by David Burke
Jay had forged a temporary bond with Madison so that he could keep track of her more easily. Then he checked on each of them individually. Some like Trina acted as though it wasn’t necessary for him to look in on her so to speak, but he could feel through the fusion, her pleasure at his attention. How the tables had turned since college. Overall the group was anxious as before any fight but they all felt a deep level of confidence in both the team and him individually. He just wanted to make sure that confidence wasn’t misplaced.
After double checking everything and scanning the dragon one more time to make sure that it wasn’t hiding something he couldn’t sense, he ordered the first wave to begin. This seemed too easy with the monster just lying there sleeping. They might kill it before it even moved. Of course, he was enough of a fatalist to know that if something seems too easy, it probably is.
A rapid volley of shadow bolts laden with Trina’s necrotic energy lashed out at the overgrown sleeping lizard. One struck the neck, another the size and the third hit the hip. The black spears bubbling with a darker energy disappeared into the creature's form. The scales on the hip burst out and left a blood wound. The spears into the neck and middle disappeared but presumably burst inside the creature.
It leapt up with a speed that defied its massive size. Gouts of blood came streaming up out of its nose and as it roared out in pain blood was evident all over those massive teeth. Immediately the temperature around them was raised by fifty degrees and normal humans would have been knocked unconscious before slowly cooking them alive. It had to be at least one hundred and sixty degrees Fahrenheit.
The dragon roared in rage and then looked for who or what had injured it. A cold intelligence was in its eyes as it looked for and then found Amelia and Trina. That alone told Jay that they were not dealing with a simple brute here. As previously discussed several things went into play at that moment. Amelia cloaked the two girls in an attempt to lose agro while Jay raised a shield and sent a spinning PSI blade into its snout.
It was disconcerting to see the blade barely nicked the scales but just made Jay prepare to up his game. Speaking of up, Meikiyo was now doing her impression of a fire goddess a hundred feet in the air and screamed to get the beast’s attention as she launched foot-thick streams of fiery plasma from each hand down against the guardian.
Jay hoped against hope that her flames would be hot enough that even the dragon couldn’t shrug them off, but that hope was in vain. At least when it opened its mouth again and spat out great gouts of flame they washed harmlessly over Meikiyo.
The massive wings unfurled and blew up dust all over the caldera but Jay’s shield protected him from that. He watched as the back legs crunched back like giant springs preparing to propel the creature into the air. Just as quickly though he saw the heat-distorted air around the creature ripple and its wings were pulled downward rather than expanding to catch the air.
It still leapt and managed to make it halfway to Meikiyo before it was pulled back down by its increased mass. Madison shouted out, “It is resisting me somehow. Not sure how long I can hold this.”
That of course meant that they had to go to phase two. He and Jessie would have to wade into battle and within range of the bone-white fangs and ebony-black claws. Jay flashed forward, faster than the dragon could react and sliced down hard with his PSI blade against its chest.
The experience of having his blade stopped was really new to him. Only the metal that made up the leviathan and that of those Forlorn juggernauts had provided any resistance. He had not expected a living creature to be able to withstand it. The blow cut into the scales and it was clear that repeated blows would do the creature in but the dragon wasn’t going to simply stand there and let him hack away.
Once again the creature proved far quicker and more agile than he would have expected for such a beast. It raked at him with claws from one front leg and his shield felt the impact. The deadly claws never touched him and even though he could feel the creature's strength it wasn’t nearly enough to break his shield.
A flurry of slashes followed but all were stopped by Jay’s shield and with too small of a PSI drain for him to worry about. The next attack was a gout of flame that spewed all over him. The shield covered him on three sides and overhead so while he felt the heat and the drain on his cooling crystal jumped up he was still fine. A part of him wondered how much heat he could resist if it weren’t for that crystal.
Jessie hadn’t been idle while Jay was drawing the beast’s attention. She leapt up onto its back in a form he had never seen. She wasn’t the colossal rhino form but rather an eight-foot form that had a black chitinous armor covering her body and long jagged saw-like pincers instead of hands. The shapeshifter went to work immediately on the wings.
First she tried to attack where the wings were connected to the shoulder, but the scales were too tough. Jay sensed her frustration and the thought that this tactic while it would eventually work would take too long. So she switched gears and instead of trying to remove the wing whole, she began slicing cuts into the leathery membrane that logically would be used to catch the air.
Those membranes were tougher than Kevlar but still not able to withstand Jessie’s might. Her power gave her strength beyond what her frame would suggest and ragged cuts began to appear with increasing speed as she worked through the wings.
This of course drew the beast’s attention and it turned its head preparing to bite at her. But the action gave Jay an opening and he went forward with a maximum-strength slash horizontally against the neck. Several scales were peeled away and a thin cut into the flesh beneath appeared.
