Unconquered Tower

TWENTY-NINE

The explosion that came an hour later turned the sky bright, a new dawn brought forth by poor measuring tools. Everyone stopped and stared at the plume of light that preceded the rumble of the explosion and gentle ripple of moving foliage. Roan swallowed hard as he finished off the ration bar he’d been working on.

With the dragon dead they’d decided to see if there was anything salvageable aside from the core which Roan had claimed. His bloodline still burned inside of it, fighting off whatever corruption was there. That was enough to get even the most hard-headed to be wary, letting him have the loot.

The problem was all the corruption that had seeped into the ground. Nobody wanted to risk searching in the dark with the puddles of it just laying around like toxic pools. They’d been on the verge of calling off the search when the blast came and everyone turned to Taoya to hear his orders.

“Half back to the cave to secure it, the other half with me,” Taoya ordered without hesitation. Even without his bloodline being active he was fast, breaking off into a ground eating sprint and rushing toward the explosion. Roan finished chewing as the teams broke up and everyone left, none of them wanting to stay around the pools of corrupted blood.

Within seconds he was alone, completely forgotten about on the edge of the forest. A second explosion came a few seconds later, less powerful than the first, but closer to them.

“That’s our village then. Wonder if they got all the hobs?” Roan spoke to the still forest as he slowly got up from his place beneath the tree and stretched. He was still weak, his body felt light and hollow, but the meal had helped settle him.

“Last time there was something big corrupted it gave me the mana shard quest. So let’s see if this is the same.” Roan had been thinking about it since the fight had begun and he started walking through the remnants of the battle scene, using the speartip of his polearm to poke at the puddles of putrefaction.

There was a warm burn down his arm and the enchantments along the weapon came to life. Every poke was a small drop of his power, but without the dragon core fueling the corruption, that was all that was needed to break apart the puddles. Around and around he walked, looking for any patch of darkness that was a little too dark.

Even with how little energy it took to clean out the puddles, within five minutes Roan was sweating again, his stomach growling with hunger, and a headache started behind his eyes. Every beat of his pulse sent a flare of pain through his skull, but he kept up the work, burning away the corruption and sipping on his canteen with what little water had managed to refill it.

“Finally,” Roan gasped as something clicked in one of the smallest pools he’d found so far. His search methodology of slowly spiraling circles had worked, nothing remained corrupted around the center of the fight and even out here, close to the edge of the clearing, there were few spots left.

The blue spark of his purifying bloodline hit the pitch black and burned through it like a wildfire, leaving him a present in the form of a small mana core shard. Roan suppressed a smile as he grabbed the shard and whisked it away to join his other two fragments.

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“Eat the dragon core.” The intruder ordered him. Roan fought against the swell of irritation at being ordered. It would do no good to grow angry at something he couldn’t control. Instead he walked over to the small dragon core, still sitting where it had been cleansed.

“Just like, swallow it?” Roan asked out loud, crouching down to grab the core. It had contracted further. Where it had been sitting was a layer of fine white ash that scattered when he picked up the core. Power rippled off of the small core causing the hairs on his hand to stand up.

“Yes. With your bloodline you should be fine.” The voice that had been whispering to him since he’d entered the tower sounded stronger now and there was a definitive rasp to it. Faint memories stirred but slipped away the harder he thought on it.

“It will help replenish your energy stores and strengthen your body. Circulate the energy as you would when you tempered.” That wasn’t enough to make him immediately eat the core, but it added enough incentive that Roan gently placed the glowing orb into his mouth.

It tasted like ash and fire. Tears formed in his eyes, but he dropped to the ground and began to circulate the torrents of fiery energy the same way he had worked through his body tempering. Time lost its meaning as his body was consumed in flame.

The dark of the forest faded away while Roan focused on moving the energy around himself. He cursed himself a fool for not doing this somewhere safe, but he soon didn’t have even the mental energy for that, focused on pushing the fire through his body.

Unlike the first time when he’d circulated the energy to cleanse himself, this power slowly sank into him, into his very bones. Sweat poured off of him as he continued to circulate the dragon core, which was shrinking with every moment. It wasn’t enough though, the fire was too hot, too fierce. Roan felt like he was on the verge of combustion.

Something vast hovered over him and touched the inferno and siphoned the worst of the heat away. The threat of combustion faded away and instead he just had to deal with the excruciating pain of a fire river coursing through his bones like a creekbed.

“Interesting. Your bloodline will be powerful indeed,” the reptilian voice boomed in his mind, shadowing everything as it continued to take more energy from the core. Roan could feel it becoming more than the whispery shadow it had been, a sinuous form began to fill out.

“Not just the corruption, but the inferior crossbreeding as well. We will need more draconic cores to experiment on. I grow weary though. Do not die while I rest.” Then it was gone and Roan was left alone in his own mind for the first time since he’d entered the tower. The sudden clarity was startling, a gasp breaking his breathing rhythm and the energy went wild for a moment before he recovered and continued to drag it into his bones.

By now almost every bone in his body, all two hundred and six of them, had been bathed in the fire of the dragon core. Then it went out. The core collapsed on itself in a wave of ash that coated his mouth. Roan coughed and spat out a wad of wet ash.

The fire in the sky was faded away, but something was burning bright enough that there was a glow toward where the villages had been. He didn’t know how much time had passed, but his limbs were stiff as he got to his feet and looked around himself.

“Stupid. But was it me?” Roan asked out loud, accidentally swallowing some of the core ash. The desire to eat the core had been so insistent, so overwhelming that he couldn’t help but want to blame his passenger. The canteen had refilled enough that he could gurgle the ash out, spitting streams onto the ground while gagging.

In the middle of his dry-heaving, he noticed the system alerts for his skills and decided he’d have to thank his passenger after all.