Honour Rae
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ATS Book 6 Ch14: Lots and Lots and Lots of Butterflies
🕑 Added 2025-04-22 05:57:23 +0000 UTCThe scourgling butterflies came at them in a slow but unstoppable wave.
Immediately, Brixaby buzzed straight upward. However, not every dragon was built for speed. A Legendary dragon not too far away roared in pain.
Arthur swung around to see him climbing upward, great sweeps of his wings frantically beating at the air. But his size made him horrifically slow.
The first of the butterflies had already reached him, and their wings sliced into his scales.
A great gout of air split off from the rider and knocked a huge portion of them away, blowing the leading wave aside to give the dragon more room.
Brixaby, with his four wings and natural Purple speed, was much faster. But even using his Flying Sprint skill, he wasn't moving nearly as fast as Arthur knew he could. The butterflies had no problems at all and were gaining.
"The pollen!" Brixaby yelled, sounding winded. "It is mixed with the air and makes everything within it heavy!" He let out a roar of frustration, and in the next moment, a dark portal opened right before them.
He and Brixaby spilled inside the dark rower's realm. Immediately, Brixaby closed the portal again, cutting off a scourgling wing.
That had been close.
Brixaby didn't even wait for Arthur to dismount. With flapping wings, he leapt to the rowboat and barked at the rower, "Take me to this place I see in my mind. We must get high above them— as high as a dragon can fly!"
The rower nodded and immediately pushed off from the pier.
Arthur tried to speak but found his voice unusually weak. His breathing was heavy too— now that Brixaby wasn't flying for his life, he was able to notice the little things.
Focusing inward, he realized his moderate healing card was working. It took him several swallows to be able to get anything out.
"That pollen—it's worse than scourge dust. I didn't realize I'd breathed any in."
Brixaby twisted his neck around to look at him. "Are you well?"
Arthur nodded. "Yes, but I don't want to be trapped in the middle of a flock of those."
"Neither do I."
Brixaby looked angry enough to spit. His black claws flexed on the wooden rowboat, and if it were not a metal object, he might have split the wood. "I dislike running from mere Commons."
"Are they Common?" Arthur asked. It had happened so fast, he hadn't been sure. The scourglings had metamorphosized in front of them. Perhaps in doing so, they had increased in rank. Stranger things had happened.
Tellingly, Brixaby did not answer.
Unexpectedly, the rower spoke up. "You could go back in time and perhaps warn the others of the situation." Though Arthur could not see his face from under his heavy hood, it seemed he was looking directly at him.
Arthur felt a chill. Yes. Yes, he could... if he was willing to use the Time card.
"And I could suck the life out of all of them and use their power to end the threat decisively," Brixaby snapped. "No, we still have many options before either of us uses those cards."
That made him feel marginally better. Brix, who feared little, did not want him to use the Time card.
"What of the others?" Arthur asked.
Though Brixaby was brave, he wasn't the most empathetic. He shrugged, the motion rolling Arthur back and forth in his seat.
"They would not be true Legendaries if they allowed mere Commons to end them."
****
The boat ride was thankfully short, and the moment they touched land and were free to move, they shot through the other side of the portal again.
Arthur and Brixaby arrived so high up that the sky was noticeably a deeper blue hue. It was also startlingly cold. The thin air did nothing for his abused lungs, but he could still breathe. Most importantly, no scourglings were in sight.
Under him, he saw the plague of butterflies and the positioning of the other Legendaries. It seemed in the short time they'd been gone, Whitaker had abandoned his hold on the demi-scourge.
It now lay, undulating in what Arthur thought of as triumph, at the base of the eruption cone.
Meanwhile, the eruption continued to spill out grubs, which immediately metamorphosized.
Whitaker and the rest of the Legendaries were busy sheltering within a large bubble shield. As Arthur watched, one pink Legendary that had helped kill the Commons was rescued via portal and placed safely inside.
And, from Arthur's view from up high, it was easy to see that the plague of butterflies was rapidly spreading outward in all directions. It was bad enough when they'd only been slow-moving grubs. Now they had truly lost control of the scourge eruption. He hated to ask, but it had come to this point.
"Brix, your Call of Life..."
The dragon was silent for a long moment. "I can kill a good number of them with it, I believe, but not all." He made an equally weighted pause. "Your time card?"
He had just been thinking how relieved he was that he didn’t have to use the card—it was a mark of how desperate the situation actually was.
Arthur thought. "I would have to go back far in time to the start of the eruption and perhaps warn people. Though I don't know what good it would do."
"And it would be more damaging to you," Brixaby said. "No."
