The woman’s eyes opened, and she rushed towards me. Silvia still wolfed up, slashed through the armour, singeing off some fur and some of her claws in the process.
“Don’t think it’d be that easy to take something from me!” the woman shouted.
“Don’t think you’re not heading right into a trap!” I said.
I’d been backing away deliberately, and Fumnaya reached her hand out to grab the woman’s outstretched hand. I winced as Fumnaya’s skin seemed to burn and sizzle, but she made contact with the ring. Her eyes glowed and runes rotated inside.
We both jumped away at the same time, and the woman glared at us. “What, you thought you could take my ring underneath all this armour?”
I quickly moved the device towards Fumnaya, remembering that it seemed to act how it did via its position relative to the people touching it. It’d made the dragon younger when touching underneath its chin, and older when touching atop its claw.
Fumnaya touched the top, and shrunk by half a foot, as I felt a few bones cracking. Then I flipped it around and she got that age back.
Seeing her stomach for a brief instant as it seemed her growth forced it upwards, I noticed that all the scars she’d gotten from the werewolf scratching she received also disappeared.
“Clever, but not–” the woman said, as suddenly her armour transformed into active acid.
“Wow, that was a long-ass timer,” I said, looking at Fumnaya.
“Apparently magic’s time scale is a bit longer than seconds?” she shrugged.
The dragon roared, and in an instant, the device was out of my hands and Fumnaya and I were flung backwards. Its tail came next as the dragon picked the woman’s chemical burned body out of the acid.
She grabbed the device with the last of her strength, and the dragon grew by about a foot in every direction, not much for its size, but enough to make me worry. Then just like Fumnaya and I, they sent the age back and the woman was healed.
“I can see now how annoying magical healing would be,” Leo said, getting closer to the two.
The woman got onto the dragon’s back and it beat its wings and exited the treetops. Fumnaya stopped the flame vortex spell, and I went and picked up the woman’s spear. It was as good as anything since I was running out of all kinds of ammunition.
The dragon and the woman slowly floated back, to the edge of the forest. I got a clear view from the massive amounts of trees that had just fallen to the dragon’s chase.
The spear was rather heavy since what should have been wood was a fairly wide bronze, and the head wasn’t steel, it was heavy ass iron. This thing would make a great tool for bludgeoning at a long-range, not so much for stabbing.
“Do you even know how to use a spear?” Fumnaya said.
“Nope, but video games have taught me they are good against mounted units.”
“What video game requires you to know that?” Fumnaya asked.
“I’ll tell you later. Did you make her ring do that dump once or is it going to be inactive now?”
“I made it so it wouldn’t do the thing she had it do before. It should be easy to pepper her with acid, but so long as she has that thing, the dragon and she can heal,” Fumnaya whined.
We all approached in a group, Leo taking up the middle of us, me and the siblings in front of Fumnaya who was lagging behind.
“I think I have an idea,” Leonardo said, turning to Fumnaya. “Put your hand on me, and try casting a spell with my power rune, Vos, match up with me for the ending, Galvos, and I think I might be able to melt that thing in her hands.”
“I guess go for it,” I said as the dragon landed, and roared a challenge at us.
“Ventos servatas, Feago vos Galvos!”
“Vos vos vos vos Galvos!” Fumnaya closed her eyes as she held onto Leonardo’s shoulder. Sure enough, the two spell circles combined, and the resulting spell was a massive blast furnace that engulfed the two.
I heard screaming coming from inside, but the one sound I wanted to hear was glass shattering. Judging by the length of screaming they were surviving too long.
“O-oh no,” Fumnaya said, as suddenly Leo dropped, straight onto the ground face first.
The only reason Fumnaya didn’t was because she was still holding her grimoire, but even she was bouncing up and down a little. The spell fizzled out as the power to maintain it was gone.
“Neat trick,” the woman said mockingly, as the two held the device in their hands, completely unscathed.
“That’s some bullshit right there,” Fumnaya moaned, as Gavin picked up Leonardo and started to back away.
“Damn it, those things are too powerful, and they have tens of them.” I grit my teeth as the dragon and woman stared at us from the tree line.
“Well now, since you don’t have your precious fireman to protect you from the cold,” the woman said, with murder in her eyes.
The dragon roared, and charged in, smashing up even more trees. Silvia turned around and barked at me and I grabbed on as we bolted away from the dragon.
Fumnaya had helped put Leo on Gavin and was holding Gavin’s tail as she floated.
“Silvia,” I said, trying to maneuver the long spear around the trees we were running around. “Circle around, I’m going to try and stab that dragon.”
Silvia just barked, and I didn’t have a clue as to what she was saying. While Fumnaya had, in fact, gotten that scrap of paper to figure out what werewolves said while transformed, that was something most likely kept back at the community center.
Suffice to say I got the gist though. “Look, it’s some kind of dragon hunting spear, I’m sure of it!” I said.
She barked again and I sighed. “Fine then. Split up!” I shouted to the other werewolf posse, and we turned in opposite directions heading in two directions away from the dragon.
The dragon didn’t know which way to go, but seeing as I was the one shouting about heading one way or another, the woman knew which way to go and the pair followed us.
