Well, congratulations, then.  I’m going to get back to work.”

With that, he leaped, then used Cloud Step to gain altitude before taking on the Shape of the Sky.  In seconds, he was whistling across Druhmor just beneath Treebie’s canopy.  It didn’t take him long to pass the first set of rings, but he didn’t stop there.  Instead, he kept going until he reached the edge of the continent, where he used Lightning Rush. 

As a bolt of electricity, he blistered across the sky, smashing through waves along the way.  The ability only lasted a few seconds, but in that time, he covered more than a thousand miles. 

It wasn’t enough, though.

Not to reach his eventual destination.

So, he kept going until he’d passed the latest ring.  Then, he dove, transforming into the Shape of the Sea just as he hit the ocean.  He cut through the corrupted water, ready to take out his frustrations. 

Fortunately, the latest terraforming boundary, marked by his underwater trilithons, acted as a beacon for monsters.  They’d come from thousands of miles away, converging in an attempt to tear apart the miracle he’d created. 

Elijah slammed into a giant monster of tentacles and too-many limbs, tearing into it with his beak-like mouth.  The taste of corruption and seawater filled his mouth – a vile concoction that he could barely stomach.  Yet, he’d grown accustomed to it over the years, so he had no trouble forcing himself to ignore the acrid combination. 

The creature fought back, wrapping him in rubbery tentacles, but Elijah’s body – especially in the Shape of the Sea – was far too durable to give in to such a force.  He ripped free, tearing the tendrils away from its bulbous body in a shower of black blood.  The creature screeched, the sound carrying through the water and echoing to every monster in the vicinity.

It was like a dinner bell.

Though in this case, the supper was well-equipped to fight back.

Elijah lost himself in the ongoing battle.  Every time he killed one monster, another took its place.  He was aware enough to know what he was doing.  He also recognized just how unhealthy it was to work through his frustrations by going on a quest of mass slaughter.  It was fine on Gorveth, where there existed plenty of enemies he could kill without an ounce of guilt.  But elsewhere?  That just wouldn’t be the case.

Even Primal Realms weren’t up to fueling his coping method.

Rather than dial it back and try to regulate the slaughter, Elijah dove deeper.  He rationalized it by telling himself that he should take advantage while it lasted, but he knew that was just an excuse.  After all, he’d already started to see diminishing returns, which cut the amount of experience he received for each kill down to almost nothing.

But even those small surges of progression tended to add up over time.

Like that, weeks passed.  Then months.  All the while, Elijah continued to fight.  To kill.  He gave himself to it fully, sinking ever deeper into the animalistic state he associated with his bestial side.

And he didn’t resurface – proverbially – until he plunged too deep and found himself facing a truly monumental opponent.  The creature was the size of a professional football stadium, with tentacles that stretched for miles all around.  Those tendrils were, in turn, lined with so many hooks and eyes that Elijah knew that trying to count them would be a useless endeavor.

The thing lay half-buried in the silt at the deepest part of the Restless Sea, and it pulsed with so much hungering ethera that Elijah had no trouble calling it a late-stage demi-god.  Perhaps it had even crossed the line into becoming a true deity, but he suspected that his previous assertions as to power scaling were wholly inaccurate. 

If the leap from deity to demi-god was anything like what he’d recently experienced, then there was no way he could fight a true deity.

Not yet.

But the fact remained that the monster was far stronger than him. 

Still, that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to fight it. 

As it turned out, that was a mistake.  Not because it beat him to a pulp or killed him.  It didn’t.  But the battle reminded Elijah of when he’d fought the flesh tree.  No matter what he did, the thing simply wouldn’t die.  He flooded it with afflictions.  He used Herald of Regrowth to boost his attributes in Shape of Embers.  He even burned it with Flames of Renewal.

In every case, the creature just kept coming for him.

The only solace came from the fact that the thing seemed equally incapable of killing him.  With his advances in cultivation combined with his high regeneration and healing spells, he was a cockroach that simply wouldn’t die.  By comparison, the monster was like a tumor that kept regrowing.

It was more than a month before Elijah realized that he was fighting a losing battle.  Another week passed before his frustrations began to peter out.  And ten days after that, he decided to flee.

