Dragon Breeder 3

by Dante King

  I could feel the excitement and the thrill of battle coursing through Garth’s mind, and was aware of it as surely as if I was feeling it myself—which I was, of course. The young dragon flicked his body sideways to avoid a thrown spear. While I clung to his sides with my knees, I released a couple of rogue Shadow Spheres into the press of wildmen. Shrieks of dismay rose from the enemy horde as body parts disappeared.

  Together with the three other dragonmancers, we dived and swept around the mass of wildmen like swallows picking off flies over a river. Bolstered by our appearance, the Drako Academy’s soldiers broke their shield wall and attacked their besiegers. The clash of arms echoed amongst the strangely even hills, as wildmen met the soldiers of the Academy.

  As I turned Garth with my mind, I saw Saya backflip off Scopula from a height of about fifty feet and land in the middle of a bunch of the wildmen like a goddamn meteor. There was some panicked yelling, and the sound of steel ringing against steel. Then came a large spray of blood as Saya hit a wildman in the head so hard with the pommel of her sword that the bastard’s dome popped like a red soap bubble.

  I grinned nastily, as testosterone and battle fury engulfed me like a red mist. It was that unique and quite indescribable sensation that most soldiers and fighting men the universe over must experience. It was the drive to kill and to win, not necessarily because you hate the people that are standing in front of you, with their crazy hair and their stone axes and their cruel eyes, but because of all the things that you care about that are behind you.

  Dotted amongst the throng of wildmen were men and women wrapped in silver fox furs and riding on enormous, bristle-haired boars. Those wild pigs were freakin’ huge: yellows tusks like sabers, iron-hard hooves connected to leg muscles that could have kicked a barn door off its hinges, bulging eyes, foam-flecked lips, and a thick reek hanging over them.

  I singled out one of those motherfuckers for special attention.

  Garth and I flew low over the skirmish, which had quickly become a full-on pitched battle. I stuck my spear out and hooked one of the war-hogs in the meat of its shoulder with the billhook part of my spearhead, along with its accompanying rider. Garth growled and tilted sideways as he took the combined weight of the hog and the rider, but it was only for an instant.

  At a telepathic suggestion from the more experienced Noctis, the younger Dragon banked hard right. With a flick of my wrist, I released the barb that was sunk into the hog. The war beast and its rider careened into a bunch of bowmen who were aiming in our direction. The boar smashed squealing into the bowmen. Its heavy, fat ass broke bones and ruined days as it tumbled into them. The rider was flung from the wreck, like a driver being ejected through a car windshield. The wildman had his face split in half by the axe of one of his unsuspecting comrades who happened to be standing near with the blade of their weapon turned outward. Brains and blood showered the wildmen nearby.

  Garth and I turned back to where the main press of fighters were mingling around the caravan and trying to brutally murder each other. I saw Penelope darting over the melee, firing down spells, as her dragon occasionally stooped its swan-like neck to rip the head off of some unsuspecting wildman.

  Penelope’s organic, flower-based spells had been the cause of some derision when we had first started training, but over the course of the last two months, she had perfected them. Now there was little room to rib her about her flowery spells.

  As I watched, she aimed her fingers at a cluster of wildmen who had encircled a squad of Drako Academy fighters. In a beautiful burst of destructive life, vines erupted from the earth. They twined their ways up the legs of some of the wildmen, holding them in place so that our soldiers could hack them down. More creepers choked our enemies, constricting their chests and throats, strangling them, crushing them to the ground.

  One particularly enthusiastic vine wrapped itself around the waist of one woman with no teeth and white hair that stuck out in tufts from her scabby head. The vine squeezed her so hard that she was pinched in two, hot entrails spilling out over the ground while she shrieked wordlessly. Other enemy warriors suddenly found flowers growing out of their mouths; drowning and suffocating on petals while pollen spilled from their nostrils.

  A flash of red skin caught my eye, and I turned to see Tamsin spin her spear around her in the same way that Black Widow might have, if she were to ever give up killing people for a living and take up ballet. The hobgoblin’s spear swept and spun in blurring circles, slashing through throats, cutting through tendons, and spraying blood and gore in all directions. Tamsin cast her weapon like an Olympic javelin thrower so that it punched clean through two wildmen. Then, she jerked her hand backward, and the spear reversed course, ripping back through the two men she had just killed but were yet to fall, returning to her palm.