“Dang it,” I said, looking back at the charging dragon.
“You know what else is a neat trick?” the woman said as the dragon took to the air above the forest.
A few heartbeats passed and I started to get worried. Then in front of us, the tree leaves were turning white and freezing solid. The dragon more or less yelped, and its tail smashed a line of foliage around us, sending shattered pieces of leaves and branches to the floor.
“Damn, it’s going to be really hard to explain all this forest damage away if anyone caught sight of it,” I said.
The dragon landed ahead of us, and another tail swipe shattered some trees and cleared out a frozen wasteland-like area for the four of us to fight.
“If you give me back my spear, I might give you a fighting chance,” the woman said cockily.
“Sure,” I said plainly.
I could feel Silvia’s body tensing underneath me. She looked up, with only one of her deep blue eyes being able to look at me. I could see the worry and confusion in it, but I reached down and pet her, as the woman hopped off her dragon and held out her hand.
I got up off Sylvia and she transformed back. I held the spear upright and used it as a walking stick for a few steps before we both arrived within the same general area.
Ninjutsu was a complicated art. It was more than just being sneaky. Lorenz had told me it was the art of survival in Feudal Japan: be light on your feet, be sneaky, use animals and the environment to your advantage, know your target and be able to get in and out.
I didn’t know much about this woman, but I knew that the area was cold and that much like Fumnaya she probably didn’t have that much resistance when it came to the cold. I positioned myself, such that if the dragon wanted to breathe ice directly on me, he wouldn’t hit Silvia, and before the woman could reach for the spear. I took out the alchemical gun and rotated it to the water chamber, firing at her chest.
Surprise, surprise, it was apparently so cold around that once the water w
as dropping to the ground it was already starting to freeze her in place.
I gripped the spear tightly as the dragon reared its head towards us and blasted me with some ice. The spear’s sigil for protection glowed a bright azure and the cold flew around it, and some even hit the woman.
I jumped away from its claw swipes and stabbed the spear at the age exchanging device on the dragon’s back, before dropping the spear and running around the dragon.
I had to jump over its tail as it tried to swipe at me, and Silvia transformed into a wolf and grabbed the device and met back up with me for me to hop on.
“Damn you!” the woman shouted.
Her breath was visible, and she started to shiver violently; the dragon, having nothing to warm her up, started to bash some more trees to allow the sunlight to help fix her.
“Okay, lost the protection spear, but that was unwieldy anyway. So long as we have this we can do some stuff,” I said, taking a look at it.
We were also about a two hundred meter dash from where we split off from the group, which was not something I enjoyed knowing.
“What’s your plan with that thing?” Silvia, who stopped and transformed back while I was still riding, said.
“I don’t know, maybe Fumnaya can do something with it, maybe not, but we clearly can’t beat that woman while she has it, and what’s more, just the two of us can’t beat that woman.”
“Do you think he has any more dragon riders in his troupe?” Silvia asked, crawling out from under me.
“I don’t know, but we should stick to the trees as much as we can, and see if we can’t get in touch with the people inside the manor house.”
“Oh god, I forgot about them. What do you think he’s going to do?” Silvia asked.
“Well, the question is how evil is he. Because some might start coup de grace-ing any unconscious werewolf, or he might be regressing them so he can use them as hostages, or regressing them so they don’t get in his way…”
“He seems to only want the dragon from the egg. It’s probably worth a lot to him, so maybe he’d keep them around for the peaceful option?”
“I had a talk with Anderson. Elves are as prideful as dragons so that many blindly obeying him seemed to him like enslavement and possible kidnapping.”
“Oh dear,” Silvia whimpered.
“When did you talk to Anderson?” Leonardo asked, still face down on Gavin’s back.
“Oh hey, you’re here,” I said.
“When did you talk to Anderson? What did that bastard have to say and how does he know all that?” Leonardo asked again.
“He spent a lot of time through the Earth plane – probably why he has that enchanted sword, now that I think about it.”
“E-enchanted sword?” Leo finally lifted his head.
I looked around. Though houses were visible, I doubted they’d be in earshot.
“Yeah, it glowed in the presence of a dragon, and made short work of them, too,” I informed him.
He stood up, looking a bit wobbly. His side wound seemed pretty bad. “Hey,” I said, grabbing the device from Silvia. “Let’s get you healed up.”
I grabbed the bottom, and he grabbed the top. He didn’t change size, nor did I, but I felt the weight on my shoulders and joints of getting older before we flipped it around.
“Ohhh, I think that fixed my ankle problem, too,” he said, looking down at his foot.
Gavin untransformed, and Fumnaya eeped as she let go of the vanishing tail.
“So, what’s the plan now? We got the healing thing, but they still have, like, hundreds of it,” Fumnaya said.
“We have to see who’s left in the manor, see if we can’t liberate some people and get some more help. Fighting a dragon is tough,” I said.
“He’s bound to have more of those dragon riders,” Leo interjected. “Getting to the manor house is going to be very difficult.”
“E-lis and Fumnaya learned some Ninjutsu, so if we get some camo paint we can get them to the underground exit tunnel,” Gavin explained.
