Beacon from Beyond (Book 1 Complete)

When he met back up with his group, they were caught up on the plan.

"...the best place to announce your survival is one hundred percent your funeral. You'll be on everyone's minds, the entire population will be there, and there are guards to keep the peace."

"Not to mention the comedic timing," Jacob added.

"Correct, the comedic timing cannot be overstated," Dei responded with absolute seriousness.

"And what of the Dragon?" Perumah asked, "Is The Champion to arrive and take care of it?"

"Nope, that's all us. He's bound by some old rules or covenants or something and he can't reach out to the dwarves unless they go to him first- whatever solution you're about to pose Perumah, I asked and he said it won't work if we help-" He said cutting Perumah off, who harrumphed and closed her mouth. "However, this is apparently a known Dragon, and he said we should be able to take it down, so the dwarves are still in luck. Any objections?"

"Yes, I do," Thadria said, and he prompted her to continue. "I'd like to sit this battle out."

"Any reason or just because you'd rather not fight?"

"The latter."

"Okay, no problem at all. So, Perumah and I will fight, while Thadria and Jacob watch us turn a dragon to dust… or goo, if my idea of what an 'Infection Dragon' will look like is anywhere close to accurate."

"I'd like to help," Jacob said.

"Jacob I don't want to dishearten you, but I don't know how that would look. I don't want to throw you at a Dragon and have you get stuck in its stomach or something."

"Oh that, yea I figured out how to make myself uncatchable."

Dei's curiosity beat back his skepticism, and he asked "Yea? How?"

Jacob launched into what was clearly a practices spiel. "Well it started when I had this thought: why can I breathe normally in the void and raw fabric? It's not like I'm just practicing the motions, I can genuinely feel air in both places, so I thought 'Hey, maybe it's because it would bother me to not breathe, so I can.' Then, I realized I could actually turn it off, and let the world affect me as I wanted. When I got that down, I went the other way instead, not letting anything in the world affect me.

"I wish I could say I can teleport or something now, but it's nothing so grand. I think it's because I'm carrying some imprint of Earth on me, so anything I could do on Earth I can always do. Such as walking in a straight line, or running."

"Question: How long did it take you to figure this out, and when?"

"Oh, like an hour maybe? And after you and Perumah left. It wasn't hard really, more like a switch getting flipped."

"Okay… can I see it in action?"

"Sure, watch this" he said, and stepped on the air.

He just started floating.

There was no magical indicator or anything, he could just float.

"Dude… okay that's good, but what does this have to do with not getting trapped? I'm pretty sure if the-"

While Dei was talking, Jacob reoriented himself to face the ground- which looked strange because he stood on a platform that didn't exist, with gravity pulling him in a way that didn't make sense- and just started walking.

The moment Jacob came into contact with the ground, there was a loud grinding noise, and he walked clean through the dirt, all of it either getting compressed or moving out of the way.

"-Dragon just eats- HOLY SHIT!!"

Jacob popped out another place in the ground, sending a spray of earth in all directions.

"How did you do that?! How do your clothes stay clean and intact? More importantly, if nothing is able to stop, move, or affect you anymore, why don't you go flying off into space?!"

"You're thinking too hard about it," Jacob waved him off, stepping onto the ground once more. Dei finally noticed there were several pockmarks around, where the man had clearly dove in and out of the ground. "It just works."

"But how? This is going past remaining unbothered- this is nuts! Can you remain unbothered by space, and distort it out of your way to teleport?"

"No, you're still thinking too hard. There doesn't have to be a reason. I can just move at my regular speeds and nothing can stop me when I do that."

"But… if you figure out how, wouldn't that be incredible? Who knows what you might be able to do!"

'Either way, this is incredible news. Now I can just send him after the demon without worry and let him harass the guy like crazy.'

Jacob could only chuckle, like he was part of some inside joke Dei didn't get. "This is all I can do. This is everything. I can be an immoveable object and unstoppable force, but there's no way in hell I can do any of that other fancy magic stuff. Just uh… don't leave me behind in the Dragon fight. If you all move too quickly I won't be able to catch up and I'll get lost in space or something."

"I'll watch you, it's okay" Thadria assured him while ruffling his hair.

"I can't guarantee we won't leave you behind, but we'll try our best."

"I won't," Perumah said, and Jacob laughed. "I'm just gonna try to kill this thing, whether you can keep up or not."

"Yea, okay, it'd be a little silly to expect you to try that hard to involve me in a fight for the death just so I can feel included."

"Does anyone else have any questions?" Dei asked, and the others shook their heads.

