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

Purple lightning flashed in the sky as the smell of death filled Elijah’s nostrils. He stumbled toward the fallen Isaak, dread and despair mingling in his heart as he let his guardian form fall away. With each staggering step, pain lanced up his broken leg, but he forced himself to ignore it, and as soon as his transformation completed, he summoned Healing Rain. A storm of soothing precipitation gathered, dumping its rejuvenating payload on Elijah and Isaak alike.

But the young man wasn’t moving, and when Elijah finally reached him, he found that Isaak’s breathing had stalled.

“No…”

He reached out and, as soon as he laid his hand on the boy’s chest, he used Touch of Nature. It pulsed, and Isaak’s body seized at the injection of healing ethera. Yet, Elijah could tell that it hadn’t worked. Forcing life into a corpse wouldn’t do anything. Dead was, after all, dead.

Yet Elijah refused to accept it.

So, he channeled it again. And again after that. Each time, the boy’s body jerked like he’d just been subjected to the electrical current of a defibrillator. However, the moment the flow of ethera ceased, he went limp. Elijah gritted his teeth and continued his efforts. Over and over, he kept going until there were only wisps of ethera left in his core. He pulled on more, flexing his Mind and Soul for all they were worth.

But it wasn’t enough.

Tears traced lines through the dirt and dried blood on Elijahs cheeks as he tilted his head back and screamed.

That didn’t do any good, either.

It just wasn’t fair. Nothing was. The world had become a cruel place where a young man like Isaak had been tasked with becoming a hero. He was just a boy, and yet, he’d marched into danger and answered the call of heroism. And then, he’d died unceremoniously, and for no other reason than that Elijah was incapable of saving him.

Of protecting him.

Ever since he’d killed those hunters, Elijah had felt that something was wrong. That everything was skewed. He’d avenged the bear, killing people that, in his head, he’d pegged as villains.

But were they?

Elijah really had no idea. The reality was that he’d reacted based on frustration and, he could admit to himself, a false sense of companionship. For so long, he’d been alone, and in retrospect, it was easy for him to anthropomorphize the creature. Yet, the bear would probably have tried to kill him if he hadn’t continuously brought it food. The same was true of the panther he remembered far more fondly than reality suggested.

More than once, Elijah had thought himself immune to the stress that came from his traumatic existence. But he wasn’t. Not anymore than anyone else, at least. He’d just processed it differently. And that flawed method had led him down a road that eventually pushed him into killing a group of hunters that may or may not have deserved what he’d done to them.

Did he feel guilty about it?

No. He did not. Not truly. Yet, he knew that, in the future, he needed to think things through, rather than react based on his ultimately flawed feelings. He also needed to be cognizant of his tendency to lose context. Animals were animals, and people were people. And in the changed world, he couldn’t blame humanity – or the various other sapient races – for killing. That was probably the only way anyone was going to survive.

What the hunters had done still didn’t sit well with him, though. He didn’t like it, and he suspected he never would. However, that didn’t mean they had deserved to die.

Thoughts like that flitted through Elijah’s mind as he struggled to absorb enough ethera to fuel more attempts at healing the fallen Isaak. He knew it was useless. But just like with the bear, he had latched onto the young man in a way that probably wasn’t warranted by the situation. They barely knew one another, after all. But in Elijah’s mind, the boy had taken on the role of a little brother.

Or a nephew.

Hopefully, if Miguel was in a similar situation, someone would try just as hard to help him.

So, Elijah kept going well past the point when he should have stopped. Then, after some interminable time, Isaak’s eyes shot open. His hand shot out, and Elijah only recognized the danger at the last second. He dove to the side just in time to avoid taking a ball of soulfire to the face.

He didn’t care, though.

“You’re alive!”

“What?” panted Isaak. “How? Of course I’m alive.”

“What?”

“It’s…um…it’s an ability. A spell. It kind of keeps me alive. It’s called Stored Soul. Think of it like a second life. So long as I cast it before a fight, I can survive fatal damage. I go into a coma for a while, but…yeah. It’s saved my life three times so far. It goes on cooldown after activation, though. It’ll be a month before I can use it again,” Isaak said, the words spilling out all at once.

“You probably shouldn’t tell strangers that,” Elijah pointed out.

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“You’re not a stranger, though. You saved me.”

Elijah shrugged. “We’re even, then. You saved me, too.”

“I did, didn’t I?” the young man said, grinning. He tried to get up, but winced. “Oh. I guess I’m not completely healed, huh? How long have been here? It usually takes a week for me to wake up from the coma.”

“It’s been about an hour. Maybe two since the monster died,” Elijah said. It made sense. Likely, the influx of healing had shortened the duration of the coma. He picked himself up, saying, “Don’t move. I want to finish healing you.”

“Uh…I think we should probably get out of here.”

“Why? There aren’t any more monsters.”

Isaak pointed at the sky. Elijah followed the gesture to see that it had broken into a million jagged pieces, revealing an abyssal blackness that did not look good. It was as if they were inside a broken snow globe, except that it was intended to keep something out rather than in.

“Yeah. You’re probably right…”

With that, Elijah reached down and helped Isaak to his feet. Then, they hobbled back to the entrance, where a pair of white crystals floated in the air. Elijah touched one, and Isaak touched the other. That prompted a notification to appear before Elijah’s mind’s eye: