The Bloodforged Kin

Chapter 213 - 207: Zavier - Dungeon Guardian

"FUCK YOU FALKOR!" Zavier's words were lost to the wind as he balanced on the neck of a giant Winter Wyvern. They were flying through the air so high that the oxygen should have been growing thin, but in the trial space of his personal dungeon the standard laws of physics didn't seem to apply. His chains were connected at the tips and formed a long loop around the wyvern's neck, the razored links of his Razorlink Chain sliding uselessly over crystal blue scales. His back was arched as he stood, pulling against the chains, more to keep himself rooted in place than to cause any damage. Strategies were flying through mind at rapid speed, none of them giving him any hope of surviving this.

After the Evernight Woods he'd taken some time to review his gains and reflect on the changes he'd experienced. He'd programmed a new skill into his pen, gained a full level out of the experience, and lost an adorable owlbear cub.

No, not lost, he'd reflected, sacrificed. The difference was key to Zavier and had taught him valuable lessons. The first was that this place was so much darker than he could have imagined. He now knew that it would test him beyond physical and magical limits, it would test the very nature of who he was, and what he was willing to do.

The second thing he'd learned was that he was willing to do whatever it took. Sacrificing Owly had cracked his soul in ways he hadn't expected. They had just met and there was no reason for Zavier to be so attached to the walking teddy bear, but knowing that didn't change how he'd felt. It wasn't that he'd lost the little guy - he could have lived with that. It was that he'd had to actively kill him, and all for his own gain. He'd had a choice - he could have left without gaining the experience and left Owly to his fate. He could have refused to play their game, even if it cost Owly's life either way.

He'd chosen, though, and there was no going back. The only thing left for him to do was to patch the cracks in his soul with ice and determination. He had a family to get back to - loved ones to save - he'd do whatever it took to reach them. He'd sacrifice anything or anyone. No more friends for him here - everything was just a pile of experience that stood between him and his mission.

He'd left the plains without looking back at the woods, staring only forward. He'd encountered a wide lake and been given another zone mission: Find the treasure at the bottom of the lake. Getting to the bottom had been easy - he'd used Fara's Gift to send him plummeting to the lake bed. Walking across the bottom had been a challenge, but his light spell had provided a small pocket of illumination that kept him from operating completely blind.

He'd been attacked, but while rooted to the bottom of the lake he'd made short work of anything that came at him, his chains more than a match for the challenges. The hardest part of the entire mission, besides finding the damned oyster that held the magical pearl, had been overcoming his body's instinctual need to breathe. Those first few minutes had been a constant battle not to inhale the water while watching his health bar to see if he was drowning. By concentrating on absorbing System energy, rather than oxygen, he was able to stabilize his dropping health, the experience lighting a lightbulb in his head. He didn't need to breathe - that he knew, but his body didn't know that. As long as he perceived that he was drowning his body reacted accordingly and dropped his health. Once he was able to sustain himself by absorbing the energy all around him, and was able to convince his lizard brain that it didn't need to breathe anymore, his health leveled out, then started increasing again. He'd recovered the pearl and tried to identify it, but the attempt failed and he got no information back. He tried activating it, rubbing it, and even stuck it in his mouth, but nothing worked. Frustrated with the lack of results he dumped it into his dimensional storage and swam back to the surface.

From there his travels brought him through high-grassed plains where he'd fought Gnolls, RPG versions of lions, elephants, and rhinos. He'd even had to fend off angry groundhogs that threatened to swarm him. He'd gotten no items and very little experience from that, not even another level. He was starting to suspect that the experience he would gain from this trial came less from the quantity of creatures killed and more from the rigors and challenges of the trial itself. The Evernight Woods had been a true trial, where he'd not only had to adapt his fighting style and learn new skills, but overcome his previous limitations and make decisions he wouldn't have made before. He'd gotten a decent chunk of experience from the lake and almost none from the prairie. He'd decided that it was because the lake had forced him to realize truths about his body and overcome the limitations that were no longer relevant in this System world.

Other terrains came and went, each with classic creatures that could have been pulled straight out of campaign modules from any RPG he'd played. He only had two regions left to explore - one a deep cave that banked sharply into the earth, and the other a massive snow-covered peak. The cave looked a little 'final boss level' to him so he'd decided to face the mountain first.

