by Dante King
“I guess I am,” I said.
Tamsin’s eyes darted over my shoulder for a moment, and she took in a deep breath, which made her chest rise in a way that I found more than a bit distracting. “And you have a Onyx Dragon,” she said. “You lucky, lucky boy.”
Tamsin’s voice was having a peculiar effect on me. A sort of melting effect. I felt a little bit like a chocolate rabbit that had strayed a little too close to an open fire.
Tamsin leaned in close, and I caught the unmistakable smells of fresh sweat, leather, and shea butter.
“By the way, just a word of advice, insinuating that a hobgoblin is related to goblins,” and she spat the word, “is about as foul an insult as you can deliver. However, I’ll forgive you this affront because of that very handsome face of yours, and because you will do me a favor.”
“What favor’s that?” I asked. Up close, I could see that the irises in her eyes were, in fact, actually gold.
“You’ll let me take you out into the practice circle and dance with me a little,” Tamsin said, and she flashed another one of those predatory smiles that simultaneously raised the hairs on the back of my neck and set my frank’n’beans to tingling.
“You want to fight me?” I asked.
“Oh, just a little rough and tumble,” Tamsin said, starting to strut slowly out into the center of the space in which she had been practicing with her spear.
Sweet Christopher Walken, she’s got a phenomenal ass! I thought. It was the sort of rump that made me want to ask her to sit in my lap, even though I was standing.
“I know you’re new here, but allow me to have the honor of being the first of your fellow dragonmancers to tangle with you, hm?” Tamsin said. “What slots do you have available?”
I was pretty sure that I still only had my legs and right arm slots, but I decided to check my crystal on a whim.
Head
Chest [insufficient skill]
Right Arm
Left Arm [insufficient skill]
Legs
Weapon Slot A [insufficient skill]
Weapon Slot B [[insufficient skill]
Wings [insufficient skill]
Titan [insufficient skill]
“Would you look at that,” I said aloud, a grin forming on my face. “It looks like I have three slots now. The head slot just became active.”
Penelope seemed taken aback at this. “Already? That’s rather soon.”
I shrugged. “I neutralized a few goblins on my way here, and my bond has been growing with Noctis, so maybe I gained the required experience?”
“Maybe,” Penelope said, but she seemed unconvinced.
“Which will you choose to use against me?” Tamsin asked me.
“Uh, I’ve been warned against the right arm slot, and I don’t think it’d be all that useful flying around you while Noctis is in the leg slot. How about the head slot? I might as well take it for a spin.” I paused to ask Penelope out of the corner of my mouth, “That would be the defensive aura thing, right?”
“Yes,” she replied, although she frowned at me. “Are you sure you wish to do this? To spar with Tamsin, Bearer of Fyzos, the Force Dragon?”
“Why not?” I asked with a shrug. I turned back to the hobgoblin. “All right then. I’ll lock horns with you, and I’ll be using my head slot.”
I stepped out into the circle, noting as I did so that the walls here were lined with mirrors. That explained why the hobgoblin had been practicing here; she had been analyzing her form.
As I walked out to meet Tamsin, I willed Noctis into the head slot of my crystal. Instantly, I felt my head enclosed in a semi-transparent helmet.
I looked over at the mirror and saw that the helmet was styled somewhere between a motorcycle helmet and a medieval jouster’s lid.
I tapped at the front and realized that there was a vizor there, but it was so clear that my eyesight was almost totally unencumbered. Only the smoked armor in my far peripheral and the slight deadening of my hearing told me that I was wearing a helmet at all.
I glanced at my crystal and saw my new ability:
Head Slot: Noctis (Aura: Blink)
Blink? What the fuck was that? I was about to focus on the ability so that I could see its brief description, but then Tamis activated her own head slot.
A similar helmet of smoked red armor, topped with a little crown, enveloped her head. She stepped forward and raised her hands.
