Path of Dragons

Elijah’s heart broke for his friend.

Dat made such an effort to maintain his appearance – to provide a thread of optimism to everyone else – that it was often difficult to see that mask fall away. Elijah had only seen it a couple of times, but each time had been eye-opening. He desperately wanted to help, but he was well aware of his social deficiencies. He’d offered, and he had no idea what else to do.

After all, helping someone was predicated on their cooperation. If Dat wasn’t ready to accept help, then there was nothing else that Elijah could do. For now, at least. Going forward, he would keep an eye out for opportunities to assist his friend.

Still, once Elijah was out of sight, he spent a long time just watching Dat via Soul of the Wild as he scoured his mind for strategies. He found none, and eventually, he just accepted his own inadequacies for what they were. After that, he took a deep breath, then refocused his mind on the arguably more important – at least in the grand scheme of things – matters.

For instance, he couldn’t ignore the reality of the situation in Hong Kong, which he’d discovered was far more complex than he’d initially been led to believe. He didn’t blame Sadie for that, but it definitely irritated him. If he’d known things were so complicated, he would have come sooner. But now, his timeframe had become both truncated and slightly more forgiving.

As far as Elijah could see, there were two major problems. The first was that Sadie and her people didn’t know precisely where the entrance to the Primal Realm was located. The knew the area – Lung Fu Shan – which was located on the northwestern side of Hong Kong Island, but beyond that, they were unsure. Before Earth had experienced the touch of the World Tree, exploring the entire region wouldn’t have been difficult, but the expansion of Hong Kong Island – especially outside the city – meant that the terrain had been merged with other areas. So, what had once been a modest hill had become a mountain whose height was closer to Everest than to its former peak. The rest of the area had been expanded accordingly.

So, it would likely take some time to properly explore it.

At least for most people. Elijah hoped that, with his senses, he could find it a little more quickly than most.

But finding the entrance to the Primal Realm was only the first issue. The second was that, even once it had been discovered, entering the Primal Realm was not as simple as walking into a tower. Instead, the entrants were required to have completed a set of challenges meant to prove their worthiness. In some cases, this mechanic was represented by assembling the pieces of a key. In others, it was akin to flipping a bunch of switches to “unlock” the door, so to speak.

No one was certain what form the challenges associated with the Primal Realm might take. Largely, this was because their scouts were incapable of scouring the region without running afoul of the huge masses of undead in the area. Elijah didn’t think he would have the same issues. Before his core advancement, Guise of the Unseen wasn’t as potent as Dat’s Ghost Cloak, but he expected it would be up to the task now. On top of that, if a horde of zombies wanted to attack him, he was more than capable of dealing with them.

In fact, there was a part of him that wanted nothing more than to let loose without having to think about how his actions might affect others. Nobody cared about a bunch of zombies, after all.

“Well, barely anyone does,” he amended under his breath. Further complicating the situation in Hong Kong was the fact that the city played host to at least three enclaves of necromancy. None of them were huge – maybe a few thousand people at most – but almost all of the residents were attuned to death, which hung over the city like a dense fog. That meant they were more powerful than they otherwise would have been, and, on top of that, they’d been at war with the people of Heaven’s Bastion since the very beginning.

That was why security had been so tight around the Branch. They’d been infiltrated on a couple of occasions – apparently, the Teleportation Network was far cheaper in such close proximity – and the necromancers who’d done so had been strong enough to wreak havoc within the settlement.

Given that, he didn’t blame their response to his arrival.

But now, Elijah wanted to check things out for himself. Being inside Heaven’s Bastion had left him feeling uncomfortable, and in a way he couldn’t really explain. It felt like a cage, and one he was eager to escape. So, after leaving Dat behind, he headed to the elevator and rode it to its terminus. The bottom four floors were kept empty, save for a martial presence meant to deal with any zombies or other undead creatures that made it that far. So, once he exited the elevator, he was forced to pass through four checkpoints on his way to the ground floor. Like the people he’d defeated around the Branch, these fighters all wore modified riot gear with Kevlar armor that had been molded to fit a more traditional aesthetic. It gave each set of gear a bastardized look that left a bad taste in Elijah’s mouth.

