Amazon Apocalypse 7: Chapter 22

As an Apocalypse Dragon, the void was like a second home to me. My blood pulsed within me, and my core grew warm. There was no air to breathe in the void, but my chest was moving with the gentle thrum of otherworldly energies.

I realized I was instinctively drawing in energy from the Kindling Dimension and siphoning it into myself. While not as good as eating, this natural respiration would add to reserves. Powerful dragon organs transformed the energy of the Kindling Dimension directly into mass and energy.

This process on its own was enough to heal my wounds and sustain my body, despite my size. It would be years before I had to land on a planet for a lungful of air or a sip of water. As long as I stumbled across the occasional void monster, I could spend centuries in space and only grow stronger for it.

A dragon like me would level naturally with time as I cycled energy through my body. Even the weakest dragon bloodlines would grow into monstrous titans given long enough to grow, and my draconic bloodline was as strong as they came.

Where had dragons come from? The core inside me bore a resemblance to the unique organ inside the Architects, who were the original humanoid species. Perhaps both our peoples spawned like monsters long ago.

My wings were spread at my sides, catching light and mana in the void like sails. My flight through the void was embarrassingly clumsy at first. I would have spent more time perfecting space travel, but I knew Adrian was ahead of me and could waste no time. The first tenth of my trip was slow as I accelerated, but as my speed increased so too did the amount of space I could skip over using Shadowrealm Stride.

Pretty soon I was worlds away, far from Glacia and even System space. I sensed several worlds with life on them in my travels, but the scent of life was never strong and not worth slowing down and delaying my trip. I suspected they were scantly inhabited worlds with bacteria, beasts, or other lesser creatures with no sign of intelligent life or prey with enough levels to be worth hunting. They were watering holes in the great desert that was empty space, nothing more.

The trail I was following grew stronger, and in my haste and inexperience, I underestimated how long it would take to slow down when flying faster than the speed of light. My wings spread wide as I slowed down, missing the planet I was looking for and looping around the nearby sun and several gas giants to return at a reasonable speed.

As I circled the planet, I studied it with vision hawks would envy. I could make out the people of this world even from where I flew. The people here reminded me of the cultivators of the Black Beast Sect and that world I'd gone to while going to meet Jade for tea. The most prominent of these cultivators wore the robes of the Pale Moonlight sect. There were lots of smaller groups, which were likely vassal sects.

The trail I'd been following ended at one of the larger Pale Moonlight sect compounds. That must have been where they were keeping Adrian.

With my destination identified, I picked a landing spot and entered the atmosphere. The flow of mana through my wings shifted for atmospheric use instead of spatial use.

My approach didn't go unnoticed. Several hundred cultivators reacted all at once, most of them B-Grade, but I sensed at least two low A-Grades, one who looked like the Pale Moonlight Scholar and another that looked like the Pale Moonlight Enforcer.

Pale Moonlight Scholar (Level 523)

Pale Moonlight Enforcer (Level 545)

I'd slain one of each already, so I didn't fear two more, even if they were backed by a few dozen B-Grades.

Still, fighting two at once would be annoying. Luckily I could summon a friend. I drew a circle with the tip of one of my wings and Lightsculptor's Brush. A huge summoning circle formed in the sky, and I poured an enormous amount of mana into it.

Sharky emerged bigger than ever, though he was still a bit smaller than I was in this form.

"Nom nom." Sharky glanced at me with a beady eye, seeming confused and uncertain for a moment. The small gestures seemed to carry much more meaning for me now than they usually did, since we were speaking one predator to another.

"Nom nom," I replied, grinning toothily at him and replied in like manner.

The two of us descended like hungry gods, me for the Enforcer and him for the Scholar.

As we drew nearer, the faces of the high-leveled cultivators fell.

"A heavenly calamity has descended upon us!"

"Those are terrifying beasts of legend! Gather up your clans and flee. This place is done for."

"Curses and damnation. It was that thing the elders brought back that lured them here. Couldn't they have taken their special prisoner to any other world?"

I roared in rising anger. The fury of a dragon was a great and terrible thing. I felt my sense of self grow more distant, but my body grew more powerful as the anger turned to physical and magical might. Without even intending to, I'd utilized Mania to enhance my Sage of Forbidden Knowledge abilities.

Then we engaged in battle, if it could even be called as much. I had been a match for the Chaos Wolf and the Pale Moonlight Sect Enforcer at the same time when I had been in my human form. Now that I was a dragon, the bleeding, eyeless woman before me was no match at all for me.

She launched a wave of projectiles at me, each shining with pale moonlight. A wave of my wings knocked them aside, and any further defenses were unnecessary. Then I breathed flame on her. She shielded herself with a pale moonlight barrier, but my breath would not be so easily contained.

Eventually, her defenses failed, and by then it was already too late for her to escape. Flames consumed her and the space around her. I turned to help Sharky, only to find him toying with his prey. The Pale Moonlight Scholar was summoning void monsters, but they just ended up being more snacks for him.

