The balaurs hadn’t quite expected the movement from Sonny and Cher, so they had over committed on their lunge. The group of raptors kind of stumbled forward off balance, and then they screeched half a moment before the two massive parasaurs stomped on top of them.
Unfortunately, Sonny and Cher’s movement had kind of broken up my protective circle, and I gasped when Kacerie lost her balance and tumbled backward down Katie’s spine.
I ordered Sonny and Cher to return to their position, but I knew that would be too late for Kacerie. The pink-haired woman had rolled down Katie’s tail and ended up right near the troodon and raptor fight. The beautiful woman also seemed a bit dazed by her fall, and she blinked her blue eyes as she spun around behind her.
Then I saw three of the balaurs spring past Katie’s flank and come right at the woman.
I didn’t have any time to think. I only had time to act, so I ordered Nicole to bend her back down a slight bit so that I could sprint down her tail. She did so, and I suddenly found myself in the middle of the melee between my troodons and the balaurs they had been fighting. I gave them a quick order to try to clear the way, but I didn’t really expect them to have time to complete it before I ran through them.
A balaur snapped his teeth at me, but Fred used the opening to bite down on the attacker’s throat. Another balaur tried to claw me, but Velma bit his arm before he could get me, and Daphne tore her own claws across his face. My sprint through their melee had provided a distraction that my team needed, and I saw them overwhelm the more muscular cream colored raptors as soon as I ran past.
One of them was about to pounce on Kacerie, but I shoved my spear forward with a shout and slammed the tip into its stomach. I was expecting my weapon’s impact with the balaur bondoc’s body to send a shockwave up to my chest, but my arm was strong, and the Golden Retriever sized dino wheezed a final cough as I ripped the spear from its chest and twisted the point around to jab at another one of his buddies.
“Victor…” Kacerie muttered as I stepped between her and the other two cream colored raptors. I should have been terrified, but all I felt was the hot flow of adrenaline in my muscles, and the headache from trying to control all eleven of my dinos against a dozen opponents.
The balaur I had just jabbed my spear at hissed as she ducked away, but then I commanded Katie to flip her tail to the right, and the tip of it knocked the raptor right upside the head. I heard a loud snapping sound, and the second raptor’s body collapsed as I spun to face the third.
This one glanced back at Katie’s tail and then darted toward me before she could bring it back to hit him. I thrust my spear forward, but the raptor guessed my attack, ducked under my weapon, and then came at my left thigh. I twisted back away from him as his teeth snapped on empty air, and then I spun around to my left to knock the back end of my spear across his face. The balaur bondoc took the hit like a heavyweight boxer taking a roundhouse punch from someone half his weight, and his face twisted to the side while his body didn’t even lean.
I spun back around as his face twisted back to me, but then I continued spinning the spear around behind my back so that the point came to face him just as he leapt toward me. Somehow, I was able to predict the trajectory of his jump, and I stomped my right foot forward as I pushed the spear toward him with every ounce of strength I had in my legs, arms, ass, and back.
The spear actually punched through him at the stomach, and I felt my adrenaline shoot through my muscles like lightning.
I was a bit unlucky, though, since my thrust hadn’t killed him.
The balaur bondoc kicked frantically at me as it screeched, and I had to pull my stomach back to keep from getting shredded by the creature’s claws. At first I thought that they had double the normal claws of the other raptors, but on closer inspection I saw that they really just had two giant claws on their big toe instead of one, and the usual single claw on the rest of their digits. The dinosaur’s limbs were much shorter than the green raptors, and way shorter than the troodons’, so I was able to dodge its attacks and then jab my spear against the heavy creature so that it was positioned at Katie’s rear.
Then I commanded her to stomp down, and the raptor was turned into a red pancake.
I yanked my spear free of the trike’s foot, turned, and then leapt the three steps back to Kacerie. She was trying to stand up, but I didn’t bother to help her. Instead, I just threw my arm under her stomach and lifted her up on my left shoulder so that she was draped over my back. As soon as I had grabbed her, I spun back around to see another pair of brown and cream colored raptors dance between Katie’s stomping legs and come at us.
