by Dante King
I made my way quickly down the wall, while behind me Noctis continued to hand out carnage in generous heaped spoonfuls. Eventually, after catching a sword blade in my open palm, snapping it in two, and then ramming the broken shard through the eye of my kobold enemy, I was able to find Elenari.
The elf was fighting like a demon in the middle of a bunch of kobolds who’d swarmed the part of the wall that she had been defending. Bodies of fallen Imperial soldiers littered the ground, bleeding and eviscerated, some still moaning and twitching.
I summoned Noctis to me and used his power to conjure the Chaos Spear. While Elenari moved and flowed through our opposition with her matching daggers, I fell upon them with the spear.
Together, we moved down two dozen of the kobolds within a few seconds. The two of us proved such a devastating force that the last two kobolds made a break for pastures new. I threw my spear through the back of one, vanished it, and rematerialized it in my hand. Feeling the comfort of the weapon back in my grip, I spun it in my palm, and then punched it through the guts of the last one. Such was the force that I put behind the thrust that it didn’t even matter that I’d used the blunt end of the spear.
Elenari wiped green blood off her face with the back of her arm. With the pouring rain, all she managed to do was smear it into her mouth.
She spat and grimaced. “You came.”
I grinned at her, my own face speckled with blood. “You didn’t think I’d miss this, did you?” I asked.
“I should have known when it started raining underground that you wouldn’t be far behind,” the elf said, punching me on the arm.
“Well, you know I love to make a modest entrance,” I replied.
“The others?” Elenari asked me.
“All here,” I said. I pointed beyond the edge of the walls. “Out there. Fighting the wild dragons. Speaking of which, we should probably go and help them.”
A mammoth flash illuminated the flog and turned it suddenly from gray to white. A deafening shriek that made the rock under our feet quiver quickly followed.
“That sounded like another dragon biting the dust,” I said, turning to Elenari.
The elf nodded. “Did you see what happened to—”
“Not now,” I said. “Don’t mourn Antou and Hulong now. Grief can shake your resolve, or destroy you if you let it. Or it can lend you a new edge, a new sharpness. Stay sharp, Elenari. We have plenty of cutting left to do.”
The elf sniffed and blinked a few times. “You’re right. Plenty of cutting still to do.”
A couple of massive shadows passed overhead then. The kobolds nearest us jabbered and cried out in their grating tongue. They held their hands up to shield their reptilian eyes from the unaccustomed rain. The Imperial troops fighting doggedly nearby took the opportunity to disembowel and delimb tens of them, spitting them with swords and clubbing them with warhammers. Still more came though.
Things looked dire. I was seriously considering that the only Imperial soldiers left at the end of this might be us.
And that was if we were lucky.
Chapter 24
The shadows passed overhead. They were dragon-shaped, that much could be seen, but anything more was obscured by the sudden bright lightning that rippled across the magical cloud bank above.
The dragon shadows swept back around and then abruptly shrunk and drastically changed shape altogether. Then, landing hard and rolling to soak up the impact of their fall, Ashrin and Jazmyn hit the slippery stone work nearby and got unsteadily to their feet.
Both women were soaked. Ashrin’s usually spiky black hair was plastered to her head, making her cat-like ears all the more prominent. Jazmyn had a long scratch running down her cheek. It looked superficial, though it was hard to tell for certain due to the rain washing the blood away even as it welled up.
“The Sun Dragon?” I asked the two women.
Jazmyn pulled a small knife from her boot and threw it, all in one smooth motion. The blade cartwheeled past the side of my face, passing so close to my cheek that I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that it had taken off my stubble. There was a dull squawk from behind me, and I stepped neatly to the side, without taking my eyes off the two black-clad dragonmancers, so that the kobold Jaz had just killed fell where I had been standing a moment before.
“The Sun Dragon?” I repeated, as if nothing had happened.
“Gone,” Ashrin said, her breath coming hard, like she had just gone twelve rounds with a heavyweight champ.
