156. Beyond the Sky (XI) (Patreon)

This was the part where Dorian magicked some incredible plan out of his behind, turned the tables, and won the day! He was Dorian, for Heavens’ sake, a legend of the Multiverse, a Godking several times over! He’d stared down tougher odds and won out. He’d overcome greater power gaps! The head ape was descending. That fist was coming fast. He was barely clinging onto consciousness. This was it. Now was the moment where legends were made.

…

He consulted his behind. Sadly it was not forthcoming. The monster was halfway to him—he could see the qi trailing its boulder-like knuckles, each falling like tiny meteors—and he was still coming up sadly blank.

…Okay! Change of plans!

This might have been the part where legends were made, true—where the hero turned the tides, vanquished his enemies, and then perhaps struck a cool pose atop a mound of their broken corpses. The sort of thing that the poets got themselves off to. The sort of thing that tended to look incredible when it worked (which, as Dorian was quickly resigning himself to, was looking very unlikely)—and very stupid when it didn’t.

The smart thing to do was to take advantage of his one real advantage here.

The creatures thought they had him trapped. They ringed him, linking up and blocking out any exit route—and the only way he might escape, up, was occupied by a massive knot of quickly descending muscle. They were sealing him in a tight jar.

But the thing with this approach was that it necessarily created a shadow… a shadow which was about the size of Dorian’s fist now but was fast growing. Come on! He gritted his teeth, curling in, making himself small. The ape was feet from his head now; he could smell its smoky breath, glimpse the saliva slicking its perfect triangle teeth. The shadow was too small! It was nearly too late. It might already be too late.

The shadow had pooled to the size of his head now. Fuck it! He launched himself in headfirst, desperate.

Half his torso followed before he felt the impact. It struck him right in the chest.

Now up until this point he’d been very, very pleased with how his body had held up. Certainly these apes hit the hardest of anything he’d seen by brute force alone. Even tempered treasures would’ve broken under their blows—and he’d gotten off without so much as a scrape. Only a lot of pain and a healthy serving of unconsciousness.

It was instantly clear he would not be so lucky this time. He had a few things going for him. First he was rolling with the blow—it struck, but its force only flung him forward into the realm of shadow. He wasn’t there to take its full brunt. Secondly it struck his lower chest. As places to take a blow went it wasn’t the worst.

Neither of these facts were much comfort when he felt the shockwave rip through his body, heard the sickening crunch in his chest. He spat out blood. Fuck. That wasn’t just one or two bones. Some softer chunks within him broke too. Organs. Then his whole body was shunted into the void and the shadow closed up behind him.

He floated there in nothing for a few seconds, a shock of excruciating pain rippling down his chest. Then frantically he tapped his Interspatial Rings and popped his highest grade healing pills. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t die from this. It’d be a close scrape, to be sure—he certainly felt like he was dying; his chest was so caved in his organs, well, the ones he had left anyways, had rearranged themselves around the indent; but he’d make it.

The more pressing issue was where he was now.

He scanned around him with his spiritual sense. The shadow realm. A transit realm. This place was hostile to physical matter, and it only tolerated him for brief stints because of his Bloodline. He didn’t dare test its patience. He had to get out of here, lets it dissolve him utterly.

But where would he go? There was a reason he couldn’t shadow jump all this time! The heart of a volcano was the worst place in the realm to find an absence of light. There was no exit point in sight.

He groaned, feeling his insides shift about within in a way insides were very much not supposed to do. He was in so much pain it had almost gone full circle; the part of his physical brain that handled that sort of stuff went out. He could hardly feel anything anymore—just an increasing tugging at every bit of his body, as though this realm were trying to yank him apart him particle by particle. He had to get out of here—straining his senses, casting about randomly, he probed again.

There was no exit still. But he did find a curiosity.

The shadow realm was a patchwork quilt made of two shades: shadow and non-shadow. Even dim light rendered a place non-shadow. But he found a place that was a third shade: a hole. Nothing at all. The shadow realm mapped cleanly onto the plane it shadowed—so this could only mean one thing…

That place wasn’t part of the plane at all!

With a burst of qi Dorian shunted himself toward it. He had a hunch he knew exactly what it was. It didn’t much matter if he was right or not. There was only one route here. Either he took it, or he died! It was like his decision to come to the Volcano, really. Or like his decision to brave the depths of the Sinkhole. When faced with impossible odds you had to take insane bets.

He was betting here that this hole was not some sort of tear in the realm into which he’d fall and vanish forever.

He was betting this hole represented a portal. Exactly the nexus he’d sensed so far away.

