Path of Dragons - A LitRPG Apocalypse (BOOK TWO STUBBING AUGUST 15)

One moment, Elijah was striding across a meadow and through a big, blocky doorway, and the next, his bare foot touched down in something warm, wet, and squishy. That alone would have been bad enough – especially when it got between his toes – but what made it even worse was the horrid stench that suddenly enveloped him.

“Oh, God,” he muttered to himself as he tried not to gag.

He was markedly unsuccessful, especially when he had the chance to truly take in his surroundings. Before him stretched a wide body of water, from the center of which rose a steep edifice topped by a menacing wall. The water itself wasn’t an inviting or placid lake. Instead, it was a seething moat, below the surface of which writhed something Elijah’s instincts told him was absolutely deadly.

That water was also the source of the horrible stench tickling his nostrils. For a moment, Elijah had difficulty placing it; it was like rotten eggs mixed with vomit and hot garbage. But after only a few seconds, he recognized the smell for what it was.

“Sulfur,” he sighed, though he knew there was more to the smell than that.

It was an odor usually associated with swamps, but after a brief look around, he discounted that possibility. The lake – or moat, really – notwithstanding, the area was incredibly arid, with very little in the way of vegetation to be found. Instead, large, rocky pillars jutted up from the ground, twisting high into the sky, which was discolored by a setting sun.

Beneath Elijah’s feet was mud, or at least he hoped that was all there was, considering that, across the expanse of roiling water, Elijah saw a wide grate from which flowed some sort of disgusting sludge.

The moment he realized that the area was inhabited, he shifted into his scaled panther form, then embraced Guise of the Unseen. And it was just in time, too, because only a few seconds later, a loud screech filled his ears before a wide shadow fell over him. He looked up to see an enormous, winged creature soaring a hundred or so feet above his position.

At a glance, it looked like a bat, but there were two issues with that assessment. First, even if his perspective was a little skewed by the distance, he judged its wingspan to reach at least thirty feet. Maybe as much as fifty. And that would make it ten times the size of even the largest bat back on Earth.

But that was within Elijah’s experience. He’d seen plenty of oversized animals, so he knew that his concept of proper size wasn’t really relevant in terms of identifying creatures. After all, he only had to remember the size of the crabs on his island to confirm just how much larger things could get in his new world.

In any case, he was far more concerned with the second problem with his initial identification. He was no chiropterologist, but he felt confident that bats weren’t supposed to have horns. Of course, that could have been a mutation, too. He’d seen hares with horns back on his island, so who was to say that giant bats couldn’t have them as well?

Elijah watched as the enormous, horned bat glided toward one of the jutting towers along the wall, where it landed. Just before it passed out of view, he caught a glimpse of something big and bulky upon the creature’s back, but he had neither the time nor the visual acuity to identify the rider.

Only once he’d gotten his bearings did Elijah bother to read the notification he’d received upon entering the tower: