Chapter 496: Entranced Hunt
The white dragon had been fighting for a full cycle of the sun.
When the corrupted orcas first surrounded him in that lightless ocean, he had met them with tooth and claw. Learning from his mistakes, he refused to fight them on their terms.
The deep was their domain. Black water and crushing pressure and the endless, choking dark wasn’t worth the fight. So he changed the battlefield. He dragged them to the sky.
The first orca he seized by the dorsal fin, his claws punching through corrupted blubber and anchoring deep into the vertebrae beneath. With a single, titanic surge of his wings, he breached the surface, and an explosion of white water and black ichor and the silver flash of scales catching what remained of the fading light.
The orca thrashed in his grip, its corrupted body weeping purple filth, its hollow eye sockets streaming trails of corruption that steamed and hissed in the open air.
It was massive, sixty feet of twisted muscle and serrated teeth, but the dragon was larger. He carried it upward, climbing through the clouds, his wings beating with the rhythm of a war drum.
At the apex of his ascent, where the air grew thin and the sky darkened to the deep blue of near-space, he released it. The orca fell, screaming its corrupted song into the void, and the dragon dove after it, his claws extended, his jaw unhinging to reveal rows of teeth that glowed faintly with the blue fire building in his throat.
He hit the falling orca at terminal velocity. The impact split the creature in two, its corrupted halves spinning away into the sea below, trailing ribbons of black blood that painted the sky like ink.
The dragon pulled up at the last moment, his wings snapping open, his tail skimming the wave crests, and plunged back into the ocean to find the next one.
He did this again. And again. And again.
The sun set. The sun rose. The battle did not end. The corrupted ocean was vast, and the orcas were many. A full pod, then another, then another, drawn by the blood and the chaos and the irresistible beacon of the rift core pulsing somewhere in the deep.
The dragon became a machine of slaughter. He would dive into the black water, his eyes cutting through the corruption like searchlights, and seize the nearest orca. He would drag it skyward, wings straining, muscles burning, and tear it apart in the open air where the corruption could not regenerate as quickly.
He would let the pieces fall. He would dive again.
The ocean around him became a graveyard. Black blood slicked the surface for miles, an oil spill of corrupted ichor that shimmered with faint light.
The corpses of orcas, or what remained of them, bobbed in the swells, their bodies slowly dissolving into the corruption from which they had been made. Above, the sky was streaked with the smoke of his passing, clouds torn apart by the force of his ascents and descents.
He found the one with the rift core at dawn on the second day.
This orca was different. Larger. Older. The matriarch, with the corruption working deeper into its flesh, transforming it into twisted bone and pulsing black light, its ribcage split open to reveal the rift core nestled in the cavity where its heart should have been.
The core pulsed with a sickly, rhythmic light, and the orca sang a command, calling the rest of the pod to its defense.
The dragon tore through them all. He ripped the core from the orca’s chest with his claws, black ichor exploding around him in a cloud so thick it blotted out what little light remained.
The creature convulsed and died, its massive body sinking into the abyss, but the dragon was already ascending, the rift core clutched in his talons.
He didn’t destroy it. Not yet.
He flew. Higher than he had flown in weeks, higher than the clouds, higher than the thin blue veil of the upper atmosphere.
The sky around him darkened to indigo, then black, the stars emerging one by one. The rift core pulsed in his grip, its corrupted light casting strange shadows across his white scales.
He looked down at the expanse below him, the ocean stretching to every horizon, an endless plain of gray water broken only by the faint, distant outlines of islands and the darker smudges of corruption blooms spreading beneath the surface.
He searched.
He flew for hours, the rift core still clutched in his claws, hi eyes scanning the seas below. He was looking for something. Perhaps if he kept fighting, kept moving, kept tearing through every corrupted thing that crossed his path, he might find what he was looking for.
Where the monsters lurked, he went. Where rifts would open, where they crowded, where the corruption was thickest, he sought them out.
He found a pod of corrupted sperm whales, their massive heads riddled with pulsing black veins, and he dragged them into the sky one by one.
He found a swarm of flying things, winged creatures with too many eyes and mouths that opened vertically, and he dragged them into the sea, holding them beneath the waves until they drowned in the element that was supposed to be their enemy.
He fought everything. He killed everything. The rift core stayed in his claws. He had not yet finished what he started.
Battered and bleeding and crusted with the dried ichor of a hundred dead monsters, the white dragon hovered in the sky as the sun began its slow descent toward the horizon.
His wings ached. His claws were chipped and cracked. One of his horns had been shattered in a battle with something he couldn’t name, and the wound still wept a thin trickle of blood. He looked at the sky. He looked at the sea. He looked at the rift core, still pulsing, still whole, still waiting.
And he frowned. Why—
"ISAIAH!"