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204. Dragon vs Storm
🕑 Added 2024-10-31 14:00:05 +0000 UTCThe blade and the dragon crashed. Dark purple and bright white light flashed. The white light instantly flared. It totally overwhelmed Ike, blotting him out to a shadow.
“Ike!” Wisp shouted, worried.
The white light flickered. Dark purple flashed through. Ike appeared from within the bright light, his teeth bared, sword meeting the dragon head-on. He battled it back, pushing it away.
The dragon roared. It drew back its head and struck again.
“Ha! Two can play at that game!” Ike drew his sword back. As the dragon neared, he unleashed a ferocious sword slash. He put all the strength of his Storm Clad into the blow. The storms drained away from his body and all poured into the sword. The upward strike of River-Splitting Sword flashed forth.
The sharp edge met the chin of the dragon. The dragon’s jaw snapped shut. Ike sliced through the bottom of its face and up through the top. The white dragon hung on the air for one moment longer, then burst into a thousand motes of light. Ike stumbled backward, taken aback by the blast.
He let out a huff and wiped his face, looking down at his hands. Bare skin met his gaze, without a hint of clouds or storms. Storm Clad had dissipated. But in return, he’d been able to deny that Rank 4 attack. If I do that, I can take on a high-Rank attack once, but after that, I’m spent. It’s not something I can do as an opening move.
Across the field, the Magpie King crashed to the door. His aether flickered, on the verge of burning out entirely. Wisp charged over while Ike was still taking stock of things and quickly wrapped him up in a ball of silk. Lifting him over her head, she ran back to Ike.
Ike looked at the boy, then at Wisp. “What are you going to do with that?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Eat him!”
Caught in Wisp’s silk, the Magpie King suddenly started struggling again. He bit at the silk with his teeth. “I won’t let you! Release me!”
Ike sighed. “Wisp, you can’t just eat people.”
“He’s not people. He’s a beast.”
Ike paused. He thought for a moment, then nodded. “I guess that’s true…”
“Don’t eat me! I taste bad!” the Magpie King protested. He thrashed harder.
Wisp smacked the side of the bundle. “Stop moving! The more you struggle, the more I want to eat you now instead of snack on you later.”
“Wait, wait. You two like gold, right?”
“Sure do,” Ike allowed. He wandered over to the Magpie King’s loot and started picking through it. Most of it was kind of trashy. Shiny, but useless. Still, some strange emanation called out to him from the depths of the pile.
It almost feels like a skill. But there’s no way this kid kept a skill orb mixed in with all this junk. Furrowing his brows, Ike kept digging.
“Leave that alone!” he protested.
Wisp gave him a look. She opened her mouth.
“I mean, take everything you want, haha. No, but listen!” He straightened up in the bundle. “On the other side of my valley, there’s lots of foolish, unsuspecting sects with lots of gold. They recognize me, and they hide their money if they see me coming. But they won’t recognize you! I can tell you where they hide their gold, and which ones are the best ones to hit! Tell you all their secrets, and the secret routes past their barriers! What do you say?” He smiled. All the dignity and majesty he’d had when he was perching on the throne was gone. Now, he was just a boy with rumpled hair and a tassel flopping in his face. He couldn’t even pull off the greasy salesman aura he was going for. Instead, it had the effect of a young child trying to convince an adult to let them off because they’d let the adult play with their toys.
Ike sighed. He nodded at Wisp. “Let him go.”
“What? You better have something to pay me back, in return for taking my snack,” Wisp snapped.
“Come on over and pick through his loot. You’re free to take whatever you want.”
“I have what I want,” Wisp said, patting the silk bundle.
Ike rolled his eyes. “Wisp…”
“What? I’m hungry.”
“Don’t eat him. He’s just a kid.”
The Magpie King gave them babydoll eyes. “That’s right. I’m just a kid!”
“Tender and soft,” Wisp commented, licking her lips.
The Magpie King went back to struggling.
“Come on. We’re just heading to this area to train. We might as well let him teach us how to find gold, while we’re at it. Gold, skills… if you think about it, that’s half the reason why we’re here,” Ike argued.
“But he said they all hide their gold when they see him,” Wisp pointed out.
“I’ll be in my small form. They won’t even know I’m there,” the Magpie King argued.
She pursed her lips.
“Think about it, Wisp. You could eat him now, or you could get lots of skills and gold and eat even more powerful things later,” Ike said.
“But I’m hungry now,” she replied, sighing. She set the Magpie King down, then considered him. “We need to trap him somehow. If I let him out of this silk, he’s going to fly away.”
“That’s a good point. Do you have anything in your loot that helps?” Ike asked, looking through his own pile of junk. He’d gotten so much from Clarina and Shopkeep that he couldn’t keep track of what he had. For all he knew, he had a tracking accessory in his bag, just waiting for a moment like this.
“Hmm.” Wisp looked through her own storage ring. For a moment, they stood there in silence, just looking for something to use.
“Oh, here!” Ike pulled a gold bracelet out of his bag. The instructions and restrictions had flowed into his head the second he turned his attention to it, as though it were waiting for him to do just that. After looking through his stuff, he wasn’t even all that surprised. Several of the enchanted items had leaped out at him, sharing their descriptions the second he scanned them with his mana. I wonder if it’s a common thing enchanted items do?
He knelt, sliding the bracelet around the boy’s ankle. The bracelet trembled, then constricted, pulling too tight for the boy to remove it from his foot. “It restricts if he leaves a certain radius of us.”
“Good.” Wisp snapped her fingers. The silk fell away.
The Magpie King climbed to his feet. He clasped his hands and forced a smile. “Where to, friends?”
“Wisp, you figure it out.” Leaving the spider and the bird to sort one another out, Ike turned his attention back on the loot, digging deeper. The skill emanations still poured out of the bones, calling to him. There was something in there. But what?
A shadow loomed over him. The Magpie King kicked his shoulder. “Leave that alone.”
“Wisp, the kid got away,” Ike shouted, without looking back.
“Hey, come here.” Spider thread snatched the Magpie King’s back and pulled him away.
“Leave my stuff alone,” he repeated, fighting free of the thread.
Ike looked up. His eyes narrowed. “What was that? Do you want to be a snack?”
“No, I…” he pursed his lips and crossed his arms. Brattishly, he turned away. “Fine. Whatever.”
A shimmer of green light appeared out of the clutter of bones and cheap jewelry. Ike’s eyes widened. He snatched it out of the pile, excited. A skill?