Down below, he could see that the butterflies were starting to escape the boundaries that the lower ranks had tried to put up. Here and there were blooms of color as hive dragons on the perimeter used card powers to put up a good fight and keep them contained. They were hampered by being spread so thin. Eleven hives' worth of dragons. Eleven hives made for a lot of dragons, but the perimeter was huge, and if any of them grouped up together to help with the fight, that left gaps.
That wasn't even going into the trap that the other Legendaries had fallen into. By now, he and Brixaby were the only ones who were outside of the shield. The rest were huddled within, and all of the scourge butterflies near the eruption point seemed dead set on getting at them. They beat at the shield with their razor-sharp wings, very likely draining it of mana by the second. That wasn’t even the worst part. That was the pollen.
Arthur's throat still felt raw from breathing in a small portion of it. The ground below now looked hazy with the accumulation of the pollen. If anybody were caught up within that...
He had to face it. They had failed. Any minute now, scourglings were going to breach the perimeter containment the lower ranks had set up and start flying out to wreak havoc on the rest of the kingdom.
He had no doubt that eventually they'd get a handle on things, but not before devastation had been racked up over a wide area.
They were looking down the throat of, if not a defeat, then something very close to it.
No, he thought in the next moment, firming his resolve. This couldn't be it. They had at least two portal-type Legendaries with them, including Ismael's Marv, who could actually tunnel through time—his card was infamous for it. The fact that he had not done it so far was extremely telling.
Maybe he has the same restrictions as my time card, he thought.
The Legendaries within the shield had huddled up together, and Arthur guessed that they were working on a plan. He needed to work on his own.
Looking down, he tried to see where he and Brixaby could do the most good.
His gaze fell on the demi-scourgling, which still lay at the bottom of the eruption, undulating in place in a rhythmic pattern. That pattern happened to match the strikes he could still feel against his mental shielding. It was working hard to keep anybody without a mental block away.
If he could get rid of it...
Brixaby was staring in disgust at the other Legendaries. "Why are they not firing at the butterflies? They are safely hiding when there are scourglings to kill?”
“The shield might not let card power pass through that way,” Arthur replied distantly, still looking. Though Brixaby had a point. The shield was cast by a Legendary user. Why shouldn’t something like that be possible?
His dragon snorted his derision. “Perhaps they are cowards and will only strike from afar.”
Then an idea—a really stupid idea, but an idea—struck him.
"Brix, do you still have your old furnace?"
"Yes," Brixaby said, surprised. "In my Personal Space, why? I cannot work on a weapon now. Besides, it is too small for me," he added with frustration.
Arthur grinned. "Do you think that you could take us right over that demi-scourge?"
Brixaby brightened, then cast his attention downward. He darted back and forth, eyeing the demi-scourgling below, which, at their height, still looked as small as an actual grub.
He took so long that Arthur wondered if he was hesitating. He did love that furnace, even though he had literally outgrown it. Then Brixaby stopped to hover.
"Here is the place," he said, then tilted his head, considering. "Perhaps I should fill the furnace with metal ingots.”
“The heavier, the better." Arthur leaned to look over his dragon's neck. "I don't think we're right above the demi-scourge, though. We're a little off angle.”
“I am taking the wind into account. You may tell me how to fly when you grow four wings," Brixaby said testily.
"Alright, alright." Almost laughing, Arthur backed away. Clearly, his dragon knew his business.
There was a slight stutter as Brixaby blinked in and out of existence, almost too fast for Arthur to catch. That was followed by a quick dip as Brixaby pulled the furnace out from his mental space and dropped it.
An instant later, a giant metal and stone monstrosity was falling at great speed.
Arthur squinted. The furnace was glowing. "Did you light it?"
"Yes, I thought it would make a lovely surprise."
As it fell, however, a new shimmering portal in the sky opened. And though it was easily a half-mile away, Arthur saw that this one seemed to be encrusted with diamonds. Very fancy… and high-powered.
Lung Bai slithered out of the portal, and the king sat regally on her neck. Clearly, the other Legendary dragons had called her in.
Lung Bai opened her mouth to speak what was no doubt a regal command… then froze in place. She snaked her head upward to look at the falling furnace.
The other Legendaries followed her gaze. Silently, everybody watched it fall, and fall, and fall. After all, Arthur and Brixaby were extremely high up.
In fact, the only one who wasn't aware seemed to be the semi-scourge. Brixaby knew his business. The furnace hit dead on.
Arthur expected the demi-scourge to be crushed, or perhaps struck hard but then badly burnt by molten metal, thanks to Brixaby lighting the thing.