"In that case, let's go kill us a plague world!"

* * *

"Your Class description is very accurate," Perumah said to him as the planet appeared in their vision.

"Hm?"

"You really do eat a lot of planets of universes, don't you? This will be the third major nexus of life that you destroy and consume."

"Hey! For one, they've all been justified, and two, I didn't even intend to consume this one!"

"You'll have to. It's too close to Caps to leave alone, and we have no way to realistically move it far enough for it to never pose a threat again. As for the life on it? I can't imagine intelligent life forming on something like this, but we will see."

He sighed, 'She's right, we'll just have to wing it.'

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

When they were close enough that he could see the planet in detail, he had to agree with Perumah's assessment that it was unlikely to hold any major intelligent life.

The dwarven artifacts got a blurry image of the planet, but now that he saw it in detail, there was no chance of it being anything but a threat. He thought those who were infected originally must've had a screw loose if they hadn't turned around the moment they saw the planet.

The entire planet was coated with sickly green spires of flesh, each covered in eyes with webs running between them, every spike as large as a mountain. No clouds covered its sky, giving Dei an unobstructed view of it all.

Still, he saw no Dragon, so they drew closer to the planet. At some threshold, Dei saw several of the eyes lock onto their group, and he felt the gaze of something powerful on him- a sensation he'd only experienced once before when The Champion feared he might try to consume the world during his fight with The Mother.

Thadria was already gone, having disappeared somewhere. Jacob on the other hand looked at Dei curiously, asking "What's up?"

"We're seen," Dei told him, "It knows we're here."

Jacob just shrugged. They were still almost a thousand miles out, so he had no way to reasonably cross that distance or do anything about it, instead getting dragged along by Dei.

Around five hundred miles from the planet, something finally changed. Reality bubbled beneath the surface, and the pressure of total ownership crashed down upon him. Authority attempted to supercede the will of the group, to force them to listen.

Dei was imbued with hate for the world and shrugged it off instantly.

Perumah was not one to bow to any higher power, and the force did little more than bounce off.

Jacob didn't even realize anything had happened.

Seeing its mental attack fail, it deigned to show itself- crawling from the dark side to challenge them itself.

Its scales were predictably green, with glowing pustules that beat in sync with one another to cause a strangely mesmerizing display. Several hair-thin whips coated its spine from head to tail, all floating aimlessly in the space. The most striking difference from what he imagined a Dragon to look like, however, were the wings.

No longer did they flap, move, or even twitch; both extended fully, several links of flesh connecting them to one another, the three-dimensional web containing a dense green star right in the middle. It was from this star that the pulse which lit up the Dragons flesh emanated, spreading across the entire thing.

Cralok-something-something, whatever his name was, was a surprisingly lithe thing. He didn't seem disheveled or unhealthy, but he was thin and gangly.

Taking the entire being in, Dei had to admit there was a strange beauty to it all. Cralok had found a kind of symbiosis with illness, and drew power from it to become the danger Dei now saw.

Cralok opened his mouth and roared a deep, resonant, guttural note somehow made its way through space.

Then, to the others, it disappeared, though Dei's mind could just barely keep up enough to see it move.

The star released a powerful pulse, and the Dragon's entire body moved on a curved path, inertia and momentum meaning nothing as it suddenly went from completely still to faster than the speed of sound. In a blink, it was on top of them, and Dei barely moved fast enough to grab Perumah and teleport behind the Dragon before its claw came down on Jacob.

A bright spark of light was let out as the claw completely shattered, and Cralok silently roared in what was clearly pain. Dei plunged downwards, entering his battle form and letting hundreds of tendrils exit his body as he started to grow and match its form. He'd spent an exorbitant amount of Potential on his size improvement, he would use it!

The web of Connection was easily evaded when Cralok's star released another burst, and once more he moved fast enough to appear as a teleport. Rather than grab the dragon, Dei felt a slice open in his side, gouging him deeply.

His soul shook, taking damage as his ghostly flesh was cut as well, but his fist still struck out, clocking the dragon in the jaw.

Cralok paused for a moment, almost disbelieving that Dei simply punched it, before spinning around and whipping at Dei with his tail.

Dei attempted to grab it, but the limb never touched him. The boils exploded, and a force shot through Dei, knocking him back as several projectiles pierced his flesh.

He felt a hot paralyzing sensation flow through him, and Divine balance worked to stop the infection from spreading further.

Still, the Connection extending from his hand took hold of the flesh, and a simple pull brought Cralok closer.

Dei felt a disgusting mana push down the line between them and sent chaos to combat it, but it was pushed aside easily. A Dragon's Authority was reality manifest, the destroyer of chaos.