The climb had been rough - there were no easy trails and every handhold was frozen over in ice and snow. The climb had been blessedly enemy-free, since Zavier had had to use every bit of his attention and the generous use of his chains to climb his way to the peak. The bitter cold he'd endured had been an experience similar to the lake, in that it had tested his physical limits. Learning to not breathe had been a cakewalk compared to convincing his body that the sub-zero temperatures and ice-laden winds were not the danger they had been before. The only thing that kept him going was replaying scenes of Bruce Wayne climbing a similar mountain to reach the League of Shadows' monastery to be trained by Ra's Al Ghul. He wouldn't have thought that chanting 'I am Batman. I am Batman," for the last hour of the climb would help, but it did.

As the temperature continued to drop he worked a part of his mind on forming the code for fire. The code was easy enough to find and not locked behind any skill walls, since it was such a basic part of the world. Turning it into something useful, though, had been a challenge. He'd focused on the heating aspects of fire, rather than the physical manifestation of it, and sent its warmth to his numb fingers. By the time he reached the summit he hadn't fully convinced his body that cold shouldn't be a factor anymore, but he'd at least brought it to a tolerable level.

He pulled himself over a ledge, collapsing on his back onto a small rocky outcropping that jutted miles above the ground below. The wind threatened to hurl him over the edge and there was nothing below him but hard stone and icy death. He groaned and flipped over, crawling his way to a cave entrance a few dozen feet in front of him. Wind-borne ice flensed his flesh and his health bar dropped for real as muscle and fatty tissue were exposed. He made the last few feet into the lee of the cave, dropping with relief as he found himself in a blessedly-calm cavern. His eyes drooped heavy and before he knew it he woke with a start, a loud snort echoing into the cavern.

Damn it, man, get it together! If you fall asleep out here you're dead! He didn't know what was in that cave, but he was confident that it would look at his sleeping form like a nice snack. It hadn't escaped his notice that there were no other creatures on this spire. Whatever was here had either cleared them out, or was a big enough threat that The System wanted him at his best when he reached it.

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"At my best," he chuckled ruefully to himself. His health was in the 60's and his entire body was stinging with deep cuts. He'd experimented with using System energy to heal himself, but that was firmly locked behind skills that he currently had no access to, and nothing in his repertoire gave him anything he could build off of.

"Welp," he mumbled as he climbed to his feet. "Nothing left to do but to do the damned thing." He readied himself the best he could and sent his ball of light ahead of him into the cave.

The wyvern had appeared out of the darkness, making Zavier jump back and clamp his lips shut to keep from shouting in surprise. It was at least 15 feet long and as wide as three horses. The neck alone was wider than his body and the thing's entire form was covered in beautiful, glittering, crystal blue scales. Most importantly, at least to Zavier, it was asleep.

He scanned the small cavern but saw nothing. No old weapons from defeated foes, no bones - nothing. Just the wyvern and him. Identify gave him the standard D&D stat sheet and nothing more. In his hesitation, lost in thought of what he could do, he missed one crystalline eye cracking open and swiveling his direction.

The fight had been a bloody melee, the wyvern forcing him on the constant defense and slamming him repeatedly into the stone walls. It used its tail, wings, and head as weapons and Zavier used every point of Agility he had just to keep himself from getting crushed. The situation was untenable and he knew that one slip-up, one mistake, would be all it took for him to end up as a bloody paste.

He decided to take the fight to the wyvern. Its tail lashed out again but Zavier was ready this time. He leapt onto it, running up the limb awkwardly, arms out to his side in a desperate gambit to keep his balance. He reached the body and found the center. His perfect recall brought up something he'd learned as a kid - The Well. Bull riding had been a popular sport in his small village in Mexico, and he recalled shouts of 'Get down the well!' It was a call for the rider to find the center point of the bull's spinning and use the force of the spin to pull the rider down onto the body, using the bull's own momentum to keep the rider in place. The first time Zavier had tried riding a bull he'd sat on the huge creature, legs barely stretching across its wide back. One hand had been tied firmly under the ropes around its neck, the other held out for balance. The horn had sounded, the chute had opened, someone slapped the bull's ass, and the world spun. Zavier came-to, looking up at the faces surrounding him.

"Did I last eight seconds?"

Laughs erupted and someone reached down to help him up. "Ay, cabrone, you didn't even make it out of the chute!" Zavier looked around in shock - the bull had leapt and he'd been thrown from its back immediately, flipping head-over-ass to land hard on the packed dirt in the chute. The bull was still in the arena, looking around in confusion.

