Nemesis - Legacy Book 5 (Legacy Series)

by Ryan Attard

  I want to be a hero.

  I grinned. “Then charge, Iotharax. Fire at them.”

  The dragon roared and charged. Fire billowed from his mouth.

  “FIRE,” I screamed.

  A jet of volcanic flame tore through the flesh wall, setting it ablaze. For all their teamwork, every single creature ran for its life.

  Too late.

  “Run, dragon, run!” I roared from its back.

  Iotharax roared and barreled through a million extra-dimensional creatures. Some he flattened, some he made explode just from impact, some were slashed beneath his claws.

  But he didn’t stop.

  Greede’s chopper whizzed over head.

  “Fly,” I ordered.

  The dragon took to the air. He saw the black chopper too. I sense magic in there. A growl. Is that the bad human who summoned me?

  “It is.”

  Iotharax roared and chased the chopper.

  Magic spiked from within the vehicle — no doubt Greede realized that he was mightily fucked (because I had a fucking dragon!) — and something formed over the sides of the helicopter. I saw the telltale signs of transmutation, and now the helicopter had missile ports, three on each side. Magic pulsated from each one.

  The first one fired. Iotharax dodged on instinct. The missile exploded in a shower of purple energy. Whatever magic it was, it hissed in the air like acid and rained down on us. My magic shielded me. The acid did not affect Iotharax. I remembered reading somewhere that dragons were suspected to be immune to magical attacks.

  As if they needed more reasons to be awesome.

  The second missile went wild. The third missile followed right after it — we were already mid-dodge, with no way to avoid it.

  And that’s when I learnt something very important about dragons:

  They are not missile-proof.

  Chapter 31

  Iotharax spun frantically in mid-air. His right wing was clipped, with a neat hole in the membrane. We were spinning out of control.

  I willed my shadows forwards again and covered the hole. At the same time, I applied healing magic. Dragons were immune to magic but that wasn’t what I was doing. Pump enough Life Magic into something and let natural healing do the work.

  The wing healed and Iotharax stabilized.

  Thank you, he said.

  “What are friends for?” I said.

  Friends. He seemed to chew on the word. I never had friends. I quite like the idea. Hold on, Erik Friend.

  And hold on I did, because suddenly I was on a draconic roller coaster, veering wildly left and right, up and down, until I finally surrendered trying to figure out which direction Iotharax would be flying and just focused on the back of his saurian head.

  To his credit, the baby — but not quite baby-sized — dragon did a good job of not getting himself shot. I guess some things are universal.

  Like running for your life and dodging oversized bullets that could end said life.

  Greede fired off the remaining missiles, and Iotharax fired his dragon’s breath. Explosions blinded me. Various magical effects rained down on me as the missiles’ magical enhancements went off in midair. Jets of heat, backlash from Iotharax’s fire, seared my skin, only for the ebony shadows to reform and darken my body into my mutated self.

  Finally, we were flying side by side with the chopper. I whipped out my gun, took aim, and pulled the trigger. The first shot went wild, bouncing off the helicopter’s fuselage and emitting a sad spark. My second shot cracked a window.

  That’s when Greede himself opened the door, sliding it back like a minivan, and aimed an AK-47 type rifle at me.

  “Iotharax, dodge!” I yelled.

  The dragon suddenly dropped to his left, just as a torrent of bullets tore a gash in his flank. The wounds were not deep but deep crimson blood rained down on the street below in fat droplets.

  His arrows are different, the dragon complained.

  “Welcome to twenty-first century America,” I yelled over the jet stream. “Home of the Free, Land of Ammunition.”

  Greede fired again. He too must have figured out what I did, that dragons were not as indestructible as the stories would have you believe. That’s the problem with legends being told by wizards and such — it was all from a magical perspective.

  Dragons could take on the biggest spells you had up your sleeve and not even bat an eyelid. But there are plenty of legends were a spear or an arrow could penetrate their hides. Guns were just a natural evolution of those ranged weapons. Just substitute your average arrow, shot by a man in armor, with an assault rifle spewing out hundreds of lead bullets at a thousand miles an hour. Probably wearing some Second Amendment t-shirt too, just to rub it in.

  “Fly under the chopper,” I instructed the dragon. “Stay behind him. And when I say go, raise your head.”

  Iotharax did as he was told. The chopper loomed over my head, the whirring blades slicing through the air and making a whoop-whoop-whoop noise that reverberated in my gut. The rear rotor blades spun precariously over where I was seated.

  “Now!”

  Iotharax raised his massive head. Horns and facial tore into the underside of the chopper. The impact made the entire vehicle skip upwards then forwards, like a flat stone chucked on a lake surface. I could hear Greede and someone else, most likely the pilot, shriek. That put a smile on my face.

