Tyrants of Earth - The Legend of Artigan

The Dwarven Tyrant hated his title, you didn’t hear anyone call Paul the Orcken Tyrant. It turned out that changing the way people called you was more difficult than he first thought. He needed to do something big. Something that would cause enough of a fuss so that even Lihua’s fight would be overshadowed.

“Now after today you will call me the Smith Tyrant okay?” he paused, “no wait Smith is too common of a last name, call me Forgelord Tyrant? No wait, lord and Tyrant, nono. Hmm I remember being called Smithing Tyrant. Why didn’t that catch on?”

“I believe that was because you told them you wanted to be called the Forgeking Tyrant a few days later.”

“Forgeking Tyrant? No that can’t have been it,” he shook his head, “it must have been Lihua spreading rumors. She still doesn’t like what happened to her bigger fanclub.”

He was debating with his [Enchanter] aide in front of his customers. Three nervous dragonslayers sat in front of him eying each other and pretending they were just here for business.

“Well? Forge Tyrant after today? Okay?”

They looked up at him, “yes sir, and about the commission’s payment, the Coryx hide is here.”

“Good, good.”

The goods were swapped for an Epic grade sword, fit for a dragonslayer. The [Dragonslayer Knight] marveled at the blade in his hands.

Then he thrust forward at the Tyrant’s chest.

The two at his side stood up as the [Dragonslayer Mage] casted a variant of [Dragonfire] and the [Darksky Stalker] threw thirty knives that portaled immediately in his face.

Bad customers.

The Dwarven Tyrant simply sat there as his own enchanted gear blocked all the point things. The dragonfire merely licked away at him.

“You’re using fire. Against me?!” Follow current ɴᴏᴠᴇʟs on Nove1Fire.net

Stupid crazy kids. But that wasn’t what he was concerned about. He eyed his [Enchanter] aide. The man had been conveniently left out of the volley of attacks, their eyes met and the aide rolled his eyes. He raised his hands and the chamber lit up with magic.

The dragonfire reversed on the [Mage], the portals dissipated and the walls started firing on the dragonslayers.

The dragonslayers yelped in shock as they looked accusatory at the [Enchanter], “you promised you’d help us! You traitor!”

The three knew better than to fight in a chamber that an [Enchanter] had helped build, they fled down the tunnels at blinding speeds.

“Should I close off the gates?” Fykar asked.

“Nah, it’s time anyway. There’s forty dragonslayers outside right?”

“I believe the Witch Tyrant said there’s forty-eight.”

“Eh, good enough, fifty dragonslayers is pretty good,” the Dwarven Tyrant looked at his aide, “you weren’t tempted at all? You might have earned yourself a Legend you know.”

“Perhaps…”

They hadn’t worked together as long as most of his other friends. If Fykar, his dragonslayer [Enchanter] had tried to help them there was a pretty good chance he’d be dead. The dragonslayers outside weren’t wrong to focus him, he was indeed the weakest of all the Tyrants.

If the fifty dragonslayers had slain him and had the help of Fykar then they could have used his home as a base against the Tyrants.

It might have worked… if they had a Legend or two of their own.

“Perhaps I was tempted,” his aide smiled at him, “but I would not miss this for the world.”

The Dwarven Tyrant nodded.

“Aye. Let’s earn ourselves a Legend.”

–

The three fleeing dragonslayers rushed out of the mountainside and towards the waiting line of hidden dragonslayers. There were squads waiting in every exit of the mountain. Fifty one dragonslayers in total now.

Even more than for the Witch Tyrant. After all, the Dwarven Tyrant didn’t stop you from healing and could curse you from another world. Every team that had a [Healer] class had come for the assault. It would be safer, but more importantly?

The Dwarven Tyrant was filthy rich.

“Assassination failed?” He asked, he was still wearing a mask and was leading the assault.

“Fucking [Enchanter] betrayed us. We weren’t fighting both of them in a deathtrap.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

The assassination was always a long shot, the Dwarven Tyrant had multiple safety measures in his home.

