“You’ve hit your limit, girl. If you run out of stamina, we’ll fall out of the air.”
“I know how much stamina I have!” she replied hotly. “I’m starting the descent. Get your head down!”
I bit my lip and held on as she angled into a shallow dive and swooped down toward the carriage yard.
As she deepened, I really began to feel those Gs – the blood rushed to my head and left me dizzy. I tucked down and stuck my butt up, trying to look past Karalti’s shoulder. What I saw made my heart skip. People were running out of the house and cluttering up our landing zone. They pointed and waved at us, jumping up and down.
Dragon riding lesson number one: people are fucking stupid.
“Get out of the way!” I growled, hanging onto the saddle grips for dear life.
Karalti snarled with frustration as she came in low, and I knew she was still going too fast. My eardrums popped, and I flinched just before she swung her back legs and tail forward, back-winging, flapping madly to halt her momentum. Her mana gauge burned down as she hit her new Split Turn ability, and that was all that stopped us from careening to the dirt in a cartwheel of broken wings and necks. Squawking like a hatchling, she tripped and skidded forward onto her keel as screaming guests threw themselves out of the way.
The landing was harder than I expected, and I’d been expecting a hard landing. It sent me sprawling forward, but because my feet were locked into the stirrups, I didn’t go flying. Instead, I pitched over Karalti’s shoulder, jarred my legs, and banged my face down against her armored scales. My nose burst like a grape on impact as we slid to a stop in a spray of dirt.
“Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.” I groaned, struggling back into a seated position. Every one of my limbs was like jelly. “Shit. Shit, Karalti. Are you okay?!”
“I’m alive!” she squeaked. She pushed herself up with her forearms and wing claws and hopped forward a few steps, shuddering with exertion “Only lost a little HP. Are you okay? I smell blood!”
‘A little HP’ was about twenty points for her, and fifteen for me. I got a couple of Mint Potions out, and patted her neck to get her to turn her head around so I could feed them to her. As she chugged them, people began to gather around us, open-mouthed and babbling with excitement.
I pumped a fist, stashing the empty potion bottles in my Inventory, and then set about unstrapping myself from the unfamiliar saddle. “Good job, Tidbit!”
Karalti whipped her head from side to side, her throat clicking, tongue hanging out. Shaking, I slid off her back, hanging onto the saddle to drop onto the ground. I was so wobbly that I stumbled a couple of steps to the side.
A young woman in a canary-yellow and white dress closed in at the front of the admiring crowd. Her eyes were as big as saucers. “You’re the hero working for the Volod! Can I touch the dragon?”
I glared down at her, blood pouring out of my face, and uncorked another potion. “Do you just touch random people on the street, lady? No, you can’t.” I drank this potion down myself and tossed the bottle into my Inventory as well.
“Make way! Make way!” I heard a familiar voice call out. Suri. She was shoo-ing people left and right, clearing the twittering crowd ahead of herself.
“Did I do okay?” Karalti nuzzled at me urgently as I dropped down, licking my chest and shoulders.
“You did great on all counts. We just flew ten miles in ten minutes. That training’s paying off.” I reached up to rub her jaws and throat with one hand, and set my nose back in place with the other. I was so high I barely felt it.
“Yeah!” Karalti ducked her head down and dropped her wings, cheeping like an overgrown chick. I smiled, looking up as Suri reached the front of the pack. At the sight of her, my petting hand slowed, and my eyes widened.
When Suri told me she was going dress shopping, I’d thought she was joking. You know – ‘dress shopping’, as in, shopping for armor. But no. Suri sashayed toward us in a sheer ankle-length gown that hugged her every curve. It was sleeveless, with thin straps and a very deep neckline, so deep I wasn’t entirely sure how it was staying on. The fabric looked like a swirl of monarch butterfly wings had been sewn together around her body. She was wearing gold rings in her ears, nose, and lip. Her axes were on her belt, and her huge sword and scabbard were slung over one shoulder, an odd counterpoint to the dress and jewelry.
“Nice landing. I like the blood.” She came to a stop in front of us and struck a pose: hands on hips, chest out. The dress slid over one of her legs, baring it up to mid-thigh. “What’dya think, soldier? Look alright?”
