Rebirth Online World

Polymath Redux – Three easy steps on how to kill a Red Dragon
Chapter II

“God dammit! It hurts so much!”

Having slowly regained consciousness, those were the first words that Mordred shouted out at the top of his lungs. His voice came out a little weaker than he expected, which was not surprising since he had originally passed out from extreme pain. In any case his current vision was blurred from just regaining consciousness but strangely there was something abnormal going on.

Bright daylight was shining in his face. Had morning come already? Had he passed out for the entire night on the cold ground of his room? However Mordred quickly dismissed the thought as he usually kept his blinds down to make his room dimly lit. So then what exactly was going on for all this light to be pouring in, but without having regained his vision properly he wasn’t able to confirm is current situation.

As his vision had slowly adjusted to his surroundings, Mordred broke into a cold sweat at what he saw. In such a situation this was the most appropriate reaction that anyone would give. His mind had wanted to go into a panic but his body was far too stiff and stunned that he was unable to execute the ‘panic’ command.

A great distance of land, not just land, a vast forest beset his sight. However that was what was below him, meaning that he was higher up than the trees of the forest. A great wind brushed past his body, cooling him down. Right, he was currently on top of a large mountain, or to be more precise a plateau area of a mountain. With an estimated altitude of around 4000 meters above sea level, even he couldn’t really believe what was going on.

With such a bizarre situation having been taken in front of him there really was just one thing he could do. That was to speak the three words that anyone would in his shoes.

“What the fuck…?”

He spent the next 20 minutes letting out pent up frustration, at first it was at this absurd scene and situation but along the line at some point it wasn’t even about that anymore, he was complaining about everything that ever went wrong in his life. To be honest, he thought it felt slightly good to scream out like this and wondered why he never tried doing this anytime sooner.

Soon he regained his calm demeanor and tried to analyze the situation… is what he should’ve done but he couldn’t calm himself down. No one would be able to do so if they were 4000 meters above sea level. All he could see as he peered down was a large steep cliff for kilometers.

Not to mention the fact that there was nothing from which he could gather significant information from. However a single thought had hit him, as though someone had literally hit his head a light bulb appeared metaphorically in his head.

What if… he was dead? He did suffer a powerful migraine after all, was it so strange that he could’ve been killed by it?

“No… I don’t feel dead. It doesn’t really feel like the afterlife, but that was assuming I knew what being dead felt like. Which I don’t.”

So was he dead? He tried pinching himself and it hurt, but those were the properties of testing a dream, not being dead. To be fair, waking up in a strange exotic locale would have anyone second guessing their mortality, and really what did the ‘afterlife’ feel like? This could be it.

Mordred quickly discarded that train of thought, whether he was dead or not wasn’t exactly conducive to helping his situation. It would be better to assume that he wasn’t actually dead, that way he could have some semblance of sanity.

Then the next likely explanation may be that someone had broken into his house while he was unconscious and brought him out here, but that was also fairly far from the realm of practicality. No matter how much he tried to wrack up his brain, an answer never came to him, this situation was simply that absurd.

Actually no, something did come up in his mind. One thing that he was neglecting to think about, it was the pop up that appeared on his computer just before the initial migraine had hit.

[Welcome to Aria]

It had said.

“Why am I remembering that now? That has nothing to do with the situation at hand.”

He tried to disregard the thought but no matter how many times he tried to that thought kept coming back to him. It was the only event that took place that was out of the ordinary before coming here, so logically speaking it could have had some links to this situation.

Though he didn’t particularly like this train of thought but having been a shut in and a slave to pop culture, experiencing countless works of fictions, a single thought came to him. There were many such stories in which a protagonist is mysteriously transported to a strange new world, away from their normal environment they are tasked with surviving in place that they’ve never even heard of. It was hard to accept it but for some reason something at the back of his head was telling him that this was the right answer.

For now he tried to discard the thought since it wasn’t logical or even feasible. He may have been a slave to pop culture and entertainment but he wasn’t dumb enough to think even for a second that this was the case. He knew firmly where the line between reality and fiction stood.

