Dragon Breeder 5

by Dante King

  He reached down and picked up the corpse of the giant I had shot in the face earlier by one leg. The corpse must have weighed four-hundred pounds, but the Shaykh had no trouble throwing it at me.

  The massive body tumbled toward me like a giant puppet, and I was obliged to swing my hammer upward and bat the makeshift missile into the ceiling. Such was the impetus of the flying corpse and the force with which I struck it, that it crashed up through the ceiling and through the roof.

  As shattered roofing spars rained down around me, Antizah careered toward me once more.

  Banishing my Stormhammer, I brought forth the Repeating Hand Crossbow and unloaded with it yet again. I was hoping that the thaumaturgical bolts would work where the throwing stars had failed.

  However, with an agility and speed that was more suited to a gibbon than a seven-foot tall, five-hundred-pound demon, Antizah dodged and rolled and bounded this way and that. No matter how quickly I adjusted my aim, the magical crossbow quarrels slammed harmlessly into the walls and surrounds instead of him.

  It was about then, with my crossbow bolts zipping around him and sparking off the armor and weapons behind Antizah, that I figured this might be a closer run fight than I had previously anticipated.

  Roaring a wordless battlecry, I took off and hurtled head-on toward my adversary.

  We hit each other with immense force. Glass exploded out from us in a ring, every single pane or piece that had survived our initial confrontation shattering. The racks of gaudy items and precious gems and antique vases were knocked over, their contents sent in all directions.

  My Onyx Armor absorbed most of the damage that my body would have taken, but I still felt the impact through the occult breastplate.

  I locked my hands around Antizah’s bulging red neck and squeezed as hard as I could. At the same time, he grabbed me by the front of my jerkin and attempted to throw me from him. I used the momentum to pivot around, plant my foot, and toss him by the throat at the nearest wall.

  The Shaykh crashed through wood and plaster in a powdery burst of dust and splinters and tumbled out into the night.

  I launched myself after him, not giving him time to do anything more than get to his knees and growl before I shin-kicked him square in the face. Antizah flipped over backward with the energy I managed to put into my kick. As he turned a neat backward somersault, I summoned my Chaos Spear to my hand, whirled, and drove the butt into his chest. There was a crunch of armor as the Shaykh’s golden chestplate crumpled and he was flung away. He crashed so hard into the trunk of a sapling that it snapped in half, and the small tree fell on top of him.

  I jumped high into the air, ninja style. My knees were drawn up close to my chest, my spear was pulled back in a double-handed stabbing position. I floated upward and then descended, my eyes fixed on Antizah’s burning red face.

  Antizah rolled to his feet and picked up the sapling he had just felled like it was a toothpick. As I stabbed downward, he caught the blade of the Chaos Spear in the meat of the trunk. The weapon’s blade went through the wood like a hot wire through a stick of toffee, but the disruption was enough that I still only nicked the shoulder strap of the Shaykh’s armor instead of skewering him through the lung.

  With a deft twist and spin, the Shaykh flicked me away with the end of the sapling. I crashed through a marble statue sprouting from a flowerbed in a cloud of stone chips and landed on my back, my Chaos Spear skittering away across some raked gravel.

  I flipped up onto my feet and stared across Antizah. The seven-foot demonic apparition that was still, technically, the leader of Akrit, reached up and contemptuously pulled off his ruined and battered armor. He tossed it away so that he then stood dressed only in his ripped linen robe. For a moment, I thought that I had gashed it up quite nicely, but then realized that the red showing through the rents and slashes in his robe was not blood but merely his bright red skin.

  Antizah lifted one huge hand and pointed at me with a clawed finger.

  “You stupid heathen scum!” he said, in a voice that reminded me of Thanos with a head cold. “Can’t you see, you and the rest of your kind, my catmancers included, are the pinnacle of what once was. I am the future. I am the new height of excellence. You throw your magic at me, and I throw it back. You share your blood with the dragon, but I share my blood with eight catmancers! Women who had already undergone a body and mind altering change. I am power purified! Now that I have this power, Akrit and all the kingdoms and empires beyond will see how great I truly am.”

