[Beastborne: Tower of Blight] Chapter 46

Your Monster Core has graduated to Tin Rank.

You have learned [Dragon (Spiritual Form)].

You gain:

(1) [Shadesblight Seal Fragment]

More and more prompts rolled in, but Hal let them wash over his tired eyes. It seemed as if he had only shut them for a second.

Overwhelming power flowed through Hal’s veins, scouring his Spirit channels clean of the Shadesblight’s withering corruption and reforging him anew.

Every one of his Monster essences spun through his Core and erupted through his Spirit and aided in the reforging of his body.

Golem essence rebuilt his flesh sturdier and stronger. Eldritch essence heightened his attunement to mana and magic.

Dragon essence poured the might of the stars into him.

Every single one of Hal’s many essences played a vital role in rebuilding his broken body. Even the blighted essence made him naturally resilient to the crushing corruption of the Shadesblight to the point he wondered if he needed the Manatree’s blessing any longer.

When Hal opened his eyes again, he was surrounded by friends and loved ones. He felt… better than he had ever felt before, in fact.

His body felt too big for him, as if he had grown overnight, but even as weak and anemic as he was, Hal could feel a burgeoning strength that he had lacked before.

It feels like my body is radiating power!

The feeling was so odd that when Hal lifted up his arm to look at his hand, he nearly expected to have an aura of strength rolling off his skin.

Skin?

Hal’s armor was gone. Melted, blown up, or perhaps just disintegrated, he didn’t know. Even the rings that had survived for so long were gone. Hal felt at his neck and cursed under his breath.

Every piece of equipment he was wearing was destroyed. In a panic, he looked around for Vorax. The mimic was in his treasure chest form.

Slowly, he opened his maw and took out the only item he had been able to save. Hal’s sword.

Meanwhile, Noth was blushing.

With a sigh of relief, Hal let his head fall back onto the pillow. “How is the Manatree?”

“Better than ever,” Noth told him, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “You had us a little worried there. Maybe you could give us a bit more warning?”

“He fought a great foe,” Orrittam intoned, his great draconic might condensed to the form of a human. “I did not think I would see the likes of which after you fought the Drakst, but I was wrong. You have taken to your training very well, Hal.”

“He did us proud,” Naitese agreed.

Hal was so shocked to see the both of them agree on anything that he pinched himself to make sure he was awake and not sleeping.

Ouch. Okay, not dreaming.

“Hal is badash!” Hermes proclaimed, then paused. “Bad… ash? Heckin’ bleck, I’m not sayin’ ash but ash!”

“Yeah, welcome to the club,” Mira groaned. She stood over Hal, leaning on her lance like a walking stack.

“Least heckin’ bleck is safe,” he muttered.

“Because nobody but oppas considers that a real curse,” Mira mumbled under her breath.

Hermes rubbed his paws together. “Now Hal has become Dragonfire wielding, monster sorcerer, bonecrafting bomber, Dragonmorphin’ man!”

“That’s a mouthful,” Mira said. “Wait, bomber…?”

“Heckin’ bleck,” Komachi said nonchalantly, with a smug grin. Elora looked scandalized. Apparently, she considered it a curse.

It amazed Hal that he could hear her as far away as he was from her. In fact, the more Hal focused on his surroundings, the more he realized he could feel everything around him.

Almost as if there were thin threads of Spirit connecting him to everything around him. To the dragons, the soul aeder, his friends, Noth, the Manatree, even to the blades of grass that nearly glowed with health.

The Manatree’s thick boughs spread overhead, much larger than Hal ever remembered seeing them. The Manatree no longer resembled a sapling, but a mighty ancient oak with a fat, wide trunk that could have doubled as a house, and tree branches that spread to cover over a hundred yards in each direction.

“He’s finally noticed,” Naitese said. “What you did was… not something I thought even a dragon capable of.”

Pieces of memory were coming back into focus, but it was disjointed. He had been so angry. So filled with rage. Everything he did had been on autopilot. There was no thought, only instinct.

He remembered saving and sheltering the soul of the Manatree. Striking out at the Shadesblight. Corrupting the Tower with the Manatree’s own blessing had been a foolish gamble that only paid off through sheer happenstance.

If he hadn’t been so reckless and attacked the Tower with Dragonfire, he might not have had an opening to latch onto. Almost as if it was meant to work out that way.

Or you could have taken proper precautions and none of this would have happened at all.

Hal was forced to agree. If he had empowered the Manatree when he noticed it was struggling, maybe all of this could have been avoided. The Tower would still be standing, but Brightsong would not have suffered the corruption, for however brief a time.

Most of all, Hal could hear and feel the song of the Manatree once more. Its voice filled the glade from edge to edge. The once withered and dying wortlings moved about in even greater numbers, many of them working to restore the surrounding land in a great ring.

The Quest was not yet complete. Knowing, and feeling, that the Manatree was not just hale and healthy again, but strengthened and renewed, Hal could finally rest for a time.

So, he went the flork to sleep.

