Titan King: Ascension of the Giant Chapter 1725: Fall of the Emerald Dream

The Titan Continent. The Southern Sea.

"Remember—between the strong, a fight gives no second chance. Every strike has to go in with everything you've got, kill in one blow." Trident in hand, voice low, Orion swept an arm round mid-word and batted the dragonling Scamp—come in from the flank—clean away. A single yelp from Scamp, and he dropped into the distant sea, fate unknown.

"And the moment you're about to land it is the moment you're in the most danger." Orion drove the trident butt-first into the seawater at his feet; a string of bubbles came gurgling up, and after them Scamp's furious squalling.

"It's not fair! How come the teacher gets a weapon and I've only got claws and tail to fight with? Scamp won't stand for it!" Scamp came boring up out of the sea, smoke curling from his nostrils, his whole body shaking with rage and pain. The scales over his head and shoulders had been shattered across a wide patch by the trident in the fight just past.

"Hm—a great dragon fighting with a trident in its grip?" Orion pulled the trident up with one hand and propped his chin with the other; Scamp's words had set off a few amusing pictures in his head. "What a fun image. Street rat, since you won't fight bare-handed, then learn the way of the trident from me." Orion gave the trident in his hand a careless toss, and Scamp, startled, dodged while throwing up a golden defensive ward.

"I don't want to." Seeing the trident come slow and not at him, Scamp eased his guard and flung out his tail, swatting the nearing trident far off. "I want to learn the sword. I want to be like that Seventh Uncle—walk the four quarters with a blade, one cry of come, sword, and the ten directions all wiped out, heaven and earth gone silent on the spot."

Smack. Orion appeared behind Scamp and palmed him flying. "You're my student—of course you learn nothing but the way of the trident." Watching Scamp tumble off, Orion couldn't help marveling. Leonidas's seed was a thing apart, all right; the boy held up to a hammering.

"No—I want to learn the sword." Faced with a thorn of a student, Orion was in no hurry either. The Insect King avatar raised both hands slightly skyward, the sea all around heaving and surging, and trident after trident, water turned to ice, came flying up out of the water to hang suspended high overhead. As Scamp came shooting up out of the sea once more, Orion said, light as anything: "Fall."

In an instant the ice-spears came down like rain, and Scamp's dragon-head, barely lifted, snapped back into the water as if it had seen some terror of a monster, his figure vanishing on the spot.

"Idiot. The enemy's grand array is set; running is just dragging out your last breath. The right move here is to meet it head-on—while your strength still holds, break the array open, then run, or fight on." Orion lifted his right foot and stamped lightly on the sea's surface, and the water all around froze in an instant, no end of ice-spears taking shape inside it, squeezing the hidden Scamp out and trapping him in the same stroke.

A moment later, a spherical array of ice-spears, Scamp caged within, carried him before Orion—head drooping, welts all over.

"Now tell me. The sword, or the trident?" Orion waved a hand, the ice-spears scattering to nothing, and laid the trident point against the spot between Scamp's brows, the picture of ease.

"Heh heh—not the sword. I'll learn the trident from my master." Scamp wore a sheepish grin, his big purple eyes rolling left and right, sizing Orion up on the sly out of the corner of them. Plainly, that not-daring-to-look-Orion-in-the-eye was a lie. "Hmph—learn the trident from you first, then use the trident as a sword. Scamp's going to be the dragon world's most dashing swordsman."

There was nothing of Scamp's scheme Orion couldn't see. He rapped the boy's forehead with the trident, his manner scornful and stern both. "A master is a master. Don't go mixing teacher and master on me, little thing—your head's full of tricks." Orion tossed the trident to Scamp and gave his order. "Go a ways off and bring back some sea-fish. I'll take you to meet an elder in a bit."

A while at Orion's side now, Scamp caught the meaning of words like that at once—break time. "Right—one moment, master." Before he'd finished, Scamp's figure was already off in the distance, no more than a black dot.

"Heh. 'One moment'—won't be back for half a day, more like. Little brat. Can't beat me, so he thinks he'll starve me out? Head's full of tricks." As Scamp got familiar with Orion's way of doing things, Orion was coming to know Scamp's temper too. This was a little thing that wouldn't take a loss on anything, ever, and would always find his own way to hit back on some matter where it wouldn't show—stalling for time, say, deliberately starving out his cut-rate master.