“Gone?” I asked.
Ashrin drew her thumb across her throat. “Gone,” she repeated. “Your plan worked well, Mike Noctis, but Jazmyn and I… We’re pretty spent. We used up a lot of mana very quickly, trying to finish that damned dragon as fast and humanely as we could.”
Jazmyn puffed out her cheeks and touched the scratch on her cheek. “We’ll keep trying to keep the ramparts free of these fuckin’ kobolds,” she said, “but I don’t think we’re going to be too much help against the other two dragons.”
“One down is better than nothing,” I said. “Far better. All right, you two keep our soldiers’ morale from dipping up here. Elenari and I will help the others from the air.”
Jazmyn pulled her sword from the red sash at her waist and made the sign of the claw against her heart.
“Good luck up there,” she said.
I made the sign of the claw with my index finger back at her. “You too,” I replied.
“If some of us don’t make it,” Ashrin said, cracking her knuckles and casting an eye at the kobolds clambering over the edge of the wall fifty yards away, “well, I guess we’ll see you in hell!”
I laughed and made a face. “Come on, let’s face it, this unforgiving world we live in is our hell and we are the devils that inhabit it. Go and remind the kobolds of this fact!”
With that, Elenari and I summoned Gharmon and Noctis to our Leg slots and took to the smoky, waterlogged air.
The rain made seeing difficult, but there were more important things to worry about just then. Like not being burned to a crisp, knocked out of the air, or in some other way killed by one of the two remaining dragons.
Saya and Penelope were flying, on the backs of Scopula and Glizbe, around the head of the silver dragon, whipping it up into a frenzy of rage. Try as they might though, they could not seem to get past its defenses—the thing was too damned agile in the air. Fire leapt from the jaws of the three dragons as they strove to get the better of one another.
The djinn, Renji, was a streak of silver on the back of her Steel Dragon, Corvar. It looked like she had become the fixed favorite of the Opal Dragon. The huge wild dragon, as long as a couple of Greyhound buses, and just as bulky, was following the much smaller Corvar with its evil eyes. Behind them, Tamsin was attempting to do some kind of damage to the Opal Dragon, but her spear seemed to be having about as much effect on the creature as a toothpick.
“Elenari,” I called, “let’s you and me take over from Tamsin and Renji! Corvar looks ready to drop out of the sky.”
Elenari gave me a thumbs-up, just as the Opal Dragon let loose with a great gout of flame and missed Renji and Corvar by only a few yards.
“Tell Tamsin and Renji to help the others take down the silver!” I yelled.
The burst of fire ripped into the side of the cavern and tore a great swathe of rock from the wall. Boulders as big as cars rained down and shattered with ear-splitting booms on the floor of the colossal cave. Tree-sized stalactites were shaken loose and fell from the ceiling high above. One landed amongst the kobold army and crushed a bunch of hapless kobolds to paste, sending burst guts and ruptured skulls spraying across the floor, while lumps of rocky shrapnel ripped the lizard-men around to pieces.
Elenari at once swept past the nose of the Opal Dragon and captured its attention afresh. Renji saw the opening that Elenari had made for her and interpreted what the elf wanted her and Tamsin to do. She flew to join Saya and Penelope in their fight against the silver dr
agon, Tamsin following after her.
With the Opal Dragon now chasing Elenari and Gharmon, I tucked down and Noctis shot forward in pursuit of the giant black monster. The Onyx Dragon had no trouble keeping up with the Opal Dragon, while it followed relentlessly after Elenari.
“This fellow is old,” Noctis told me. “Old even as I would reckon it. Killing him will be hard.”
I didn’t much like the sound of that.
Meanwhile, with four dragonmancers harrying it, the silver dragon looked to be coming off as second fiddle. It was a beautiful display, whenever I was able to take my eyes off my own quarry, that Tamsin, Renji, Penelope, and Saya were putting on. Their movements were as patient and synchronized as any of our preceptors back at the Academy could hope to see.