When Hal woke up, his friends had gone, and he suspected he’d been out for a long time. Much longer than a single day, judging by how restored he felt.

His body was just now beginning to feel like it should. Before it had felt… new. Different. As if it was a fragile shell. Sleep had done him a great deal of good.

Sliding the blanket off, Hal staggered to the nearest lazy stream and peered at his own reflection. He looked… different. Not only was he no longer gaunt or haggard looking, like somebody who hadn’t eaten for a month, but his features had subtly changed.

He was more handsome than he ever remembered being. His body–at which point he realized he was naked–was far more toned and muscular than it had ever been before.

Even for 20 Strength, he shouldn’t be half as ripped as the man he saw in his watery reflection.

In essence, he looked more like the mental image he had of himself when he was a kid, thinking about what sort of man he would become.

Rubbing his stubbled chin, which had never looked great before but now made him wonder if he should have gone into modeling, Hal wondered what caused this dramatic change.

The various prompts that had gone by while Hal was unconscious were easy enough to dredge up. As he witnessed the change to his Monster Core going from Copper to Tin, he began to understand what happened.

His essences had reforged his body, each type and family empowered him far beyond what his enhanced Monster Core would have been capable of on its own.

There was a faint sheen to his skin, a healthy glow that was unmistakably magical. No human’s skin looked that good.

Something rustled behind him. Hal turned and covered himself as best he could, keenly aware that he was naked.

Hermes looked up at him, pausing halfway to the man. “Wanted a drink of water,” he muttered, rubbing a paw against his muzzle tiredly like a little kid waking up in the middle of the night.

Without looking back at Hal, Hermes moseyed on down to the stream and began to drink from it. After a few slurps, he slinked back to the blankets and fell asleep as if nothing happened.

Hal followed the oppa back to the warm blankets with a gorgeous young woman curled up under them. Slipping beneath, Hal fit into the empty hollow he had left behind and shut his eyes once more.

Sunlight streamed in, and the sound of giggling brought him fully awake. Noth was by the stream, kneeling and washing a very feisty Hermes, who was trying hard not to take a bath, and failing very badly at it.

Every time he struggled, Noth only laughed harder.

“Cruel and unusual punishment!” the oppa cried. “This coat is dry-clean only!”

“Oh, hush, or you’ll wake Hal.”

Hermes stopped thrashing and went quiet and still.

“That’s a good oppa.”

Hermes smirked toothily at that.

Grinning to himself, Hal sat up. He was about to wrap the blanket around his waist when he saw a surprise waiting for him. His old training clothes from when he trained with the dragons.

Only… they didn’t look old. They looked new and different. With freshly sewn in sigils made with thread-of-gold.

On the back of the tightly wrapped combat robes were three names written out in the sigils of High Draconic. They read: Orrittam, Naitese, Hal. As if he belonged to their family.

Tears stung his eyes, but Hal was quick to dash them away and don his new clothes.

He looked over at Noth and Hermes, joining them by the river as he knelt down to splash his own face with cool water from upriver.

“How did you sleep?” Noth asked as she rinsed off the grumpy oppa.

Hermes paused his squirming to squint at Hal. “He always been that handsome? Like that… meme from Brookmoors. The guy with the big chin.”

Noth smiled up at Hal. “He’s always looked that handsome to me.”

“Nah, you just sayin’ that because you want some monster mash, mate.” His brain seemed to catch up with what he said and the oppa covered his face with his paws.

Noth gently shook him, presumably to help dry him, but clearly because he had said something so crass that even Noth was bothered by it.

And she spent a lot of time with Mira.

“Go dry off,” she told him, setting him on a towel.

Both Hal and Noth watched as Hermes, unable to contain his animal side, rolled and thrashed on the towel to dry off his damp fur.

When he was done, he looked like a dandelion, all puffed and white with a faintly curious expression, as if he didn’t remember being that big.

“I slept well,” Hal told her. “Better than I have in a while.”

“You were out for four days,” Noth told him, wiping her hands off. “I figured you would want to know.”

“And the Tower?”

Noth shook her head. “It wasn’t destroyed, but you dealt it a grave wound. How grave is anybody’s guess, but the first group that went in has yet to return. The ground around the Tower is clear once more. The corruption that was there is gone… but so too is anything that was corrupted.”

“You mean it’s just stone?”

She shrugged one shoulder and turned back to the Manatree. “There’s some dirt too. Anything that the Shadesblight had infected, anything living out there died. You scoured it away, which is a kinder fate than the Shadesblight had in store for it.”

“It’s not over yet,” Hal said, feeling his connection to the Manatree and through it, the Tower itself.

As much as he had hoped it would allow him to harm the Tower further, he had no such luck. But he could feel the life forces of his friends within, and he knew they were safe.

“Is that because of the Manatree or…” She motioned to Hal’s body.

Hal looked at his hands. Strong and lithe once more. It was like being a withered husk was all a dream. But one look at Noth told him it hadn’t been.

“A bit of both,” Hal told her with a grin.