"I'm catching a familiar scent off him. Like Leonidas's bloodline. You and the big man tie the knot?" Gulp, gulp—off in the seabed not far away, a shadow gathered and came surging, and waves of huge bubbles rolled up from the bottom.

"Ha—tie the knot? Take a guess, then—am I the cock or the hen?" An old friend out of seclusion; the gladness on Orion's face overflowed past holding, and he turned the joke back instead.

"Hmph. You've got to be the hen." As a rule, when some leviathan of the deep surfaces, the shadow grows larger and larger and the water around it turns to churning undertow. But the picture before Orion ran otherwise—the giant shadow grew smaller and smaller, and in the moment it broke the surface it became a pirate chief about Orion's height, clad in battle-armor, a Three-Horn hat on his head.

"Congratulations—you've made the demigod realm at last." Orion put out a hand and thumped the Kraken on the chest, glad through and through.

"A long way short of you and Commander yet." It was precisely because he'd ascended to demigod that the Kraken could feel out just how wide the gap between him and Orion ran.

"What's the use of that talk? The road ahead's long—there's bound to come a moment you catch up." The Kraken nodded, granting Orion's point; a demigod's lifespan ran long, and he had time and to spare for the chase.

"That one just now—Leonidas's child? I caught a dragon-might off him, same affinity as the big man's." The Kraken turned to glance the way Scamp had vanished; with his sense, he saw every last move Scamp made off in the distance plain as day.

"Mm. The best-gifted little one of all the brother's children—and he would foist him on me to teach. Don't sell him short; Scamp's got the makings of a demigod." Orion gave the one explanation, then, struck by some bit of fun, looked at the Kraken and asked in a put-on, peculiar tone. "Say—Leonidas is your guide-and-mentor, and Scamp's his child. Does that make you Scamp's generation-mate, or his elder? If Scamp calls you 'big brother,' then as Scamp's master, don't you have to call me 'uncle'?"

The Kraken rolled his eyes, then, righteous and grave, his tone dead serious: "I'm his uncle. Me, you, the big man Leonidas, Scamp—we each reckon by our own line. Don't go thinking you'll get one over on me."

—

The Emerald Dream Realm. The Dusklands.

Gaze as far as the eye could stretch and all that met it was the vast Boundless Expanse, the evening glow like a thing afire, lakes scattered across it like flecks of ornament, the sinking sun, the grandeur of dusk.

Deputy Commander Edward and Mondusath, Great Dragon King of Light, stood on the air high in the heavens, looking down on earth and sky.

"I've studied the Emerald Dream Realm's history. This ancient land, from the past down to now, has played out nothing but slaughter and betrayal—which is why it never bred a being able to master heaven and earth, to gather all into one faith. Dark creatures, the descent of Dark Deities, sea-fiends running riot—down to the giant invasion your coming brought. Every time disaster fell, it was a mass extinction." Mondusath gazed off at the distant Continent of Chaos, his look far and long, no end of pictures seeming to run through its depths.

"And that Thessiber?" Having witnessed with his own eyes the miracle of Thessiber turning his body into law, Deputy Commander Edward held a deep impression of the man.

"He had his chance. But he died." Mondusath nodded, granting Thessiber's dauntless spirit of sacrifice. A people, or a great power, must have a few figures like Thessiber to stand up, to shelter the rest from wind and rain, to make the sacrifice for the whole. "He was a fool. Before he died he found his people no true road out, and groomed no able successor to come after. You ought to understand—any power, beyond the one at the helm, should hold complete left and right factions inside it. Only so can it breed another race-leader of the opposite extreme. Sometimes a people splitting over a difference of conviction is, instead, an effective way to preserve it." Mondusath drew his gaze back. The things he spoke of were no idle fancy. In the course of his life, the dragons had lived through disasters like these without number. "A great detonation of thought, factions checking one another, even the trading-off of power between tiers—all of it is a sign of a people thriving."

"A pity." The Deputy Commander let out a sigh, swung the magic staff in his hand, and triggered the Emerald Dream Realm's end-button.

