Monroe

Chapter Two Hundred and Twenty-Six. Thou art crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

Korldon Astaides, formerly the High Priest of the Church of Light, lay spread eagle in the center of the ritual circle. His screams had become dull rasps as his vocal chords frayed and snapped from the strain.

Kellan Garvades, Defender of Greenwold, Blessed of Vi'Radia, Sovereign of the Skies, was carefully carving lines through both the marble slab beneath the bound figure, and through his flesh. He paused only to 'ink' the lines with blood drawn from his tongue by his own claw, the luminous violet fluid settling into the channels.

"You should have better spent the opportunity the System Update provided you," Kellan said conversationally as he worked. "When I saw that you'd redirected yourself towards the physical attributes, I'd hoped that you'd accepted your failure, and were prepared to move on." He shook his head. "I've been spending too much time in my true form," he confessed. "Were you of the Noble Blood, you would have submitted after I defeated your attempt to usurp my hoard."

Kellan leaned back on his haunches and stretched his wings, rolling his shoulders as he inspected his work.

"What baffles me is how you could have possibly expected to defeat me in melee combat," Kellan continued, shaking his head again. "You spent nearly a year leveling your melee skills, true, but I am a Dragon."

He finished his inspection of his ritual with a satisfied nod. It had been millennia since he'd last worked this particular magic.

"Ultimately, your hubris is your undoing," Kellan said. "You grasped for power like a greedy wyrmling, claiming the mantle of High Priest for all seven gods of light. I'd ask if you never considered the ramifications of having one person holding all those threads, but it's clear that forethought is not your strongest quality."

Kellan began channeling delicate threads of mana into the ritual pattern laid out in his blood. "Still, it provides me with a unique opportunity," he finished.

Shadowmancy, to control the flows of mana. Animancy, to control the life force of his blood. Necromancy, to control the movements of the soul. Invoke Sanctum to block the path to heaven. Invoke Netherworld to block the path to hell. Invocation to follow the path of the Primordials, claiming the power of a defeated foe for his own.

Korldon Astraides, despite having delivered ruinous pain to others, had never been one to experience it himself. Even his recent encounters with monsters as he learned to wield melee weapons, having confirmed that the update hadn't removed whatever foul sorcery the heretic had worked to repress his ability to express his mana internally, had not been marked by any real pain.

The result was that the angel was nearly insensate as his nude form was lifted into the air as the ritual began. If he'd been able to sense the mana flowing around and through him, he might have been struck by its elegant complexity.

Kellan could feel the ritual reaching its apex. He breathed in deeply, and then exhaled, his breath igniting his blood, which carried the mana of the ritual.

All four of the angel's wings ignited, the feathers burning away over the course of three seconds, while at the same time the flames began to eat into his flesh.

It took eleven seconds for the angel to be consumed by flames, but the flames remained, hanging in the space formerly occupied by the angel, flickering in place.

Kellan inhaled, and the flaming after image of the angel was pulled into his maw. As soon as it contacted his flesh, it flared brightly, before flowing over his scales before sinking into his chest.

The dragon fought to maintain the ritual as it reached completion. He could feel the Korldon's soul fighting against him, and while he had little respect for the former High Priest, he was, or had been, tier eleven.

Kellan bared his teeth unconsciously as he maintained the hundreds of threads of mana, adjusting each one as the soul fought against its fate. The two minutes it took to complete the ritual felt like an eternity, before the soul he'd pulled into his body stilled.

He roared his victory as the links to the seven gods of light coalesced, seeking to attach themselves to him. With a feral snarl, the likes of which can only truly be appreciated when gracing the countenance of a furious dragon, Kellan grasped the connections to the gods of light, twisting them, and then snapping them.

"I don't care if it's just sitting there, it's a threat," Mike said firmly. "You don't leave a weapon like that at your rear."

"We don't exactly have photon torpedos," Dave replied. "How exactly are we supposed to get rid of it?"

"We could try just blasting it," Jack suggested.

"Maybe a ritual blast spell?" Amanda mused.

"Or we could just nudge it to get it moving, and I could jump into a random universe," Bob said.

The conversation stopped.

"I didn't consider that," Mike admitted.