  I made a noise that sounded like an ice hockey buzzer. “Wrong, dickhead,” I said. “We already all know what kind of man you are, and it isn’t a great one. You see, any man can stand having everything taken from him, but if you want to see if someone is truly great, then give that person everything they could ever desire and see how they act. You’ve lived a life of prosperity ever since you shot out of the end of your daddy’s pecker, and are you a great leader, a great shaykh, a great man?” I laughed and slapped my knee. “I don’t think so, dickhead.”

  Antizah bristled and snarled, “Cease calling me ‘dickhead’ at once! Show me the respect a pioneer such as myself is due!”

  I held up my hands placatingly. “All right, all right, all right,” I said, “no more dickhead talk.”

  I smiled. Slowly and wide. “How about if I call you Richard Cranium instead?”

  This took a moment to sink in, and I wasn’t sure he fully understood. But he at least knew that I was taking the piss.

  The Shaykh let out a howling roar of fury and bellowed into the night, “My people will worship me like a god, or I shall make them despair!”

  I rolled my shoulders and twisted my head until the bones in my neck clicked. “Today, I think you’re going to find out that your people have more backbone than you ever gave them credit for.”

  I used the power of Pan’s Tempest helmet then, transporting myself across the garden with the speed of lightning. I smashed my helmeted head up into Antizah’s chin in a meaty headbutt that rocked him to his foundations. He stepped back a pace, grunting in surprise.

  The sudden drain in mana that the Lightning Speed used sent a rush of blood to my head, slowing me by a second.

  Rocking back onto his toes, Antizah delivered a doozy of a headbutt of his own to the crown of my head.

  It might have gone poorly for me then, if I had not been wearing my helmet. As it was, I was obliged to totter backward a few steps as my vision doubled. As I retreated, I felt my armor suddenly flush hot all over.

  “It is ready. Fully charged with kinetic energy,” Noctis told me.

  “Kinetic… what?” I asked, momentarily a little blurry.

  “The Onyx Armor, Dad!” Wayne cried in my head.

  “Cook that bastard!” Garth and Cyan cried together.

  I’m not a man to be pushed around, but good advice is good advice, and it’s always beneficial to make your kids think that you listen to them, right?

  As the seemingly tireless Shaykh Antizah came at me once more, I pulled myself together and aimed the conduit that lay in the center of my breastplate at the charging demon.

  In the middle of the gleaming sable breastplate was something like a fiberglass partition. It was the same shape as the onyx crystal hanging around my neck, only larger. It was partly filled with a swirling, silver fog, and right at that moment, that fog was shining with an ethereal radiance. Essentially, the Onyx Armor absorbed kinetic damage and transformed it into offensive Chaos Magic, and it was this distilled Chaos Magic that I let loose at Antizah.

  The scintillating beam of silvery, black-laced magic hit the demon shaykh right in the chest. For a split second, he froze in the air like a cartoon character being electrocuted—only I didn’t see any bones through the effervescent glow that encapsulated him. Then he was rocketed away, blasted through the wall of the garden and out of sight. There were a few distant crashes and screams as he made his dramatic exit.

  I knew that it was highly d
oubtful that I had dispensed with the shaykh that easily. He might have loved to hear himself talk, but from the monologue he had delivered to me a moment ago, it sounded like he had expected the change he had undergone. That made me think that he had been a lot more scientific in his research and execution than the late Captain Cade.

  I sprinted through the garden, ducking under the ornamental jewel-encrusted fruit, and sprang through the break in the garden wall. The stones and bricks that had been used to construct it had been sheared cleanly, as if by a giant laser beam. Their edges glowed molten orange and clinked and clicked as they cooled.

  I had hit Shaykh Antizah with such a powerful beam of magic that he had been blasted through the adjacent two walls that separated the palace grounds into neat little gardens, walkways, and courtyards. It was a simple thing to follow the trail of smoldering, smoking vegetation, obliterated brickwork, shattered statues, and demolished shrubbery until I found my old pal once more.