Doing so was trickier than he expected, but he managed it through a combination of Savage Strength, surging Heart of the Tempest, and, once he broke through the waves and shifted into the shape of the Sky, Lightning Rush.  Even then, the creature’s miles-long tendrils pursued, not stopping until Elijah crossed the outer ring of trilithons. 

Elijah didn’t relax until he was back on land.

After shifting into his human form, he sat on the cliff overlooking the Restless Sea.  Dangling his legs over the edge, he watched the mountainous waves.  The atmosphere was humid and clammy, reminding him of the home that seemed so far away.  So many memories of mornings spent with his family, with his friends. 

He missed his grove.

He missed his people. 

And he missed Earth.

He remained in place for hours, with salt of the sea, corruption, and monster blood still clinging to him.  His clothes had once again been destroyed, so he remained entirely naked.  But there was no one around to remark on it.  No one to notice his lack of modesty. 

When he finally decided to stand, he did so anticlimactically.  No dramatic sighs.  No declarations that things would change.  He just pushed himself to his feet and began his trek inland.  He didn’t stop until he’d left the mist behind.

That was when he took a long and cold shower, scrubbing himself with a rough stone and plenty of low-quality soap he’d gotten in M’yakein.  It was another reminder of what he’d left behind on Earth. 

“What I wouldn’t give for a hot shower and good soap,” he muttered bitterly to himself before pulling his tent out of his Arcane Loop.  He ducked inside, immediately grateful for the cozy confines of what had become his home.

Idly, he realized that he’d spent more nights in that tent than he had in his treehouse within the Hartwood Grove.  He’d lived there longer than he had lived in his apartment in Honolulu.  Or any place other than his childhood home.

“That really is a depressing thought,” he said to no one.

Elijah was well aware that a cure to his loneliness lay only a few hours away.  He could head to M’yakein and slowly integrate into that society.  Over time, they would grow accustomed to him, and they would start to treat him like everyone else.

But that wasn’t what he wanted.

Not really.  Because his loneliness wasn’t truly rooted in solitude, though that was a component. Instead, he wanted very specific companionship.  He wanted his friends and family.  He wanted his home.  He wanted his planet. 

Yet, those things seemed so far away that he’d begun to suspect that he’d never see any of them ever again. 

For years, he’d convinced himself otherwise.  And during those months when depression had begun to set in, he’d focused on the various tasks surrounding his efforts to terraform Gorveth.  Yet, he’d never really escaped it.

And no matter how many leaves he discarded and regrew, the feelings never really went away.  Largely because the source hadn’t changed.

“Maybe I really do need therapy,” he said to the tent’s interior.

As he lay back on his bed of pillows and wrapped himself in warm blankets, Elijah finally let himself acknowledge his gains.  Despite not killing the most powerful monster, he’d slaughtered thousands of other creatures.  And even with diminishing returns, the gains were impressive.  Added to that was the constant trickle of experience from Treebie’s growth and the ongoing efforts to terraform Gorveth, and he’d pushed himself to level two-seventy-three. 

An impressive pace, all things considered, but the fact that he didn’t get a spell evolution at level two-seventy was more than a little disappointing.

For a while, Elijah lay there just staring at the inside of the tent’s roof.  It rippled slightly in the wind – further proof that he was on the right track with Gorveth’s development.  Once, it would’ve felt like a hurricane outside.  Now, with all the vegetation to cut the wind, the breeze was much less aggressive.

If he kept going along his established path, maintaining the pace of terraforming without interruption, he suspected it would be another century before he and Treebie managed to cover the entire planet.  But at no point had he thought that would be the end of his labor. 

Would the creatures of the abyss allow a cleansed planet to exist?  Or would they fall upon it with the same fervor as the world’s monsters?

Elijah didn’t know.

But as had been the case from the very first breath he’d taken after being stranded on the planet, he knew he had no choice but to keep going, to keep fighting.  Would he ever reach his goals? 

He didn’t know the answer to that question, either.

However, he knew he’d never be able to simply lie down and quit.  There would be speed bumps along the way.  Slight hiccups where his resolve wavered.  But he would always get back up.  He would always take that next step. 

He would never give up.

With that resolution in mind, he fell into a deep slumber.  Not a restful one, but rather, one of satisfaction.  Because he knew that no matter how far he fell, he would always keep climbing.  There was comfort in that surety, and it saw him through to pleasant dreams.