My first thought – beyond “Holy shit, she’s gorgeous what the fuck do I say” – was the sudden terror that Archemi might have a ‘Hide Your Awkward Boner’ minigame. Karalti’s body stiffened behind me.
“I, um, uh, wellll…” I tried to subtly adjust myself without using my hands. “Is it just me, or is this new armor of mine really hot all of a sudden? Hoooo. Ahhhh. Excuse me for a moment.”
I turned, marched on the spot until the pain stopped, then turned back. “There we go. Better.”
“What are you doing?” Karalti demanded. “We were talking!”
Suri arched a scarlet eyebrow, and glanced down at my crotch. “I guess that answers my question.”
“Hang on a second.” I patted Karalti on the neck, and pointed up at my face. “Excuse me, ma’am. My eyes are up here?”
Suri smirked. “Could have fooled me, given how much time they’ve spent resting at tit-level over the last couple days.”
Okay, that one actually got me to blush. I glared back at her and gestured at her chest. “It’s just that I can’t help but wonder how you don’t float away into the sky like a hot air balloon.”
Suri let her lips part and wet them, leaning forward in a way that made it very difficult to continue looking at her face. “Probably for the same reason you don’t bust the cup off your armor every time you think you’re gonna see a nipple.”
“Stop it!” Karalti lunged past me at her, snapping and slavering.
I was not expecting to be suddenly shoved from behind. Her elbow hit me in the shoulder and sent me face-first into the gravel. “The fuck, Karalti!”
“Mine!” Karalti snarled at Suri as she backed away. Drops of white napalm splattered on the stones and in the garden bed, where they sizzled. “Get away from him!”
Suri held her hands up. “Whoa there, Sunshine.”
“Karalti! Cool it!” I scrambled up to my feet, confused and shaken. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Stupid party! Stupid Suri!” Karalti’s eyes blazed with hot, humiliated anger. She snapped at me, narrowly missing my face. “Stupid YOU!”
“What?” I tried to go to her, but she irritably flicked me back with a wing. “Come on, Tidbit, we just-”
“Don’t you ‘Tidbit’ me! I didn’t put this saddle so you could… so you…” Karalti couldn’t finish whatever she was trying to say, and spun around with her nose in the air. Scattering people with her tail, she stalked off down the driveway, roaring at a pair of hookwings who tried to bob their heads at her. The dinosaurs screeched and backed into a carriage, nearly knocking it over.
“I… what?” I stared after her in bewilderment.
“Your little dragon’s in love with you, Hector,” Suri said, suddenly close beside me. “You hadn’t figured that out?”
“In love with me?” I reached up to untie my hood from my helmet and pushed it back. “I know she’s attached to me at the hip, but… She’s a completely different species to me. Not to mention, she’s basically my kid, and that is all kinds of weird.”
“Yeah, but she’s not your kid, is she? She’s a moody teenager the size of an elephant.” Suri clapped me on the arm as I blinked. “C’mon. This is just one of those things she’s going to have to work through.”
“But… What if she doesn’t come back?” I felt – and sounded – as young as Karalti actually was.
“She will. She’s gonna go write in
her diary about how much she hates you, sing some pop songs, and then she’ll be back and trying to crawl up your arse again.” Suri gently took me by the elbow. “Come on, Casanova. We’ve got your nose to mop up and our primaries to protect. They’re waiting for us.”
Chapter 28
I let Suri guide me up the stairs to the gate leading to the manor courtyard. Nobles, courtiers, the king’s advisors and spies and religious allies mingled among disguised soldiers. The butler and servants dashed around the garden looked stressed - everyone looked kind of stressed, actually – but the real guests had turned up in gowns and porcelain heels, fur-trimmed coats and wigs and foppish hats. They were drinking wine and nibbling on nuts and fruit while uniformed guardsmen lounged boredly at the fringes. The other half of the crowd were also richly dressed, but in ways that could readily conceal weapons. These guests were also polite, but wary, alert, and not drinking anything.
