School of Swords and Serpents Boxset: Books 1 - 3 (Hollow Core, Eclipse Core, Chaos Core)

by Gage Lee

  The other dragons stepped back from their opponents, claws raised into defensive postures. Though the dragons had caught us by surprise, their attack hadn’t gone as well as they would have liked. My team had held their own against a superior force and had even done some damage. Eric’s opponent was left with burn wounds, while Hagar’s rubbed at the bruised circle around his throat.

  “I am not sure you’re right about this,” Trulissinangoth said quietly. “But, I’m also not sure you are wrong. The Flame moves in mysterious ways. It would be most unfortunate if we disqualified ourselves by attacking our allies. Even ones as pathetic as you.”

  “Then we have a truce,” I said. “We won’t attack one another until we’re given no choice.”

  “Agreed,” the dragon said. “I don’t like the way this has worked out, but I will accept your truce. For now.”

  The fire in her eyes told me that the minute she thought she could get away with it without losing the challenge, the dragon would rip my heart out of my chest and flame broil it in front of me.

  I had to figure out how we’d beat them.

  Soon.

  The Ring

  THE SILO CONTINUED to rotate while the teams eyed each other. Hagar had a truly murderous glint in her eye, and a thin trickle of blood had leaked from the corner of her mouth down to her chin. I had no doubt she would have killed the red dragon youngling if I hadn’t called a truce.

  “Door,” Eric said.

  The silo had stopped moving, and another arch appeared, this one larger than the one the dragons had come through. On the far side, I saw a stretch of stone floor and a curved wall.

  “After you,” Trulissinangoth said. “Humans are still in charge of the Grand Design. For the moment.”

  “I’ll show you the way,” I said. If she wanted to be sarcastic, I could be twice as surly. “Just like my people have for the past few thousand years.”

  That drew growls from the rest of the dragons, and I smelled fire and ozone in the air. They could grumble all they wanted. I knew the dragons wouldn’t attack me. Not yet. I turned my back on the Shambala team and gestured for my friends to join me. We marched through the arch together and entered the next phase of the challenge.

  The floor in this room was rough and covered with a fine layer of gravelly grit. The room we’d entered was actually a wide passage between two curved walls. Strange statues were perched high up on the walls, their bodies seeming to grow from the stone. Their glinting eyes followed us as we entered their domain, and I felt a sudden sense of danger closing around us. Their twisted bodies and malformed, tentacled faces were horrible to look at, but I forced myself to examine them.

  One of them looked just like the creature I’d seen in the vision of the Empyrean Flame.

  “This is definitely a trap,” Clem said. “There’s something dangerous here.”

  “Let’s find out how dangerous it is,” I said.

  I stepped forward, ready to activate any of my stitched techniques if the need arose. I had to be more observant, quicker to react, than anyone else, because using a vessel was slower than an innate technique. That split second between knowing when an attack was coming and activating a defense could be very costly.

  “Yep,” I called back to my friends, “this is definitely a trap.”

  Jinsei-fueled scrivenings covered the floor ahead of us. The grit that littered the floor made them hard to see from more than a few feet away, but they gleamed with a pure white light up close. A quick study of the complex pattern on the floor told me it was a trigger. Any creature that touched it would interrupt the flow of jinsei through the scrivening and trigger the trap.

  “Get the dragons in here,” I called back to my team. If the challenge demanded we team up, then there had to be a reason. I’d bet a thousand oboli we’d need the dragons to get past this trap.

  “I’ll get them,” Abi said.

  “What are you waiting for?” Trulissinangoth shouted when Abi returned with her team. “We don’t have all day.”

  “You do,” I shouted right back. “The rest of the teams won’t even try to win. Or don’t you trust them, now?”

  “There’s no sense in taking chances,” the dragon said. “Now, move along. I want to get this over with so I can claim my prize from the Empyrean Flame and my people can once again rule over you like the cattle you are.”