I let him toy with the Pale Moonlight Scholar while I followed the trail I'd been chasing across the stars. Adrian was deep in the heart of the Pale Moonlight Sect compound.

Ancient wards tried to stop my way, but with a roar I unleashed a Void Cannon, shattering them and a good portion of the stonework. A few B-Grades attacked me only to be consumed in flame. The smarter ones turned tail and fled as I smashed my way into their sect.

I tore the roof off a building as I reached the end of my hunt, but what I saw there stirred something deeper than mere fury.

Sitting on a table were pieces of desecrated flesh. The face and body lay separated and were those of a large man. I'd never seen him alive and in the flesh, but the corpse was one I recognized. It was the corpse that held the ancient remnants of the A-Grade soul Adrian was supposed to inherit. And here the Pale Moonlight Sect was chopping it up like some looted monster.

I didn't see Adrian's body anywhere, but if this had been stolen from him, he was almost certainly dead, both in body and soul. There was no way I knew of to separate him from this corpse without tearing his young soul to shreds in the process.

If he was lucky, he'd have died in a single blow from one of the A-Grades Sharky and I had been fighting. If he was unlucky, they'd brought him here to extract the corpse more carefully.

The emotions roiled through me as fast as I could track them. I experienced the joy I'd felt when I held him for the first time. Then, the pride I felt as he took his first steps and wielded that beetle of his to best all the older kids. I remembered how he'd snuck into Myrina's room to play with her swords, and his love of chocolate pudding. He was my son, and while I might someday have others, none could ever take his place.

My roar of lamentation shook the planet. Then all emotions besides fury became fuel for a deep-seated and boundless wrath.

Before, I'd thought the anger of a dragon was a terrible and fearsome thing, but I hadn't known the half of it. I had been far too merciful with my arrival. The Pale Moonlight Enforcer I'd killed had died more gently than she deserved.

My son was dead. This world would serve as his tombstone, and every member of the Pale Moonlight Sect could lament his death alongside me as they went to join him.

My second roar shook the world again, and my fearsome hatred shattered the sky. Birds fell midflight as their hearts gave out. Fish in the rivers went glassy-eyed and sank to the sand below. Mortals felt their souls ripped from their bodies and cast into the afterlife.

The cultivators survived, but only so I could hunt them down myself. Their deaths would be far more complete. In my anger, I felt the last human parts of me pass into dreamless sleep.

***

When I awoke and came to my senses, I was on a ruined world once more.

The atmosphere had boiled away, and the ground was barren. Only Sharky's void spawn prowled the land in search of survivors. Soon, they'd turn on one another. When the last of them finally died, perhaps life would return to this planet, but until then there would only be death.

Unlike before, I was still in dragon form. I still had that Potion of Absolution, as well as the Humanoid Transformation Technique Jade taught me. I could use either to try to turn myself human again, but why bother? Wasn't being a dragon better?

I looked at the stars and realized I wasn't on the same world that I started my rampage on. My wrath must have carried me across the stars in search of more Pale Moonlight Sect worlds.

At this point, only Sharky knew how many people I'd devoured and how many worlds the two of us had consumed together. I vaguely recalled the desire to turn each barren and broken wasteland into a memorial for my son, but now they felt like hollow and empty victories.

The Pale Moonlight Sect was a large organization, and they'd sealed their trail to me. I couldn't track them the way I'd searched for Adrian. All I could do was lurk here and wait for them to show themselves again, and the dragon portion of me wanted to do just that.

If I followed my new instincts, I'd nurse this hatred for ten thousand years until either I or every member of the Pale Moonlight Sect was dead.

But I wasn't just a dragon. The what human part of me remained reigned those instincts in. My son was dead, and even if I destroyed the galaxy it would do him or his memory no good.

But at the same time, I wasn't interested in returning home to Bridget empty handed. I wasn't sure I could face her at all, and certainly not now. My head was still full of heavy thoughts. How could I console her when I couldn't even console myself?

I lurched to my feet and flew skyward once again in the hopes that I could clear my mind. As I did so, I sensed the other thing I'd felt drawn to besides my son. Whatever was calling me was close.

I flew lazily this time. Sharky wanted to stop at a few more worlds and continue our rampage, but I wasn't in the mood for such things anymore. I was afraid I'd been a bit of a bad influence on him while I was an angry dragon. Ravaging entire worlds wasn't something I wanted to do too often.

We entered an ancient and abandoned solar system, though the mark of the Architects' presence was obvious. There was only one world in the System, with no planets or asteroids bigger than a minor moon. They'd likely all been strip mined to create the enormous world in the center of the system.

And what a world it was. Not a planet, but a ringworld that wrapped around a dwarf sun.

It looked dim, and from a distance I hadn't even known there was a world at all. The top and bottom of the star were so shrouded with solar collection systems that the star emanated no light and would be undetectable from a distance. Perhaps that was why some other faction hadn't already discovered it long ago and cleaned it out of anything valuable.

