Forged By The Apocalypse - A LitRPG With Draconic Potential

The next two days passed in a blur. I burned mana at the ideal rate, essentially removing any mana recovery I had to constantly strengthen myself. I used this strength to blast my way through the second and third trial towers. Only one remained, the pagoda. I started with the tower I had named East Tower before, one completely obscured by mist.

The haze was actually slightly acidic, but easily dealt with by keeping an aura of Dao pressed outwards. I shielded Naea and myself through the fog and was rewarded with an ominous tower, both in appearance and name. Named the Trial of Flowing Waters. The burning smog was a harbinger for the bulk of the challenge within.

Five levels, each of increasing difficulty, much like the Storm Dragon’s. Just like then, the inside of the tower was much larger than the outside. Each floor had the same directive - reach the exit. The trial seemed simple but was actually a pain in the ass. Quite literally.

Upon entering the tower, the scenery changed. The sun was bearing down on me, and water ran between my legs. I found myself standing above a reservoir of murky water which was half-filled. A path stretched around the massive container at a slight incline. The trial appeared as a System prompt and I arrogantly claimed it was dumb. Go from point A to point B, how hard could that be?

As I began walking the path, water started trickling in the other direction. By the time I had jogged for a few minutes, the water was up to my ankles. Only once it reached my thighs did it become an impediment, around halfway up the path. By the time I was able to jump off the path and move to the next level, I was pushing back a waterfall’s worth of water. Still, the actual difficulty of the first level was minimal, requiring less physical strength than I had fighting the Scorepion Manager.

The second level was identical in its requirements, with a twist. The water was starting to sting my skin. By the time I finished level two, my skin was raw like it had been sunburned badly. I hadn’t bothered using an Infusion to push away the effects. A few seconds with Naea cleared it up before I could tell her not to bother. It was only pain.

The third and fourth levels continued this trend, with the acidity of the water increasing. At the end of the third level and for the entirety of the fourth, I needed to expend more mana than I recovered just to keep the liquid from burning me alive. Naea hovered nearby, doing flybys in which she slapped me with pulses of healing magic. It felt like an egg being cracked on top of my head, cooling down my heated skin.

The potency of the acid in the liquid had become brutal by the fifth and final layer. Naea’s healing was required the whole way but I didn’t for even a moment consider backing out. Pain was nothing, so long as I could keep moving. Perseverance was rewarded halfway through the climb when the river abruptly ceased its assault. I had inhaled so many fumes and choked on so much acid I initially thought I had failed somehow, saved by the trial’s magic. Naea looked over the edge and told me the reservoir had completely drained.

Whoopee.

Unlike the trial of the Storm Dragon, it seemed the others were not connected to a higher power in the same way. The rewards also weren’t as potent as the Hurricane Heart, but I doubted I could handle any more strange and powerful energies inside. I walked away with the gains from the tower without giving them much more than a second glance.

Then, it was time to move again.

The third tower fell as quickly as the second, which is to say within a day. After the East Tower was North. We didn’t bother heading back to Home Base. It was safe and I didn’t need anything from there. The journey to the next tower was quick and required no great effort either. Our recent gains had come in very handy.

The third trial tower was the Trial of Luminous Possibility, and it was the biggest pushover of the three. The challenges were made completely nonexistent by the presence of our Dao. More specifically Naea’s, which once again proved especially useful at casting away illusions. Fairy Dragons were mischievous and often played tricks on unsuspecting travellers with their magic, so they were naturally potent when it came to dispelling them.

This place would have been a joke, either way. A bad one. The trial started as aggressively as it could, which is to say, not at all. Naea stopped me from acting on the System prompt which appeared before she removed the glamour from it. The tower had even fudged the System message, which irked me. Just another thing I couldn’t trust. Listening to Naea’s instructions, I made my way through the increasingly complex mazes of each layer.

The goal was to walk in a completely straight line to an exit I couldn’t see, while promises of power and wealth whispered from all sides. Each layer increased the difficulty, of course, but the test of this tower was unfortunately too late. Naea and I had dealt with stronger temptations by far. Without my own Dao to protect my mind and then Naea’s to invalidate the tricks, it might have been a different story.

I was sharp like a knife. I considered getting Naea to stop protecting me from the mind-altering effects but decided against it. Better to just get it done and move on. Once more we scaled a trial tower. The rewards from this tower were, ironically, even less interesting than the last. At least that one had given me another achievement.

The sun had risen and fallen twice since I found the other person’s body.

On the third day, Naea hit me hard in the stomach, forcing me to my knees. Shocked, I flared my mana angrily. I looked up at her, surprised and enraged by her betrayal. Of course, when I saw the tears of frustration and pain on her own face, I managed to stop myself. “Stop!” She begged, only able to choke out one word over her sobs.