“Alright, everyone enter from your positions and go slow. Treat it like a Trial and things will go smoothly. A Tyrant’s horde awaits!”

Now that was how you motivated adventurers. They were all used to navigating dungeons and killing bosses at the end. All of them had faced the dragon of the Tenth Trial. How tough could the Dwarven Tyrant be?

All the information indicated that he was, at best, as good as a [Blademaster] in the twelfth realm team. They took up their positions around the mountain entrances.

And that was when the mountain, the largest mountain in all of The Realm started shaking. All the dragonslayers at the base started looking at the entrance to the home of the dwarven Tyrant and dropped their jaws. It was crumbling?

Massive cracks spread from the sides and down to the base.

“Rockfall!” He called out with his aura, “it’s probably a defensive mechanism.”

Collapsing the entrances would be frustrating to deal with but they were dragonslayers. A bit of digging wouldn’t be too bad.

He punched through a boulder that was the size of a house. Pathetic, is hiding and turtling the best plan you’ve got? Dwarven Tyrant?

It would be dangerous if they’d delayed long enough for the other Tyrants to get here. He was about to give the signal to the squads but the shaking didn’t stop, it only got louder. No longer did the cracks look like small fissures, it looked like someone had taken a miles long [Cleave] skill and had used it multiple times on the mountain.

“What the fuck?” Someone called out.

Most of them retreated into the skies and regrouped, watching the mountain continue to crumble. Dragonslayer or not, nobody wanted to be buried under an entire mountain as it crashed around them.

“Is it… rising?”

All fifty dragonslayers watched in shock as the largest mountain in the Realm began to rise.

–

The Dwarven Tyrant had spent two days working on a Quasi-Legendary artifact for an adventurer he did not know. Everyone believed it took him months for one of those. It wasn’t an unfair assessment, every other crafter would take years to create even a single Epic tier artifact.

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Still, if the Dwarven Tyrant had only been taking a fraction of the time to do commissions…

What had he been doing in his spare time?

“Break the chains!”

“Aye!”

Excited voices echoed back to him through both enchantments and wired devices.

He wasn’t like the other Tyrants; he was not so far above everyone else that working alone was meaningless.

“Chains broken!”

“Maximum mana through the floatstone!”

His [Enchanter] picked at his ear.

“You don’t have to yell, I’m right here.”

The [Enchanter] passed his mana through the circuits. The floatstone was infused into the walls, sometimes smelted, sometimes just pieced in and connected to the circuitry itself. It wasn’t a perfect seamless integration, their advancements in magitech weren’t there quite yet.

It had been hell trying to understand mana circuitry before his aide… no, his friend had come here and helped him along. Floatstone was both very magical and somehow incredibly, annoyingly, magically non conductive.

Their forge, their home began to rise. Magic started to pulse and vibrate the air around it. Crushing and loosening the hard stone that surrounded them.

Even as mad as they were, they hadn’t decided to make the entire mountain float.

Just half of it.

The mountain started splitting. Heaping chunks of stone and precious ore exposed as the actual building began to make itself visible. Those idiots had thought they had mapped out his home with skills and magic. They didn’t know the first thing about advanced magic. The skills… he had asked for Lihua’s help for some of those.

Screens flickered on as the first cameras of the fortress came alive. It saw in multiple spectrums and could even see magic.

It wouldn’t catch all the [Rogues] with their skills active, but the others?

A program started processing all the masked dragonslayers, taking in their height, weight, density and even heat. Signatures that identified them all as unique. Their tics and even breathing patterns were being logged.

Names started matching to most of them, skills listed at the side.

Oh dragonslayers could have hidden all of that, even their weight.

If they had even known it would be a problem.

And that was just the surveillance.

As the fortress rose above the ground the sky rippled in a telltale sign, the dragonslayers looking up to realize another Legend had been born.

Then the notification hit.