Chapter 5: The Dragon's Lesson
Agheel Lake stretched before them like a mirror made of molten silver, its surface so still it seemed painted rather than real. Torrent's hooves splashed through shallow water that sparkled with each step, disturbing reflections of clouds that hung too perfectly in a sky too blue to believe. The peace was absolute, profound, the kind of serenity that made Gara's gamer instincts scream warnings he chose to ignore.
"This is too easy," he muttered, guiding Torrent toward the lake's center where something glinted beneath the surface. "Beautiful lake, perfect weather, no enemies in sight. Either this is a safe zone or—"
The water exploded.
Agheel erupted from the lake's heart like a mountain deciding to take flight. Water cascaded from scales the size of dinner plates, each one gleaming with the kind of fire that lived in the space between stars. The dragon's roar didn't just fill the air—it rewrote the fundamental nature of sound itself, turning silence into an alien concept and making Gara's bones vibrate with frequencies that shouldn't exist.
"SINCE WHEN DO THE DRAGONS FLY?!" he screamed as Torrent bucked beneath him, the spirit steed's loyalty overwhelmed by ancient instincts that insisted running was the only viable option when faced with walking extinction.
Agheel's head swung toward him with predatory intelligence, eyes like molten gold fixing on the tiny figure that had dared disturb its rest. The dragon's mouth opened, revealing teeth the length of swords and a throat that glowed with the promise of imminent combustion.
Torrent vanished.
Gara hit the water hard, his faithful steed abandoning him to face the dragon alone. He couldn't blame the horse—even spectral entities had their limits, and those limits apparently included biblical-scale fire-breathing reptiles with personal space issues.
Fire engulfed the world.
Death #57: Flying Dragon Agheel. Immolated. 10/10 for spectacle, 0/10 for survivability.
He respawned at the nearest Grace, body unmarked but memory perfect. The sensation of burning alive lingered—not just the pain, but the smell of his own flesh cooking and the sound of water turning to steam around his corpse. His hands shook as he pulled out his notebook, but the tremor wasn't from fear anymore.
It was from excitement.
A dragon. An actual, honest-to-god, fire-breathing dragon. In his old life, he'd spent thousands of hours fighting digital versions of creatures like Agheel. Now he had the chance to face one for real, to test everything he'd learned about timing and patience and the sweet satisfaction of bringing down something that should be impossible to kill.
He was back at the lake within minutes.
This time, Agheel was waiting. The dragon hovered above the water, wings beating with the rhythm of thunder, watching the approach of the tiny figure who'd already died once and come back for more. Intelligence gleamed in those molten eyes—not just animal cunning, but something deeper. Recognition.
Gara shifted his stats on the approach, dumping everything into Vigor and Endurance. Pure tank build, designed to survive long enough to learn patterns.
Agheel's claws caught him mid-dodge and crushed him like an empty soda can.
Death #58: Flying Dragon Agheel. Crushed. 2/10 - apparently tanking doesn't work against physics.
Respawn. Adjust. Return.
This time he tried mobility—maximum Dexterity, enough Endurance to dodge for days. He lasted almost thirty seconds before Agheel's tail caught him with a sweep that launched him into orbit. The view of Limgrave from three hundred feet up was spectacular. The landing was less so.
Death #59: Flying Dragon Agheel. Tail-swiped into low orbit. 8/10 for air time, 1/10 for landing technique.
Respawn. Adjust. Return.
Death #60: Eaten whole. The experience of traveling down a dragon's throat was educational but brief.
Death #61: Wing buffet. Turned out dragons could use their wings as weapons. Who knew?
Death #62: Fire breath while dodging previous fire breath. Apparently Agheel could multi-task.
Death #63: Claws again. The dragon was getting creative with its grip strength.
Death #64: Trampling. Yes, dragons could trample. The laws of physics were more like guidelines anyway.
Each death taught him something new. Each respawn brought him back faster, angrier, more obsessed with the puzzle of scales and flame that hovered above the lake like a mobile natural disaster. Somewhere around death #65, he stopped feeling the pain entirely. The fire, the claws, the crushing weight of dragon feet—they became data points in an equation he was determined to solve.
From somewhere beyond sight, Melina watched.
POV: Melina
The Tarnished had died ten times now, and each return was faster than the last. No tears, no cursing, no rage—just cold analysis and mechanical precision. He moved through death like other warriors moved through warm-up exercises, treating agony as educational material.
"This isn't natural," she thought, her spectral form invisible to both dragon and prey. "Even the most determined Tarnished show fear, show pain. This one treats resurrection like... like a tool."
She'd guided many warriors in her long existence, had seen the strongest break after half as many deaths. But this strange man in his impossible clothes returned each time with less emotion, not more. His humanity was bleeding away drop by drop, replaced by something colder and infinitely more dangerous.
When he died the fifteenth time—crushed beneath Agheel's landing—he respawned with a smile that made her spectral blood run cold.
POV: Gara Smith
Death #70 was different.
He'd been mapping Agheel's attack patterns for fourteen attempts, documenting timing windows and vulnerable moments with the systematic thoroughness of someone debugging particularly stubborn code. The dragon was strong, fast, and intelligent, but it was still following rules. And rules could be exploited.