But he had vastly underestimated the force of something that heavy striking an object from that high up. A word drifted in and out of his mind, learned from his time in the Dark Heart Challenge: velocity.
Yes, something that was possibly thousands of pounds, including the ingots, had a huge amount of velocity from falling about as high as a dragon could fly.
It didn't just obliterate the demi-scourgling, it created a blast that rolled outward, ripping apart the emerging scourglings from fissures at the base of the volcano. Then, a large part of that side of the cone crumbled into a giant landslide that buried and crushed more emerging scourglings.
The throat of the eruption was open for a moment, spilling scourglings everywhere, before it too collapsed under its weight, throwing up a huge mass of dust, dead land, and poison scourge pollen.
Arthur and Brixaby looked at each other.
Finally, after a few minutes, the rumbling from the collapsing cone stopped. The dust cloud continued to rise, obscuring everything.
Lung Bai flapped her narrow wings once. Suddenly, all of the dust and pollen fell to earth as if she had grabbed each mote and forcefully pressed it down.
The scourgling volcano was revealed, not completely obliterated, but very close to it. It had been flattened in a series of cascading landslides, and it seemed that many of the fissures around it had been closed, crushed, or simply plugged.
Nothing more emerged.
Thankfully, the other Legendary dragons had been safe within their shield. They looked up at Arthur and Brixaby too, and Arthur wished very much that he could read the expressions on their faces.
Despite the distance between them, Lung Bai's voice slithered into his ear and everybody else's. "We were summoned because we were told this eruption was out of control, but now I see it is well in hand."
One of the Legendaries—all of whom were still hiding in the bubble shield, Arthur noticed—spoke something back to Lung Bai. Though they were so distant, Arthur could not hear exactly what was said.
He only heard Lung Bai’s reply.
“On the contrary, you do have the means to control what remains of this scourge infection.”
Then she tilted her head up to stare very obviously at Arthur.
What did she mean?
Then it hit him. Oh.
Reluctantly, Arthur withdrew his Cataclysmic Firestorm card from his pocket.
Note: YES I'm aware butterflies come from caterpillars not grubs, but they're scourglings. They don't follow the rules. ;)
Comments
Arkell Henry
I thought we were supposed to get 2 to 3 chapters a week
Jessica Hussey
Magical portal card that uses a row boat journey to go from one place to the other. How do we know that the air pressure doesn’t change during the trip? Honestly dude…don’t science the story to death. The plot will be the victim and you’ll just ruin a damned good book. If you want to science the shit out of a book go read some Michael Crichton or something.
Sigma Zeta
The penny's terminal velocity is about 25-30 miles per hour, which would give you a nice thunk but probably wouldn't kill you or even seriously injure you unless it hit you directly in your eye. But that nice hot iron furnace? Hehehehe.
Jessica Hussey
You know….i have heard that if you were to drop a penny off a skyscraper, it could kill someone. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but when I go to a city I find myself looking up at the tops to make sure there are no people up there dropping stuff.
Caleb Mutant
Great chapter. I'm so excited for morev
Arkell Henry
Next chapter
Sigma Zeta
Lung Bai: "Okay, I'll take care of this." Brixaby and Arthur drop an iron furnace on the demiscourge, and it go SQUISH! Lung Bai: "You seem to have this well in hand!" Arthur and Brixaby: "Huh? How?" Lung Bai: "You're a flying natural disaster; you'll figure it out." CATACLYSM TIME! Note to Honour Rae: I have some airplane nerds in my life, and some of them (not most, I mean most could figure out this is fantasy and not bound to any rules) would get into a frothing tizzy over Arthur going abruptly to such high altitude without ill effects, even ear-popping. I just assume Arthur's dragonriding skill handles this automatically, so I'm not sure how much you want to be on the nose about that. *wing-shrugs* I guess readers that have stuck with you this far would have worked out that much, so no big.
Corey Paulson
I thought he did rip it out when he went back.
Anime Problem
Time for brixaby to forge the Rods from God.
Kail311
I imagined this kind of strategy from Candy Floss, have her lift a trough and her rider drops things from it or his spatial bag. Granted, a common and new rider might have accuracy issues but they'd definitely hit something if scourge carpet the ground.
Justin Barnett
I thought Arthur’s card only let him speed up and slow down time, not time travel.
Zac Crow
Is anyone else pissed with Arthur? Why the fuck has he STILL!!! not gone back for his dad an rip out his dad's girlfriends an the villagers oaths? I understand not talking to the king about his father (yet) but honestly wtf....
