Dragon Breeder 3 Dante King (spiritual books to read TXT) 📖

She launched a hail of flickering green darts from the palm of her hand. The darts shot through the air, leaving little concentric cone-trails in their wake, and burrowed into the ratfolk that they struck. Within moments, the darts were doing the same thing as the poison infused sais had; afflicting the enemies they struck with a fast-acting necrosis. Body parts dropped off the ratfolk as they wailed and thrashed, their furry skin sloughing in swathes from their bodies.

A few ratfolk near Gabby and me tentatively started heading back in to engage with us. Gabby fit an arrow to his bowstring and sent it flying. Then another and another. Each shot was accompanied by a proceeding squeak of pain as the shaft hit home.

I let Gabby keep the hoard at bay for a moment, though I did stab a few with my spear, just remind them of the delivery that lay in wait when they charged again, and turned my eyes back to Ashrin.

Ashrin now wore a green helmet, fashioned in the manner of an insect’s head, so I figured she had assigned her dragon into her Head Slot now. An aura had surrounded her. It was an aura that simply radiated poison, an aura that was as green and foul looking as swamp gas. It set the ratfolk to coughing and choking, making them all the easier for Ashrin to break apart with her bare hands.

She might have been a one trick pony, as far as her magic was concerned, but it was the kind of trick that enabled the pony to go through her enemies like a flamethrower through an army of scarecrows.

I was drawn back to my own fight when the ratfolk I had rattled with my Forcewave ability charged me and Gabby. I considered using my Shadow Spheres, but the last thing I wanted was to miss and bring the whole cavern down on our heads, so I elected to plunge my spear into stomachs. As I drew my spear out from the insides of my latest kill, I noticed Jazmyn to my left.

My other bodyguard was carving apart the enemies around her. She wielded twin chakrams—circular throwing weapons that could also be used to slice and dice in close quarter combat.

Jazmyn, for all her rough bluster, moved with the grace of an interpretive dancer as she fought. She swirled and ducked and pirouetted in a ceaseless and unpredictable flow. She hacked and slashed at the eyes of the ratfolk with the serrated, knife-blade edges of the chakrams, disabling more than she killed, but effectively putting them out of the fight nonetheless. Her coterie moved around her, dispatching those she left alive, in a practiced and efficient manner.

Jazmyn dodged a spear thrust with ease, then threw her two chakrams at two different enemies, burying the blades in their foreheads, sending chips of skull and gobbets of brain in all directions. The circular blades flickered and disappeared, and I guessed that Jaz had switched her dragon’s power into a different slot. A rat bastard tried to run her through from behind but was suddenly impaled on a blade that pistoned out of the back of her armor.

Self-aware armor! I thought with no little envy.

Casually, I stepped to the side and let a ratfolk warhammer whistle past my nose. Barely looking, I put my fist through both breastplate and ribcage of the rat and ripped out his lungs. Meanwhile, Jaz had activated a different slot and was casting the massive magical net that she used on me during our sparring sessions, snaring and slaughtering those rats that found themselves caught in it.

I turned my mind and my eyes and my hand back to the task at hand. I switched slots, and the Chaos Spear rose and fell like the sword of Damocles above the heads of the suicidally driven ratfolk. They invited peril unto themselves and my spear arm delivered that peril and then moved onto the next.

It was a biblical slaughter.

Bright red blood slicked the floor of the cavern. The pond had changed from a mineral blue to scarlet. Bodies were heaped in mounds. And still the ratfolk kept coming.

I implemented my Onyx Armor at one point, allocating Noctis’ power to my Chest Slot. The armor soaked up kinetic damage—sword blows and arrow strikes and the like—and stored that energy up until I was able to release it as a blast of Chaos Magic through a conduit set into the middle of the armor.

I fought with my hands, breaking bones with punches, rupturing organs with spinning kicks and murderous knee strikes. I instructed my squad to focus on protecting themselves and told them that I needed to allow some of our enemies’ blows to land on me.

After a while, the Onyx Crystal hanging around my chest throbbed with heat and knew that the magical reservoir was full. Using my mind to access this external source of energy, I directed my chest at the milling, cutlass-toting mob of ratfolk near me and blasted a swathe through them. The stink of burning hair and cooking meat filled the cavern as the energy lanced through the ratfolk. Those caught by the beam of sizzling white and black Chaos Magic were torn limb from limb. Skin cracked, fat melted, and a few rat bastards burst into spontaneous thaumaturgical flame.

Finally, I noticed that the ratfolk were coming less frequently. As my companions and I hacked them down, broke them apart, and shot them to pieces, fewer and fewer of the foul humanoids were left to fill the gaps we left in their ranks.

Just when I thought that I might leave my squad to clean up the rest while I found Diggens Azee and asked him for one of those tinnies of his, another tremor rocked the cavern.

This juddering shake was accompanied by a deep bass boom that shook the cave like a drum.