I guessed that my Troodons had taken care of the other bondocs so I ordered them to jump between the new pair of aggressors so that I could backpedal with Kacerie. They instantly followed my orders, and I heard the screeching melee behind me as I turned and ran to Nicole’s tail.
The trike was dealing with one of the smaller raptors, but I saw her bring her horn down to pin one a moment before Emerald drove her spear through its skull. Then the scaled-woman turned around, saw me running toward the trike’s back, and scrambled to the edge of the spine so that she could help grab Kacerie as I climbed up the tail.
“Victor!” Trel shouted as soon as I had plopped Kacerie down on Nicole’s back, and I turned to see that four of the raptors had jumped up on Tom’s saddle. Liahpa was pinning two of them down against Tom with her spear while they kicked their clawed legs at her, Sheela was trying to pull her spear away from one who had caught the end of it in his jaws, and Trel was fending one off with her legs. I guessed that the spider-woman had lost her spear in the melee, and it looked like she was about to get forced off Bob’s back and fall to the ground.
I didn’t have much time to think about who I needed to help first. I was closer to Liahpa, so I took two sprinting steps across Nicole’s spine, leapt across the gap, and landed on Tom’s platform saddle. My spear sprayed blood as I twisted it over my head and then slammed it down into the face of one of the raptors that Liahpa had pinned. It died instantly, and then I yanked the weapon free of its skull before I did it again to the remaining raptor that the silver-woman had pinned.
Then I went to pull my weapon out, and it snapped off at the tip.
“Shit!” I cursed as I jumped past Liahpa and brought the remaining half of my weapon down on the bondoc Sheela was struggling with.
I had always been pretty damn good at playing whack-a-mole.
The raptor’s skull exploded with a resounding crack when I hit it, but a moment later I realized that my spear haft had actually caused the loud gunshot sound, and my weapon was now only a few feet long.
“Victor!” Trel shouted once more, and I turned toward my lover just as I saw her back spider legs reach out to catch Katie’s top spine so that she wouldn’t tumble down on Bob’s side.
Something inside my brain snapped, and the headache suddenly vanished from my skull. I didn’t see anything but the fucker trying to kill the woman that I loved and suddenly I felt my shoulder connect with the back of the muscular raptor. I’d tackled him football player style, but before I could try to regain my footing, we were both falling off Bob’s back.
Then we hit the grass below.
Something broke when we fell, and for half a moment, I thought it was my ribs or spine. I’d landed on the raptor though, and the dinosaur let out a gasp of agony which convinced me that it had borne the brunt of our fall. I’d landed right on top of its chest with my shoulder, and I twisted my face out of the way of its jaws a split second before it could bite my nose off.
I pushed my forearm into the raptor’s throat and then yanked my knees up to my own chest so that it couldn’t scratch me with its leg claws or kick me off. The position also meant that I was putting more weight on its throat, and the balaur’s gasp of pain quickly turned into a sucking noise of panic as it tried to inhale through a crushed trachea.
“Fucking die,” I growled as I pushed harder on my f
orearm. This dinosaur probably weighed as much as I did, but in a body half the size. It wiggled against me like some sort of jiu jitsu master, but I could feel it start to lose energy with every gasp it tried to take.
Movement caught the corner of my eye as I tried to choke out the balaur, and I saw another cream colored beast dash toward me. I also heard Liahpa shout my name from above, but she sounded really far away, so I ignored her and commanded Katie to jump forward. The trike obeyed my order, and her nose horn speared the approaching raptor through the torso like a corndog on a stick.
“Victor!” Trel, Liahpa, and Sheela shouted together, and I looked up from the raptor I was choking to see six more dashing across the grassy field toward me. There were less than ten yards away, and I knew that there was no way I’d be able to get up on Bob or Tom’s back before they got to me, and there was no way that my friends could fight all of them on the ground.