Unfortunately, the pull of fate I'd been looking for had grown weaker, and all I could tell was that it had been present on this world recently. I could only hope that it would show itself again.

So Sharky and I explored. The surface of this ringworld had been claimed entirely by monsters, and had been that way for thousands of years. The great war that sent all remaining Architect civilizations back to the dark ages must have also done the same to this place.

Dark age peasants would have been incapable of running a ringworld, and the void had claimed the place for a few centuries until whatever calamity that happened was eventually resolved and the ringworld's self-repair mechanisms kicked in. But any attempts to recreate an ecology would have been short lived as soon as the monsters started spawning.

I circled the ringworld and enjoyed flying along its inner surface. There was something nice about seeing endless expanses of land rolling past beneath me. For a while I'd been counting continents, but gave up after reaching ten thousand. The interior of this ringworld had a surface area a million times that of Earth. Perhaps several million, though I hadn't gotten a dragon's eye view of Earth before the integration and couldn't say for sure.

Sharky and I landed occasionally, sniffed out an A-Grade monster or beast worth hunting, then chased it down and ate it. I was gaining levels as rapidly as I had earlier in the integration, both thanks to the worlds I wiped out and thanks to my hunts with Sharky.

Congratulations, your race, Apocalypse Dragon, has reached level 632!

It seemed like I'd spent so long as a peak B-Grade, only to rocket right past the early A-Grade levels. I was now firmly in the middle A-Grade, though I wasn't sure if my levels would carry over to Homo Fatum Deus or Sage of Forbidden Knowledge. Since becoming an Apocalypse Dragon, I'd only gotten levels in that.

Our explorations and hunts took us through several ancient ruins that would have been fascinating if I were still human, but as a dragon I was more interested in exploring, feasting, and fighting. Building things just didn't have the same appeal as before, though I was certain I could do it if I put my mind to it.

All in all, this ringworld was a fine place to be. If I decided to stay a dragon for good, it would be a nice place to call home. The hunting grounds were huge and endless, and I could explore this place for a thousand years and still not have flown over every valley and cave.

Smaller and weaker worlds could only support a single A-Grade beast like myself, and even larger and more powerful ones would never have more than a half dozen or so. But a world like this one could have thousands, and their hunting grounds would be so far apart they'd never even notice their neighbors.

Some time passed as I got a better grip on my thoughts and my dragon instincts. It was hard to count the days when we traveled so much. The day and night cycle wasn't exactly standard on this ringworld either.

Sharky might not be talkative, but I was thankful he was there. He helped me come to terms with my son's death and what happened with just a few wise words. Well, one wise word that he repeated a lot.

"Nom nom," Sharky said sagely.

"Nom nom," I repeated, reaffirming his earlier advice to be strong in the face of adversity and work through my problems one step at a time.

It was then that I could sense the thing that drew me to this world tugging on me again. It was close.

I turned to investigate, and Sharky followed.

In the distance, a group of medieval knights were fighting low-ranking monsters. In the lead was a woman in impressive armor. It looked like it had once been as shiny as polished silver, but had since dulled with constant scratches from battle and repairs from lesser craftsmen.

The crown over the outside of her helmet was a clear sign of royalty, as was the banner she had planted in the ground nearby.

Her presence was strange. I'd already searched for signs of sapient civilization and found nothing. Where had she come from? It was possible there was a hidden humanoid civilization in the forest or underground, but steel armor didn't spring out of the ground. It took mines, charcoal, forges, and smiths. I had a keen nose for smoke and would have sniffed even primitive signs of industry long ago.

I hovered in the air from afar and watched her from above, trying to figure out why I was so keenly interested in this woman in particular.

I hadn't tried kidnapping a princess yet. It was probably something along those lines. I figured I might as well give the hobby a try and see if it was as much fun as it was cracked up to be.

Then, the woman removed her helmet, and I realized why I'd been so drawn to her.

I knew that face.

<Note>

Carter had a lengthy adventure with Sharky that spanned several months. Alas, Sharky isn't the most talkative traveling companion, so I had to compress it down to half a chapter. Besides, adventures tend to be rather simple when it's a pair of mythical apocalypse beasts flying around eating everything.

Don't worry, we'll get back to human Carter content soon. Also, Carter's dragon brain must have completely forgotten about the integration, which is still ongoing back home. Fortunately, human Carter built a sturdy political system that can mostly take care of itself.

Anyway, now that I've finally hit a non-cliffhanger chapter at the end of my outlined content, this is where I want to stop for a bit.

I've got to get some editing done and then get some hardcore outlining done for the next book. I know the wait is annoying, but I do think the story overall benefits from extra time to plan between major arcs. If the planning and editing phase lasts longer than a month I'll pause patreon subs, but I don't think it'll take that long. (And I hope to release a few shorts to tide you guys over for a bit. Suggestions are welcome.)

I know this isn't the end of the book, but since it was planned to be I just want to thank everyone for reading!