Dragon of the Shield 7: A Calamitous Chaos (Patreon)

Junior Resource Manager Derekhen read through the files on his computer while making notes to send to the Clone Bays. Despite what some would believe, coordinating the efforts of an omniversal conglomerate required more than field agents procuring samples to be reproduced at later times. To say nothing of the help desk filled with baatezu and once omnicidal AI.

Calling the task of managing all the different employees and clients a full time job was a vast understatement. Hell most of the individuals captured and sold to the Company were immediately hired and put to work in relieving the eternally short staffed employees. The sound of his office door opening pulled Derekhen’s attention from his paperwork as the lanky form of Rekiac, his aarakocra assistant, came in, holding a manilla folder with an extremely nervous look on her face.

“What is it?” Derekhen asked, resigned for the absolute shit show that was undoubtedly about to unfold.

“Ah, well, sir… you know, um, that Demon Shield Challenge?” she asked, hesitantly.

“One of our earlier challenges, what about it?”

“Well… the thing is, I was looking over one of the challengers… and, you see…”

“Spit it out already.”

“One of the challengers left Melromarc before the first Wave.”

Derekhen paused, before giving an incredulous look and asking, “How? The Shadows in the employ of the Three Heroes Church, let alone those that answer to the King, should have made that impossible. Was there a bug in the system?”

“Ah, well… I still have some of the, er, interns going over the data. But, if I were to guess?”

“Guess.”

“When the challenger was filling out his build, one of the chosen Waifus had never been chosen for this particular challenge, so the set up for the Paper Trail backstory left a stretch of Melromarc’s border less observed and defended than it otherwise would have. Combine that with the backstory provided due to the Amnesia Clause, and the challenger managed to make contact with some of the few individuals that had a way through the Waifu’s territory.”

Derekhen blinked in confusion, “Which Waifu? Who could have a backstory implant that causes such a gaping weakness in Melromarc’s borders?”

Rekiac pulled out a few sheets of paper and handed them to him. He took one look at the pictures and promptly slammed his forehead plate onto his desk. Repeatedly. He couldn’t blame the one responsible for this screw up too much, in the fifteen years Derekhen had been working for The Company after he got fed up with the leadership of Velen he’d never seen or even heard of anyone purchase or capture this particular waifu. If the folks over in Catalog Design had a sense of humor he’d have thought her entry a joke.

“Great, so our challenger managed to unintentionally find a work around out of the hard mode challenge. How are we going to fix this? Because if we don’t the bosses will have our heads,” Derekhen asked, and he wished he was exaggerating.

“Well sir, as I was compiling the data to bring to you, I had an idea. Perhaps we can have certain individuals brought into the challenge in opposition? I don’t mean another field agent, but cloned individuals that would be put against the challenger? Plus, perhaps we can make a modification to the Dragon Hourglasses, have him sent back to Melromarc after he completes a Wave?”

Derekhen leaned back, rubbing at his chin under his facial tendrils. The ideas had merit, and the former wasn’t unprecedented. Plus they had to do something to get the challenge back on track.

“Alright, I’ll make a few calls,” Derekhen said as he reached for the phone on his desk. “Good work Rekiac. Go talk to Exarch Gralus, she’ll be able to tweak the Hourglasses.”

[hr][/hr]

[quote]03:43[/quote]

Three minutes to go. We all had leveled up a bit more in the last two days, and between the five of us we averaged around level fifteen. Zmei was the lowest at level twelve, followed by Renamon at fourteen. Jester and Raphtalia were both at sixteen while I had just squeaked by into seventeen before I stopped gaining experience early yesterday.

I… don’t know if we’re ready. But there was no more time to get ready. I’d had the girls spend the last six hours just relaxing. I wanted all of us to be rested before we were thrown into a life or death battle. Hanabek had been “persuaded” to give me more information on the Waves, so I knew more or less what we needed to do.