The void was riven by a sudden unknown force, the blue empyrean torn by an unseen hand, baring a vast black-gaping fissure. In an instant the whole world threw up a stress-response out of terror, no end of source-power taking shape to try and mend that spiderweb of ever-spreading rifts. Then the earth was trembling, volcanoes erupting, seas overturning and rolling back—disaster on disaster crowding in, the mark of World Essence gone unstable, the prelude to ruin and the last day.

"What have you done?" A halo of light appeared not far before the Deputy Commander and Mondusath, and within it a figure of blurred form put a furious question.

"Furious—and afraid too, which is why you don't dare come close to us. That's the sorrow of the weak." Mondusath shot the halo a glance, not a shred of interest in it.

"A pleasure to meet you, Lord Thessiber." The Deputy Commander, by contrast, seeing the figure, showed it a measure of respect and made a mage's courtesy.

"My lord—what is it you mean to do?" In the face of Mondusath's terror of an aura, abyssal and oceanic, Thessiber dared not address him at all. It was the Deputy Commander's manner that let Thessiber see a thread of hope; he forced his fury down and spoke to ask.

"This world is too chaotic—it needs setting in order. We mean to destroy it and drag it into an Ascendant Plane. That, I'd think, is the best home it could come to." Gentlest language for the cruelest fact; the courteous Deputy Commander turned, in Thessiber's eyes, on the instant into a Fiend.

"You're ma—" Thessiber hadn't finished before a low, muffled roar cut him off. He lifted his head to see a World Tree root whip the rift in the void open and force its way into the Emerald Dream Realm. The root came on, became a world-ending dragon whose body ran past where the eye could find its end, and devoured the whole world's source-power like mad.

"Operation's begun—and the Clowns have all jumped out too." Mondusath gave a long dragon-cry and became a vast dragon-shadow, streaking toward the Sunward Reach and the sea. There, evil demigods who'd caught the shift in the source had sprung into the air; sea-race demigods, unable to bear the churning of the deep, had leapt up out of the water. All of them were Mondusath's quarry—one of the tokens of allegiance he'd handed Orion.

"Destroying the world does no one any good. Wouldn't it be better to let the Emerald Dream Realm grow on, long and far?" Seeing Mondusath gone, Thessiber gathered divine power while pleading with Deputy Commander Edward.

"Your opponent isn't me." The Deputy Commander gave a faint smile and pointed at the Orion phantom stepping, soundless and slow, out of the far end of the World Tree root. "Both of you shaped from rules—the fight will run all the sweeter for it. Lord Thessiber, good luck to you." From first to last, the Deputy Commander held Thessiber in great respect; a dauntless sage willing to sacrifice for his people deserved praise in spirit, live or die.

"He—who is he?" That he couldn't read Orion's realm filled Thessiber with terror, and with a bottomless despair besides. Against the Mondusath of before, Thessiber felt Orion the stronger, the more dangerous.

"My lord—" Ssshk. Thessiber looked down at the trident driven into his chest, his eyes all disbelief, the whole sky of it mirrored in his gaze.

"My lord, why do this? Anything can be talked over." Being a rule-incarnation, Thessiber felt no pain at all. He lifted his head and pleaded with Orion at the top of his lungs, hoping to halt the destruction, hoping for a word with Orion.

Crack. Orion reached out and seized Thessiber's head, ten thousand strands of rule-force pouring in, slamming at the Weave of Reality within Thessiber's body. To drag the Emerald Dream Realm into Titanion and fold it in for good, Thessiber—this peculiar "world-spirit"—had to be wiped out first. Anyone else might be spared; Thessiber could not.

"For the sake of what passed between us once, I'll leave the Silver-Eyes a way to live." Hearing Orion's words, Thessiber blanked two seconds, then knew him.

"It's you—so it's you." Feeling his own rule-force on the verge of snuffing out, Thessiber flared into his original form in a last flickering of light, his whole self turning to countless motes that appeared over the Continent of Chaos, charging his own people with something.

"Not killing him?" The Deputy Commander appeared at Orion's side, puzzled that he'd let Thessiber flee.

"He's already dead. What showed just now is only a thread of obsession." Orion paid Thessiber's lingering obsession no mind; the gap between them ran too wide—Thessiber had been one-shot in a single pass, not worth a mention. What Orion cared about was that pack of Dark Deities come from who-knew-where, and whether they might kick up some accident and draw down a stronger power.