The void dragged at him as he went. Even merely these scant seconds had him feeling a pressure totally opposite what the lava had inflicted on him—rather than a squishing in from all sides he felt like a chunk of dough flattened out and spread farther, and farther and farther—spread so thin that at any moment a hole would tear in the middle and it’d all fall apart. There was no long-winded deliberation, no plan, no pause. He went for it.   He passed through the gap. His body and spirit met a thin film of brilliant qi which ensconced him, stretched around him, let him through.

It spat him out in a heap. He landed on all fours.

His hands met a disturbingly familiar feeling. Hot coals? He glanced down and saw a ground made entirely of the stuff, sanded over by a distinctive crimson powder. A powder that carried on the air, ever-present, like embers…

Well. Shit. He blinked.

He glanced up, and froze.

Before him stretched a landscape of reddish orange. What parts of the sky were visible beneath a night-black cloud layer were a dark, bewitching purple. Thick lava flows dominated the landscape, nearly segmenting it into a series of coal islands. In the distance rose bare plateaus of ruddy red stone.

Most striking was the air. It nearly choked him with qi it was so thick; he felt like he was in a smoke-filled room. It hardly seemed like air at all compared to what the Lower Planes had; every breath of this sent a shock of scorching vigor rushing down his system. Even caved-in chest felt instantly numbed. This was not air mortals breathed. This was the air of gods.

I’m in godsdamned HELL!

He glanced around, dumbstruck. And by the looks of it—by the feel of it—no mean Lower Circle either. This was some Middle Circle. Heresy? Anger, perhaps?

Whatever the case, he couldn’t stay here long either. Not as a mortal. A few more breaths and this qi, too potent for mortal bodies, would start to burn him up from the inside. He glanced behind him. The portal was a subtle thing, a warble in the air. Nearly like the distortion of a heat wave. Easily missed.

Blue lightning rent the sky above, blanking the clouds with light. Silhouetted against them was a flock of grotesque outlines in the sky—things with a dozen wings and far more legs slowly drifting about.

Which was all the encouragement he needed to get out of here for good! He whirled around. He was already lucky the portal spat him out in a deserted stretch, rather than an Imp nest. Hell crawled with monsters; it might’ve been the most beast-dense set of planes in all the Multiverse. Any second now a stampede of demons might crest the horizon.

Blinking white spots from his eyes, he launched himself back through the portal, hoping against all hope that wherever he ended up was not filled with things that wanted to eat, kill, or maim him.

He landed in a heap for the third time that day. No lava beneath—good first sign! He glanced about. No monsters in sight—second good sign. He was in hollow, dimly lit chamber, it seemed. Smooth obsidian-like walls rose up around him, rising up into the gloom. All about them there was the groaning of churning magma but it felt distant somehow, as though there were layers of stone between them.

But what was this furious spark in his stomach? What was this incessant shiver, this upwelling of energy from his toes to his fingers to the roots of his hairs? He felt like a struck gong. Resonance?! It was the strongest Resonance he’d ever felt—he could hardly stop his body from trembling if he tried! Could it be because the portal had spat him out in the heart of the volcano—the Torchdragon’s natural habitat? Could it be because he’d entered its birthplace? It was unsettling; he couldn’t help but feel like knew this Resonance somehow. Like he’d felt it before, somewhere in memory he couldn’t quite grasp.

He blinked, trying to suss out details from in darkness. It was unusually thick. Even his enhanced sight could only make out bare outlines…Come to think of it, this chamber’s qi did feel stupid dense. It almost felt like he hadn’t crossed over from Hell at all! It ground down upon him; he felt like he was at the bottom of a deep ocean floor. His eyes glimmered. This was it. The spot of his breakthrough, at long last! Oh, yes—this weird little chamber will do nicely. No threats in sight. No disturbances. A fantastically qi-rich environment. He was free to break through.

But just when he was about to let himself relax, let himself stretch a little and really settle down to meditate, a yawning sound echoed down the chamber—like the slow grating of something colossal, followed by a huge whooshing of hot air. Was it his imagination or did the walls of the thing flex and shift all about him?!

It was almost as though the chamber was breathing… snoring, almost?

And then Dorian had a deeply unpleasant thought. A thought that had his heart in his throat.

No fucking way.

He squinted harder, trying to pierce the darkness—darkness that seemed suddenly unnatural, like there was a dark qi tainting the air.

Before his eyes, clean lines resolved in the darkness. Lines with which he was all too familiar.

Lining the walls—or what until now he thought were walls—were a Torchdragon’s scales.