"The ritual is cheap, and I've had a lot of practice," Bob continued. "Just need to give it a push to get it moving, and we can dispose of it. Best of all, I can always go get it back if we were to ever need it for some reason."

"That'll..." Dave trailed off.

Everyone felt it, as if the entire universe had just shifted a millimeter to the left.

"What the fuck was that?" Jack asked.

"It was definitely mana related, but it was both huge, and miniscule at the same time," Bob said, frowning. "Whatever just happened, happened to every single atom of mana, but despite the scope it didn't change anything."

"Well, the good news is that we've been back for a few days, so whatever happened, it wasn't our fault," Eddi said.

"Optimism is a beautiful thing," Harv muttered.

"Whatever it was, we still need to get that thing out of orbit," Mike said. "I know I won't be comfortable setting the Freedom down until it's gone."

Kellan woke up with a start and a snort, shaking his head as he suffered the momentary disorientation that came with waking up in a humanoid form.

He sat up, blinking, and flipped the covers off to the side, swinging his legs over and resting his feet on the floor, using the pillar at the edge of the headboard to pull himself to his feet. His actions were beyond automatic, taken so many times over the centuries as to be nearly autonomic.

He frowned as he stood. Something was wrong. Strike that, many things were wrong.

The floor was wasn't freezing cold, which it should have been. There was no cloud of dust hanging in the air from moving the covers, nor was his throat as dry as a dessert. He didn't even need to clear his eyes.

He was alone in the room, and no one stood outside the door, which was effectively a huge mirror that allowed him to see outside, while letting the person tasked with waking a sleeping dragon to ensure they were at their best.

Kellan turned his mind to the many threads of mana that linked him to his Kingdom, and he quickly found the problem. The ship that had hung above Greenwold was gone, taking the ritual tracking spell he'd attached to it far enough out of range to break the flow of mana linking him to it.

He strode across the room and into the attached bath, where he sat down in the tub, and conjured boiling hot water to fill it. He let out a quiet groan of pleasure as the heat suffused his lesser form, grabbing a ball of soap from the edge of the tub, and set about cleansing himself. 𝐟re𝚎𝘄𝚎𝐛𝚗o𝚟el.c𝐨𝚖

If he had to label a single aspect of his humanoid form as the worst, it would be a difficult task, but in this moment and all the others like it, he would have said it was having skin. He moved the conjured water out of the tub and over to the toilet in the far corner of the room, where he quickly, but gradually released the spell, filling the toilet with the dead skin and oil-fouled soap that remained.

Proper scales didn't accumulate filth like that, although there was much less than normal. Much, much less. He couldn't have been asleep for more than a day.

Standing from the tub, he moved back into the bedroom, where he plucked his cellular phone from the charging box. The screen glowed happily as it informed him that it was ten twenty-two pm, the same date as when he'd lain down. It also informed him that it was sixty-four degrees, and that two moons would be visible in the sky, which was clear of clouds. Those were relatively new features, added just a month earlier by one of the transplants from Earth, a man named Chris, who had been recruited by Jack Scalligio to oversee the implementation of the cellular network.

The people from Earth hadn't been willing to give up their cellular phones. The change from working a menial service job had been gleefully exchanged for wading through monster blood, but they'd made it clear that their phones were the core of their hoard, and they weren't surrendering them. The end result were communication satellites orbiting above his continent, and an ongoing public works project to manufacture the necessary materials and equipment to extend the network to every town.

Trade with Earth had died down to a trickle as the various businesses who had provided all the components for their modern society either struggled to replace people lost to the new opportunities to live comfortably with far fewer hours invested, although considerably more danger, or they failed completely. The later was more common than the former, which had left Earth struggling to rebuild their infrastructure, upon which they relied rather heavily.

Kellan shook his head, tapping his phone to send a message to his Seneschal, Ericka. His mind was wandering, a side effect of waking up so early after preparing to sleep for six months. Message sent, he placed the phone back in its box, then walked over to the closet and began dressing. Another disadvantage of this form.

He was tying his boot laces when a knock came from the door. He could see Ericka on the other side, worry clear on her expression.

"Enter," he called.

Ericka stepped into the room closing the door behind her. "Your majesty," she said, bowing from the waist.