I could only think of one possible way out of this. I knew it was a long shot since these things were aggressive and trying to kill me, but I didn’t think I had any other options. My Tame skill was still untested, but if it didn’t work now, I was going to die.
And so were my friends.
“Stop!” I shouted at the six balaur bondocs as I willed them to follow my orders.
For half a second it seemed like my order didn’t work, but then the six raptors slowed their trot some ten feet from me and blinked as if they had just woken up from a dream.
“Back up,” I growled at them, and they all turned their heads to look at me.
“Back. The. Fuck. Up.” My voice felt like sandpaper rolling over concrete as it came out of my throat.
Then I pushed down hard and felt the neck of the raptor I was wrestling with pop.
The six balaur bondocs heard the sound too, and they all took three steps back.
“I’m your leader now,” I growled as I pushed up from the dead body of the raptor and stood. My head was as bit wobbly, and my back and shoulder hurt, but other than that I felt fine.
One of the balaur bondocs curled his lips away from his teeth, and he let out a hiss that sounded like a long sword being sharpened. It was a challenge from the group’s alpha, and I knew that my Tame ability hadn’t won them all over as easily as I had first suspected.
“You wanna fucking go?” I growled as I slammed my fist into my chest. “Come on. Step up and I’ll rip you apart.”
The alpha wasn’t quite the tallest of the group, but he had the broadest shoulders, and his coloring was closest to pure white. His eyes were a clear blue color, and we studied at each other for what felt like a minute. Trel, Sheela, Kacerie, Emerald, and Liahpa knew better than to make a movement or talk, so it felt like it was just me and this muscular raptor in a staring contest.
The first one to blink, or look away would lose, and if it was me, these guys would rip me to pieces before my friends could get to me.
My heart hammered into my chest and sent blood pulsing through my brain like a wheezing tuba. My legs were shaking, but the raptor couldn’t tell because of my pants. My palms were sweaty, but I had my hands turned so that he couldn’t see them. I didn’t even know if this dinosaur could even read my tells, but I guessed that any halfway decent poker player would know that I was bluffing. There was no way I could go toe to toe with this guy without a spear, and I definitely couldn’t take out six of them.
Then the white colored balaur bondoc looked at the corpse of his friend I had just killed, lowered his head, and let out a docile hiss that sounded like a balloon losing some of its air.
My vision flashed a bright color, and I blinked open my Eye-Q to see that I’d tamed the last six of the raptors. I let out a long exhale, and then realized that my Tame ability had actually changed from a 3 to a 4. I still had no idea what it meant in terms of what I could do with my ability, but it did feel like my headache was gone.
I turned to look up at the top of Tom’s back and saw Trel, Sheela, Kacerie, Liahpa, and Emerald perched on the edge of the trike’s crest. Sheela and Liahpa still had their spears raised, but the other women were defenseless, and fear was plain on their beautiful faces.
“Did it work?” Sheela whispered as her golden eyes looked at the group of raptors.
“Yeah,” I said. “They work for us now. Let’s get inside the gate and make sure that none of them have gotten to the inner walls.”
Chapter 5
Sheela and Liahpa got our gates opened in a handful of seconds, and I left Tom behind with them when they closed it so that the rest of the group could run ahead toward the inner wall. I’d gotten lucky in the fight, and all my troodons were alive. Both Daphne and Velma were covered with blood, but they ran as quickly as they normally did, and I didn’t sense any pain from them. Nicole looked to have a few cuts on her legs, but they weren’t really bleeding heavily, and she also didn’t have a problem sprinting across the open field of our fort toward the shorter walls where we kept our huts.
I didn’t see any of the balaur bondocs trying to scale the inside wall, but it didn’t mean that they weren’t already inside, and both Trel and I jumped off Bob’s back, onto the top of the wall, and then flipped over the side instead of wasting time trying to get Hope’s doggie door open.
“Galmine!” I shouted as soon as I rolled on the grass on the inside of our first fort. My eyes scanned the two huts, but I didn’t see any sign of the white, cream, or brown feathered raptors.
