14-46. The Praesidium

The spear came in, moving with the sort of inevitability that could shatter mountains. Elijah stepped back, trying to buy time so he could dodge. But it was useless. The weapon cracked against his shoulder, dislocating it with a single blow.

He gritted his teeth, refusing to show the signs of pain.

“Fix that,” Birk grunted, turning around and returning to his side of the training ring. The space was about fifty yards across and encircled by carved stones that served to sap Elijah’s attributes down to something manageable. Birk could control the effect, and he’d hinted that he would eventually allow Elijah to fight with full power. But not before he learned the basics.

And despite Elijah’s many battles, his pre-World Tree training as a boxer, and his efforts to improve on his own, his technique was woefully inadequate. Birk was more than willing to show him the details of just how far he still needed to go.

The giant drake casually spun his blunted training spear as Elijah shoved his shoulder back into place, then healed the torn ligaments. Thankfully, the training circle didn’t prevent the casting of spells.

Elijah spun his own spear, working the soreness out of his shoulder. The patterned scales across his torso and snaking up his arms glinted in the sunlight. He’d started out wearing a shirt, but the constant abuse had turned it to shreds. In the interest of maintaining his wardrobe, Elijah had then stripped down to nothing but a pair of pants.

He wasn’t even wearing any of his equipment, save for his Antlers and his Arcane Loop. He’d also cancelled all his buffs. Even Lupine Reflexes and Heart of the Tempest. Without those, he felt like he was moving in slow motion.

The only saving grace was that Birk had similarly been stripped of his attributes, equipment, and self-buffs.

Not that it made any difference.

The drake’s skill with weapons was enough to render him entirely unassailable.

“Begin.”

Elijah circled to his right, remembering not to cross his feet. He maintained pristine balance, both hands on his own practice spear, which was meant to perfectly mimic Thorn’s shape, weight, and balance. Birk had whittled it in the space of a few minutes.

Suddenly, the drake moved. A second later, the clack of wood on wood echoed through the training circle. The clash only lasted for a couple of seconds, but in that time, their weapons collided six times.

Even though Birk’s attack was only meant to probe his defenses, Elijah was forced back, desperately defending until Birk withdrew.

“You’re off-balance. Too slow. Read your opponent.”

That was easy for Birk to say. Elijah had seen no warnings of attack. No weight shift. No twitching muscles. No hip turn. No precursor at all. It was just stillness followed by explosive motion. His technique was perfect.

Elijah gritted his teeth, ready for the next clash. One cluster of leaves watched for early warning of attack. Another paid attention to his footwork. Still another focused on environmental factors, while a fourth cluster managed the rest of his body.

It wasn’t working, though.

So, Elijah changed things up. Instead of dedicating whole clusters to singular tasks, he pushed them to individual leaves, all in the same cluster. When Birk attacked, his responses were crisper, with far less delay.

Elijah still wasn’t close to good enough to keep himself from taking a beating.

So it went for the next six hours. They took a couple of breaks for food or water, and Birk repeatedly told him all the things he was doing wrong. His mistakes with his footwork. The wasted motions. The lapses in attention.

“Good. You are not hopeless,” Birk said when they’d finished. “You are capable of learning.”

Then, he gave Elijah homework.

Mostly, various drills meant to assign attacks and defenses to muscle memory, but he also expected physical conditioning. None of it would take place outside the training circle, either, so Elijah couldn’t lean on his attribute advantages to see him through.

He didn’t mind, though.

If nothing else, Elijah was well-accustomed to repetitive tasks. So, he took to his assigned work like a fish to water. Still, his mind did wander a bit, mostly to the previous night.

Sara was nothing like he’d expected, but they’d quickly fallen into a sibling-like relationship. Which was accurate, he supposed. She was technically his adopted little sister.

It was an odd feeling, being the older sibling. But Elijah found that he enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, after camping in the jungle with him, Sara had been forced to return to Ashakar so she could continue her studies. To his surprise, he missed her.

Of course, that was probably because Birk was anything but personable.

Thankfully, his isolation wouldn’t last much longer, because Tura had agreed to allow him to attend the first round of qualifiers. The Tournament of the First Fang was scheduled to last for close to two years, but the qualifiers would take place over the course of a single month.

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Elijah wanted to see what he might be up against.

He also needed to access the Branch and send some messages out. And finally, he wanted to explore the city a little. After all, he’d barely seen any of it so far, and if a draconic city wasn’t enough to get his attention, then nothing would be.

Still, Elijah gave his all to his training, completing the drills and even going an extra mile with his physical conditioning. By the time he’d finished, he was drenched in sweat, with his body feeling like he’d just run multiple marathons in a row.

Which was mostly accurate, except that that marathon also included gymnastics, weight training, and agility drills. He’d ended the session with a bit of yoga. That wasn’t part of his assignment, but it always relaxed him.

Birk seemed to approve, though it was difficult to tell what the big drake was thinking. He just sat in an old chair, smoking his pipe as he watched Elijah’s progress.

When Elijah approached and told him he was finished, he just grunted and asked, “Are you satisfied with your effort?”

Elijah didn’t even answer. Instead, he just turned around and did another few laps around the training circle. He recognized the manipulation tactic for what it was, but the stubborn part of him just wouldn’t give the drake the satisfaction of giving in.