  I held my ground. There was an obvious trap on the path ahead. Plus, I didn’t want to look like I was giving in to the dragon’s demands.

  On the other hand, I did have to keep moving if I wanted to win this thing. If we didn’t get ahead of the other teams, we’d have to deal with all of them when we reached the end of the challenge. Those were odds I couldn’t overcome with quick wits and snarky insults.

  “When in doubt, fuel up,” I muttered to myself. I plucked one of Christina’s vials from my belt, tore the cap off with my teeth, and downed it in a single gulp. I flicked the empty container onto the floor ahead of me with a casual gesture.

  The instant the vial landed on the scrivenings, the nearest gargoyle’s head swiveled and unleashed a beam of ruby-red light. The blast of energy transformed the empty jinsei container into a puff of acrid smoke.

  “And,” I said, “that’s why I’m not walking across that.”

  “Coward,” the dragon taunted me.

  “Idiot,” I grumbled back.

  The rest of my team joined me at the edge of the trap. Clem kneeled down and examined the scrivenings with an expert’s eye.

  “Anything that touches the floor will disrupt the flow of jinsei,” she explained. “The scrivening is overly complicated. Whoever designed it made the trigger as difficult as possible to cross, which is why there are so many curls and whorls. They didn’t leave any spaces big enough even for my tippy toe.”

  Clem stood and moved away from us, toward the outside wall. “Ah, here we are.”

  She gestured for the rest of us to join her, and we scurried over. The dragons watched us with bored expressions, but I saw the look of curiosity on Trulissinangoth’s face. She was dying to know what Clem had found. She was also far too proud to ever admit that.

  It was frustrating. If she’d only cooperate with me, we could get both teams through this more quickly.

  “I get it now. The power for the circuit comes into the scrivening here and exits right there.” Clem squinted at the design. “I think we can bridge the trigger here, then walk right across.”

  “You think it’s that easy?” I asked.

  “I do,” Clem said. “I’ll need my serpents for this.”

  She summoned the stormy tentacles of light again and directed them down to the edge of the wall where the scrivening began and ended. We all held our breath, hoping we weren’t about to see our friend blow herself to smithereens.

  The serpents hesitated, each of them a tiny fraction of an inch above the floor. Clem took a deep breath, closed her eyes, furrowed her brow in concentration, and then let out a long, slow sigh.

  In the same instant, her serpents dropped to the floor. Power flowed up the first one, through Clem’s aura, then whipped around her to travel through her other serpent and into the exit point.

  “Wow,” Clem said, her aura flickering with raw power. “I’m still alive. That’s pretty awesome.”

  “Clem, can you stretch your serpents far enough to cross to the other side?” I asked.

  “Not a chance.” Clem sighed. “The trap covers the whole width of the hallway and it’s at least thirty feet across.”

  “So, we’re still stuck,” I grumbled.

  “Maybe,” Clem said. “But it looks like the pattern mirrors itself. There should be another entry and exit point on the other side. Keep the circuit bridged here, I’ll cross over to make sure.”

  I really didn’t like the idea of our scrivening expert crossing the trap on her own. We were out of options, though. Every minute we spent second-guessing ourselves was a minute the other teams could use to get ahead of us.r />
  “I’ll do it,” Hagar offered. “Looks easy enough.”

  Less than a minute later, Hagar had her serpents in place.

  “Wish me luck,” Clem said with a grin.

  She put her foot on the trigger before any of us could react. Jinsei flashed around her foot and rippled through the scrivening.

  The tentacled gargoyle’s head swiveled toward my friend.

  But it didn’t fire its beam of crimson death.

  “Whew.” Clem’s voice shook. “That was scary.”

  “Get across there before it changes its mind.” I tried to smile, but it was impossible. My adrenaline was still spiked from the fear I’d felt at Clem’s near-death experience. My heart rate jumped again when Clem stopped in the middle of the pattern.

  I nearly keeled over from shock when she let out a frustrated shout.

  “There’s another connection here!” She banged her fists together. “There’s another set of power points right in the middle of this thing.”