That caused the head to rubber band back and knock Jay back. His shield once again protected him but the force still pushed him hard enough so that his feet cut shallow furrows in the ground. “Hurry up, Jessie, do what you can and then move back. He is stronger than we thought,” Jay shouted.
Truthfully he didn’t know if the dragon was a he or a she, but supposed it didn’t matter. At least Jessie took the order seriously and opened her mandibled mouth before spraying out a thick mist of greenish acid onto the membrane. She was really pulling out all the stops on the animal powers train.
He could only presume that she had managed to super condense the acid of some animal she knew about. As a former veterinary student she would certainly be in a position to know more about animals than most. Whatever it was wasn’t working though. It didn’t eat at the scales at all and didn’t affect the undamaged wing membranes very much. But where it really went to town was on all of the cut tissue.
The slashes began to widen as the caustic substance began burning away, causing the creature to buck uncontrollably. Jessie went flying off of it and onto her back against a mound of rocks fifty feet away. She groaned and didn’t move much but he could tell she was okay if sore, through the bond.
At the same time, Amelia and Trina appeared again and launched another volley of combo bolts at the beast. This time however the shadows seemed to burn up before they ever made contact with the creature and then the purple energy dissipated harmlessly in the air. Jay tried to draw its attention back to him with a flurry of slashes but the beast seemed to have decided to rid itself of the more vulnerable threats. Even if that was not what Jay wanted.
Meikiyo dove down and flashed like a nova in a burst of heat and light. The dragon might be immune to the heat but the light still forced it to shut its eyes. That gave the other two a chance to run. Watching it lash out wildly with great speed, made it terrifying to imagine what it would have been like if Maddy wasn’t helping slow it down.
It was then that the beast showed how crafty it was. It suddenly changed tactics on a charging Jay and attacked him. Its back claw dug up rock and dirt into a great cloud that blocked Jay’s vision. In retrospect later he realized he should have just moved forward with his scans acting as his eyes, but it was instinct to stop when blinded. None of the rocks penetrated his shield but the dust lingered in the air obscuring his
vision.
Jay felt a surge of pre-cog warning and tensed for an instant before deciding the creature couldn’t get through his shield. Then the long serpentine tail lashed around the side of his shield and struck him with the force of a wrecking ball. Since the evolution of his Forged Body skill, his durability and strength were one skill. This both made it easier to maintain his focus and assured that even though he had been shielded his durability was still maximized since his strength had been.
The result was that Jay’s body while not quite as strong as actual steel was more than two-thirds as tough. So a blow that would have sheared the flesh from his bones and shattered those same bones had he been human was only enough to knock him flat and make him see stars.
The dragon however, didn’t follow up on that attack but took advantage of the time that Jay was incapacitated and bit down into the rock. Then with a mouth full of the basalt it again belched out flame which sent a giant ball of magma soaring at Meikiyo. The heat wasn’t a threat to her, but the sheer weight of the rock knocked her out of the air. She landed hard breaking her shoulder and knocking herself unconscious.
Huong went running for her but the heat of the magma was making it hard to get close enough. She cried out for help but Madison was straining just to slow the dragon, Amelia and Trina were busy dodging claws that would cut them open in one go. Both girls were faster than the slowed beast but neither could get close enough because of the wall of intense heat it was putting off.
Jessie was slowly working her way around to help Huong save Meikiyo while the other two tried to fight it. Amelia got desperate and activated Phase Burst. Her body shifted out of phase with the world around her just like her shadow energy. She flashed through the heat and into the creature. Once inside she had to materialize again long enough to slash out with her shadow sheathed dagger cutting great wounds inside it.
As she had shifted back she transformed her body into its ectoplasmic form hoping that would keep the forge-like heat of the creature from burning her alive. It worked, but only to a limited degree. Even as the creature was shrieking from the pain of having its internal organs shredded, Amelia began to shriek as its fiery blood scorched even her altered form.
Fortunately before she lost consciousness she was able to phase burst back out the other side, but was left crumpled on the ground. He B.O.B. armor had helped to protect her but only the covered parts. Most of her curly blond hair was gone, burnt to ashes and her beautiful face was a mess of burns. All she could do was lie there in agony on the ground crying out.
Simultaneously, Madison activated the cannon in her mech to fire an ice ray at the beast. As predicted the cold energy was overcome by the creature’s heat that was replenished endlessly by the volcano. Still it was enough for Trina to rush the creature. She blasted out her deadly purple energy as fast and as hard as she had with the juggernaut but this time she was empowered by the boost in levels she had gotten when fusing with Jay.
The deadly decaying energy broke down the scales in a single section that was two feet in diameter. Not a large spot on such a massive creature but enough for her to shove a plexisteel spear into the beast’s much softer flesh. This spear was not a shop purchase but a tech division creation made at Trina’s request. It was filled with woven fibers of the same material that made up their armor suits and had a PSI crystal embedded in the head.
