Dragon Slayer

{A/N: It occurred to me today that the end of my last chapter suffered from pacing issues, logical errors, and my MC wasn't treating Karliah as well as he should've. It has been edited as of 1/13/22 at 11:55 p.m. You are more than welcome to take a gander.}

Yuri was well-rested, to the point where he felt refreshed even. His mana was full thanks to the Eye and it felt like the hours after a good workout. Perhaps overworking his magic increased his resistance to the side effects or his capacity? It was time to look at his status again.

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Status: Yuri Nightingale

Titles: Champion of Akasha

Race: Arch Human

Power: 45

Speed: 45

Perception: 40

Mana: 380

Stamina: 260

Record Points: 8865

Skills: Mana Construct, Basic Ice Manipulation, Basic Fire Manipulation, Basic Wind Manipulation, Basic Earth Manipulation, Basic Lightning Manipulation, Basic Mana Manipulation, Shroud of the Hunter

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His Power and Speed jumped by 5, and his mana took another leap upward. Stamina too. Perception hadn't moved, which is probably indicative of some sort of cap. He wasn't using it much, either way, only being more sensitive to the average noise or smell from more than twice the distance he used to be. ESP was a much better tool when it came to 'sight' if you could call it that.

His intuition was telling him that there was something he was missing from the elements. No way would his skills continually pile up like this without fusing into an elemental 'catch-all' skill, right?

Maybe he had read too much Tensura. It was the light novel that got him into Isekai, really.

Yuri closed his status, promising to investigate more elements and more magic mechanics when he returned to the college. Another thing he was curious about was Illusion magic and the possibility of finding or creating curse magic.

Yuri activated the Shroud once more, then lifted himself with Telekinesis to get a better look at where this dragon ran off to. He slowly floated to the contained Dwemer ruin that jutted out of the mismatched earth.

Below him, what looked like an old community area could be found, with a dry fountain, pathways to libraries and discussion halls with golden domes that had long lost their luster, and stairways leading to different rooms, residences, and floors across the smooth stone and gold inlaid foundation.

The only indication of flaws or the passing of time would be the cracks across floors and fallen statues, and the Falmer armed with chitin swords, bows, and armor crawling to and fro. What confused Yuri the most was how a dragon and these Falmer came to cohabitate? They were clearly much more armed than any of the ones he had already witnessed.

'Either something of value to their sustenance hides within these walls, or something they fear lives outside of them and they use this place as protection. Blackreach is known to have Centurions wake up if you walk too close to them, perhaps they were willing to stay here instead of risk being found by one. The armor would be a deterrent from the lazy dragon, though I doubt it would be much more effort than if I had to eat a crab.'

By now, Yuri had cleared halfway across the mini-city and landed on the chandelier to use as a foothold to scout. He held onto the chain that it swung from and for a moment an image of a nearly naked Miley Cyrus sticking her tongue out and swinging on a wrecking ball almost overlapped with his own image in his head. He quickly shook that thought out.

'Perhaps I need some pussy, stat. Should I attempt to seduce Tonilia as Yuri or as Erebus?'

Go for a prostitute? Absolutely not. He never had the habit, paying for sex felt like an admittance of weakness to him personally, even in his past life. He didn't judge those that did but never wanted to venture into any sort of 'red light' seeking behavior.

With his enhanced hearing, the sound of a deep, almost growling breath echoed into his perception in a very slow rhythm. He couldn't tell where it was coming from yet, but he could tell the damn thing fell asleep already.

He looked around for a while before realizing that this dragon wasn't anywhere inside the ruin. But he could still hear it, it couldn't be that far. He floated off of the wre- chandelier and made his way to the wall in the opposite direction from where he entered. He landed on the wall soon, it wasn't very wide and not designed to hold people at all. He used earth magic to affix himself once again.

He leaned over the side and looked out; he found rocks, blue vegetation, nirnroot, wandering Falmer, and centurion charging pods alongside the cobblestone path leading from tower to tower.

Yuri reveled in the fact that he found the connecting point to several different Dwemer ruins which each of these elevator towers led to. He heard another deep snore, finally.

He looked down against the wall and to his right. An edge of a spiny tail poked from the corner of the wall, meaning this dragon wedged itself between the ruin and the wall of the cavern. This dragon might be as suicidal as Yuri was because that definitely isn't conducive to a combat-ready state.

Like a tightrope act from the 'Cirque de Soleis', Yuri held his arms out and added artificial suspense to his walk along the wall. He made his way around the bend in record time and was hard-pressed to think of this dragon as something more than a sunbathing lizard.

Either purposefully or as a result of a child of Akatosh using this as a resting place, a natural canopy of blue and luminescent mushrooms took it upon themselves to stretch from the natural wall to the artificial one and provide itself like an awning to the dragon. He was in bliss, the poor bastard.

He was at the tail end, and the dragon stretched all the way to the other side of the wall, its head barely poking out. It was also under a canopy.