“Very well, Earthling,” she said, her voice only slightly muffled, “let us see what you are made of.”
She started toward me, so I pocketed my crystal and left whatever the “Blink” ability did as a surprise.
When it came to sparring, I wasn’t one to let myself get weighed down with notions of chivalry. It didn’t matter whether you were fighting a guy or a gal, what mattered was getting them down and out of that fight as quickly as possible. The cardinal rule was: rather them than you.
I strode out, fainted with a right jab, and then lashed out with a front kick with my left foot. Almost immediately, I realized that something was very wrong. It felt like I was trying to fight underwater. As soon as I got within about a foot or two of the hobgoblin, forcing my limbs onward was like trying to push them through molasses.
I danced backward, avoiding a couple of lightning-fast punches from Tamsin.
That’s magic, that's her aura. It slows my strikes so that they’re way easier to avoid.
It was a startling realization. Annoying too.
I ducked under a vicious high kick and went to slam my fist into Tamsin’s kidney, just to test my theory. Sure enough, her aura slowed my punch enough for her to spin easily out of the way. I couldn’t see her face behind the helmet, but I could tell by the set of her shoulders that she was enjoying herself.
“Come on, Noctis, fucking help me out here, huh?” I growled into the interior of the helmet.
Tamsin lunged in and let loose a string of jabs that were so fast that I almost couldn’t follow them. Only my professional fight training allowed me to twist, duck, and weave out of the way as they rained in. Somehow, I managed to avoid having any of them land on me, but they still drove me back until my spine was pressed against the mirrored wall.
Tamsin’s final blow in her series of punches was a haymaker, which I only just managed to avoid. The hobgoblin’s fist smashed into the wall with such force that a stretch of mirror exploded outward in a concentric ring of shattering glass.
“Holy fuck!” I gasped. The power of that blow, had it made contact, probably would have had my head sailing across the Training Hall.
Part of my brain—the part not busy with keeping my melon attached to my neck—wondered when I would have that level of raw physical power at my fingertips.
You won’t at all if you don’t keep your face from getting turned inside-out, I reminded myself.
Tamsin let loose an axe kick that left a crater in the ground, right where I’d just been standing. I tried to take advantage of the fact that she was off balance and smack her ungentlemanly in the back of the head, but once more, her aura prevented me from making contact.
The beautiful hobgoblin lashed out with a counter punch, and I slapped her hand away, the shock of that glancing blow almost numbing my arm. Then I was up against the shattered wall once more, with Tamsin’s fist heading straight for my ribcage.
“Shit,” I said.
Then, in a blur of motion, I was exactly where I would have been had I possessed the speed of a cobra. I was behind Tamsin, and had no real inkling as to how I’d gotten there.
Tamsin’s punch crashed into the wall, sending a cloud of plaster dust bursting out, as if it had been shot with a solid-slug shotgun round.
“What the…” she said.
She swung about with a roundhouse kick that no doubt would have sent me yards across the practice circle, but once again, without any clear notion as to how I’d done it, I was behind her.
“Short range teleportation,” I muttered, barely able
to believe the words coming out of my own mouth. “That is so fucking cool.”
The hobgoblin came at me again, but this time I channeled my energy and actually sent myself where I wanted to go. She missed me again. And the next punch didn’t even get close.
However, the more I used and relied on my aura ability, the weaker I felt myself becoming. It was that same mana weakness that Elenari had warned me about. It sapped the energy and will from muscle and sinew.
I won’t be able to rely on this in a prolonged fight, I realized.
With that in mind, I dodged Tamsin’s next sidekick, which flung a table holding some water skins across the room, and then I teleported right behind her. As I moved through space and time quicker than I had any right to, I began to close my arms in a bear hug. It was around nothing at first, but in the blink that it took me to get behind the hobgoblin, my cinch was almost complete. Her aura did little to stop me getting my hands on her.