This allowed Trina to channel her power into the creature and cause a rapid decay. Jay was just getting up as the creature thrashed about in agony. Its left side rotted away as it stood there. But then Trina failed to dodge a swiping set of claws and Jay watched as one of her arms was ripped clean off her body. Two other claws punched through her body, one in the abdomen and the other through her thigh leaving that leg dangling by a thread.
Her body was flung across the caldera and she lay motionless on the other side. The momentary confusion was up. Jay couldn’t allow anything as trivial as a concussion and potential brain bleed to slow him down. He time skipped to the creature and sliced into the exposed flesh. His blade sheared away more scales with a second slice.
The intense heat was starting to turn his skin red but Jay didn’t care. He activated an attack that he had only theorized about. Suddenly it was as though a dozen copies of him were moving around the creature. Each one simply a copy of himself as he bounced through time to be able to simultaneously slice the beast twelve times. The combined blows fell repeatedly as Jay danced out of the way of claws and slammed formations into place to block its jaws.
Blow after blow Jay rained down on the creature all too fast for the human eye to follow. He pushed his temporal manipulation to a new level as first a dozen and then two dozen versions of himself all existed in the same instant. Each one hitting with maximum speed and strength undiminished by the splitting effect since each was fully Jay, just from a different time.
He borrowed past versions of himself from the past few minutes before the battle had begun and used each one as a weapon against the monster. Each version came at the monster with his full power. Some sent spinning PSI blades into it. Others launched more melee-based attacks, but all of them were cutting the lizard to pieces.
No other outcome was possible. Jay’s will was resolute and he would keep borrowing as many versions of himself as necessary to accomplish this. His strength started to drain out even with his massive PSI pool but the creature was being cut to ribbons. It finally collapsed and great gushing streams of blood coursed out of it creating a huge pool such that the girls able to move scrambled to get out of the way.
Jay collapsed and felt the world spinning around him as his consciousness slammed back together. The temporal irregularities coalesced in his person and his body shuddered. He experienced agony at an atomic level. Only his great need to help the injured girls enabled him to endure it and even then he passed out from the pain.
Chapter 17- Waking Up
Jay woke up. His head felt like a freight train had hit him and his tongue like it was yesterday’s gym socks that had dried up all stiff. There was just a flicker of light pushing in through blinds on the window. What a crazy dream he had been having.
It was definitely the most vivid dream he could ever remember having. But something was off. He didn’t remember his dorm room bed ever feeling even remotely like this. The bed he was in was much larger, like king-size larger. He felt all stretched out on it. The comforter over him was thick and soft and… hmm it smelled like the forest.
The mattress was also definitely missing the combinations of pointy springs and lumps that he had come to associate with his home away from home. Something must have happened for him to end up in a place like this. He went to sit up so that he could look around the room. His heart was starting to pound as he didn’t know where he was or how he had gotten here.
Except he couldn’t sit up. Oh, he could sit up, but there was a head resting against his chest. A very feminine head judging from the mop of poorly cut brunette hair. Wait, not just one head. There was another head with curly blond hair cuddled into the crook of his arm on the other side.
Now he knew he was still asleep. It wasn’t that he had never woken up in bed with a woman, although not nearly as many times as he would have liked. But, two at the same time… that was just more than he could fathom.
Oh… he realized in that moment that he was very naked, and so were they. Legs were entwined with his, breasts pressed against his sides, and a softness that defied description in the pleasant sensations that it caused in him. Little Jay was definitely at attention then.
Wait, dreams… now he remembered. He had been having weird dreams. Dreams about beautiful women, speaking to him. But neither of these women looked like the ones in his dreams. Not that they weren’t beautiful from what he could tell.
Then another detail came back to him. In those dreams the women always said the strangest things to him. Most creepy of all, when they spoke it was always in his own voice. Even the memory of those other dreams sent ch
ills down his spine. There was something about the one cocoa-skinned beauty that terrified him. Well and she made him sad, too.
The best thing he could think to do was to try to get up out of bed. Maybe the dream would fade away and he could go back to his all too boring life. He couldn’t even seem to remember what day it was but he knew there was something that he had to do. Something important, he just didn’t know what it was. Maybe he had an exam.
If it wasn’t for the two beauties next to him, Jay might have thought that he had somehow screwed up and ended up going home with some cougar that picked him up at one of the college bars he went to infrequently. That would explain the plush setting and also his complete lack of memory about things.
He tried as gently as he could to disengage himself from the two women with him. They were pretty firmly pretzled with him as though they had been worried he would get away. Or the odd thought crossed his mind that they were worried he had hurt himself. Jay didn’t know where that thought came from.