When he finished the last lap, he just gave Birk a wave and said, “See you tomorrow!”

Then, he passed the outer ring and felt his attributes flood back. To deal with his soreness, he used Wild Resurgence. A few moments later, he was out of sight and stripping down so he could take a shower.

When he dressed, he didn’t bother with his suit. Instead, he just put on his best set of normal clothes and shifted into his dragon form. A moment later, he was airborne. For a few minutes, he just flew around, skimming across the jungle’s canopy and enjoying the dense vitality. But soon enough, he gained altitude and found his way to the city.

He wanted nothing more than to explore the Reach, but he knew that Sara’s Academy was located in the Crown. So, he passed through the clouds and into the upper parts of Ashakar. It didn’t take him long to find Sara, who stood in front of a particularly fancy tower with a couple of other students.

He landed a few dozen feet away, then shifted back into his human form.

“You ready?” he asked upon approach.

One of the other students muttered, “Emerald…”

Elijah ignored them. So did Sara, though Elijah didn’t miss it when she stuck her tongue out at one of them. Before long, they were on their way. This time, he didn’t fly her around, mostly because it really was frowned upon for dragons to let anyone but dragoons ride on their backs. Tura had explained it, and though Elijah didn’t much care about how it reflected on him, he definitely didn’t want to embarrass Kirlissa. So, he’d agreed not to allow it anymore.

Still, he felt that going on foot was a little silly when he could easily fly.

He also couldn’t escape one simple fact. Even though he acknowledged that the Crown was an impressive place, it was also extremely boring. It felt a little like walking through an art gallery. Sure, it was nice. It was impressive and beautiful. But after a while, it lost some of its effect.

And it just wasn’t fun in the way that most cities were. There were no street vendors. No shops. Just a bunch of stuffy institutions – not unlike the Academy – and ancestral seats of power.

Elijah didn’t hate it or anything, but it had quickly lost its appeal.

Thankfully, he had Sara there to cure some of his boredom. She rarely stopped talking, leaping from one subject to another through a web of tenuous connections only she could discern. Elijah’s attention span had never been a strength, but even he found it difficult to keep up with the constantly shifting subjects.

Eventually, they reached one of the air lifts, which took them down to the Reach. Elijah didn’t see much of the lower part of the city before he found himself aboard a huge cloud that reminded him of Tura’s personal flight artifact. However, this one could accommodate more than a thousand people.

And the depot where they’d boarded it played host to thousands of such clouds.

When he asked Sara about it, she explained that the arena for the Tournament of the First Fang was too large to be inside the city. So, they’d built it a few hundred miles away.

It wasn’t until thirty minutes later that Elijah truly understood that reasoning. Back on Earth, the largest arenas could barely hold a hundred thousand people. Even then, they were enormous marvels of modern architecture and engineering. But the arena dedicated to the tournament put them all to shame.

“How many people can it hold?” he asked, staring at the massive structure.

“A few million,” she answered. “Not including the towers.”

Elijah could believe it. The bulk of the design was familiar enough, and it reminded him a little of the Colosseum in Rome. Part of that was because of the general shape, but mostly, it was because of how much artistry had been involved in its construction. Like the towers in Ashakar, it had been built from that same, familiar green-ish material, and it sported similar gold trim. The guiding architectural principles were the same as well, leaning hard on arches, incredibly detailed ornamentation, and sharp edges.

The totality of the effect was more than impressive.

And that wasn’t even considering the massive palaces atop equally large pillars surrounding the arena. Thirteen of them.

When Elijah asked about the number, Sara explained that they were meant for the thirteen most powerful transcendents in the Empire of Scale. “There are rumors that they will all attend,” she said eagerly. “Even the Emperor themselves is supposed to be here for the finals!”

“Themselves?” Elijah asked, suspecting that the system’s translation feature had gotten the grammar wrong. It was the second time he’d noticed the error.

“Oh, yeah. Right. That’s probably weird for you. A million years ago, the Emperor split himself into nine bodies. Some kind of cultivation thing. Nobody really knows the exact reasoning or how it works. But yeah. Nine bodies. They’re kind of like twins, but they do have different personalities. It gets complicated when they argue.”

“Interesting,” Elijah muttered, wondering how something like that would work. He barely had the capacity to manage one body, so the idea of steering eight more sounded like a special kind of hell. But he didn’t say that because he didn’t want to offend anyone.

As the cloud drew closer, Elijah saw that the arena wasn’t as isolated as he’d been led to expect. From afar, it looked like the tree line abutted the arena, but as they came within a few miles, Elijah saw that there was an entire city’s worth of buildings surrounding the massive stadium.

It wasn’t as big as Ashakar, but it was still much larger than a place like Ironshore.

The cloud pulled into another depot, and they exited alongside the other passengers. As they entered the city, they joined the flow of tens of thousands of other pedestrians who shared their destination.

It was during that short walk that Elijah saw something extremely comforting. The area surrounding the arena sported many of the features he usually associated with cities. Was it odd to see drakes and serpentors hawking street food and cheap mementos? Sure. But it gave Elijah a warm feeling in his chest.

It wasn’t until a few minutes later that he realized why.

It cemented the reality that, for all their power, dragons were still just people. And their society reflected that fact.

“Welcome to the Praesidium,” Sara said when they finally reached the arena’s entrance.

Elijah just smiled as he took it all in.