The fight fled from me. I blinked and it was like my eyes opened for the first time in days. I reached out my hand but it was slapped away, forcing me to look at it. The skin was blistered, torn and scarred from the punishment I had put it through. I could see Naea’s laboured breathing and tired wingbeats. There were even punctures in them. When did that happen?

Scared, like a timid house cat, I approached my own soul cautiously. I winced when I felt the damage I had done to my body but it was nothing compared to the mess I had cultivated within. My inner world was a tempestuous chaos, more so than usual. A decent force of will was needed to get back to peak form but there was a much more distressing sight.

The storms were natural to my soul at this point, but the flowers were gone. My world was barren save for the grass which covered the visualisation of land.

Naea’s touch was gone.

The tears were in my eyes before I opened them. Slowly, hopefully and thankfully, I wrapped the still weeping Naea into my arms. She allowed it, sniffling and breaking my heart as she punched my chest lightly. “Big, goofy, bloody, stupid idiot,” she whimpered.

“Agreed,” I replied. “I’m the worst. Shit. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” I repeated my apology gently, stroking Naea’s small head. We were on the path to the final tower, West Tower, the one which looked like a pagoda. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t summon an ounce of urgency, so we just sat there on the path above the sand.

Quietly, slowly, I felt the fractured bond mend. Like creases being smoothed out of paper, the ridges between my soul and Naea’s fell away. The reverberations of her soul echoed my own. Without words, I confronted the damage to my own soul and the rebound it was having on the only friend I had in the world.

Our quiet huddle continued, both of us crying quietly.

I wept for the lives lost in my sphere and beyond. The people I had spoken to one minute and the dead bodies I had run away from as quickly as I could, not once looking back. Clearly the psychic damage from the café lingered under the surface. I could hear my soul speak through my connection to Naea and I cringed. It was like listening to myself complaining in a recording of my voice. No one likes the sound of their own voice in a recording at the best of times, let alone hearing themself whine.

I wasn’t haunted by ghosts, I reminded myself. Actually, that’s probably possible, I realised unhelpfully. Well… Maybe? Even if I were, it wouldn’t be my fault. The accusation in the eyes of the dead wasn’t aimed at my actions. I thought back to the piercing amethyst eyes of Mrs Naebol.

My thoughts moved quicker and quicker as the molasses of melancholy were burned away in the heat of rage. She could have helped, I fumed. She could have explained… anything. Instead she turned me into a murderer and her personal suicide machine. Fuck you, Mrs Naebol. Except, it wasn’t Mrs Naebol, was it. Her name had been Naeboaroseax. A dragon. A coward at the same time. My Dao boiled at the idea of a cowardly dragon, suddenly glad I killed her.

Once more, Naea’s soul was the steel rod upon which mine balanced. Another violent and unnecessary emotion was cast away as she continued to lay flowers upon my soul with her forgiveness and patience. I chuckled. “You’re an incredible therapist, Naea. That was supposed to be my job, before all this started.”

“You?” She snorted. With the crying, it was a distinctly snotty sound. “You’re unhinged, though.” I laughed, glad she was comfortable enough to tease me. The impetus to smash myself against the Dungeon until one of us broke was gone, but this was no place to stay for long. I decided we would rest for a day, standing up and walking back to Home Base.

“Thank you for snapping me out of it. I went a little grimdark there for a minute. Let’s go back and look through what those towers gave us. I’ll make you some nice food and you can be as mean as you want the whole time.”

“That sounds good,” Naea said quietly into my chest. Together, we walked for hours of slow trek in simple conversation. I told Naea about my life before the System, about the world Earth had been before the craziness. I shared stories about my childhood, glossing over the strained memories and focusing on the fun ones. “You have how many brothers?”

“Three,” I expressed with over the top disdain. “My poor mother. Two sisters, too, but they’re the youngest and enough of a change from the six of us that it gave me mam a new breath to her lungs.”

“You sounded like me for a second there.” Realising she didn’t know her own history, as it were, I dove into tales of my homeland and its greatest legends, the fae. My knowledge was from old fairy tales, which was exactly the right name to say to Naea, who would randomly whisper the phrase as I spoke.

“Fairy tales,” she breathed. “Are there dragon tales?”

“Dragons have them, but we don’t.” I waited for a second. “Get it? Tails? Tales?” I cackled at the fairy’s deadpan expression and ran Naea through a few of my favourite stories. She liked the stories of Tír na nÓg, the basis for Neverland in the story of Peter Pan, the most. I told the story of Oisín and Niamh, a sad story which had her in tears.

“Yeah,” I consoled, “most of our stories are like that…”

Naea didn’t try to fly the whole, slow walk back. I didn’t ask if she wanted to.