He hoped this time turned out differently.

He flung his chains out to either side, whipping them to swing underneaths the wyvern's neck. A Charisma point later and they were fused together at the tips. Zavier wrapped the ends around his hands and pulled upwards, trying to choke the beast to death.

The beast had other plans. It sprinted for the cave opening and, with a crack of leathery wings, was in the air. Once again Zavier's world spun around him as the wyvern twisted, banked, and flipped through the air in tight spirals. It couldn't reach him from his spot in the well, but it could damned sure shake him off.

Air roared in Zavier's ears and tears flowed from his eyes, freezing as they flew behind him. The first few minutes took all of his concentration just to remain on his feet and not be sent flying to his death. He tried channeling heat and flame into the chains, and was even rewarded with a flickering of fire that raced down their lengths, but it was a candle's flame against a glacier.

The fucking scales, man! I need to get to the flesh underneath! He wriggled the chains desperately, trying to work them underneath the scales without losing his footing. Unfortunately for him, the scales overlapped facing towards him and every attempt to move his chains just sent them skittering over the protective plates and pushing him further out of the well. He couldn't keep trying this - he was one step away from being flung off the thing's back.

Desperate times, and all of that, he thought, then he leapt.

Zavier flew to the side in as wide of an arc as he was able to get. He reached the arc's apogee arched his body like he was swinging on a gymnastics bar, then kicked his legs out. The momentum had him swinging underneath its body, the huge head looking down at him in confusion. He reached the peak of his swing at the other side and kicked his legs upwards, momentum driving him over the top of the wyvern's neck again.

And thus did Zavier become a swinging necklace of razored edges and loud screams. He swung faster and faster, building up speed as each circuit took him a little faster. The wyvern screeched and attempted to chomp on him as he passed underneath, but he was moving too fast. Sparks began to appear across the wyvern's neck and Zavier felt resistance from the chains as they began to carve a groove in the hardened scales.

Cries of "FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!" were shared with screeches of pain and fury.

The wyvern spun a wide loop, angling back towards the spire. It dove in close to the mountain's edge, trying to knock the madman off by slamming him into the walls.

"FUCK FUCK FUCK!" Zavier shifted and caught the side of the mountain with his feet then began running along it, sprinting across the vertical face like it was the ground. Every time the wyvern dipped away he pushed off the wall to continue his swing.

The wyvern had had enough and made another wide loop, turning to aim straight for the cave. The infuriating man couldn't continue to swing around him if they were inside.

Zavier saw what he was doing and redoubled his efforts. He choked up on the chains, twisting them around his hands at each apogee to reduce their length. The mountain came closer into view but Zavier was lost to the sight. Everything was a flash of spinning, swirling snow and he had to close his eyes against the visual onslaught or risk throwing up.

He felt the wind change and realized that they were close enough to the spire for the winds to be circling it rather than coming from straight ahead. He pulled tighter, catching the wyvern's neck with his legs and slamming himself hard onto its back. He opened his eyes and saw the cave's maw approaching at terrible speed. He closed his eyes again - this would either work or it wouldn't, and seeing what was coming wouldn't help.

He pulled, every muscle in his body straining to its breaking point.

The wyvern screamed, bucking against the razored chain that had found its way into its throat.

The pair slammed onto the outcropping and slid into the cave. Zavier heaved a final time and felt the chains go slack. He was thrown from the wyvern's body to slam into the far wall of the cave. He dropped to the ground and looked up with panic.

"FUCK FUCK FUCK!" He leapt out of the way just in time for the wyvern's head to hit the wall behind him hard enough to send tremors through the cavern.

An hour passed while Zavier recovered. The wyvern's body had long-since disappeared, leaving only a single crystal blue scale in its place. He'd identified it, still with no luck. He tucked it away in his dimensional storage but didn't move from his spot. He was in no condition to try the long climb back down.

"You couldn't have died at the bottom of the mountain, could you, you bastard?" Zavier tipped over, falling into a boneless sleep on the cave floor.

The trip down the mountain was far easier than the climb up. Zavier pulled the shield from his storage and climbed to stand on it like a snowboard. His chains whipped forward and back in constant swings, controlling the speed and direction of his lightning-fast slide down the mountain. He reached the bottom without incident, grinning madly to himself. His sleep had restored his energy and his slide down the mountain had invigorated him. Whatever came next, he was ready.