Although, if this was indeed the afterlife then the line between those may have skewed a little. In any case it was simply a theory far detached from reality as one could get, but the similarities kept popping up.

“No, no. it can’t be.”

Trying to rid himself of such thoughts he tried to focus on what was really important right now. That was the method of getting down from this place, because if he did not he would eventually starve to death, being stranded on top of a large mountain wasn’t exactly is ideal way of passing on.

Mordred thought himself to be rather competent when it came to problem solving, but he couldn’t come up with any other method of getting down from his current position other than manually climbing down. Though the mountain’s sides were extremely steep with only small protrusions every 200 meters or so. The prospect of a 4000 meter free climb down without any safety equipment was extremely unappealing, because one wrong step meant instant game over.

A dilemma was presented before him; either climb down with minimal guarantees of safety or stay up here to starve to death. Over the past ten years after his parents were gone he couldn’t exactly say that the prospect of suicide hadn’t crossed his mind numerous times but this was still scary no matter how much he thought over it.

Funny, if this was a game he could’ve easily just jumped down, but everything from the sensation to the smell was real right now. This wasn’t a game, this was reality, this really was happening to him right now.

With an unknown burst of resolve creeping up at him, he decided that there was no other choice, he had to climb down or die. If this insane attempt was successful then he would gain universal bragging rights that he could stuff in the face of professional mountain climbers. Though knowing those kinds, if actual professional climbers found out about his free climb they may attempt to one up him.

Alas, it was no time for such concerns.

‘4000 meter drop, piece of cake’, he reassured himself. With those protrusions every 200 meters or so he could use to stop and rest.

“As long as I don’t mess up my calculations and steps, my projected trajectory should take me straight down to the bottom without too much trouble, I mean aside from the instant death if I mess up.”

After deciding that he crept closer to the edge to calculate how many steps it’d take and if there was any points he could rest. Sure enough there were several points on the slope were he could take momentary breaks to regain stamina. They were around 200 meters apart making it extremely punishing to make any errors.

Starting with his left leg he slowly climbed down. Both extremely nervous and scared to death he grit his teeth and continued. The constant wind blowing past him was howling as if to taunt him. It was singing his death.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, what did I do to deserve this? Was it because I was too arrogant? Was that it?”

He found he could distract himself by commenting on the situation, thereby making the prospect of plunging to his death slightly less horrific. Despite not being the athletic type, he found it odd that he was able to rather easily climb down. Successfully making it to the first protrusion he sat to take a breather while trying to avoid looking directly down. He could see the clouds in front of him further cementing his predicament.

He knew he couldn’t delaying climbing down any more, because night was about to fall. Resuming his climb down once more he slowly put his leg forward to check for balance. Suddenly from afar he heard a bone chilling roar. One that shook even the sky above him. Luckily the tremor didn’t affect the mountain too much, but he was stunned in place at the ungodly sound.

“That… didn’t sound too good.”

Mordred shifted his head to get a better vision of what was coming, and a small figure could be seen flying towards him on the horizon. It was too far away to make any detail of what it was and since it was so far away he decided to ignore it and resume his climb down.

But he was once again met with the same beastly roar. This time the unidentified object that was flying towards him was more visible. With an instantly recognizable shape Mordred panicked and started to climb down even fast.

“You’ve got to be joking. No, no, no, no.”

It was large, red, winged and scaled. The wings spanned its entire body length, which was about 10 meters, with hardened scales all over its body. Sharp claws and teeth that looked like it could bite through solid steel and if that wasn’t horrifying enough, it had a spike tipped tail to emulate a horned mace.

Now one may be wondering how Mordred was able to get all of that detail in a few short seconds and from so far away. To be quite honest, Mordred himself didn’t really get it either, he was just kind of able to ‘see’ far away, but it was no time to be pondering on the details of his vision at the current time. Flying red death was charging at him at a frightening pace!

Though Mordred didn’t want to quite believe it was to the case, but clearly the dragon had laid its sights on him. Just like straight out of a fantasy fiction, it spat fire from its mouth, specifically it was a ball of intense liquid-like fire that melted anything in the vicinity.