“I don’t think that’d be that hard to come by. The fatigues for blending in might, but there is a lot of tall grass that could provide some cover; a little illusion might help as well if that doesn’t immediately cause them to find the area,” Leo mused.
“Okay, we should check on the house before we do anything else, make sure no other dragon rider has got into it.”
We all walked back, sure to give the icy area a wide berth in order to avoid the wrath of the dragon-riding lady.
“How’d you manage to get away from her?” Gavin asked.
“Well, let’s just say that a Middle Eastern body combined with an ice dragon makes for a weakness to water after they pull off a neat trick.”
“Which is to say that the dragon made an entire clearing of shattered foliage receive the liquid nitrogen treatment and then she shot them with water to induce hypothermia,” Silvia explained.
“Metal,” Fumnaya said.
“Having her spear protect me from the icy cold winds was a bonus, but we lost that thing again,” I said, sighing.
“I’d much rather have one of those tonfas, seems so convenient,” Silvia said.
“Anderson also talked about those. Apparently, they are traditional dragon hunting tonfas, made to perfectly counter a dragon when using the right martial art,” I explained.
“I find it hard to believe that Anderson would know so much about that,” Leo said, stroking his chin.
“Look, out of all the administration of the community center, he was the least amount of asshole to me, so I don’t care how much you don’t think he’d know,” I said, folding my arms.
Leonardo glared at me and pinched the bridge of his nose. Or as much as one can when their helm has only a small slot for their eyes and they are currently wearing a gauntlet.
“I know that the woods circle around and get near the manor, so it’d be best to get that camouflage quickly, and get around the woods to where we choose to enter,” he said, looking around.
“Camo clothes are unlikely to work, but I know for a fact that there are a lot of muddy areas around the forest; if we combine that with some flora, it might work as camouflage.”
“I don’t have a change of clothes and you want me to roll around in the mud?” I asked, in a shrill voice.
“There’s a washing machine at David’s new house, is there not?” Leo said.
“Not one I’d trust to wash out that much mud… and not to mention people are going to notice some muddy or dusty footprints.”
“Eliminate what you cannot do, and what’s left is what you should. We cannot leave that area uninvestigated, and this shrubland isn’t going to work with anything other than this kind of camouflage. We have limited time as it is in the day, and looking for anything to match it is going to take too long!” Leo explained, waving his arm much like Lorenz.
I sighed, “This is going to be a long day.”
17
Chapter 17
Simple plan: get in, check and see what’s been going on, grab some ammo and, boom, everything should be hunky-dory. Well, no, obviously not, since they’ll still be trapped; that man would still be looking for my dragon; and, oh yeah, dragon riders would be hunting us down if they heard or found us out and about.
I silently wondered if more people weren’t getting a visual of dragons flying around. It’d kinda suck if this led to the discovery of the magical world.
While crawling through the field I amused myself with the idea of average joe, walking around town, no work for the day, and they just hear a loud boom and suddenly that golden-skinned woman asks them if they saw any of us or a dragon.
Then average joe would have to explain to her while looking at her dragon, that dragons don’t exist.
Average joe seemed a little too uninterested in his life, so I guess it was more a millennial who didn’t have a shift at Circle K.
I looked up. The grass obscured my immediate area, but above the giant
golden portal, there were two more flying dragon riders, one green one, which had a few specks of blue among its scales, and a purple scaled dragon.
Remembering dungeons and dragons, as Fumnaya would never let me forget it, I figured these might work like that, with their scale colour dictating what they breathed. Silver was cold, I was assuming red-orange was fire, leaving green and purple.
One of them was definitely poison, of that I was sure. Acid magic had tended to be green so maybe that’s what the green one was. Leaving purple to be poison? Or maybe the green had been such violent poison that it ate through the skin?
I remembered the stone and concrete the acid green worked on and got out of that mindset. A shift forwards, and with a bunny taking a look at me for a moment, I got to a point where I could see the man, who was staring angrily at the portal.
His group of elves was lined up by the manor. I couldn’t tell if they’d come up with a bunch of age more than they had previously, but they were diligently waiting.
The man seemed very angry, holding his tonfa tightly and crossing his arms. He had his eyes closed, deep in thought. I silently wished he didn’t have the tonfa so that we could assassinate him from afar and be done with this.
A man immune to Fae tricks, who could overpower a werewolf mob; truly, it was like looking through a field that you’d been crawling in for a while up at a lion, or tiger. A predator, no doubt, the type didn’t matter.
I could feel Leo’s stare on my back, and I shifted forwards again, approaching the back entranceway that made the manor’s underground addition so interesting.
There’d been no door, and since I was crawling in, I didn’t even come up to the place where you had to watch your head. I felt like I was in the clear when I heard the same sounds Cynthia had made when she was making black powder before.
I gulped, no holding back now, I had to ensure that if someone was here, I had the drop on them and not the other way around.
That might prove difficult with the grass on my back that would definitely make a sound at some point. As slowly as I could manage, I lifted up off the ground and began the ninja walk towards the origin of the sound.
The Stray Dragon : (A collage age urban fantasy with werewolves werewolf community center book 3) Page 14