Then Hope let out a startled toot, and I turned to see her curled up in her pen next to the door. She was blinking in the afternoon light, and I guessed that she had been taking a nap.
“Victor?” I heard Galmine call out from inside our first hut, and then Jinx sprinted out of the doorway and jumped into my arms.
“Hey buddy!” I gasped thankfully as I petted the pretty dino’s blue feathers. A moment later, Galmine came to the edge of the door and she gave me a cheerful smile.
“Is something--” the gray skinned woman began to ask, but Trel interrupted her with a hug.
“You are okay!” the spider-woman sighed gratefully as she embraced Galmine.
“Yes, I am!” Galmine cooed as she hugged Trel back. “I love hugs, but why do you both look so worried?”
“There were some raptors trying to get inside of the outer walls,” I explained as I set Jinx down and wrapped my arms around both Galmine and Trel’s waists. “We thought that some of them had made it inside and attacked you, Jinx, and Hope.”
“Oh, no,” Galmine gasped. “That’s terrible, but I didn’t hear or see anything. Besides, Jinx was here to protect me, and so was Hope.”
“These were pretty scary raptors,” I said. “My Eye-Q calls them Balaur bondoc, and they almost got us as we tried to defend the wall.”
“But they didn’t get us,” Trel said as Galmine’s sparkling green eyes grew large. “Victor saved us by taming six of them. You should see them, they are handsome and muscular, just like Victor.”
“Uhh, I’m not really quite that muscula--” I started to say, but then I heard Hope’s door swing open, and I turned to see Sheela, Kacerie, Liahpa, and Emerald walk inside.
“I did not see any more of the raptors inside our camp,” Sheela said as she nodded once at me.
“Good.” I exhaled and felt my shoulders relax.
“Did you really tame more wonderful dinosaurs?” Galmine asked me as her arms circled my neck.
“Yeah,” I said after I kissed her soft lips. “They are about the size of the troodons, but they are slower runners.”
“What they lack in speed, they make up for with strength and hardiness,” Sheela said as she pulled Galmine into a hug. The rock-skinned woman cooed again as her friend hugged her, and then they both pulled away from each other with smiles on their faces.
“You don’t need to worry about me,” Galmine said as she rested a hand on Sheela’s and my shoulders. “Show me these new friends.”
Kacerie, Liahpa, and Emerald took quick turns hugging Galmine, and
then we all walked back out of Hope’s door so that we could inspect the new additions to my dinosaur army.
“They are quite handsome,” Galmine said as she squatted besides the big white feathered one that was their leader. “What are you going to name them, Victor?”
“Hmmmm.” I opened my Eye-Q again and noticed that there were three males and three females. The names came quickly to my mind as soon as I finished my count, and I pointed at the big white feathered male that Galmine was petting.
“That one is named Chandler, the other male right next to him is named Joey, then the smaller male at the back is Ross,” I said.
“I like those names,” Galmine said as the other women nodded. “What about the others? Are they female?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The really pretty one that is at the back is named Rachel, the one next to Chandler is Monica, and the one in the middle is Phoebe.”
“I like that last name,” Galmine said.
“Yeah, I figured you would.” I laughed and then gestured for the troodons to come near me so that I could inspect them for damage.
“Will you use these balaur bondocs like you use the troodons?” Sheela asked.
“I don’t think so,” I replied as I ran my fingers through Daphne’s feathers. “I think they will be great guard dinos. Besides, they like sitting around in the same three locations all day anyway.”
“They do?” Galmine asked with a puzzled expression on her beautiful face.
“Yeah,” I laughed. “Okay, so I’m taking these names from a popular entertainment show on my world. It was about a group of six friends that sit around a coffee shop or their apartment and talked all day long.”
“That sounds like us!” Galmine said. “But we are seven friends.”
“And we don’t really sit around a coffee shop talking all day long,” Kacerie sighed. “I really miss coffee.”
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