Dei severed their Connection, and Cralok reached out to Dei's body, taking hold of the infection within and making it fester.

Dei was not unprepared, boiling his blood with a usage of Convection- something he hadn't done in a long time.

While Cralok focused on Dei though, Perumah had quietly stuck it with several bulbs from behind. Its eyes briefly flickered to her, but it felt no pain from her attack, and Dei's entire body had suddenly caught fire, partially purifying him to let Divine Balance do the rest.

Dei shot forward like a bullet, and Cralok met him halfway, tackling him in the chest and attempting to dig his claws deeper. They grappled for a moment as Dei took a few surface level swipes, dealing in short strikes himself

Dei phased out of the physical world then back when he was behind the Dragon, taking hold and attempting to squeeze the blood from its neck while scratched at it with his own claws.

A beam shot from the star on Cralok's back, but Dei already dodged, feeling a terrible heat pass by his head while Cralok spun around to slash at him once more.

Dei caught the hand one, then the second strike in the other. Leveraging his feet against the Dragon's stomach, he pulled hard, quickly feeling something crack.

Cralok needed only to open his mouth, and Dei was gone instantly.

Behind him, blistering heat cut through everything, and Dei watched Perumah's retreating form as well.

Though it was only a burst of Dragonfire, when the blinding light died down Dei could clearly see that the star upon Cralok was diminished.

Overall he saw… annoyance on its face.

With a wave of its hand, Dei felt the infection within him grow, though not through his body.

From his stomach, several smaller lizard-like forms exploded out, then began to tear into his flesh. He swatted them away, but more kept appearing.

Right before he teleported, he felt a sense of danger spike from his Void affinity as the space below the Physical realm suddenly boiled, and Dei saw Cralok's star glow brightly, no doubt maintaining some kind of spell to prevent him from moving easily.

Diving into the Spiritual Realm instead, he moved, but his attention was drawn by something else- something that followed behind him in small quantities.

They were… itty bitty spirits.

They were half-formed and almost nothing, but the Duplication mana saturating the area mixed with the Spiritual mana getting blasted from him to create tiny spirits.

'Interesting…'

He felt himself get pulled by something inescapable, and knew he had to enter the Physical Realm once more.

He came out just in time to see half of Cralok's body explode, roots and red flowers digging through its flesh, tearing at it.

It paid for the momentary distraction when Dei released all limiters on his speed, shooting forward fast enough to hurt himself from the force.

Crashing into Cralok, they barely went feet before hitting Jacob, hard.

Dei already knew that the Dragon's scales were impossibly tough, as only blunt-force had done anything until this point.

Dei felt something break, and the vibrations traveled through both him and the Dragon. A roar could be heard as it made its way through his flesh, and Dei believed something important broke with it.

Cralok went utterly berserk. Thrashing and biting at him as Dei tried to hold his own. Half the Dragon's body continued to be torn at by Perumah's roots, but they died in the droves as Cralok focused on killing them through either micro usage of fire, or a decaying infection.

Cralok's left arm was still broken from where Dei had almost torn it off, and Dei had to use both arms to stave off its snapping jaws and other claws. Its neck was vulnerable, but he was too busy trying to keep his flesh together.

In either panic or inspiration, he tensed and lunged forward, biting at its neck. Its efforts redoubled, and the mana in his body thrashed as waves of Duplication and Disease pulsed free from Cralok, disrupting everything in his body.

Still, his jaws did not relent until he'd taken his pound of flesh. Immediately afterwards though, Cralok managed to escape when Dei's entire body locked up as poison filled his mouth.

'Not my best idea…'

Cralok used his strange movement ability to get distance from the three of them, and looked absolutely offended at the state they'd put him in.

Covered in holes, bruised, and bitten.

"Savages…" Cralok spoke for the first time in the fight, then turned and fled back to his planet.

They were already resolved to not let him escape, so Dei took hold of Jacob and flew after Cralok.

Dei watched Cralok fly towards his planet with unimaginable speed, reaching it in seconds, yet not stopping.

He slammed into his planet without slowing down, his body exploding in a flash of gore.

'Did… Did Perumah just kill him with a mental attack?'

He was so stunned at the Dragon's sudden demise that it took him a few seconds to notice the rumbling, and how the star had suddenly winked out rather than explode like it should have if kept unstable.

The entire planet shook, the eyes darting about wildly and the flesh spires shaking.

The entire thing cracked, wings opening to reveal the core of the planet- a glowing orange earthen body, Cralok born anew.