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

The arrow whistled past as it narrowly missed Miguel’s head, but the next projectile had much better aim. It slammed into the segmented plate of his helmet, skipping off the lacquered wood before spinning off into the underbrush. Meanwhile, Trevor leaped to avoid a Voxx that tried to disembowel him. The stag’s hooves came down hard, digging into the monster’s thick scales.

But Trevor knew better than to linger. There were six pursuers and five more Voxx in the area, and if they hesitated even for a moment, the enemy would catch them. And given the four Miguel had already killed, they likely wouldn’t treat them with respect or dignity. No, getting caught was more than a death sentence. Instead, it was assuredly a path toward torture and long captivity.

Miguel refused to allow that for himself, let alone Trevor. So, he bent close to the stag’s neck and urged him to greater speed. The deer responded, embracing his moonlight powers until he glowed with ethereal light. Using that ability to push him his speed to new heights, he soon began to outpace their pursuers.

Trevor leaped over a dry ravine, then darted to the left just in time to avoid a descending spear. Miguel repaid the owner of that weapon with a quick slash of his sword. It wasn’t a weapon meant for mounted use – it was far too short for that – but he made do. The wooden blade sliced through the dark elf’s forearm, stopping only when it hit the bone. To the elf’s credit, she didn’t even cry out. Instead, she clutched at the wound as she fell behind.

Miguel didn’t see any other reaction.

Another arrow missed him by a wide mark, thudding into a nearby pine tree. “Faster,” Miguel coaxed the stag, and Trevor responded. The sprint was enough to outrun their pursuers, but Trevor couldn’t keep it up indefinitely. Eventually, he’d find the limits of his stamina – especially after making such copious use of his lunar abilities.

They allowed him to run faster than even his attributes would normally allow, and he could also use them to create planes of moonlight so he could travel over water or bound high into the air. However, he was still a very young deer, and as such, he’d not had the time to build his reserves.

That was one thing Miguel had learned about guardian beasts. They were powerful creatures, but they were not infallible. From what he could tell about Trevor, the deer only had one ability, and if he pushed it, he could quickly run himself out of stamina. So, it was up to Miguel to rein him in, lest he push himself too far and make himself vulnerable.

Of course, if that happened, Miguel would protect his friend, and he knew that if their situations were reversed, Trevor would do the same for him.

For the next few minutes, they continued their mad dash through the forest, but it soon became clear that they wouldn’t escape so easily. The dark elves were everywhere, and even if Miguel and Trevor managed to leave a few behind, their path soon took them into another group. That pattern repeated often enough that Miguel began to wonder just how many dark elves had come to Earth, and how far they’d managed to spread.

More troublingly, he started to realize that if he was going to survive, he only had three options. And none of them were good. The first was to simply keep going, but as Trevor’s heaving chest told him, that plan’s viability had a distinct expiration date. Soon, Trevor’s stamina would give out. Maybe it would take hours more, but the stag simply couldn’t keep going indefinitely – not at full speed, at least.

Making that even worse was the notion that they weren’t just being chased. The dark elves were everywhere, and even as they left one group behind, their path took them into another group. So, outrunning them wasn’t really a good plan.

That brought him to the second option – hiding. There were a few caves here and there throughout the area, but he questioned whether or not hunkering down in the dark elves’ native territory would be a good thing. They were subterranean creatures, so trying to hole up in a cave seemed like a very bad idea. That made the second choice even worse than the first.

Finally, there was the third option, but it was one that Miguel didn’t really want to choose. He just wasn’t sure he had much of a choice but to fight back. He had no idea how many elves there were, and from what he’d seen, they were powerful enough to push him to his limits. Perhaps well beyond.

If he fought, there was a distinct possibility that he’d die.

But wasn’t that true of every time he went into a battle? He couldn’t go through life avoiding danger – especially when there was no other viable choice but to fight. It was a simple concept, but the realization was still profound. With that gripping his mind, Miguel shifted his focus from lamenting his lack of choices to making the most out of the one path that had a chance of survival.