They darted and looped around each other in a way that bamboozled my eyes, let alone those of the increasingly pissed off silver dragon. They never allowed the silver a chance to draw a definite bead on any one of them, before one of the other three shot passed or distracted it in some other manner.
Tamsin was ruthlessly prodding at the silver with her spear, thrusting it at any part of the beast that looked less well armored than the rest of it. This wasn’t her magical spear as she couldn’t summon it with Fyzos currently in her Leg Slot. Nor could she use her Telekinesis spell that she’d acquired only a few days ago.
At the same time, Renji was peppering the silver with bursts of metallic stars that whipped around it like a blizzard of shrapnel propelled by magic.
Penelope suddenly darted into the oath of the silver dragon, spun on Glizbe’s back, and raised her arms above her head, just as the wild dragon opened its mouth to spew silver-white fire at her.
Penelope’s dragon poured forth a green flame that plunged into the wild dragon’s mouth like multicolored bubbles. Blooms and vines twisted out of the silver dragon’s open jaws, wrapping around its snout and covering its eyes.
The beast roared, or at least tried to, but Penelope’s dragon continued to breathe the strange and beautiful dragonfire until the silver dragon was enveloped in flowering vegetation. It slowed, shaking its head, flapping to keep itself airborne.
Tamsin’s dragon, Fyzos, corkscrewed from underneath the silver dragon’s belly and, as he passed upside-down over the back of the enemy dragon, Tamsin dropped from between his wings and landed like a cat on the back of the floundering foe.
Wasting no time, the red-skinned hobgoblin dispelled Fyzos and conjured her magical spear in Weapon Slot A. Tamsin raised her newly summoned weapon and plunged it into the base of the dragon’s massive skull.
It must have been a small spot, where the dragon’s spinal cord met the hollow of its skull, and Tamsin must have had only had a second or two to find a gap in between the scales. However, that being so, the spear stabbed home all the same.
Saya dropped from the back of her Gargoyle Dragon to stand next to Tamsin and, using her prodigious strength that was formidable even amongst dragonmancers, she hammered the butt of the spear with one fist, driving the weapon deep into the silver dragon’s head.
The effect was instantaneous.
The silver dragon spasmed and simply… fell away.
It dropped like a stone from the sky, its wings fluttering like busted parachutes behind it, blossoms spiraling away as they were ripped free in its terminal velocity.
Saya and Tamsin found themselves falling too.
But only for a couple of seconds.
Renji swept in from where she had been hanging back and collected them on Corvar’s strong steel back.
The silver dragon fell silently through the rain. Down, down, down. Until, with a meteoric impact, it smashed into a squadron of kobolds waiting their turn to ascend a scaling ladder and obliterated them.
It was the neatest bit of teamwork that I think I had ever seen. I had no time to really appreciate and savor it though, for at that moment Noctis and I were buffeted by a blow from what felt like a ship’s mast turned sideways and used as a bat.
It was the Opal Dragon’s tail.
I tasted hot blood in my mouth. The world lurched, and only my quick instincts allowed me to keep hold of Noctis. My hand shot out as I began to slide from my perch on my dragon’s back. I found purchase on one of the Onyx Dragon’s wings. With a snarl of frustration, Noctis was pulled into an involuntary spin. Somewhere above us—or was it below?—there was a rush of heat and a flash of flame.
The spin was righted in a few seconds, and Noctis pulled up sharply, flapping hard to gain altitude. With effort, I managed to get myself settled once again.
“Where—” I began to say, casting about for Elenari.
“There!” Noctis said, mentally drawing my attention to a sight below us that made my blood turn to liquid nitrogen.
While Noctis and I had been somewhat distracted by the business of making sure that we did not fall out of the sky, the cunning Opal Dragon had made its move. Clearly, the hulking beast’s apparent sluggishness in the air had been a ruse, for it had somehow managed to inflict an injury on Gharmon.