The elegant entryway into the manor itself was manned by guards and a pair of Knights of the Red Star who were frisking everyone who went inside.
“Kingsman.” One of the tattooed knights – a woman – stepped forward to greet us. “You’re allowed to bring your arms and armor in, but I must inspect you for magical contagion. Curses, hexes, suchlike.”
“Sure.” I held my arms out.
“Do I need to go through processing again?” Suri asked.
“No, my lady.” The knight took a thick golden wand off her belt, and ran it up and down my body like a metal detector. It crackled with energy, and glowed blue when it passed over my backpack.
“Please let me look at your magical items,” she asked.
I gave her a thin smile, and began pulling things out. Some of them, like the alchemy potions, easily fit in a real bag. Others, like the seven-foot-long Spear of Nine Spheres, appeared in my hands like a magic trick. When she passed the device over it, the golden rod turned white. The knight raised her eyebrows, but seemed unconcerned. Maybe the Spear wasn’t cursed after all.
“Alright. Thank you.” She nodded to us, and then looked past me to the next approaching guest.
“Damn,” I said once we were inside. “Never seen one of those devices before.”
“We call those Samarthi’diva in Dakhdir,” she said. “They measure magical force in sigils or items. A mage can enspell it to look for particular types of magic. That cruddy old spear of yours must be something special to glow like that.”
“It will be, assuming I can get it fixed.”
We passed another doorman inside the Grand Hall, and turned down a gold and white marble corridor, following a babbling hum of noise. Suri walked ahead of me, and I couldn’t help but stare at the way the dress slid and shimmered over her ass and legs. It was hypnotic, but checking her out was a guilty pleasure. When I tried to reach out telepathically to Karalti, all I heard was a furious whine.
We broke out into an enclosed garden. It was painfully noisy. Musicians played fiddles and drums, jugglers twirled stacks of plates on sticks, dancers spun ribbons of silk, and people crowded together in laughter and chatter. Other than the guards stationed around the walls, I was the only person in armor.
Dammit. I should have worn something nicer. My parents had drummed it into me that good Korean boys were always well-dressed. Because of this, I’d stuck to grunge fashion on principle, but I currently felt like That Guy who’d turned up to prom with his shirt untucked and no tie.
“So, what are your thoughts on tonight’s shenanigans?” I asked Suri. We didn’t pause at any of the food or drink stations, heading instead for the back of the garden. “Ready for a fight?”
“Always. And I think this place is a bloody powder keg waiting for a match,” she replied. “But they’ve taken precautions, I’ll give ‘em that. About one in every ten guests here is a soldier from the Vulkan Garrison. There’s a couple of mages, too. Toth has a Sage with him.”
“Father Matthias. He’s a good man.”
“Hopefully he’s a good bodyguard,” she replied tersely. “Anyway, you and me have been assigned to the noble targets because His Majesty thinks that we’re more likely to take a bullet for our primaries. You’ve got the Duke. Unsurprisingly, I have Andrik.”
“Matthias told me about that. How do you feel?”
“How do you think?” Suri replied quietly. “I dressed to look nice, sure, but the little weasel’s been eyeing me like a fresh rack of lamb. There’s different types of ogling, and some of them I’m okay with, and some of them I’m not.”
I swallowed the impulse to ask if whether or not my kind of ogling was okay. This wasn’t about me. “Want me to tell him to get fucked?”
Suri made a sound of disgust. “He’s a blue-blooded royal cunt. He’ll have you staked if either of us say ‘boo’ to him. If that wasn’t the case, I’d do it myself... though backup is always appreciated.”
I looked around, but couldn’t spot Andrik. “Aye aye, comrade.”
Suri’s stride faltered, and her back stiffened. She turned on me, and I nearly ran into her chest. “What did you just call me?”
I blinked. “I… uhh… was being a smartass?”
The corner of Suri’s eye twitched as she tried to hold my gaze, but after a couple of seconds, it faltered. She looked… shaken?
“Don’t ever call me that again,” she said, her voice barely loud enough to be heard. “Not even as a joke. I know you didn’t mean anything by it... but… please.”