The first order of business was to find a properly defensive position. As he’d previously established, caves wouldn’t do, and for obvious reasons. He didn’t know which ones might lead further underground, and he didn’t have time to explore them thoroughly. A cliff face might work, but with their advantage in range and likely attributes as well, there was a good chance that the elves would simply climb the cliff and attack him from above.

So, natural formations were probably out.

That left the possibility of finding a defensible building. It had only been a little more than five years since the world had been transformed by the touch of the World Tree, and that amount of time wasn’t enough to tear down all of the buildings. Sure, some – like the prefabricated houses that had populated much of suburban America – had fallen, but there were plenty of others that had survived intact. And Miguel had seen enough of them during his journey to recognize that he stood a good chance of stumbling upon one during his flight from the elves.

He just needed to keep an eye out.

Over the next half hour, Trevor bore him through the forest. Elves attacked frequently enough, and more than once, Miguel was forced to counter their ambushes with vicious attacks of his own. He even managed to kill one. However, his previous conclusions held firm, supported by the fact that, in all that time, he didn’t break away.

Then, finally, he and Trevor stumbled upon a gold mine of a location. It was a container yard next to an enormous warehouse that Miguel expected had once been a distribution center for a shipping company. The collection of buildings was so damaged that the structures were useless for his purposes, but Miguel was far more interested in the shipping containers themselves. They were made of solid steel, and while that didn’t make them quite as fortified as it would have before Earth had changed, it was still enough to stymie the elves’ pursuit and hopefully force them into a bottleneck.

So, with a plan in place, Miguel urged Trevor to greater speed, and the stag responding with a burst of acceleration that took them into the forest of stacked containers. Many of those stacks had been overturned, spilling their contents onto the ground, and most of the others remained locked. Miguel and Trevor raced past those, looking for one that met their requirements. After only a minute or so – with the dark elves still in hot pursuit – Miguel found the perfect one.

It was positioned on the ground level and surrounded by a half dozen other containers on each side. There were three stacked atop it as well, which meant that if the dark elves wanted to get to him, they’d need to go through quite a lot of steel – and whatever was contained within the huge, metal boxes – to do so. The final advantage was that it stood open, and it was clear that someone had looted most of what had been inside.

Miguel saw a couple of mostly rotted boxes that suggested it had once contained electronics, which told him that it had been empty for quite some time. Regardless, the emptiness gave him plenty of room with which to work. So, he ushered Trevor inside, and the moment Miguel dismounted, the stag’s stamina finally gave out. Trevor collapsed, his breathing labored as his emotions went wild with fatigue, a desire to help, and shame that he couldn’t do so.

Stolen story; please report.

“It’s okay,” Miguel soothed. “You did a great job. It’s my turn to protect you.”

With that, Miguel closed one of the container doors, then jammed a wooden dagger through the ground to keep it shut. That was all the preparation he could make before the first pair of dark elves came into view.

They did so warily, both carrying bows with nocked arrows. One had a slash across her cheek, which Miguel vaguely remembered giving her. At the time, he hadn’t known she was a woman, but in retrospect, he couldn’t bring himself to care. An enemy was an enemy, regardless of gender.

“Surrender!” she called from afar, her melodious voice sounding like a song on the wind. “We will treat you fairly!”

Miguel remained silent. He had no intentions of giving up. Even if he trusted that they wouldn’t kill him – which he didn’t – he couldn’t afford to fail his mission. The people he’d sent back to Ironshore from Norcastle represented a good start, but most of those refugees had been noncombatants. If his city was going to survive the coming war, they needed a lot more fighters.

The dark elven woman, with her purplish-blue skin and white hair, shook her head, then raised her bow. A second later, an arrow was in the air.

Miguel slapped the projectile aside with his sword. He didn’t need to use any skills or spells. His swordsmanship and attributes were more than enough to accomplish a feat that was possible, albeit rare, even before the world had transformed.

The dark elf frowned.

Then, she rapidly fired six more arrows. Miguel could scarcely see how she had drawn so many so quickly, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. Instead, he used his latest ability, Protection of the Wind.