  When I did, I found that we were not alone.

  “This would be the distraction, then?”

  There was a battle happening at the Shaykh’s house and everyone looked to have been invited. By the size of the courtyard, and the selection of small buildings currently in the middle of being burned to the ground by raging blue flames, I figured this must be the harem.

  At a glance, it appeared that a selection of catmancers were fighting with other catmancers, while dozens and dozens of the palace guard were trying to decide exactly who they should attempt to bring down.

  A sudden burst of familiar brilliant illumination drew my eye. I saw the unmistakable spectral form of Will zooming out of a cluster of guards who were hopping around with their hands clamped over their eyes. It was obvious that Will had just done his flashbang impression.

  A shrill warcry drew my attention to Tamsin, armed with her ubiquitous spear, trading blows with two catmancers armed with leaf-bladed swords. As I watched, Tamsin blocked a blow from one of the catmancers and swept the other catmancer’s sword around so that it tangled up with the weapon of the other woman. Tamsin leapt, did the splits in midair, and double-kicked her two enemies in their faces, sending them reeling.

  I guessed that not all the catmancers had been quite as amenable to turning coats as Zala might have predicted. I wondered whether this was because they had been brainwashed by Shaykh Antizah or because they really thought that he deserved to be running Akrit.

  “To take a leaf out of Noctis’ book, Father,” Pan said, almost apologetically in my mind’s ear, “I would say that that is an irrelevant detail. Fight like a dragon; fight to win. Leave all else from your mind.”

  It was anarchy of the first order. Fires of numerous colors reached up into the night sky, clawing at the stars with their flickering fingers. The dead and dying lay scattered like dropped washing.

  There was a sucking explosion off to my right, and a large hut sitting in the middle of a rococo pond, which might have once been a sauna or massage room, exploded as a stray spell hit it. A trio of guardsmen who had clearly been standing too close were tossed heavenward, screaming as their robes burned with pink fire. They splashed down into the pond, bobbing as the pink fire continued to consume them, heedless of the water.

  The three-ton statue of a centaur that flipped slowly out of the stark shadows was the only clue I needed as to where the Shaykh was.

  I caught the statue, my shoulder muscles bunching as I took the weight, and then threw it back in the direction of the demonic form that had appeared out of the gloom. For his part, Shaykh Antizah didn’t want to continue our little game of catch. Instead, he ducked and allowed the statue to thump harmlessly into the gravel path behind him, sending stone spraying.

  “I’m just about sick of you, you son of a bitch,” I growled. “Let’s get this over with!”

  An Entropic Mine might have sealed the deal, but with allied and enemy catmancers and guards everywhere, I wanted to keep collateral damage down to a minimum. I doubted any of the guards were particularly loyal to Shaykh Antizah but were fighting more out of fear for their own skins than anything else.

  Chaos Spear in one hand and Stormhammer in the other, I walked out to try and finish what we had started the moment we had sat down for that first cup of coffee with Shaykh Antizah.

  The Shaykh attacked in a whirlwind of claws and snapping jaws. It looked like he thought I owed him for stirring up his city and he was going to take his pound of flesh in the most literal way possible. The front of his robe had been burned away by the intense beam of magic that had erupted from my Onyx Armor’s conduit, and I was delighted to see that the red flesh underneath was bubbled and scarred.

  I struck out with my two weapons, but he slid around the point of my spear and countered with a buffeting punch that could have buckled the side of a M113 armored personnel carrier. In turn, I swatted his blow away with a downward strike of my Stormhammer, crushing one red hand into the beautifully manicured lawn. Tendrils of storm energy flowed up his arm. While the crushing blow to his paw seemed to have little effect on his body, the magical lightning cracked his skin so that weeping red lines appeared along his forearm.

  Roaring, he snapped his jaws sideways at me in retaliation, attempting to rip my throat out with his yellow fangs. I used my Blink ability to disappear and reappear around the back of him. Shaykh Antizah’s elongated jaws snapped on thin air, and I punched him hard in the back of the head with the hand holding my spear, using the haft of the weapon to deliver more bang for my buck.