Muscle memory guided him now—pure instinct carved from repetition and pain. He didn't think about dodging the wing buffet; his body simply wasn't there when it arrived. He didn't plan the roll beneath the fire breath; momentum carried him through movements he'd practiced in blood and resurrection.
But knowing the patterns wasn't enough. He needed damage. Real damage. Enough to put a dent in something that could casually swat down mountains.
Mid-fight, while Agheel wound up for another crushing attack, Gara made a decision that would have been suicide for anyone else. He shifted every stat point he possessed into Intelligence—becoming, for a few crucial seconds, a glass cannon of unprecedented fragility and devastating magical potential.
His mind exploded with clarity. The world became equations and energy flows, cause and effect mapped in golden calculations that hung in his vision like divine spreadsheets. He could see the exact angle of Agheel's approach, could calculate the precise moment when the dragon would be most vulnerable to magical assault.
Gara raised his hands and unleashed every spell scroll he'd collected from Rogier's cache. Glintstone Pebble became Glintstone Storm. Rock Sling became Rock Apocalypse. Magic flowed through him like liquid lightning, each spell amplified by Intelligence scores that no human mind was meant to contain.
The barrage lasted three seconds and rewrote local reality.
Agheel's roar of pain shattered windows in Gatefront Ruins half a mile away. The dragon tumbled from the sky, scales cracked and bleeding light, crashing into the lake with enough force to send tsunamis rolling toward the shore.
For a moment, Gara stood victorious in knee-deep water, smoke rising from his fingertips while golden blood painted the lake surface. Then Agheel's death reached him—not just the creature's physical dissolution, but the release of power that had been building for centuries.
Seventy thousand runes hit him at once.
The absorption was beyond euphoria, beyond anything his nervous system was equipped to handle. Golden light erupted from his eyes, his mouth, his very pores, as power flooded his cells like liquid divinity. His vision became pure mathematics—he could see the fundamental code underlying reality, could perceive the elegant equations that governed everything from grass growth to gravitational constants.
For ten perfect seconds, Gara Smith transcended human limitations and touched the mind of whatever cosmic programmer had written the laws of physics.
Then his nervous system overloaded and he collapsed into the lake, vomiting golden dust while his brain tried to process sensations that didn't have names in any human language.
Rune Sickness felt like dying in reverse—every cell in his body trying to become more than it was, evolution accelerated past the breaking point. His muscles spasmed, his bones ached, and golden veins traced patterns beneath his skin that pulsed with each heartbeat.
"What you are is not natural, even for Tarnished."
Melina's voice cut through the agony like a cool breeze. She knelt beside him in the shallows, her spectral form solid enough to provide comfort, one hand resting gently on his forehead. Her touch was winter morning and starlight, reducing the fever that threatened to cook his brain from the inside.
"The amount of power you just absorbed..." she continued, her single eye studying him with curiosity rather than fear. "It should have killed you. Or driven you mad. Instead, you metabolized it like nourishment."
Gara tried to speak and managed only a sound like a broken radiator. Golden spittle leaked from the corner of his mouth, tasting of electricity and possibility.
"Perhaps you're meant to break patterns others cannot," Melina mused, helping him sit up as the worst of the seizures subsided. "Perhaps the Grace has marked you for something that requires... unusual capabilities."
"Pretty sure I just break myself a lot," Gara croaked through chattering teeth. His voice sounded like he'd been gargling gravel and regret.
Melina's laugh was silver bells in a graveyard—beautiful and unsettling in equal measure. "That too. Come. Let's get you to solid ground before the carrion birds decide you're sufficiently dead to be interesting."
She helped him to Agheel's Grace, a Site that had materialized where the dragon fell. The golden light was warm against his skin, soothing the lightning that still crawled through his nervous system. As the Rune Sickness slowly subsided, Gara began to understand what he'd actually accomplished.
Level 23. In one fight. From a standing start at level 8, he'd jumped fifteen levels through a combination of tactical deaths and magical overkill that probably violated several laws of nature and common sense.
His stats were beyond anything a normal Tarnished should possess at this stage. His magical reserves had expanded to accommodate power that could level buildings. His understanding of the world's underlying mechanics had deepened to the point where he could perceive probability flows and causal chains with supernatural clarity.
He was becoming something inhuman, one death at a time.
That night, by the light of Agheel's Grace, Gara made another entry in his journal. His handwriting was steadier now, the tremor of fear replaced by the precision of someone who'd found their calling in the space between death and resurrection.
Death #57-70: Flying Dragon Agheel. Various methods including immolation, crushing, consumption, aerial trampling, and one particularly creative incident involving dragon breath while I was already on fire. Overall experience: 9/10 for spectacle, 1/10 for pain management, 2/10 for mental health. Total deaths: 70. Beginning to suspect that being alive is overrated anyway.
He closed the journal and stared into the Grace's light, watching golden flames dance with patterns that almost made sense. Somewhere in his peripheral vision, numbers flickered—health, stamina, magical reserves, all displayed in neat floating text that shouldn't exist but absolutely did.
"Starting to forget what being alive used to feel like," he whispered to the night air.
The admission hung between them like a confession, and Melina's spectral form flickered with what might have been concern. But she said nothing, perhaps understanding that some truths were too dangerous to acknowledge, even between maiden and Tarnished.
In the distance, other dragons called to each other across the night sky, their voices carrying promises of future lessons written in fire and pain. Gara listened to their songs and smiled.
He was ready for the next class.
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