Dragon Breeder 3 by Dante King (e novels to read online .TXT) 📕

Unable to resist unexplained behavior, I got up, mentioned that I was going to use the little boys room, and followed the gnoll.

“Mike, where are you off to?” Jaz asked.

I repeated that I was going to take a quick leak in one of the passages.

“All right, but I’m going to have to come too. General Shiloh’s orders,” Jazmyn said.

I made an unimpressed face.

“Don’t worry, I won’t peek,” Jazmyn said, grinning salaciously.

I laughed, nodded, and followed Diggens Azee.

Rounding the corner of the passage that Diggens had taken, I saw the flicker of his hat brim candle bobbing some one-hundred yards ahead of me. As I approached, I saw the squat figure kicking around a pile of rubble with his great clomping boots. I drew level with him and noticed that he had unearthed a weird glowing stone.

Diggens crouched down, pulled a trowel and brush from his extensive belt, and began digging around the stone. I watched, enthralled, as the thick, clumsy-looking fingers moved with a concert pianist’s care and dexterity. After only a few moments of careful excavation, the stone popped free of the clutches of the earth and Diggens pocketed it.

“What’ve you got there, Diggens?” I asked as I glanced at Jazmyn who was waiting a stone’s throw behind us. She had a smile on her face that said, “What is it with males and needing to piss together?”

Diggens sat back on his haunches and pushed the brim of his hat up with his fat forefinger.

“You ever heard of a guilty epsorodite, dragonmancer?” the gnoll asked me.

“No,” I said.

“How about an olive augrogrossular stone?”

“No.”

“Any idea what occurs when a layer of viridian zorokizite is subducted into a seam of torbygen?” the gnoll inquired, scratching at his ass with the trowel he had just used to uncover the strange glowing rock.

“No,” I said flatly, “I do not.”

“Well, I’ll just say then that this here rock is a powerful little geological delight unique to Galipolas Mountain, and will fetch me at least one fuckload of scales when I come to sell it to the artificers.”

Diggens shot me a wide smile and secreted the gem into some pocket or pouch. Then he went back to poking about in the pile of rubble.

Suddenly, something else caught my eye. Something brighter even than the gnoll’s avaricious grin.

It looked like a play of light, a moving wisp of glowing vapor, perhaps.

I followed this odd thing a little further down the tunnel, but before I could determine what the heck it was, the wisp vanished.

Jazmyn followed along behind me. Her face was calm, unruffled, but she held a knife in her hand all the same.

From behind me, Diggens Azee called, “Careful, fella, it’s all too easy to get lost down here if you’re not used to such places.”

Barely hearing Diggen’s words, I said, “Did you see that? The little ball of light?”

“I saw,” Jazmyn said softly. “Though what it was…”

Diggens replied in the negative. “Too busy looking for my retirement fund, dragonmancer,” he said.

Frowning, feeling like I had not seen the last of that strange eldritch wisp, I turned and headed back toward the cavern in search of dinner, Jazmyn stalking along behind.

* * *

Sleep that night was a broken affair. I was used to sleeping somewhat uncomfortably, so it wasn’t camping out and sleeping on straight rock which woke me. It was the companies of soldiers periodically marching through the large cavern. Their steel boots trudging past us never failed to wake me from my light slumber, and by the time I managed to doze off again, another company would inevitably troop past.

Where we were camped was as safe as I imagined it was possible to be in the Subterranean Realms, what with the Empire’s armored soldiers stomping by every hour or so. Given that the Empire had cleared this area, shored up the tunnels, and squads regularly marched through them to keep the braziers and torches burning, I should have felt perfectly sanguine. However, I couldn’t help feeling something tickling at the base of my spine. A feeling of unease warned of danger looming on the horizon.

Next to me, Tamsin slept like a log. Her chest rose and fell, her breath hissing through her sharp teeth. A thin sliver of yellow eye peeked out from under one lid. I wondered whether hobgoblins could do as dragons were said to be able to do and sleep with one eye open.

Renji lay on my other side. The djinn had gone to sleep on her side, facing me, and had not stirred for at least three hours.

As yet another company of armored soldiers clattered past, I let out a soft sigh and rolled onto my side.

And found Renji gazing steadily at me.

“Trouble sleeping, Mike?” the djinn mouthed.

I made a sarcastic face and held my finger and thumb about half an inch apart. “A little,” I said.

Without saying another word, perhaps because she did not want to risk waking any of the other dragonmancers lying around us, Renji reached across with one blue hand and started fumbling with the front of my breeches.

Within a handful of seconds, my cock had been liberated from its material prison, springing out into cool subterranean air.

I opened my mouth to say… something, but then Renji took me in her hand and began to stroke and massage me.

Renji, pumping away on my prick, leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Have you ever felt the grip of a blacksmith’s on your tool, Mike?”

My cock, like all my muscles, had been dragon-enhanced after the Transfusion Ceremony, and could now reach a hardness that I could never have achieved in my fully human days.

Renji’s strength, obviously, had grown too, and so I found myself walking a fine line between exquisite pleasure