"Rise," he intoned as he stood from the bed. "It would appear that the vessel that delivered the Church of the Light from Parceus has left our skies."

Ericka frowned as straightened. "The High Priest is... gone," she swallowed, "and his lessers are still in the Adventurer's Guild, unless they've somehow managed to slip my tracking ritual."

Kellan nodded. "I doubt they've done so, but please confirm that they are still here. While you do so, I'll investigate the missing ship."

It was important to be both kind, and polite with your subordinates, he'd found. Ericka had been witness to his ritual earlier that day, and it had apparently been somewhat shocking for her. If he'd awoken as scheduled, time would have dulled the experience, but as it stood, it remained fresh in her memory.

Ericka nodded. "I'll see to it immediately, your majesty," she replied, bowing from the waist again as she backed up to the door then left the room.

Kellan had a rather more expedient method of egress, activating his Air Step spell, arriving upon the roof of the audience hall. Looking up at the clear night sky above, he leapt into the air, shifting to his true form as he did so, rapidly gaining altitude as he streaked into the sky, higher and higher.

He wrestled with his nature, as he longed for nothing more than to roar his supremacy to the world, searing the sky with his flame to scream his ultimate victory over Parceus to the sky. There was a reason he'd been planning to hibernate in his humanoid form.

He ascended through the atmosphere, conjuring a thin layer of air over his form as the air gave way to vacuum.

Kellan arrived at the location where the ship should have been. In its place, or very close to where it had been, was another ship, entirely unlike the vessel that had arrived bearing the Church of the Light's High Priest from Parceus. It was nothing so much as an obsidian cylinder, rounded at both ends.

There was no debris to indicate that the other ship had been destroyed, and the new vessel wasn't large enough to contain it, making theft unlikely, although with dimensional magic, not impossible. He utilized the air he'd was conjuring as thrust to maneuver closer to the new vessel, his eyes reading the mana layered over and throughout the ship.

He snorted in surprise. He recognized the primary mana signature. "So that's where you went," Kellan murmured to himself. He'd suspected that Bob and his friends had fled into space to avoid the agents from Earth as well as the Church of the Light from Parceus, but he had thought he'd gone to Earth's universe to do so.

Grinning fiercely, he twisted as he abandoned his true form, which would not fit within Bob's vessel, and regained his humanoid form. Using the conjured air around him, he activated Air Step, appearing a few feet away from a large table around which sat Bob and his friends.

"Well now," he smiled, "I'd wondered when I'd see you again."

Bob scrambled to his feet, bowing to the King of Greenwold.

"Your Majesty," he replied. He could hear his friends saying the same thing as the also rose to their feet.

"Rise," Kellan said.

Bob straightened and carefully watched the Dragon who had appeared in their ship.

"I suppose that you are what happened to the vessel from Parceus?" Kellan asked.

"Ah, yes, your Majesty," Bob said.

Kellan raised an eyebrow, clearly waiting for Bob to elaborate.

"We thought that leaving something with those kind of weapons up here would be inviting trouble, so we disposed of it," Bob explained.

"How did you dispose of it?" Kellan was still smiling.

"We gave it a nudge with the Freedom to get it moving, then I opened a portal to another dimension," Bob admitted.

"So it's floating around in Earth's universe then," Kellan mused.

"Ah, no, not as such, your Majesty," Bob said.

The King raised an eyebrow again. "Where is it?"

"Well, I don't really name each one of them," Bob shrugged. "I'm sort of mentally labeling it as 'the one where I dumped the ship with the laser canons.'"

"Each one of what?" Kellan's tone was light, but there was a slight edge to it.

"Each universe, your Majesty," Bob replied hurriedly.

"Each. Universe." Kellan seemed to consider the words individually.

"Well, yes, your Majesty," Bob said. "We've been exploring the multiverse, waiting for tempers to cool and, hopefully, people's interests to shift away from us."

"How?" Kellan asked.

Bob projected the System notification.

New Skill created under the Magical School of Dimension.

New Skill : Exploratory Interdimensional Portal. This skill allows the user to open a Portal to another, unknown, dimension. The terminus of this Portal will be outside any planetary masses. Functions identically to the portal skill in all other aspects.

The Skill will mirror the users Portal skill.

"We call it 'jumping', your Majesty," Bob explained.

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