  Iotharax whined something about having a headache. He beat his wings, soaring over the helicopter as it waved unstable in the air. The blaze that came out of his mouth was nothing short of majestic. It covered the entire helicopter, dousing it in an inferno that blinded my entire field of vision.

  Beyond the fire, shielding the chopper, was a giant disk of green light. It absorbed the flames and dispelled them to the side. After a few seconds, Iotharax ran out of steam and panted in the air. Greede snarled at us from the helicopter. He traced a sigil with his hands.

  The green shield shot forwards, sigils alit inside it. We crashed into it and the shield shattered. Magic consumed the dragon, who tilted.

  Suddenly, the dragon had no head. Instead, a green outline glowed where his head was cut off, and was getting ever closer, taking with it more of the dragon’s body.

  A miniature portal, I realized. Greede figured out I won’t be able to chase him if he took my dragon away.

  I swore, running from the green light. Unless he took the time to set a DNA identifier on the spell — and something told me he didn’t — then the portal would also take me with it.

  And as cool as Iotharax was, I had very little desire to end up in the dragon dimension, where I would probably be the very definition of ‘easy prey’ for those overgrown, fire-spewing, magic-shrugging, lizards.

  The portal ate half the dragon by the time I ran out of space to back up to. I was perched precariously on Iotharax’s tail, swishing to and fro. There was very real chance it would be the dragon that threw me off, before the spell could take him away. Either way, it was a very long way down for me.

  Before the eventual splat.

  Hey, on the other hand, I could break my record for the tallest place I jumped off of.

  Suddenly, there was no more dragon, apart from the tail. It went rigid, then bent a little, and suddenly snapped up. I was thrown.

  No, correction. I was catapulted off of Iotharax's tail and went sailing.

  Right over Greede's chopper.

  It was my turn to scream, and boy, scream I did. By some miracle I avoided the main rotor blades.

  I windmilled my arms and realized two things.

  One, I was still holding my gun in my right hand.

  Two, my left arm hooked over one of the ski-like landing things. Later, I found out they were called skids. Right then, I called them 'things I literally hung onto for dear life'.

  I hung suspended like a Christmas ornament for a few seconds. I read once that in times of great peril, when the chips are down and the situation is out of your hands, you get to know what kin
d of person you are. Do you freeze, or do you go down fighting?

  Me, I did both.

  I froze for a second before my brain went into Action Man mode. Not letting go of my gun, I grabbed my right wrist with my left and hoisted. Remember when in gym class you were taught how to do pull-ups, and when it go too difficult you were like “I’m never gonna use this in real life.”

  Guess what, you will when you're hanging from chopper skids in mid-fucking-air.

  I pulled myself up, hooked first one leg, then the other, and managed to get my left hand on the fuselage. The door was still open. Tendrils of shadow shot from my body to latch onto the doorframe and by some miracle, I was now inside the chopper.

  Greede turned, his face blank and then confused. He swung the AK around, but I was better trained, quicker, and a hell of a lot more pissed off.

  I grabbed the barrel of the gun and swung it away from me just as he fired. The bullet went out the door and my hand sizzled. I barely registered the pain.

  My gun buckled and a bullet tore a flesh wound on his shoulder. Lucky son of a bitch.

  I manipulated the gun so that he was holding it in one hand, and locked the arm. I fired two knee strikes into his abdomen. He made a wheezing sound. The rifle went skittering out the helicopter. I swung my pistol into his face, tearing a gash on his cheek, and Greede sprawled on the ground, completely at my mercy.

  I stepped over him and pulled back the slide of my weapon, making sure there was at least one bullet with his name on it.

  Then I aimed it squarely at his head.

  "It’s over," I said, my voice cold and clipped. The terrified look on his face was genuine.

  This was the moment of truth. One trigger pull, one little muscle, one bend of my index finger, and Alan Greede — the Sin of Greed itself — would be no more.

  I pulled the trigger just as my mind registered something in his face changing, something other than fear.

  Terror — pure, primal terror.

  Time stopped.

  My gun never went off. I willed my finger to pull the trigger but my body did not move.

  Then again, few things did. I could hear the rotors whirring lazily, struggling to turn as if the air had turned into gelatin. The creatures down below stopped moving and a silence fell, unnatural and hungry.

  Alan Greede was sweating.

  I never felt it, never saw it coming. There was no explosion of power, nor any flashy demonstrations. One minute, I was in the real world where things moved — like bullets — and things died, like the walking dick-hole I was trying to shoot.

  The next minute, there was pain, and nothing. There was light, and fire, and dark, and cold.

  He stood over Greede. Six feet, with alabaster skin and ebony hair falling in long perfect strands. His features were perfection itself. Were I capable I would have thrown myself at his feet, begging for him to alter his gaze because I was not worthy to be looked upon by a creature so magnificent.