The Emerald Dragon’s flank was blackened, and one of her wings was injured. Elenari appeared unscathed, but she was staring behind her with the resigned, calm eyes of one that sees death looming.
The huge Opal Dragon was slightly below and behind the stricken Emerald Dragon, within a few short seconds of killing both her and my wife. It could have done so already, if it had wanted to kill them with its fire, but I figured that the beast wanted to make a meal of this kill, in every sense of the word.
Saya, Renji, Tamsin, and Penelope were too far away to help in time.
I looked down, judged the distance, and jumped from Noctis’ back.
There was no thinking on my part, really. It was the only course of action that I could see, so I took it.
I splayed my arms and legs like a skydiver, gaining a little more control over my freefall, and pointed myself at the huge head of the Opal Dragon.
Time slowed.
I saw the black dragon’s eyes twitch across, as it noticed me hurtling down to meet it. The vertical cat-like pupil contracted. I read glee in that cold reptilian stare, but also confusion. Prey did not act like this, did it? Its attention had very much turned from the injured Gharmon and Elenari to me.
The dragon opened a mouth the size of a three-ton moving truck. Rows of teeth as long as my arm and as sharp as Satan’s cock glittered up at me. A cloud of breath that was so foul it would have made a maggot retch reached out to envelope me.
I had a plan.
I just hoped it wasn’t one of those plans that came up short.
I fell into the dragon’s open mouth, and the world became a dark, hot hellhole.
It was about time that the dragon’s massive jaws snapped shut that I thought I might have made the biggest, and last, mistake of my life.
Still, there was always a little more time.
Working at the speed of thought, I assigned Garth’s power into my Right Arm slot. I prepared to let loose with the biggest Forcewave that I could. My rationale, when I had leapt from Noctis’s back, had been that even if the Opal Dragon could not be harmed by magic from the outside, it might be able to be hurt by magic from the inside.
But the thing was just so huge and so powerful…
I considered using a Shadow Sphere but didn’t want to end up erasing anything else along with the Opal Dragon. I didn’t care about myself, but if the Shadow Sphere were to somehow ricochet and hit one of my fellow dragonmancers, I’d never forgive myself. I could sacrifice myself but not someone else.
For now, Garth’s Forcewave would have to suffice. And if that didn’t work…
I shook my head, not wanting to think about whether this plan would fail.
As I gathered the Forcewave mana together, I became aware of the other three dragons that shared my brain—Noctis, Pan, and Wayne—linking their mana reserves to that of mine and Garth’s.
Holy hell, I realized, they can lend their power to the drago
n that I am actually making use of at a particular time. They can boost Garth’s power by lending him some of theirs! Together, we are one larger reservoir of mana!
There’s a time for flabbergasted amazement at a revelation, but when you’re about to be ground to hamburger meat between the molars of a mythical creature is not that time.
With the massive bolster of mana that my three other dragons provided me in this life-or-death situation, the Opal Dragon’s head ruptured like a melon into which a pipe bomb had been inserted.
The spell expanded the air around me with such force and violence that the giant black dragon’s head was completely annihilated. One moment, I was seconds from death, trapped in a stinking oubliette filled with teeth. The next second, I was free falling, covered in dragon blood, while the enormous carcass of the Opal Dragon dropped away from me to the ground below.
The fact that I was alive blanketed my senses, overwhelming every other immediate consideration, even the excellent truth that the fucking wild dragon was dead.
In hindsight, I came to understand that the boosted Forcewave worked because it was an actual physical changing of the atmosphere inside the dragon, rather than a direct attack on the dragon as a regular spell would have been, but I didn’t worry about that as I fell through the air.
I didn’t worry about too much at all.
Then, in a rushing rustle of wings, Noctis was falling parallel to me. Vaguely, I heard his calm old voice echoing through my head.
“Mike, get on!”
More to stop the nagging than anything else, I stirred myself to one final effort and reached out to pull myself onto Noctis’ back, while the ground rose to meet us at a speed that might have alarmed me had I not been so dazed.
