Spear of Destiny James Baldwin (free romance novels .TXT) 📖

the mistake of looking back as the monster’s open maw grew larger and larger... an endless black hole that engulfed us from behind, snapped shut ahead of Karalti’s muzzle, and dragged us back down into the earth.

Chapter 58

The Voidwyrm’s gullet was large enough for two dragons of Karalti’s size to fly side by side—until it moved. Karalti bellowed in alarm as the spines of the sandworm’s throat contracted around us in time with the worm’s undulations, forcing her to constantly adjust her turns. We passed the wreckage of the Lockhart, wood skewed on the razor sharp hooks that lined its upper esophagus.

“What do we do!? What do we do?!” Karalti was struggling to control her panic.

She couldn’t see—but I could. I knelt up, squinting through the acid fumes engulfing us. “We tunnel our way back out. Tune into my vision and focus on flying. Keep it together: this shit isn’t over yet.”

The wind moaned in my ears as Karalti followed the writhing contours of the tunnel. It was not quiet inside the worm: the sound of its burrowing roared from every rumbling, dripping surface. There was a rhythmic banging from up ahead: the sound like huge rocks slamming together. Was that it’s heartbeat?

I flicked to the group PM. “Hey! Can any of you guys hear us?!”

[You are imprisoned. PMs have been disabled.]

Of course. I reoriented on the path ahead. “We’ve got this, Tidbit.”

“But it’s still got over eight-hundred-thousand-”

“We’ve GOT this. Believe in us, Karalti.” My nostrils flexed as a fierce, cold anger stirred in me. I wasn’t going to lose my dragon here. Not like this. “Mortal Blows are a game mechanic that mostly ignores levels. So we find this thing’s heart. We cut the arteries, and we kill it from the inside out. The only creature capable of this – the ONLY creature that could possibly do this – is a dragon like you. Small, extremely fast, and very, very brave.”

The booming, rumbling, crunching sound was deafening now, and as the worm reared and straightened out, I saw why. Ahead of us, the tunnel constricted into a narrower hole that opened and closed like a mouth. Behind it, great crushing slabs of bone pounded against one another. There were more [Gizzard Teeth] behind them, grinding sand, stone, and potentially us, into mush.

“We’re gonna have to time this right.” My hands were shaking, slippery inside my gauntlets as I stared straight ahead, not even daring to blink. “Do you trust me?”

“Yes.”

“Then follow my count.”

I began to count by thousands the way the army had taught me, timing the opening and closing of the beast’s throat. Karalti beat her wings in time with my metronome, and the two of us together were able to spot the gaps. She shot through the first and second sets of teeth. There were three more beyond them, opening and closing at different intervals. We cleared the third just before the monoliths crunched together, but the fourth set was slower to open and I missed a second. Karalti desperately backwinged, wheeling around in a loop before shooting forward, right into the fifth set of teeth as they closed down like a guillotine.

“HASTE!” I shouted.

Karalti’s scales shimmered in the dark as she boosted forward at high speed. I hung on for dear life as she rocketed through the narrowing gap, ducking down. A rotten cheese smell blew across us as my dragon shot through, her tail just barely clearing the crunch.

“Fuck a whole lot of that,” I moaned, looking forward. “And fuck a whole lot of THIS.”

‘This’ was the biggest sphincter I’d ever had the misfortune to behold. Fifty feet around, it was the undisputed King of Assholes. The alpha and omega orifice. It was also the perfect physical embodiment of my current feelings toward Ororgael.

“I have to land.” Karalti gasped, her wingbeats faltering. “Can you light a torch? I don’t need a lot of light, just some.

I did so—and almost wished I hadn’t as the inside of the Voidwyrm was revealed in glorious technicolor. The heaving walls were an extremely unattractive shade of olive green, shot through with black and violet. The ‘floor’ was covered in ankle-deep mucus and a field of fleshy feelers that grasped at my dragon’s feet as she landed. Karalti landed with a squelching sound I hoped to never hear again.

“Here.” I got her potions—Stamina, Mana, Water—and balanced out along her neck to give them to her. She swallowed urgently, her neck rippling. Both of us froze as the Voidwyrm suddenly screamed and began to thrash: Karalti clung on with her claws as the ‘room’ inverted, and our floor suddenly became a wall.

“They must be hitting it with the Symphonic Array again,” I said, clinging to her neck with all limbs like a tree. “Listen. Can you hear a heartbeat?”

“No.” Karalti eyed the sphincter of doom, catching her breath. “Is that the entry to its stomach?”

“I literally know two things about worm anatomy: they don’t have lungs, and they look like slimy noodles.”

The opal seams of Karalti’s scales brightened as she cast Bioscan on it. Surprisingly, we got a readout:

  Voidwyrm Empress Gizzard Sphincter

HP: 2500/2500

MP: N/A

The entry to a Sandworm’s intestine. Immune to Acids, Earth Magic. Vulnerable to fire.

“The intestine. Of course, it’s the entry to the intestine.” I rubbed the top of my helmet, and regretted it immediately as my glove stuck to the slick, slimy surface. “Here’s a question for you. Why do you think it is that Archemi has a pee meter, but not a poop meter?”

“I’m gonna guess it’s because all the poop in the world is stored in whatever is behind the big butthole.”

I pulled the Spear from my back. “Let’s just hope the Voidwyrm Empress went to the bathroom recently.”

Karalti closed her nostrils, pawed the ground, and ran straight