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

at the air behind them. They were clad in pot metal armor that looked like it had been beaten and constructed out of old cauldrons, cart wheel hubs, discarded buckets, and whatever other miscellaneous junk they had been able to find down in the Subterranean Realms and the mines that spiderwebbed through them.

As anyone who had ever witnessed a praying mantis being overwhelmed by ants, the most apparent danger that the ratfolk presented was their sheer weight of numbers, not their skill in combat. There were scores and scores—hundreds—of the screeching beasts.

The ratfolk had to split their forces and come around the pond, like the tide flowing around a rock. Tamsin’s spear flew from her hand and skewered one of the foremost runners. She retracted it with her magic, so that the rat was wrenched forward into the pond in a spray of bright crimson, splashing face down in the water.

Renji had equipped her Steel Dragon, Corvar, into her Weapon Slot A, and was wielding him as a huge, all-steel battle-axe. As the ratfolk came frothing around the pond and came to meet us, the djinn pulled her weapon back and swept it round in a low sweeping arc that was beautiful to see. She carved through four of the hapless scurrying rodent humanoids with that one swing, sending lopped torsos tumbling. The backswing proved to be just as efficacious; pointy-eared heads rolled, limbs went flying, and blood fountained from severed necks.

It took no time at all for the bodies to start piling up around us.

I had decided to use my Chaos Spear initially and was sweeping it around in devastating circles, punching it in and out of ratfolk bodies and using the flickering, flame-covered haft to deflect the numerous blows my enemies were trying to land on me.

I parried a thrust from a cruel shortsword and kicked the rat wielding it so hard in the guts that he vomited blood and was hurled backward, plowing a furrow through the ranks of his fellows pressing in behind him. I heard him land with a dull splash in the pond, but was already whipping the butt end of my staff around to cave in the skull of another enemy coming in hot from behind. He fell, and I plunged the tip of my spear into the face of yet another rat, whisking up his features like a bowl of scrambled eggs. A sword swept toward my neck, but I caught it in my naked palm without it so much as drawing a bead of blood, wrenched it from the wielder’s hand, slashed it across the throat of a different rat, and used it to hew the leg from under yet another.

“I fucking hate rats!” Bjorn was bellowing from somewhere off to my right. “I fucking hate them!”

There was a tinny explosion from the other side of the pond. Renji’s squad were standing in a triangle formation around their dragonmancer, flinging glass flasks into the milling ratfolk army. The flasks disappeared into the confused crush, and then went off with tinkling whumpfs. Shards of scything metal shrapnel flew in all directions, cutting down and maiming tens of the unfortunate ratfolk; slicing through the homemade armor as easily as if it had been made from toffee.

The waves of ratfolk were becoming quite overwhelming, the sheer numbers of the things becoming more and more of a hazard as the fight progressed.

Gabby was pressed against my back. I could hear the mute grunting as he laid about himself with his collection of lethal knives. Whenever a chance presented itself and he was able to get enough room to use it, he would sling his bow from off his shoulder and fire off a couple of shafts into the throng of manic ratfolk.

I for one could have done with a little extra space to think. Not because I was getting tired, but because a part of me that I could not repress worry about the wellbeing of my fellows. I did not want anyone dying today. I did not want anyone spending their life for mine.

I reached around and grabbed Gabby by the back of his shirt. Then, I crouched down, pulling my squad’s bowman with me, and let loose with a Forcewave spell. The immediate area around Gabby and I was rocked by a thunderous expansion of air and energy as a swelling ring of invisible power burst outward. It flung dozens of the ratfolk away like straws in a hurricane; sending them crashing into one another, impaling themselves on their fellows’ sword points and flipping them into the rows of rats behind.

In the space and lull of action created around me and Gabby, I quickly assessed what the others were doing.

Everyone, so far as I was able to discern, was still alive.

The dragonmancers, predictably, were holding their own with relative ease.

Had I doubted the superior skills, training, and capabilities of Jazmyn and Ashrin before, I doubted no longer. The women who had been assigned as my bodyguards were tearing swathes through the ratfolk in the same manner that sharks spread disarray and panic through a shoal of anchovies.

Ashrin had summoned two sai—melee weapons best used for stabbing and trapping—from out of some hidden sheaths in her armor. They were the type of arms that had been made world-famous by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, Rafael. The blades of the sai must have been impregnated with some noxious spell or magic, or perhaps they were the weapons conjured when she assigned her dragon into Weapon Slot A, because whenever she struck one of the ratfolk, their flesh started to melt from the wound until they were literally puddles of gore and goo on the cavern floor.

As the ratfolk around me struggled to their feet, snapping and clawing at the bodies of the dead and injured that covered and obstructed them, Ashrin’s weapons vanished as she switched slots.