I leaned away from her. “Uhh... okay? No worries. I thought that was standard address in the Pacific Alliance?”
It was her turn to look puzzled, and then I remembered: she didn’t know. She had some kind of VR amnesia.
“It’s… You’re only the third person to ever talk about this shit to me,” Suri reached out and grabbed my shoulder. Hard. “Australia. The Pacific Alliance. This ‘Total War’. Sometimes, I admit it… I get flashes, hunches about something just out of my reach. But mostly what I remember is what was done to me by the other Starborn I knew. They used to sling that word around while they were torturing me.”
My skin prickled with a rush of fear – and anger. I dropped my voice to a hiss. “What? Players were torturing you? Inside Archemi? Did they have blue halos like mine, or gold, like Rin’s?”
Suri looked down. I saw her throat work, and then she let go of me. She turned her head away, then reached up to push a lock of hair back behind her ear. Her fingers were trembling.
“Oh hell, I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just asking because… Well, this has some major implications for like, the entire world and the Devs… uh… the Architects. It’s hard to explain–”
“Don’t. Please.” Suri shook her head with small, rapid shakes. She was no longer able to meet my eyes. “Look – I know that there’s something beyond this world, alright? I know you and Rin and those ‘Architects’ know something I don’t about Archemi. And I don’t want to know what it is, okay? Some things should just be left alone.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated. I wasn’t sure what else to say. The only explanation I could think of for how Suri was even here was genuinely awful. I was about to try to comfort her when the crowd parted, and Kirov came striding toward us.
“Hector!” He boomed, throwing his arms up. He was dressed in his armor and helm, the bronze disks and red lacquer mirror-polished. “A pleasure to see you again! Ahh, and I see you have worn your best clothes for the night’s festivities! But rytier, you appear to have some blood on your face.”
“Figured I’d warm up before the Slayer got here.” I shook his hand and clapped his arm, glancing back at Suri.
“My goodness, Lady! You look incredible!” Kirov turned to her next. “May I plant a kiss upon your hand and pay my respects?”
“No, thanks. Not right now. I better get back to Andrik,” she said, backing away from us. “Excuse me.”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. Nice one, Hector. You’ve managed to screw both the women in your life in the space of thirty minutes, an
d not in the sloppy, happy way.
“Oh, well. Still, that reminds me! Have you met the Voivode yet?” Kirov was apparently oblivious to Suri’s misery as he pivoted back to me.
“No sir, I have not,” I sighed.
“Then come! I, Ur Kirov, shall introduce you to the luminaries of Taltos!” Kirov was flushed in the cheeks and nose, and clearly had a bit to drink. Before I could ask him ‘can we not?’, he had looped his arm through mine and dragged me off into the snake pit.
Kirov pulled me along the floor like an overeager dog straining at his leash, coming to a stop in front of a trio of people dressed in long, thick robes trimmed with gold, silver, and fur. The woman had a pinched, button face and wrinkles around her lips; the older man was balding and beaky, and the other had the scowling, blocky features and paunchy belly of an old soldier gone to seed.
“Your Grace, may I present you with the man who faced the Slayer in single combat and nearly brought him to bay!” Kirov burst into their conversation like a wrecking ball, throwing a heavy arm around my shoulders. “Dragozin Hector, this is the Voivode of Czongrad and his lovely wife, and this is Lord Rasiv Braska, master of the Royal Treasury.”
“Uh... pleased to meet you.” I was already searching the room frantically for some way to get out of this.
“A pleasure,” the Voivode replied. He had a droll voice and piercing gray-green eyes. The hand he offered me was soft and limp, but dry as crisp new dollar bills. “Nearly brought him to bay, you say? What prevented you from doing so?”
“It started out as single combat, but it didn’t stay that way.” I spotted my salvation across the room: an interesting-looking NPC who had a vendor marker and a HUD highlight. He was an unusually tall, patrician Lysidian man with short, neat, silver hair, and he was standing beside a display table laid out with items of jewelry and weapons.
Trial by Fire: A LitRPG Dragonrider Adventure (Archemi Online Chronicles Book 2) Page 25