Aj Hietanen
Nothing like a big rock to squish the big bug.
Andrew Quintana
There are situations that can’t be improved by dropping something big and heavy on them from a great height.
Devin
I think it’s time to store a lot more gigantic heavy objects in storage, Rods from God strategy is extremely effective
Hailhound
I have no problem with the grub getting obliterated by simple physics. In fantasy settings people act like powerful people can only be killed by magic or other powerful people, and forget that a sword through the chest will kill anyone without magical bullshit organs, much less a terminal velocity hunk of metal. I love video games, but I think they tend to distort how we see fantasy settings. Video games are all about balancing, you want to reward thoughtful decision making and preparation but don’t want a boss to be basically immune to one approach and just get deleted by another. While more realistically specialization wins the day, especially with a party or minions along. The demiscourge seemed to have invested all in its mind attack and left its smaller brethren to defend it, but had no inherent defenses (scourge only have one card I think) and that makes me happy. We see both the advantages of that strategy, this devastating initial attack, and the downsides, what you can’t see will kill you
Sayjinlord
Rod from God ❎️ Forge from Brixaby ✅️
jacobAnderson
Absolutely amazing chapter, keep up to great work
StrollingEye
Excellent chapter, it was looking remarkably distressing last chapter, and the first part of this one, but it resolved well. Very well. I felt quite satisfied with how this resolved. I am looking forward to the next chapter where the Cataclysmic Firestorm eating critters are mopping up the last of the Scourge lings, without any shards being left behind I presume. It is a harsh, damaging, destructive card. The other Legendaries must be disturbed to see it being in use? I think it would help if the scourge grub had some shields that visible shattered with the weight and velocity of the falling furnace, having no defence seems unusual. I also wonder at Brix flexing his claws on the metal or wooden boat -I think you were trying to imply that metal wouldn't bend, or Wood would bend safely, with the frustrated clawing of Brixaby. Maybe this could be made clearer?
Forint
In case you want to drop things faster: https://what-if.xkcd.com/20/
Forint
I'd like him to learn the force equation. To get a lot of force, you need mass and acceleration. That's mass*distance*time*time. You see time there twice, that's because it's very important. And he has a time card. So he should be capable of feats of excessive force.
James Donnelly
He doesn't like mind cards though. And if don't see the king letting him have one that powerful. Maybe he can trade it for a different card in the kings library. Maybe the 4th card of his personal space set?
Salvo
I do wonder what metaphysical issues multiple legendary of different sets do to spell hearts. When Arthur was crafting the summoner set, it became clear that the user’s heart was influencing them to come together. If he adds the cataclysm to his heart, won’t the power twist his other cards essence? Did Chester have this problem with call to life and cataclysm?
Sharrif
People often underestimate the sheer power of physics and the value of dropping a large rock on someone’s head.
Reno
An undulating grub obliviously dancing its hypnotic dance before going SPLAT is a very cool mental image. https://tenor.com/view/parrot-party-gif-11781022180037669995
Reno
I'm actually quite happy you didn't use the word kinetic energy. Arthur would have no idea what that is. Velocity is an appropriate simplification, even though its weight wouldn't affect how fast it fell. (Arthur would have no way to know that either unless he'd read Galileo's work)
Reno
I love the tough love from mother mythic.
Reno
Well that card didn't take long to come up. I look forward to seeing the cataclysm.
Honour Rae
Literally I was wondering if I could include a Loony Tunes style whistle of object falling from the sky... but decided that was a bit much. ;)
Voror
That was definitely a nasty combo with both the numbers and the pollen having such a debilitating effect. I can't get a read on the Rower suggesting the time card. Though it may have just been giving practical advice despite the cost. Though good point on that other Legendary with the time powers. I remember when that was first brought up it seemed way too broken and there had to be a catch but if it has aftereffects like Arthur's card it would make sense. I didn't get the impression he could actually time travel though. Could have sworn it was just stopping time. Novel idea with the furnace as a bomb that wound up working well. Bit disappointed neither Arthur or Brix got any kind of skill from that. Probably more Brix but it feels like there could be some kind of skill you get from this. Looks like they were right at the brink though it seems Lung Bai rather than the King is doing most of the talking still. We are using the summon then. Rather apt how soon it had a use. Almost wonder if Lung Bai has seeing abilities and knew that'd be a good move.
Alan Jahic
Damn, I do love it when the ol’ “drop a piano on their head” strategy is used
Andrew Foster
Ah nothing like a suborbital bombardment.
TNM
Since it's Arthurs kill he should get scourge lords card.
CasStocks
Thanks for the chapter!
