I felt potent wave after potent wave of power surging into me as I greedily "bit" into Renora's soul. Every nanometer I moved closer to the beast, and every nanometer it was dragged closer to me, I grew mightier and it grew weaker. The beast was incredibly powerful, comparable in might to the quasi-mythic archdemon Gorgomuth despite the fact that the being's dual elements were not ones known for their direct might.
As the beast grew weaker, and thus began to slowly but surely be dragged towards me as if I were the center of the gravity tugging on it, I began to glow. I felt titanic power surging through me, supercharging my cells, my blood, and even my teeth. My soul itself began to hum as I felt my mind racing with newfound knowledge and power, power and knowledge that I was in the process of taking from Renora himself. I had to work to momentarily ignore the truly massive notification that began to fill my mind's eye, alerting me even without looking at it at the enormity of what was going on.
"Thank... You... Renora..." I whispered, my voice exploding out of me and chilling the blood of my foe. I felt my powers connecting me to the dragonkin of Renora's dragons, and his draconic minions themselves. The smile on my face widened as I felt time begin to slow to a crawl as my power began to peak and the notification in my mind's eye began to glow, forcing me to pay attention to it.
[Alert: Manifold Ascension Achieved
You have attained the power to become a mighty dragon lord, making you one of the extremely rare beings to be a fourfold ascendant. Dragon lords are to dragons what gods are to lesser mortals, and what sanguinarchs are to vampires, creatures of creation, power, and deserving of respect, reverence, service, and even worship.
As a dragon lord you possess the power to attune to the elements that dragons can attune too, and can do things such as manipulating your attuned elements, shrugging off the greater mega powers of even other ascendants, and of course command the loyalty, respect, reverence, and worship of other dragons as well as lesser draconic lifeforms such as dragonkin. Even more fantastically is the fact that some aspects of your transformation are supercharged due to your other traits as an ascendant being!
You are becoming a mythic-wyrm-aspected dragon lord, the strongest and by far the rarest kind of dragon lord. Your personal power is going to dwarf that of most other dragon lords, even allies of yours such as Ranthor and Ranthia, due to both your status as a mythic wyrm and your nature as a multi-elemental dragon lord.]
I read through the notification and with each paragraph I read the thing began to change, its text changing so quickly that even I would have had trouble keeping up with it if I hadn't had my perfected mind to rely on.
[You are a cosmic god of nature and that is what is guiding your ascension. It is because of your innate ties to nature, life, and the elements, that you are able to become such a potently mighty dragon lord, one that is quite extraordinarily tied to seven of the eight elements!
You are attuned to all four of the so-called 'classical elements', earth, water, fire, and air, as well as three of the remaining elements, celestial light, poison, and the void. Your nature as the anael, as well as the fact that you stole Renora's powers are why you are tethered to celestial light, and due to your powers as a sanguinarch you are tethered to both poison and the void itself. The last element you must attune too, eventually, is the element known as 'Storm', which refers to lightning and electricity.
As a seven-elemental-attuned dragon lord you naturally attract draconic worshippers, and you are also capable of effortlessly gaining the support and loyalty of all sorts of dragons, even mythic wyrms, which are the mightiest non-higher-being dragons in existence. Dragon lords can also accumulate power in a variety of ways.
Dragon lords gain strength through worship, through the acquisition of souls, through the treasure stored in their vaults, their vaults themselves, through the acquisition of artifacts, and through the acquisition of heart scales which are themselves in the bodies of dragons and dragonkin. If you wish you could invest some of the potent personal power you've acquired to date so that you can increase how much power each of these sources of strength give you. Would you like to do that?]
Time was nearly frozen around me, and when it slowly trudged along I saw that Renora was still being dragged towards me. The dragon was still fighting against me, helplessly but determinedly attempting to resist the pull of my powers.
I continued to read the extensive notification and when I reached the question at the bottom of the latest wall of text I chuckled and didn't hesitate. Part of my success was owed to the fact that I had maximized every single source of power that I had access to. I knew that if I was to continue to grow in power and successfully build my empire beyond the cute but largely unknown galactic "power" that we were currently I'd need to be ambitious and maximize every font of power I could.
As soon as I informed the system that I'd be investing my personal power into maximizing the potency of my newest sources of power I felt a small portion of my immediate power escape me and in return I felt my soul's "capacity" for power increase, filling me with pride, even as the text boxes in my mind's eye began to change again. And I also felt a sharp awareness of my own personal stores of wealth spontaneously spring into being in the back of my mind, which allowed me to momentarily ignore the text boxes in my mind's eye.
Without thinking I also went ahead and invested a further store of my personal power into mastering the sins of greed and envy, since I figured that I was already going to go ahead and gain tremendous power due to my wealth. I knew that mastering greed would only further increase the amount of power I got from acquiring material wealth, and that it'd allow me to show off how much personal power I had acquired over the last few months. I also knew that envy came with significant boosts to my abilities to copy others, powers which would serve me well as I began to move against the ascendant alliance that shattered Etherscape.
As I felt my body begin to adjust to my newfound mastery of the potent sins of greed and envy I gazed at the potent dragon lord who still opposed me and I began to see just how much treasure the brutish beast had acquired over the course of his long life. I could physically see how much he was "worth" over his head, and the amount was a tantalizingly high number in any currency, which filled the newly created, covetous part of myself with a fierce longing for his wealth. That part of me wanted to take his wealth for myself, but I knew I'd be able to do that soon, since I was going to take everything from him.