It just barely grazed Mordred and upon contact with the mountain it instantly melted, boring a hole through it. There was no time to even think about why it wasn’t as hot as Mordred had initially thought it to be, the mountain was hit with intense heat but he wasn’t? However it wasn’t quite the time now, because of the initial melting of the mountain it destabilized it, causing a rockslide.

It wasn’t just rocks, molten rocks started crashing down.

“Why?! Why god dammit!”

Losing balance because of panic, Mordred lost grip of the surface he was hanging onto and fell backwards, seemingly plummeting to his death. This was the end of the story, for him to be dragged into an unknown world and dying in the first few minutes, no reason, no explanation, just confusion.

As he fell backwards, time seemed to slow down as his life flashed before his eyes. Though there really weren’t too many things he was fond of but he still regretted dying in such an unreasonable place. While falling down he noticed the dragon just suspended in the air with its wings; it was smiling at him, or at least that’s what it seemed like.

Was it smiling because it had successfully plunged Mordred to his death?

“God damn you! You shitty lizard! I’ll kill you!”

Regret filled him as he fell, but something miraculous happened. He fell about what seemed to be 200 meters and just stopped mere inches away from hitting the next protrusion. Then he slowly started floating down, letting him land safety.

“Just what?!”

Confusion swelled inside him even more! Then he realized… what this was. He had witnessed and experienced it thousands of times, behind a monitor. It was an acrobatic skill under the [assassin] subsection, a skill known as [soft landing]. The gist of the skill was that it negated falling damage by reducing the inertia greatly, the maximum range was 250 meters, and as long as it was within that range the user wouldn’t suffer any injuries.

But the question is why did it activate for him?

Reasonably speaking it would be easy for him to come up with an answer for that but one must also not forget that this was reality for Mordred. He couldn’t so easily accept the premise that just maybe he inherited his game character’s powers. No, it couldn’t be, that was in the realm of fantasy!

But what about that dragon? Clearly that was fantasy… so then could it really be?

He hadn’t noticed it before but the clothes Mordred was currently wearing was greatly reminiscent of the equipment his game avatar wore. A white overcoat and inside a black vest with a red tie and black trousers. He had black gloves and touching his right ear there was a silver earpiece.

‘This was it!’ he thought. He couldn’t mistake these equipment, it really was his game avatar’s! Though honestly quite hard to believe, for the moment he decided to go with the flow and an evil smirk etched across his face; revenge.

“Tch, if I’m wrong about this then I’m screwed.”

Without giving Mordred any further time to recover the dragon once again lunged towards him when it noticed that Mordred didn’t die. Slightly opening its mouth to throw another fireball his way.

“Dammit Mordred, concentrate! This is the only thing I can rely on! Don’t screw this up man!”

He spoke to himself as he closed his eyes and soon felt his body falling down. He was no longer at the protrusion, instead he was a bit farther up, specifically he had landed on top of the dragon’s back.

[Blink], it was another skill under the [assassin] subsection. In essence it was a short range teleportation skill. Since the skill provided a great deal of mobility and distance closing or expanding, it was very useful even if it didn’t have any additional effects.

“Ahahahahah! Fuck! This is it!”

He shouted while holding onto the back of the dragon. Slowly he raised his hands as it started to bask in a menacing red aura.

“This is revenge!”

He shouted.

Mordred, not his real name but it was real enough for him. As a human being he was flawed in many ways however his one greatest flaw was that he was a very vain person, he didn’t consider the fact that anyone could be greater than him. Of course he understood in his head that there was always someone higher and greater but as long as he didn’t see it for himself personally, they were just as fantastic as this dragon.

Not an illusion of grandeur, just a childish sense of arrogance. He knew this well.

Feeling all the power concentrated on the tip of his hands he swung down on the dragon’s back and pierced through its extremely tough scaly armor and deep into its heart. [Assassinate], a signature skill of the [assassin] subsection, a powerful bread and butter skill. Its power doubled if used against a person’s back.

Right now he was unarmed thus it would render the attack weak, but with Mordred’s specs, even an unarmed [assassinate] was enough to one hit kill a red dragon.

He had won.

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