  It was a beautiful sight—a true dance of death.

  My attention was ripped from Tamsin when there came a terrible, earth-shattering groan. The five hills on either side of the road heaved and cracked, like enormous green eggs.

  Then, something came from that crack. Multiple somethings.

  Giants.

  Chapter 2

  The giants burst free from the earth, cascading soil falling from their broad foreheads. Judging by the furious bellows the giants were making, they were not happy. Each must have been at least thirty feet tall and weighed a good ten tons. They had gray or brown or blue hides, root-like hair, and mouths that could have quite easily bitten a car in half like a fucking Mars Bar. Their teeth were very human, if mostly broken and discolored. Their hands had three fingers each.

  Most confronting, though, was that the giants wore no clothes. Their monstrous trouser snakes were on show for all to see. Enormous cocks swung about their huge knobby knees like the trunks of some particularly indecent elephant.

  “Just when you think you’ve reached the point where nothing will surprise you in this world,” I muttered to myself. “Then, this shit happens.”

  Every single wildman and Drako Academy soldier stopped fighting and just stared at the ten giants and their ten swinging shlongs.

  Then, one of the giants roared and picked up one of our infantrymen. With an almost delicate plucking, the giant ripped the man’s legs off like a chicken and tossed them into his mouth.

  “Not on our side then,” I said, as everyone started fighting and running and yelling.

  “Giants are on nobody’s side but their own,” Noctis said.

  One of the wildmen got inadvisably close to one of the giants and was crushed into the earth like a blood-filled cigarette butt. His bones cracked as the enormous nudist ground the hapless prick into the dust of the road.

  It looked to me like our one-on-one fight with the wildmen had just been stepped up a notch to a saucy threeway.

  Arrows whined through the air, seemingly aimed at nothing and everything. A few punched into the hides of the giants, but they had about as much effect on the big, tall bastards as a mosquito might. Spells sizzled and flashed, as Penelope, Tamsin, and Saya occasionally let some magic fly. The noise was incredible.

  Garth flapped in a circle, his eyes scanning for danger, as I mentally commanded him to maneuver around to the rear of one of the naked-ass giants. As he flew, I conjured up one of the strongest Shadow Spheres that I could manage. I had seen how ineffective arrows were against the massive giants, so I wasn’t going to half-ass it when it came to casting a spell at them.

  I released the magic, and it struck the giant in the leg. The great figure’s leg burst apart in wisps and tatters of Chaos Magic, dissolving into nothing. The giant shrieked in a voice that rattled my teeth. It toppled over backward, crushing one of the carts and sending spices billowing into the air in a cloud of orange and pink.

  Instantly, a group of nearby wildmen swarmed the downed giant, hacking and cutting at it, while the legless creature thrashed and beat at them.

  Another giant found itself mired by one of Penelope’s spells, legs all tangled up in thick
thorns like barbed wire.

  Penelope moved in closer on the back of her dragon, no doubt wanting to take the giant all the way down. The giant had other plans. Its fist shot out and struck at Glizbe. The Rooster Dragon swerved to the side to avoid the blow. Penelope, kneeling on Glizbe’s back, almost toppled off. Glizbe adjusted in midair, so as to save Penelope from falling.

  With a bellow rivaling the noise that the nine remaining giants were making, my crew appeared in their flying longboat.

  Bjorn stood in the prow of the magical vessel, fist held high and broad bearded face contorted in a howling battlecry. He gripped a huge battle-axe in one hand, and his enormous muscles gleamed even in the moody light of the stormy day.

  Rupert caught my eye as they sailed past where Garth and I were hovering in the air. He was, of course, wearing that ridiculous Robin Hood-esque hat of his, and he gave me a thumbs-up as the vessel swept passed.