She might have been super strong, but she had not been expecting to get taken down by me. And just because she was stronger than she should have been, it didn’t mean that she was heavier. I flipped her over my hip and pinned her to the ground. Her thighs wrapped around my waist, while my hands gripped her by the wrists. She squirmed, and her crotch ground into my groin as she struggled.
Keep your head in the game, I told myself, and not that head either.
“Mind if… I go on… top?” Tamsin grunted.
She slipped out from under me and rolled me onto my back with a deft twist of her legs. I still had a hold of her hands, but now she was on top of me, with her breasts crushed against me. The smell of the beautiful hobgoblin was thick in my nostrils. Our faces were inches apart, the helmets clonking together as we wrestled.
It was immediately clear that she was the strongest person I’d ever tussled with.
By far.
She laughed as I tried to take her down, as though my strongest grip carried merely a child’s strength.
I could feel the muscles in her legs bunching and her arms heaving. The thinness of her leather breeches made me very aware of just what parts of her lower anatomy were rubbing and pressing against mine.
Then, there was a cough from above us.
“I, um, I think that is probably enough for now, Mike,” Penelope said in a small, squeaky voice. “Don’t you, um, don’t you think?”
I looked up at Tamsin. Her helmet had disappeared. I made mine do the same.
“You fight well,” she growled in a low voice.
“Uh, and you’re just about the strongest person I’ve ever fought,” I said.
“You are weak,” she said, and I felt a comeback bubble up to my mind, but I didn’t voice it. She was right. Compared to this superpowered woman, I was little more than a mouse.
“You will be formidable when you have passed through the Transfusion Ceremony,” the hobgoblin added. “I will gladly spar with you anytime.”
Tamsin got off me, pressing her pelvis hard into my groin as she dismounted me. I was pretty sure that she did that on purpose. At least she hadn’t used all her strength.
I followed Penelope out of the Training Hall and into the corridor.
“This Transfusion Ceremony,” I said, “when can I go through it? I want the strength Tamsin had.”
“The strength we all have,” Penelope corrected me. “You will receive the ceremony soon enough. After you select your squad. So long as you don’t die.”
“Right,” I said. “I forgot that was a possibility with the squad selection.”
“And after the ceremony, you must develop your bond with your dragon. This will enable you to open other slots so that you can will Noctis into them. To do that, you both must become more powerful. Through fighting, and through battle.”
I grinned to myself as I stared into the obsidian-like crystal where Noctis was housed. “Fighting and battle, I can do that.”
Chapter Twelve
Saya met me outside the corridor as Penelope mounted her Rooster Dragon and returned to the Grand Library.
Saya was still only dressed in her billowy linen shirt and loose-fitting gray pants. The shirt was big enough to cover all the bits and pieces that might have caused a good soldier to release his arrow prematurely, as it were, but still skimpy enough to garner more than a few glances from those that we passed.
“It took me forever to find you!” Saya exclaimed, seeming a little flustered. “I thought you’d be in the library.”
“Penelope thought she’d show me the training halls. I gained access to a new crystal slot, too.”
“Really?” Saya said, clearly surprised. “You haven’t been doing much training, or gaining experience in the field, so your bond with your dragon must have grown a lot.”
I patted the crystal in my pocket, inside of which Noctis was held. “I guess it has. He’s a pretty reliable guy.”
“We ought to get moving,” Saya said. “I heard that there’s quite the crowd waiting to compete for a position in your squad.”
I followed my beautiful statuesque guide through the enormous and befuddling interior of the Drako Academy.
“Should we have brought a picnic or anything with us?” I asked. “This place is absolutely ginormous, and I’m a growing boy that needs his protein.” I put a hand on my ripped stomach and patted it.
Saya gave a little grunt of understanding. “We do not have to go far, but if you’re hungry, we can stop off somewhere on the way to the Disputation Dungeons.”
“Catchy name,” I said. “And, yeah, that’d be awesome. I could definitely eat.”