  I was just beginning to feel like I might have the upper hand when Shaykh Antizah whipped around and hit me with a spinning sidekick.

  I was tossed unceremoniously across the harem courtyard, scattering a quartet of guards hurrying to engage with Renji like skittles.

  I got quickly to my feet, which proved to be a good move. The guards had dusted themselves off too and looked to have decided that they were happy to dispatch me before moving on to Renji.

  After fighting with Shaykh Antizah, however, four run-of-the-mill guardsmen were absolutely no trouble. I didn’t even bother to block the swing of the first axe that was swept sideways at me. Instead, I tensed my bicep, and the weapon rebounded from my arm, throwing the female elf wielding it off-balance. I snapped the spear of my next attacker like a twig, kicked a third so hard in the stomach that he was thrown backward in a cloud of vomit, and then grabbed the fourth man and flung him at the elven warrior so hard that they were both knocked cold. The remaining guard held up his broken spear in surrender. His eyes were as wide as saucers.

  I jerked my thumb over my shoulder, where Shaykh Antizah was busy studying his injured arm.

  “You really want to die fighting for that hideous asshole?” I asked the purple robed guard.

  The man shook his head vehemently.

  “Then I’d go home, grab the wife and kids, and take a long weekend out in the desert,” I said.

  The man did not answer. It’s hard to do that when you’re legging it in the opposite direction. His broken spear clattered to the stones.

  I turned around, letting out a long breath, before I started forward in a mad dash.

  Shaykh Antizah was heading for where Zala and Hana were fighting a bunch of Shaykh-loyal catmancers back-to-back. He was stalking toward them, his all-black eyes reflecting the multiple fires scattered around the harem courtyard, making him look even more devilish than he had done previously.

  As I ran, I activated my Wing Slot and took off, my booted toes skimming along the gravel.

  A posse of crossbow-wielding guards ran out of a building on my left as I shot across the courtyard. They must have been drilled to within an inch of their lives because half of them dropped to one knee while the other half continued to stand behind. Then, they all drew a bead on me, tracked me, and fired.

  I barrel-rolled in the air, the crossbow bolts twittering and whistling as they passed around me. I did not stop to engage with the guards—there was no time for me to be bothering w
ith the likes of them. My gaze was fixed on Shaykh Antizah. I imagined he was blaming Zala for the subsequent uprising and destruction of his comfortable palace home.

  He wasn’t far from me now, but neither was he very far away from Hana and Zala.

  As I blasted through a box hedge, I noticed a trio of longbowmen had taken up position on a balcony overlooking the harem courtyard. They were aiming up a couple of allied catmancers engaged with a dozen of the palace guards.

  We had been told explicitly while training at the Drako Academy that it didn’t matter how strong a mancer you were, if you had a longbow arrow drop through the back of your neck or pierce your spine, there was precious little you could do about it. Hardened sinew, tougher bone, and thicker skin—it didn’t matter. Longbows could deliver their payloads on target with enough oomph to go through chainmail with ease.

  The archers drew their strings to their ears, sighting down at their targets.

  While in mid-flight, I fired a couple of Shadow Spheres at the support columns of the balcony. They vanished, and the crossbowmen were sent suddenly tumbling to the courtyard below along with the rest of the balcony. The collapsing structure crushed a couple of men who were coming out of a door underneath, while two of the archers accidentally loosed their bows as they fell. One of their arrows hit an unfortunate guardswoman in the side of the neck. She fell, spewing blood. The other arrow, by complete chance, smacked between the shoulder blades of Shaykh Antizah.

  The arrow shattered against the Shaykh’s broad back, and he turned to find out who had dared to try a shot at him. The shot did nothing to hurt him, of course, but it did distract him.

  Using this distraction, I came zooming over an artistically placed pond so fast that water jetted out behind me, sprayed into a fine mist by my wings. I ripped past Shaykh Antizah, grabbed Hana and Zala forcefully by the backs of their shirts, and hauled them into the air and out of danger.