But he wasn’t there to critique their fashion sense, and he could tell that each of them was strong enough to give an enemy a hard time. For his part, Elijah felt certain that he could destroy the lot of them without issue, but he was beginning to understand that he was the exception, rather than the rule. Normal people just couldn’t hope to stand up to him.

That had been true before the Trial of Primacy, and the gap had only widened since its completion. Compared to him, those fighters were barely better than vanilla humans – a difficult thing for Elijah to accept. He didn’t like thinking of them in those terms. They were obviously proud and accomplished people who’d worked extremely hard to gain the levels they had. But reality was reality, and it didn’t really care about how he felt about the situation.

From a structural perspective, the bottom floors of the building were a little more daunting than the people who manned them. They were riddled with fortifications, both active and passive, and Elijah suspected that any force that made it through would have to pay a significant price for every step they took.

“Are you going to be okay out there?” asked the man in charge of the last checkpoint. He glanced toward the doors, adding, “It’s pretty dangerous.”

Elijah nodded. “I’ll be alright,” he answered. “I’ve been through worse.”

After that, Elijah stepped past the man – and his twenty subordinates – and waited on them to unlock the heavy, steel doors that looked like they would have been at home guarding a bank vault. The huge doors swung open, revealing an urban hellscape.

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Elijah stopped in the doorway, gaping at the scene before him. For the first few hundred yards all around him, there was nothing. The residents of Heaven’s Bastion had cleared the plaza for defensive reasons. However, beyond that was an abandoned and deteriorated city.

Far to his left was a dock populated by piled-high storage containers, each one rusted and broken open, with a crane having fallen across the area. To his right was the sea. But ahead, he could see nothing but deteriorating buildings, many of which had experienced visible damage. One had even fallen entirely.

He stepped forward, and the door clanged shut behind him. The echoing sound put Elijah in mind of finality. He was cut off from the safety of the fortress-like building. Or, from another perspective, he was finally free of its oppressive aura. He let out a sigh of relief, knowing which viewpoint he felt more strongly characterized his own.

With his staff clicking against the concrete ground, he covered the distance to the edge of the cleared area and onto a wide street that cut between the buildings. There were hundreds of abandoned cars clogging the street, though many had been dismantled for salvage. What was left were mere skeletons that barely hinted at the machines they’d once been.

He wove through the wreckage, and as he drew further away from Heaven’s Bastion, he saw that the vehicles were slightly more intact. Clearly, that was where the settlement’s crafters had found their raw materials.

Once he was out of sight of the building, Elijah waited a few more minutes before he shifted into Shape of Venom. The second the transformation was complete, he took on Guise of the Unseen before padding forward. He’d memorized a map of the area, but he quickly discovered that much of it was inaccurate, largely because huge swaths of the city had been replaced with other, out-of-place urban areas. Elijah saw signs in a wide variety of languages, ranging from English to what looked like Arabic, and everything in between.

Still, he knew the vague direction of his destination, so he wasted no time before taking off at an easy jog that would have gotten him a reckless driving ticket in a school zone. The only thing that slowed him down was when debris or wreckage blocked the street. In those cases, he sprang to nearby walls, climbed until he could bypass the obstruction, then continued on his way.

It wasn’t long before he caught sight of the first zombie horde.

They moved in huge clumps containing thousands of walking corpses. Perhaps even tens of thousands. Most were so rotted that Elijah could scarcely guess at their origin, but the few that were still intact were plainly Asian. However, Elijah saw enough variations in attire and – oddly enough – hair color that suggested that many of the zombies had originated in other places. Likely, they’d come from the displaced additions to the city.

Or maybe Hong Kong was more diverse than he’d been led to believe. He was no expert, so that was just as likely an explanation.