Yuri didn't want to wake it if he didn't have to. Giving the ancient thing a quick death would be beneficial to both of them. He brainstormed with this in mind.

He looked up to the ceiling, covered in stalactite, and thoughts of the French Revolution came to his inspiration.

Yuri gently rose to the cavern's ceiling and flipped himself upside down to cling to it. With his inventory open to collect any falling debris and earth magic activated to the max, he began molding the ceiling as his muse.

In less than 30 minutes, a wedge was forming. 10 feet long was its edge, and from the edge, the rock faces angled up narrowly to form what looked like a woodcutter's ax. Yuri had to carve out a space for him to work above the edge, meaning the entire rock formation was held in an upside-down bowl. The ax head's base ended and curved into a point, held by a 2-foot wide pole sticking out of the back for easy and instantaneous dropping without any change of trajectory. Yuri spent another 30 minutes sharpening the edge and taking more volume from the sides before he realized he was being picky. This thing was tightly packed and heavy and sharp as a bitch. Damocles would be proud.

Yuri looked down and confirmed what his ESP already told him: that the dragon hadn't moved, most likely to conserve energy for its life in captivity. Yuri grinned in victory, then went down to perform his final touches. He cut the mushrooms in the flight path of Vulthuryol's head and stored them to avoid the noise letting the dragon react. He then took a spot in the highest point of his workspace and used earth magic to quickly sever the earthen thread that held his swift and terrible executioner. On its way down, Yuri used Gravity magic to accelerate its drop speed for good measure.

Silently it fell, Yuri held his breath in honor of the tension. 60 feet and a single second seconds later, a boom shook the earth and kicked up dust all the way to the top of the wall's height. Screams from the Falmer residents of the Library echoed one after the other to ask of their peril. No answer came.

Yuri's ESP told him of his success, but this was also evident by the fact that no sound came from the target of his guillotine.

[Record of Vulthuryol, Lesser Dragon Obtained - 500 RP]

"Ha, the Record called him a lesser dragon. Makes you wonder about the greater ones"

Yuri grinned victoriously and dropped to a free fall before landing with a thud and bended knees, rising shortly after.

Yuri ignored the Falmer who were preparing to come and investigate and strode to his victim. Vulthuryol's head was neatly severed, his eyes were still closed. It appears he died rather peacefully despite the manner of his execution. Something inside him was grateful this was so. Pity, perhaps?

Yuri had no intentions of welcoming the approaching blind natives or continuing to stay underground for any longer. The mana was only slightly denser, but the air was much stiffer. He quickly stuffed the dragon's head, followed by his body, into his inventory for later dismantling.

"Thank Akasha for the inventory size"

Yuri then imagined with as much clarity as he could muster, the scene of his previous subjugation of the party of mercenaries tucked behind Irkngthand's walls. A portal opened beside his hand in reply, and a gust of wind came from its mouth.

"And thank the Eye for my mana battery. 50 mana for a portal. That's more magicka than most mages in Tamriel could muster, I believe. I've solved the puzzle of why no one uses portals."

He floated himself with Telekinesis and exited the portal and closed it before a hail of poorly made arrows almost ruined his coat. Not that he would let them.

The skies above Irkngthand's entrance were exactly as he remembered, save for the lack of sun. He looked down with night vision and realized that the loot he made those poor bastards drop was still there. No way he could've explained the items disappearing so easily, so he left it there. Luckily, it survived a single day in an abandoned ruin.

Yuri lowered himself quickly and trotted to his loot. With a grasp of his inventory, all the coin pouches in the 2-foot tall pile became his, along with a few swords and armor pieces. They were only steel, no need to take it all. He would certainly need them to practice Enchanting before he tried it on the dragon bone equipment he would make later. The lit campfire that was left in a hurry was long-dead. With a snap of his fingers, the fire roared back to life. Yuri took a seat on the grassy ground with his back against a log and got cozy. No way he was putting his ass on wood anymore after that carriage ride.

Yuri took a proper pose in meditation and waited for his temporary companions. He had two reasons for this, one of them being he felt generous enough to use a portal back to Riften and didn't want to leave them here when he could save time with the rest of his job on the vaults. The reason he didn't grab them personally? He reaaaally didn't want to be underground any longer.

Meditation gave him hardly any benefits, save for his blood taking a marginal increase in purification speed as long as he did. It was steadily approaching the Mana Blood Base that would be the foundation for a unique bloodline, and the key would unlock the potential of every single one of his lineage to the best of its ability. Or so he hoped.

Yuri grew bored of meditation after an indeterminate amount of time and found that the less focused he was the less effective it was to meditate. He abandoned the practice for the time being and pondered his power.

"Aside from the elemental mastery skill fusion theory, I have one more pressing question. ESP allows me to use telekinesis spells and teleportation at a distance from myself without me physically projecting the mana to that spot. Why can't I do this with elemental spells or spells with similar nature to being projected? Do natural spells have their own plane of existence they can travel freely as spatial spells do, and I just haven't found it yet?"

{Next Chapter: Thoughts of Light and Shadow}