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

Elijah’s shoulders slumped in exhaustion – both mental and physical – as he took a long, deep breath. The salty air tasted almost sweet after spending so much time beneath the ocean, fighting against wave after wave of alaken. He waded forward until he reached the beach, then dropped to his knees before rolling over and collapsing onto his back. One deep breath followed the last as he closed his eyes.

“That was pretty rough, bro.”

Elijah opened one eye to see Dat sitting beside him. The Witch Hunter was staring off into the middle distance, his gaze entirely unfocused as he clearly considered their actions over the past week.

“To say the least,” Elijah agreed.

And it was true, too. While grinding against the alaken hadn’t been as dangerous as enduring the other challenges, it had come with a few other issues none of them had anticipated. Chiefly, the weight of killing tens of thousands of clearly sapient beings pressed heavily upon their minds. Certainly, everyone knew the creatures weren’t real – not in the traditional sense. That fact was confirmed when the entire challenge reset after they’d left. However, that line between real and conjured tended to blur when you were surrounded by floating entrails, submerged in the blood of those purportedly fake enemies, and listening to their muffled and bubbling screams of agony.

Perhaps things would have been different if they’d given themselves a break between iterations of the challenge. However, with time being of the essence, they’d chosen to chain grinding sessions after only a couple of hours in between each one. That had turned the past week into a tidal wave of death, blood, and other viscera that none of them could endure unscathed.

Apparently, post-traumatic stress was still a thing, even after the world’s transformation. It didn’t cripple anyone. Nobody was going to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, and they certainly weren’t going to descend into panic at loud noises. However, the other signs were still there.

“I think I can speak for everyone when I say that I never want to do that again,” Ron stated. Elijah felt him nearby, lying on the pebbled shore only a few feet away. Sadie was still standing, but her posture mirrored Dat’s. By comparison, Kurik busied himself by grumbling under his breath and cataloguing his remaining traps. Everyone coped differently, and Elijah knew the dwarf well enough to recognize the stress within him.

“We can’t avoid killing,” Sadie said. “That’s our world, now.”

Of late, there hadn’t been much time for anything but slaughtering the eel-like alaken, but Elijah could recognize that something had changed with Sadie. She’d never been particularly personable, but she’d grown even more standoff-ish than ever before. He worried that he’d done something to offend her, yet he knew that broaching that subject would only make her angry.

Or angrier.

So, he’d kept his concerns to himself, choosing to address it with Dat when they had a little privacy.

“I’m going to rest my eyes a bit,” he muttered. He was dirty, covered in blood and salty water, with bits of gore and seaweed in his hair, so he knew he needed to take a shower. But at the moment, his goals were much simpler. After casting Healing Rain and Soothe on everyone, he promptly fell asleep.

When he awoke a few hours later, he regretted that.

“Gross,” he muttered, looking down at his armor. He could only hope that his cleaning powder would take care of all the blood and other nastiness that had seemingly seeped into the leather. So, after telling the others what he was doing, he retreated to a secluded area surrounded by boulders and began the arduous process of removing the grime from his armor, clothing, and most importantly, himself.

The armor, he doused in cleaning powder before setting it aside. However, when he looked at the clothing he wore underneath, he realized that, regrettably, it represented a lost cause. There were so many rips and tears – not to mention stains – that it had become unsalvageable. Better to simply destroy it than to spend time and resources patching the clothes.

Once that decision was made, he tossed the bundle of cloth aside to be burned later, then embarked on an epic quest of self-cleaning. That’s when his decision to immediately fall asleep came back to bite him. The blood and salt had dried on his body, forming a truly grotesque crust that took quite a lot of vigorous scrubbing before it came off. Thankfully, his homemade soap was up to the task, and it left him feeling invigorated in a way that he couldn’t quite explain.

According to Nerthus, the soap was capable of slowly inching him forward in regards to his body cultivation. It would take decades for it to do so on its own, but the fact that it could even do that much made it extremely valuable. Still, he used it because of the way it made him feel, rather than some far-off benefits that wouldn’t come to fruition for years. But it was a nice side-benefit, nonetheless.

In any case, it took almost half an hour of vigorous scrubbing before Elijah felt clean. By that point, the cleaning powder had already done its work on his armor, so after donning one of his last outfits, he strapped the leather set into place. With it – along with all his other equipment – came an influx of attributes that only accentuated his refreshment.

Finally, when he returned to their camp, he pulled out his French press, boiled some water, then made some coffee. Everyone else – aside from Sadie, who maintained her inexplicable disdain for the miraculous beverage – partook, following it up with a meal of dried pork that restored the last of Elijah’s buffs.

And just like that, he felt normal enough to check his gains: