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

that none of the wildmen could escape. Saya, with a warhammer that she had conjured by moving Scopula into what I guessed was Weapon Slot A, caused ruination wherever she went. Crushing skulls like grapefruit, she used brute force to pulverize any wildman dumb enough to get in her way.

I lost my spear while bringing down the sixth giant. I had given the big naked guy the old fishhook treatment, hooking him in the mouth and towing him in a circle with the help of Garth until Saya shattered his ankle bones with a couple of devastating blows of her dragon-powered warhammer. The giant’s fall wrenched the weapon from my grip, and it disappeared under him as he toppled to earth, flattening a couple of unfortunate infantrymen of the Drako Academy.

I took that as a sign that I could take the fight to the ground with the rest of our men. Spying out my coterie, I swept in low on Garth before vanishing him back into his crystal, which I had hanging around my neck in a similar golden cage pendant as Noctis’ onyx stone.

As I fell through the air, suddenly bereft of a dragon to hold me, I channeled Noctis’ power into Weapon Slot A. The Chaos Spear crackled into being in my hand.

I fell all of fifty feet, slamming into the earth in one of those epic superhero landings, the likes of which every little boy wishes he could achieve when he jumps off anything higher than the sofa.

The impact caused the wildmen nearest me to stagger. I used their momentary unbalancing to snake out a lightning fast thrust with my spear and impale one big guy with a pair of fighting axes. The Chaos Spear went through him like a hot wire through a lump of pig lard. Using my dragonmancer’s strength, I swung the man easily over my head and used his beefy body to hammer one of his buddies into the dirt.

My spear whipped in and out of the men and women surrounding me. The weapon severed limbs with its leaf-shaped blade, cutting arteries and speckling the ground with liberal amounts of blood.

When all those in my immediate vicinity were dead, I leaned on my spear and watched my squad at work.

Boy, what a couple of months had done to both me and the lads. Each one of my men had been goddamn excellent warriors in their own right before I had met them, but the eight or nine weeks since my meeting with the Overseer had wrought a great change in all of us.

Where before, we had been fighting men without any real focus, now we had a reason to get better at the arts of war, to become a more tight-knit and cohesive unit.

The wildmen came rushing toward my three friends, waving their weapons and shields in the air like a bunch of lunatics. A shift had occurred in the wildmens’ collective mentality. No longer were they trying to rob the caravan and slaughter those who defended it for sport. Now, their primary objective was killing as many people as they could before they were all put to the sword. They all shared a berserker vibe—you know, the wide bulging eyes, the flared nostrils, the foaming mouths.

As I watched, Bjorn, Gabby, and Rupert naturally assumed the roles that we had set out for one another during a sit-down months before.

Bjorn, being the biggest, meanest, most stubborn bastard of our quartet, naturally assumed the post of tank. As a cluster of wildmen ran around the legs of a giant, which Saya and Tamsin were attempting to take down, Bjorn stepped to the fore and bellowed a challenge.

Gabby let fly with an unerringly placed arrow from his longbow. The projectile caught the lead wildman through the throat and sent him down spewing blood and curses. Those wildmen following closely behind him tripped over his prone body and tumbled into the dust.

As the half a dozen remaining men engaged with the battle-scarred Bjorn, Rupert reached into the satchel slung over his shoulder and pulled out a glass vial, filled with a dim golden potion.

I knew what that was. It was a vial of dragonblood—Garth’s blood specifically. With a few extra ingredients and words of power spoken over them, these vials had become, essentially, corked hand grenades.

The ceremony used to create these potions had been Empire-approved. According to the Academy higher-ups, this made the manufacture and use of them legit, so long as the dragon who supplied the blood was a willing donor. Something had struck me as a bit weird about that, seeing as the Bloodletters were being explicitly hunted by the Academy for utilizing this sort of dragon magic. I got that they were kidnapping, drugging, and taking advantage of dragons, but to use the same methods to make weapons for the Academy smacked a little of hypocrisy.

Still, it couldn’t be denied that the weapons were effective.

Rupert lobbed the vial over the heads of the oncoming six wildmen and into the midst of the three men who had gone down in a tangle. As soon as the glass vial shattered and the air mixed with the potion, there was an explosion like a mortar round landing. The three attackers were blown to smithereens, lumps of charred, unidentifiable bits of body thudding down around us.

Bjorn slashed one wildman across the face with a one-handed blow of his axe. The powerful blow ripped the unfortunate fellow’s eyes out of his head and tore his nose off his face. Bjorn grunted as one of the other men managed to land a knife cut on his thickly muscled, heavily scarred shoulder.

I hadn’t ever asked Bjorn how he was able to take cuts and stabs that would ordinarily tear right through the muscle to the bone. I assumed that it was some perk of having Jotunn blood running through his