  Gabby was at the helm, steering the longboat with a silent intensity that radiated proficiency. He was a mute, having had his tongue cut out at some point in his mysterious past. Despite this lack of oral instrumentation, Gabby was quite a hit with the ladies when we went out on a weekly sojourn into the town.

  My coterie’s longship bloomed suddenly out of the aromatic fog where the falling giant had smashed the spice wagon. The vessel swung to point at the giant that was about to bat Penelope out of the air.

  With a blatant disregard for Academy equipment, Gabby rammed the magical vessel right into the giant’s chest. Timbers and spars splintered, as did the giant’s ribs. Scarlet blood fell like rain on the combatants gathered nearby, as both ship and giant crashed to earth.

  I grinned like an idiot as my three squad members leaped from the falling longship, whatever magic that kept the craft airborne having failed.

  I was also pleased to note that a few of the wildmen were crushed as the mainsail toppled over sideways like a falling tree.

  After that, Garth and I applied ourselves to the eradication of anything and anyone that was not a dragonmancer or wearing the colors of the Drako Academy.

  Tamsin was a swirling hurricane of destruction on the ground, cutting down wildmen like a scythe through wheat. Penelope, after her near miss, cruised the fringes of the battle, making sure that none of the wildmen could escape. Saya, with a warhammer that she had conjured by moving Scopula into what I guessed was Weapon Slot A, caused ruination wherever she went. Crushing skulls like grapefruit, she used brute force to pulverize any wildman dumb enough to get in her way.

  I lost my spear while bringing down the sixth giant. I had given the big naked guy the old fishhook treatment, hooking him in the mouth and towing him in a circle with the help of Garth until Saya shattered his ankle bones with a couple of devastating blows of her dragon-powered warhammer. The giant’s fall wrenched the weapon from my grip, and it disappeared under him as he toppled to earth, flattening a couple of unfortunate infantrymen of the Drako Academy.

  I took that as a sign that I could take the fight to the ground with the rest of our men. Spying out my coterie, I swept in low on Garth before vanishing him back into his crystal, which I had hanging around my neck in a similar golden cage pendant as Noctis’ onyx stone.

  As I fell through the air, suddenly bereft of a dragon to hold me, I channeled Noctis’ power into Weapon Slot A. The Chaos Spear crackled into being in my hand.

  I fell all of fifty feet, slamming into the earth in one of those epic superhero landings, the likes of which every little boy wishes he could achieve when he jumps off anything higher than the sofa.

  The impact caused the wildmen nearest me to stagger. I used their momentary unbalancing to snake out a lightning fast thrust with my spear and impale one big guy with a pair of fighting axes. The Chaos Spear went through him like a hot wire through a lump of pig lard. Using my dragonmancer’s strength, I swung the man easily over my head and used his beefy body to hammer one of his buddies into the dirt.

  My spear whipped in and out of the men and women surrounding me. The weapon severed limbs with its leaf-shaped blade, cutting arteries and speckling the ground with liberal amounts of blood.

  When all those in my immediate vicinity were dead, I leaned on my spear and watched my squad at work.

  Boy, what a couple of months had done to both me and the lads. Each one of my men had been goddamn excellent warriors in their own right before I had met them, but the eight or nine weeks since my meeting with the Overseer had wrought a great change in all of us.

  Where before, we had been fighting men without any real focus, now we had a reason to get better at the arts of war, to become a more tight-knit and cohesive unit.

  The wildmen came rushing toward my three friends, waving their weapons and shields in the air like a bunch of lunatics. A shift had occurred in the wildmens’ collective mentality. No longer were they trying to rob the caravan and slaughter those who defended it for sport. Now, their primary objective was killing as many people as they could before they were all put to the sword. They all shared a berserker vibe—you know, the wide bulging eyes, the flared nostrils, the foaming mouths.

  As I watched, Bjorn, Gabby, and Rupert naturally assumed the roles that we had set out for one another during a sit-down months before.

  Bjorn, being the biggest, meanest, most stubborn bastard of our quartet, naturally assumed the post of tank. As a cluster of wildmen ran around the legs of a giant, which Saya and Tamsin were attempting to take down, Bjorn stepped to the fore and bellowed a challenge.