  “How many?” I called out.

  “Four,” Clem responded.

  That made sense. I should have seen this coming. The teams had to work together to get across.

  “Get your team over here,” I commanded Trulissinangoth. When she hesitated, I put the weight of my core behind my next sentence. “You need to do your part, or we’ll never get through here.”

  Trulissinangoth said something to her teammates, and they all laughed.

  “Very well,” she said with a shrug. “We will let the lesser creatures guide our path. For now.”

  I was going to take great pleasure in beating this dragon bloody when the test was through.

  “We need to cross over together.” I explained the dilemma and the only solution I saw.

  “I don’t see a problem,” Trulissinangoth scoffed. “You humans will bridge the trap, and we will cross.”

  “Wrong,” I snapped. “We’ll bridge it in pairs, and we’ll cross in pairs. That way neither team has to worry about any mistakes from the other side. Now send one of your people out to meet Clem.”

  The dragon grumbled at that, exactly as I knew she would. It would have been too easy for her people to let us get halfway across and then trigger the trap. There’d be none of that on my watch.

  The red-scaled dragon crossed the scrivening, his eyes narrowed into suspicious slits, and joined Clem. She explained what he needed to do, and they bridged the trigger points to allow the next pair, Hagar and the blue-scaled dragon, to reach the far side of the trap.

  Where they ran into another problem.

  “There are more triggers over here,” Hagar shouted. “Twelve of them, it looks like.”

  “That’s okay,” Clem said. “When we get everyone else across, then six of you can bridge those and we’ll join you.”

  We followed Clem’s plan, and soon we were all on the far side of the trap.

  “I’m so glad I could assist you in overcoming this challenge that you would not have been able to defeat on your own,” Clem said to the dragons as she joined us. “I look forward to when you return the favor and do something we could not accomplish.”

  The dragons rocked back on their heels as if Clem had just slapped them all across their broad noses.

  “You’ll pay for that insult,” Trulissinangoth spat. “I’ll make sure it is the last you ever utter.”

  “You can try,” Clem said. “I’m not much of a fighter. Be sure you finish the job, though. Because I’m smarter than you’ll ever be, and you’ll never see me coming if I survive.”

  “That’s enough.” I stepped between them. “Look, we have more of these traps to cross, and who knows what else we’ll face. This isn’t the time for a fight.”

  “That time will come,” Trulissinangoth promised me.

  “You bet it will,” I said. “But now it’s time to work together before the other teams beat us to the goal.”

  With that settled, our team of happy allies continued its journey around the ring. We crossed two more sets of traps with the same two-by-two plan. As we passed beneath each gargoyle, I examined it for some clues as to what lay ahead. Something about them troubled me, but I couldn’t figure out what.

  Finally, we reached a door set into the inner wall. It opened to greet us, and Trulissinangoth motioned for me to step in first.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll be happy to pass through the door if the dragons are too frightened of it to lead the way.”

  If insults got under Trulissinangoth’s skin, I’d keep them coming. We had to work together, but that didn’t mean I had to play nice. Anything that upset the dragon would work in my favor down the road. If she was distracted by her anger, she’d be less capable.

  The new chamber was another silo-like room, though it was much larger than the first one. My team entered with plenty of room to spare, and the dragons followed us in, their eyes cast toward the ceiling as if expecting a sneak attack.

  “Open the next area,” Trulissinangoth demanded.

  “And how am I supposed to do that?” I asked. “Look around. There’s nothing on the walls. Or the floor or ceiling, for that matter. How am I supposed to open a door?”

  “Figure it out,” she said.

  “Knock it off,” Eric shouted. “You overgrown lizards haven’t done anything since this challenge started. Why don’t you figure something out for a change?”

  “Why don’t you follow the orders of your betters?” the dragon shot back. “That’s something you should get used to.”

  An aura of flame burst to life around Eric. Rage smoldered in his eyes, and he raised his fists into a fighting stance.