Regardless, Elijah noticed a couple of details about that first zombie clump that gave him pause. First, they were higher level than he had expected. Ethera wove through them in dense ropes of energy, suggesting that they were almost as powerful as the undead creatures he’d fought in the Trial of Primacy. That was unexpected, especially considering that there didn’t seem to be anything special about them. Surely, there were more powerful undead creatures out there as well, which brought the danger confronting the people of Hong Kong into sharper focus. After only a few moments, Elijah realized something profound – those ropes of ethera bound them together, strengthening them. Were they under the influence of a Tactician? He didn’t think so. Instead, it was more like they were a colony of individuals that functioned as a whole. Like coral. Or fungi. Elijah couldn’t be certain without further study, but it appeared that the more of them that gathered together, the stronger each individual would become.

The result was not encouraging. As it stood, people like Sadie and Dat – and probably Nico – could have fought the horde and won, but those guards he’d passed would be woefully outmatched.

It was no wonder they hadn’t made more progress.

The second factor that worried Elijah was that the zombies were not homogenous. Racial differences aside, he could tell that there were different types of zombies within the hordes. Some seemed like run-of-the-mill fighters, but when Elijah saw them attack a pack of wild dogs, he saw that many used powerful ranged attacks as well. Those were represented in a couple of ways, but Elijah was most disturbed by the ones that seemed to belch giant balls of sticky and caustic goo. A close second, in terms of disturbing sights, was when some of the zombies yanked boney projectiles from their ribcages and threw them with unerring accuracy.

Needless to say, the dogs did not last long, and the feeding frenzy that followed left Elijah feeling nauseous. He’d considered helping the animals, but the whole thing had happened so quickly that by the time he could have done anything, half the dogs were already dead. He could have killed the zombies – probably – but not before they finished their job.

So, feeling both guilty and a little helpless, he moved on from the gruesome sight. Over the next hour or so, he saw a handful of similar scenes, which he studiously ignored. He wanted to help, but he knew that doing so would only delay the inevitable. If he really wanted to assist, then he needed to find the source and cut it off.

By mid-morning, he found the first enclave of necromancers. To him, they looked much like normal people, though they were much more ragged than the residents of Heaven’s Bastion. Elijah also saw that many of them used undead creatures for manual labor, including as guards. But more distressingly, he saw children playing in those settlements. Mostly, though, Elijah didn’t feel threatened by them. They were just people, albeit ones that had chosen to exist within the framework of their environment rather than fight against it.

He didn’t know what to make of that. On the one hand, he found their resilience admirable. However, on the other, his senses rebelled against the idea. But most of all, he couldn’t help but wonder if his concept of life was skewed by his experiences. It was definitely something he needed to consider. One thing was absolutely certain, though. The situation was a little more complicated than he’d been led to believe.

Eventually, Elijah found his way to what the locals had dubbed Dragon Tiger Mountain. The name irritated him, and it wasn’t difficult to understand why. To the people who’d named it, dragons were mythological creatures, and in a lot of ways, they’d been adopted as mascots. But for Elijah, it was his reality, and he found the entire thing offensive.

In any case, he quickly found that the area was crawling with skeletons clad in World War II-era military gear. Most of it was rotted, but Elijah caught sight of enough helmets to know what he was looking at. Fortunately, they were no more attentive than the zombies, though they did patrol the area in defined patterns.

Weaving between them, Elijah noticed the rising levels of death-attuned ethera, and he followed that until, at last, he zeroed in on the source. It was a huge, concrete bunker with a large satellite dish – probably two-hundred feet across – pointed toward the sky. The thing had clearly been built decades before and abandoned not long after, because many of the panels were missing, and the mechanical parts looked to have been rusted shut.

However, when Elijah entered the bunker itself, he quickly navigated the labyrinthine tunnels, following the increasing density of death-attuned ethera until, at last, he reached a large, rusted door. He laid his claw on it, and a notification appeared before his inner eye:

You have reached The Desolate Reach. To enter, receive a blessing from the Shrines of War, Water, and Cunning: Man Mo Temple Tin Hau Temple Ap lei Chau Temple Shrines will unlock in eleven days.

Elijah had found the Primal Realm, but it seemed that he had a little time to kill before he and the others could challenge it.

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