  Gabby let fly with an unerringly placed arrow from his longbow. The projectile caught the lead wildman through the throat and sent him down spewing blood and curses. Those wildmen following closely behind him tripped over his prone body and tumbled into the dust.

  As the half a dozen remaining men engaged with the battle-scarred Bjorn, Rupert reached into the satchel slung over his shoulder and pulled out a glass vial, filled with a dim golden potion.

  I knew what that was. It was a vial of dragonblood—Garth’s blood specifically. With a few extra ingredients and words of power spoken over them, these vials had become, essentially, corked hand grenades.

  The ceremony used to create these potions had been Empire-approved. According to the Academy higher-ups, this made the manufacture and use of them legit, so long as the dragon who supplied the blood was a willing donor. Something had struck me as a bit weird about that, seeing as the Bloodletters were being explicitly hunted by the Academy for utilizing this sort of dragon magic. I got that they were kidnapping, drugging, and taking advantage of dragons, but to use the same methods to make weapons for the Academy smacked a little of hypocrisy.

  Still, it couldn’t be denied that the weapons were effective.

  Rupert lobbed the vial over the heads of the oncoming six wildmen and into the midst of the three men who had gone down in a tangle. As soon as the glass vial shattered and the air mixed with the potion, there was an explosion like a mortar round landing. The three attackers were blown to smithereens, lumps of charred, unidentifiable bits of body thudding down around us.

  Bjorn slashed one wildman across the face with a one-handed blow of his axe. The powerful blow ripped the unfortunate fellow’s eyes out of his head and tore his nose off his face. Bjorn grunted as one of the other men managed to land a knife cut on his thickly muscled, heavily scarred shoulder.

  I hadn’t ever asked Bjorn how he was able to take cuts and stabs that would ordinarily tear right through the muscle to the bone. I assumed that it was some perk of having Jotunn blood running through his veins. The Frost Giants were a hardy bunch by all accounts, and there were few warriors tougher than Bjorn. The motherfucker was as hard as a coffin nail.

  Another of Gabby’s arrows struck the man who had cut Bjorn. The projectile took the enemy warrior through the eye and punched out the back of his skull, a piece of his brain stuck to the arrowhead.

  Bjorn spun and cut and slashed, nailing the rest of the wildmen. All apart from one: a slink
ing fellow who had snuck around his back and looked set on cutting Bjorn’s throat wide open.

  That slinking bastard had not reckoned, however, on our coterie’s slinking bastard.

  Rupert materialized behind the wildman and thrust a finger-wide stiletto into the would-be killer’s ear canal. Even over the din of the battle, it made a crunching noise that made me wince. As the man fell away, rigid as a board, Gabby shot him in the kidney with an arrow.

  “Oh c-c-come on, Gabby!” Rupert said, spinning to wag a reproving finger at the mute man with his curtains of auburn hair hanging across his face. “He was mine. You’re not going to try and claim another k-k-kill from me, are you? You’re better than that, aren’t you?”

  Gabby shrugged, winked one hawk-like, yellow eye at Rupert, and then pulled the finger at him.

  Rupert flushed, ripped off his hat, and pointed the ridiculous bit of headgear at Gabby. “That’s g-g-going on my tally, damn it!”

  “Ladies, ladies,” I said, interjecting myself, “don’t squabble. There are plenty to go around.”

  Bjorn prodded at the cut on his shoulder and looked about us.

  “Not entirely true, boss,” he said.

  I glanced around. There was a reverberating thump that rattled my bones, as the last giant was brought crashing over. The giant thrashed like a wounded bull elephant as Penelope’s vines twined inexorably around its limbs. Even in its death throes, the giant still managed to lash out with a massive horny foot and snap an Academy infantryman backward, bending his spine in the wrong direction so that it broke with the sound of a shotgun going off. Eventually though, the giant was put to the sword, overcome by sheer numbers.

  Bjorn wasn’t wrong though, I realized. In the thrill of battle, I had lost track of just how we were doing overall. Once we dragonmancers had gotten the unexpected giant problem under control, the reduced wildmen had slowly been worn away by the better trained, more level-headed troopers of the Drako Academy.