I’d be spending the entire battle in Wyrm Form, doing my best to keep all the attention on myself and trying out some of the shields I’d been neglecting on the smaller monsters. In the meantime, Zmei would be targeting “lieutenant” type monsters, Renamon would be scouting for the Corpo-Boss amongst the monsters, while Raphtalia and Jester would be supporting both myself and Zmei. If at any point Renamon felt she was in danger of being overru…

[quote]00:00[/quote]

My mental recap of our plan was interrupted as something hooked me under my sternum and then there was a sharp tug. Shaking my head to remove the disorientation I was feeling, I looked around, seeing my girls at my side. We were on the edge of a forest, but not a proper edge where the trees grew more sparse. There was a firm line where there was forest, then wasteland, the kind of wasteland that Hanabek’s caravan had traveled through between Melromarc and Zeltoble.

“Girls, get ready,” I ordered as I toggled Wyrm Form, instantly shooting up in height. Sinaya conjured her magic lollipop, Zmei started flexing her coils, Lisitsa jumped up into the trees, and Milashka drew her blade.

“So how’s this,” I started to ask before Milashka gasped and pointed up. I followed her finger, and despite myself, my jaw dropped.

The sky was… breaking. There was no other word for it, and from the broken sky, monsters dropped down to the ground. As they drew closer, I took in a deep breath and let out a challenging bellow. If I was going to be forced to fight, I wasn’t going to let a bunch of monsters challenge me.

The first monsters to reach us were… weird. Small, flying bug-like things with four leathery wings, a head like a mosquito, and several extremely thin legs that ended in hooks. They were also very fragile. Even I was able to squish them easily. The problem was that there were a lot of them.

I brought my hands together, the sheer size of my clawed hands catching three and turning them into paste as I clapped. My tail, tipped with four pairs of spikes like a stegosaurus, whipped around, piercing and popping bat-mosquitoes like oversized, blood filled water balloons. The wings that tore through my jacket lashed out, knocking them from the sky to the ground where my feet mashed them into goo. Even with killing over a dozen in a single second, more and more kept coming to the point that I was being covered in them.

It wasn’t just the bugs landing on my scaly hide and trying to drive their needle mouths into my skin. There were reptilian monsters carrying what looked like primitive swords made by lashing teeth along the edge of a stick and giant turtle shell shields, and further back were massive, blue skinned behemoths with hideous underbites and fangs that looked like they belonged on an angler fish.

“Steady!” I bellowed, before unleashing a cloud of poison gas, killing dozens of bugs and several of the lizardmen.

“We can’t keep this up for long!” Zmei pointed out, before she shot her tongue out like a frog and pulled one of the lizardmen in and coiled around it.

“It’s just until Rena-Lisitsa finds the boss!” Milashka returned, her blade flying about her like a dance.

“Assuming we don’t,” Sinaya paused to slam her magic-made weapon into a behemoth’s face, sending a veritable swarm of teeth flying, before finishing her sentence, “end up drawing the attention of a Zeltoble Death Worm.”

I didn’t answer, letting out another bellow to keep the focus on myself. The bat-mosquitoes couldn’t pierce my scales and the weapons of the lizards just bounced off unless they hit just right to deal a piddling amount of damage, but the behemoths. They were a different story.

They had enough strength that if I didn’t work to dodge their blows, something I’d fallen out of practice at since getting this stupid shield, they’d take a sizable chunk out of my health each time they got their claws into me. I could only focus on so much at once, my claws, wings, tail, teeth filling the air in a circle of death around m…

My concentration was broken as Milashka screamed and I felt something slam into my back. I roared out in pain as my back practically folded in half, but there was also another voice screaming as it did. I fell onto my back, and was suddenly smothered in lizardmen that bit, stabbed, clawed, and did everything in their power to try to kill me.

There were too many, I couldn’t get them off me fast enough… and suddenly several screamed in pain as a flurry of leaves blew over me, before yellow and white fur filled my vision. I scrambled to my feet, Lisitsa climbing to my shoulders.