The thing that I noticed about the Drako Academy was that you had no idea what was going to be around the next corner.
There were soldiers stationed at many of the doorways and gateways that we passed through, and not all of them were human. From what I managed to piece together, I saw elves of one kind or another, some mean-looking dwarves, a few reptilian-looking lizardfolk and, as we passed through an archway that led out into a cobbled quadrangle—
“Uh, are those… Did I just see some centaurs?” I asked out of the corner of my mouth.
“Probably,” Saya said casually.
“Right. Cool. Just checking that I hadn’t accidentally ingested some magic mushrooms or something.”
“For obvious reasons, centaurs make the very best cavalry,” Saya told me.
“That makes a lot of sense,” I said.
I didn’t know why seeing centaurs struck me as any weirder than seeing goblins or orcs. Perhaps it was because the horse half of them was something that I could relate to Earth. Goblins and orcs looked so fantastically outlandish that my brain sort of just glossed over them, brushed their existence under the rug to deal with later.
All the guards, whichever race they might be a part of, were attired in the same sort of armor. Their heads were covered in a fine mail coif—with convenient ear holes cut out for those humanoids that needed a little extra room in that department—that gleamed like polished bronze. They had elaborate pauldrons, shaped like miniature dragon wings, that protected their shoulders and armpits. Over their torsos—I figured because they were on guard duty within a keep that had not been breached by the enemy for donkey’s years—they wore simple leather jerkins, with burnished, long-sleeved mail hauberks that came down to mid-thigh over the top. They sported polished vambraces on their forearms and leather gloves of dark crimson on their hands. Their legs were clothed in comfortable-looking breeches that were tucked into serviceable leather boots. Propped against their shoulders were war scythes—properly vicious-looking spears with razor sharp, curved blades—and at their sides, they wore short swords.
The thought of moving around with all that armor on—and probably more when it came to actually going into battle—might have seemed impractical. However, I’d read somewhere that it was a common misconception that armor was so heavy that it turned the wearer into a metal mannequin that could barely move. Apparently, a full suit of armor back in th
e day had weighed about fiftyish pounds, which was less weight of gear than what modern firefighters carried, or soldiers had lugged around with them since the start of the nineteenth century. I habitually trained in a sixty-pound weight vest myself.
All in all, the guards looked exactly like the sort of people you would not want to fuck with. They were impressive, standing there with their impassive faces and immoveable stances, and I had a sudden, visceral urge to join their ranks and be one of them.
Apparently though, I am going to be far more capable than any of these guys, I remembered.
It was an exciting thought. I couldn’t wait to get started.
As disciplined as the guards looked, I still caught many of the male soldiers following Saya with their eyes as she stalked past them. I attributed this to a simple case of boys being boys when it came to females walking past without any pants on. I thought that it was the shirt that was getting the surreptitious glances—the shadows of Saya’s nipples were evident even through the linen—but then I concluded that it was the woman herself that was collecting the sneaky sideways looks. When I mentioned this to Saya, as we crossed the cobbled courtyard, she grinned at me.
“I told you, Michael,” she said. “It’s because I am a dragonmancer. Respect is our due.”
As if to emphasize her point, she began pushing through the throng of men and women gathered around a smoking brazier in the middle of the cobbled quadrangle. Some turned with a growl or narrowed eyes when Saya moved them aside. As soon as they saw who was cutting the line though, they gave brief nods of respectful greeting. I noticed that they would then raise their right hands, with forefingers curled into the shape of a crude claw, to their chests in a sort of salute.
I followed Saya through the crowd, getting quite a few interested looks of my own, due to the fact that I was still dressed in my Timberlands, jeans, and jacket. We pushed our way to the front of the mob, and I saw that there was a large pit of smoldering logs and coals that had drawn the crowd. Stuck into the bed of coals and embers were sword blades on which a variety of different meats were skewered. They were running with grease and giving off a smell that had appealed to humans ever since the first mammoth steak was put on the grill.