I gazed dominantly at my enemy as I took in the fact that now the only sin I wasn't a master of was the sin of sloth, and the only draconic element I wasn't attuned too was the storm element. I was an incredibly powerful ascendant being, which was handy since I'd need to be on another level to tackle the alliance of ascendants who had dared to move against the people of Etherscape.
My body began to shift rather subtly, at least for now, as I turned my attention to the text boxes in my mind's eye. I could feel my body changing, without my consent, as I continued to read the notification alerting me to the specifics of my idiosyncratic ascension.
[Dragon lords are power incarnate. As a dragon lord you are now even more powerful than you were before, and due to your connections to several different dragon lords of each of the elements you have now earned full copies of their powers, including the one dragon lord power you wouldn't have had, due to your lack of attunement to the storm element; weather control. You have become something fully distinct, a sort of being above a dragon lord; a dragon monarch!
As a dragon monarch your charisma is amped up to truly absurd degrees and things such as limits on how many dragons you can command and the usual considerations about draconic breeding rates are naturally gone. Dragon monarchs are true draconic deities, such as Tiamat, Echidna, and Nidhogg, and each of them will surely be interested in meeting you, a being of love, power, and nature, as well as a lord of dragons. You are different from them in that have existed since the beginning of this multiverse's existence, you have not. Even in your past life you did not come into being at the beginning of this instance of 'time', instead you were born billions of years after the creation of this multiverse.
In time you will learn more about things like dragonkin, the half-draconic spawn of dragons and other beings, and of potent artifacts to take for yourself, as well as other aspects of your nature as a dragon monarch. But for now, return to the battle at hand. And as a gift for having both the potency of the domains of souls and power under your influence, as well as being a dragon monarch, identify the feeling deep in your soul and use it against Renora to render the dragon lord truly vulnerable to your power. Defeat him and take what was once his. Use your power to exert your dominance!]
I momentarily fell to my knees as I finished reading the notification. Upon doing so I closed my eyes and began to search deep within myself, doing something not unlike "Soul-searching" to make use of the "Gift" that the system told me it was giving me. As I did I felt my body continue to change against my will, growing stronger than ever before even as I felt myself begin to quite literally grow in size. And, distantly, I heard the sound of familiar figures arriving to the battlefield.
The Staneeth Expanse was the temporary home of various ascendants of distinctive levels of power. A group of such ascendants were in the midst of teleporting to the capital world of the tel'Nora hegemony when they felt a truly enormous wave of cosmic power wash over them. The power was enough to leave even the eldest of the warriors who had been doggedly attempting to follow Raul's orders breathless, right when they began to appear just outside of the town hall where Raul was having his climatic battle with Renora and Noshtex.
The area they appeared within was a ruined mess of a battlefield. They could see the debris of the town hall and scattered corpses littering the street where the battlefield was taking place. The place smelled of blood, fire, and was somehow as cold as death, which was something that made many of the warriors pause for a moment. It was at the moment that the warriors paused that Raul's transformation into his draconic form fully took place.
The warrior stopped reading notifications and fully shed his loosely humanoid form. Variously colored scales began to fully cover his body as he grew larger and larger, abruptly going from a few meters tall to the size of a small building in the span of a few nanoseconds, even as his multicolored mouth began to move slowly and deliberately.
The warrior kept his gaze firmly locked on Renora, studying the once powerful dragon lord stoically even as he scanned his soul. Nevertheless, despite his stoicism and calmness his appearance shocked, amazed, and even frightened the retinue of servants, generals, and advisors of his who had just appeared on the battlefield. They had not been able to find Renora and so had decided as a group to help their master against Noshtex, only to find Renora and Noshtex jointly battling their lord and failing miserably to defeat the newly ascended dragon monarch.
The dragon monarch himself had just discovered the true nature of the "gift" that the system was granting him: it was a potent word of eldritch power. The dragon's gaze was firmly locked on Renora when he opened his gigantic mouth, revealing row upon row of imposing and deadly teeth and a long, scarlet tongue.
The dragon uttered the word of fel, destructive power, and as he did so tendrils of azure energy leaped out of his mouth and began to strike Renora, surging into the once-mighty dragon and pummeling him, draining him of critical vitality, potent willpower, and what little energy he had managed to keep even in the midst of suffering from the consumptive barrage of the mighty and newly ascended draconic monarch. The draconic monarch had been awarded a potent and draining "Word of power" capable of flaying and weakening the soul of even a dragon lord, provided the speaker was similarly powerful.
Renora roared out in agony, but fell to the ground fully, defeated and sapped of the power to fight back against the dragon monarch he had unwillingly helped to unleash. Renora gazed up at Raul as the mighty draconic monarch strode up to his crumpled form. Raul's eyes radiated power and life, even as the dragon he had defeated and was now beginning to fully drain gazed at him, defeat and submission visible in the wyvern's once proud eyes.
"I am triumphant!" Raul roared, never once fully utilizing the potent powers he possessed as an outer god. His voice exploded out of him and was so powerful and so jubilant that it traveled across space and filled the ears and minds of Renora's and Noshtex's servants, causing them to fill with despair and throw down their weapons in front of the strange, alien military that had been besieging them for the last few minutes. Their very souls vibrated with the knowledge that their masters had been defeated, brought low by the newest manifold ascendant being in the omniverse.