  His armor was made out of melted gold and fire. Unlike the golden armor that angels wore, his was darker, dirtier even. Black and red stained it, swirling in patterns that were mesmerizing and utterly beautiful.

  ‘Ugly’ could never be associated with this being.

  Behind him, twelve wings flared, six on each side. They tore through the helicopter as if it were nothing but plain air. Each wing was large enough to canvas the entire chopper. Their tips ended inside the sky, forming part of the clouds, the altered atmosphere Greede had summoned that had now been broken by the presence of this newcomer, and the jubilant rays of a newborn sun. He was a part of it.

  No — it was all part of him.

  The air sang in a distorted warble. The logical part of my head started drawing conclusions. Whoever this was, he was so powerful that his mere presence was enough to stall the flow of space and time. Just a few seconds on Earth would be enough to fundamentally alter it.

  This wasn’t a creature. This was the apocalypse incarnate.

  He raised a hand towards me. My powers vanished, along with my mutation. I was just a regular guy before a god. My magic was gone, my powers gone, my courage gone.

  Red hot agony pierced my skull and wrapped around my brain. I screamed. At least, I think I screamed. I couldn't hear myself. I couldn't feel anything besides pain.

  But I could see.

  I could see very well as the creature placed that same hand on my chest and pushed me out of the helicopter.

  Chapter 32

  I fell for a minute. No, actually it was more like an hour. It doesn't matter really. It doesn't matter how peaceful it felt just to plummet, or how terrified it was to realize that I was going to die.

  None of that mattered.

  Because, eventually — inevitably — came the crash.

  My body created a crater several meters deep. I’ll leave it up to your imagination to figure out the state of my body. Suffice it to say, most of me had liquefied by that point.

  But the universe had played a cruel joke on me once again.

  I was alive enough to see Abi and Gil over my body, one flashing red and gold, the other white and green. Beyond them, an ocean of Asmodaii flowed from the lip of the crater, thirsting after my corpse.

  Because I was a corpse, and I was dead.

  I was watching this from a bird's eye view. Watching as my friends and family fought to keep the monsters from what remained of me.

  Something tugged at the corner of my head. A memory, one I had repressed years ago, given by a creature I had fought when I was sixteen and still in training to be a Warlock, a monster known as a Baku.

  I had seen this at the time.

  My mangled body. Abi and Gil yelling “ERIK” as they pushed back entire armies of Asmodaii. Somewhere beyond, Jack, Amaymon, and Mephisto were doing their part. Even Greg and a few of the Grigori had showed up, along with their Knights.

  A proper team effort.

  I looked up, expecting to see the creature and Greede. Nothing. Instead, the remains of the helicopter fell down like a meteor on a building a few blocks away.

  I looked at myself, splattered on the ground in the middle of a crater I had created upon impact. I expected to feel magic, to start healing, to get up and fight.

  But why was I out here? Why was I floating away?

  That is correct, Erik Ashendale.

  The world went dark and then a light flashed before me, burning the universe in a supernova.

  Samael’s voice echoed again, and the angel of death descended upon me.

  It is time.

  READY FOR MORE?

  You’ve reached the end of Nemesis but Erik’s adventures aren’t over just yet. Check out the rest of the Legacy Series and find out how the saga began.

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  Thank you for reading.

  Author’s Note

  I’m never happier than when I’m writing one of these. This book was by far one of my favourites to write; there were scenes in here that have been gestating in my mind since the very c
onception of the Legacy Series.

  Yes, that ending too!

  Reaching such a milestone in the series was almost a dream back in when I started, but here we are now, five years later — five years stronger. In five years, I made a career for myself, creating a series of books that fans seem to enjoy, and that allows me to make a living doing what I love.

  Fans like you are the most important aspect of my career for you make my understand that I am not alone in my love for the series.

  And for that, I can never thank you enough.

  In particular, I wish to thank Linda Collins, Teresa, Roger A. Fauble, Melannie Mann, Steph Gooding, Pete Ffrench, J Steffey, and Ann, for reading this novel ahead and providing me with much needed notes on how to improve it.

  That they did, along with raving about the book, which in turn uplifted me no matter my mood.

  So, thank you, dear fan reading this. You allowed me to have a career and pursue a passion.

  This is only Book 5. We LOTS more fun ahead of us.

  Thank you,

  Ryan Attard

  About the Author

  Ryan Attard is the author of the Legacy series, the Pandora Chronicles, and the Esper Files.

  Hailing from a faraway island, it wasn’t long until Ryan began creating his own imaginary friends and writing down their adventures.

  As Egan Brass, he writes the Esper Files — a tale of super-powered individuals set in a steampunk universe.