A glance around showed that we were in serious shit. Milashka was down, her leg clearly broken, Zmei and Sinaya hovering over her protectively but we were completely surrounded. The bat-mosquitoes were circling above us, the lizardmen formed ranks that completely enclosed us, with the behemoths looming in the background. Then, I spotted what had to be the Boss Monster.

It looked like a giant, emaciated panther, but with tentacles protruding from its shoulders that were capped with terrible, hook covered pads. It paced back and forth, letting me see that it possessed six legs instead of four. I was bleeding from over a dozen different places, but I stared down the monster, meeting its eyes that were filled with malevolent hatred.

It snarled, before letting out a screeching yowl, like a demonic puma. The lizardmen and behemoths closed in, ready to tear us limb from limb… when suddenly the ground shook. Sinaya and most of the lizardmen fell from their feet, while I just barely managed to keep mine. I looked around, easily figuring out that this wasn’t the work of the Wave with how unprepared the monsters were for it.

“No,” Sinaya whispered, her eyes wide in horror.

“What is it?” Lisitsa asked from her place on my shoulder.

Sinaya didn’t have the chance to respond, because I spotted what was causing it. A plume of dirt, moving in a line straight for where we were. Hanabek and Sinaya had both mentioned death worms, I guess we were going to see one. I rolled my neck, only to feel my heart plummet into my stomach as the massive creature burst from the ground like a scilla snapping men off a ship.

Two arms ending in scythe-like blades longer than I was tall, even in Wyrm Form, lashed down, stabbing into the ground two feet away from the Boss Monster, which began recoiling in pain, crying and yowling in sheer agony. For a moment, before the death worm lifted its arms and brought the apparent prize to its mouth.

“Sinaya… what are our chances?” I asked, as the monsters slowly started to rise up into the sky, the worm snapping up everything that came within reach of its arms.

“We have to run, we’re nowhere near strong enough to fight it,” she said as she tried to heal Milashka’s leg.

I didn’t spare any more words, I just scooped up all of my girls, turned around, and started to run. I ran for the treeline, hoping that the root network would be enough to keep the worm from bursting up from under me and eating us all. It was a big worm, all I had to do was get to cover while it was distracted, it’d take time for it to burrow through the dirt to reach us.

That was when I learned a crucial detail about Zeltoble Death Worms that no one had bothered to tell me. They spit acid. They are incredibly accurate at spitting acid. I felt the warm, liquid mass slam into the small of my back, just above the base of my tail, and immediately my back under it started to sizzle and burn.

I cried out in pain, moments before my legs stopped listening to me and I fell forwards. I maintained my focus enough to put my hands out to keep from crushing everyone, but I wasn’t going anywhere. Look up, tree line’s close…

“Girls, run. Get to the trees, I’ll keep it busy,” I told them, trying not to reveal how much pain I was feeling, even as the burning sensation started reaching deeper.

“But…” Milashka started, her eyes wide in fear and something else.

“That’s an order,” I snapped, making their slave curses spark. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Zmei and Lisitsa helped pick up Milashka, even as Sinaya hesitated. Her curse sparked again, and she finally started moving. With my arms, I rolled myself over so I could look at the beast. I couldn’t move, there was no way my poison breath would reach it, I had no ranged weapons thanks to this shield, and my spells didn’t have the necessary range to reach it.

Calling up one of the shields I’d unlocked but never gotten around to using, I pointed the face of the shield at it and growled, “Gravel Shot.”

There was a blast of scattered gravel bits from the face of the shield, but as with my spells, they didn’t reach far enough. Well, that was my last option. All I can do now is hope it’s going to go after the easy prey first. Namely me.

Fortunately, relatively speaking, it was. It threw itself forwards, like a sea serpent that was diving back into the ocean, it’s cavernous mouth open wide enough to engulf myself and everything in a seventy five foot radius. As it came down, and I felt a hooking sensation in my guts, I roared out in defiance at it. My claws and teeth lashed, biting into its flesh just before there was a tug.