  “Eric,” I cautioned.

  “No,” he shouted. “I’m sick of this. If they want to fight, let’s fight.”

  “Have it your way,” the dragon said.

  She brandished her claws, and her team prepared to attack. Clearly, they’d decided that Eric’s threat was reason enough for them to turn on us.

  “Eric!” I shouted.

  The lights went out.

  And the floor vanished.

  The Pit

  WE PLUMMETED INTO A well of darkness.

  The dragons roared in surprise, and the rest of us shouted in dismay. Sparks of light flew past like shooting stars, red, green, blue, black, a trace of purple over there, more lights than I could count. They didn’t show me walls or a floor, though, and mostly just told us how very, very fast we were all falling.

  I summoned my serpents, far too fast, and a spear of pain shot through my core. I shoved the pain aside and lashed out at one of the lights. When my serpent touched the flicker, there was a tiny, almost imperceptible change in the speed of our descent.

  “The lights!” I shouted. “Touch them with your serpents.”

  “It’s working!” Hagar shouted. Our terrible fall slowed, again and again, until we hung motionless in the darkness.

  “Do something,” I shouted at the dragons’ leader. “Unless you want to hang here until another team wins the challenge.”

  “Something is wrong,” the dragon said. “I detect eyes on us. Someone is watching, waiting. As soon as we do this thing you ask, they will strike.”

  “Are you insane?” I shot back. “We’re not going to attack you.”

  The dragon eyed me cautiously, and I heard growls from the rest of her team. I couldn’t imagine what they had to discuss. Unless they used their serpents to touch the lights, none of us would ever get out of this pit.

  “We feel your allies, Jace Warin. Their eyes are on us, even now. Know that we do this, not to help you, but to help ourselves.” We began to rise slowly at first, then faster. “Remember, humans, you’ve already lost this challenge. No one, not even your families, can save you from what happens next.”

  For a moment, I wanted to tell my team to pull their serpents off the lights. If the dragons were trapped in this pit, they couldn’t win the Gauntlet, either. Humans would win, and they’d have a few thousand more years to pou
t over their loss.

  But that would let the traitors win, and I could not abide that. My team would win the Gauntlet, somehow, and we’d use that victory to show the world what the Inquisition was up to.

  Somehow.

  As we climbed toward the surface, I pondered the challenges that still lay ahead. The obstacles we’d faced so far were strange. Making us choose our allies was clever, because it also chose our enemies. Forcing us to work together proved that we could cooperate. But dropping us all in a pit didn’t prove anything new.

  That was disappointing. I’d honestly held out some hope that these challenges would prove to dragons and humans that we could work together. It was pointless for us to fight over the future when we could ally to make the world a much, much better place.

  “We don’t have to be enemies,” I said. “I get that you want to win. But don’t you see how much easier this would be if we worked together?”

  The dragons all laughed like that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

  “That’s what I’d expect an abomination to say.” Trulissinangoth chuckled. “You’re the reason we dragons must seize control of the Grand Design. My people won’t stand by and let the soul eaters return.”

  While that nickname certainly had a more sinister implication than Eclipse Warrior, the dragon’s derisive tone told me it wasn’t meant as a sign of respect. Even the dragons had been poisoned against the very people who’d saved them all.

  We finally reached the surface, and the floor reformed under our feet. In the same moment, the walls that had formed the second silo vanished and left us standing in a circular arena.

  With a horde of constructs rushing toward us.

  An equal number of humanoid and dragon constructs swarmed across the stone floor. They all held weapons that flashed from the light of a fire that blazed above us.

  “Let’s see how well you fight,” Trulissinangoth snarled.

  And then the constructs were almost on top of us.

  “Defensive wedge!” I shouted, and my team formed up in front of me. Eric took the lead, with Abi and Hagar right behind him. Clem took a position on Abi’s left, while I took advantage of the cover my friends provided to activate the vessel that held my Borrowed Core technique. I reached out for the nearest rat or other small creature and found—nothing.