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

“We all know that you wish to rescue your wife,” she said, “but you have to remember that you are integral to the Mystocean Empire. You’re its fuckin’ future, yeah?”

“I know,” I said understandingly, “but if Elenari were to die while I stood back and watched, Jaz, I would never forgive myself. It’s as simple as that. We might be about to drop into one hell of a scrap, but you have to remember that everyone you come in contact with is waging a daily battle inside of them that you don’t know anything about. I’m not going to add to the war that is fought inside of me by having Elenari’s death on my conscience. It’s not going to happen.”

Jaz made a face and clapped me on the shoulder. “Fuckin’ fair enough, then, greenhorn,” she said, with something approaching the old swagger she had had when I first met her. “Let’s stop flapping our lips and get down there then, yeah?”

As I mounted Pan, I had a quick mental conversation with my team of dragons and outlined my plan.

It was, admittedly, a rough plan. Hell, I doubted it could have been rougher if I’d scrawled it on sandpaper, but I thought that it would do as a distraction. Hopefully, it would allow my six friends to surprise the wild dragons, as well as enabling me to get behind the walls and rendezvous with Elenari and Antou.

Pan took off from the hill of boulders as softly as a bat. Staying low, so that his cobalt coloring would not be so visible, we skirted around the milling, mad mass of kobolds. They were pressing ever closer to the walls, heedless of the rain of arrows that showered down on them from the crenellations above, slaughtering dozens at a time.

I guided the young Tempest Dragon with my mind, showing him where I wanted him to go, until we reached the far end of the ruined fortress wall. Here, in the corner, where the wall of the fortification met the wall of the cavern, there was no direct assault by the kobolds.

The edge of the attacking force was a good five-hundred yards away. They were totally focused on the main length of the battlements that faced out onto the plain below. Which meant that there were also no defenders here.

Pan and I alighted on the edge of the wall completely unnoticed.

“Okay, Pan,” I said, “sorry to throw you straight in at the deep end here, but do you think you can do what we just discussed?”

Pan gave me a look out of a young eye that contained a very old soul.

“I am a Tempest Dragon, father,” he said. “It’s what I was born to do.”

“Then, go,” I said.

Pan took off, leaving me on the wall.

The cobalt dragon shot like a sleek blue missile high into the upper airs of the cavern, so high that he was invisible against the ghostly blue bioluminescent glow of the huge cave worms.

Then, when he deemed himself at a sufficient altitude, he began to breathe his dragonfire. This though, was not dragonfire as I had ever seen it. Pan had told me, during the lightning-fast conversation I had had with my dragons, of what he was capable of, of what he could do.

It had seemed strange to my ears, but I had quickly gotten over that. If you let mere strangeness put you off doing things in the Mystocean Empire, you’d end up getting nothing done.

The plume of fire that issued forth from Pan as he swirled and swooped through the air, was more cloud, smoke, and vapor than actual conventional fire. Branches of crisp blue lightning flickered through the building smog of accumulating vapor.

It was not long before the Tempest Dragon had built a substantial cloud bank high above the action taking place on the plain below.

“Holy shit, you’re doing it!” I muttered.

“A dad should never doubt their kids!” Garth chided me from inside my head.

I scoffed at that.

A sudden roar from below made me look down.

“Oh shit,” I said.

The black and silver dragon had turned their attention from their own kobold troops to the walls once more. With twin snarls of predatory anger, the two dragons began to fly directly toward the defenders.

Looking up, I saw Pan weaving his storm above everyone. The Tempest Dragon herself was mostly invisible now, wreathed in clouds that were getting heavier and grayer and darker with accumulating moisture.

A flash of white out of the corner of my eye captured my attention. A bone-white dragon, which I assumed must belong to Antou, rose from behind the walls and rushed headlong at the two dragons heading toward the battlements.

The enemy wild dragons split apart and went to either side of Antou and her steed, whose name was Hulong, I now remembered from what the General had told me.

Hulong let loose a hissing stream of white flame at the silver dragon, but the other creature avoided it deftly. Antou dispelled her dragon, switching crystal slots, and landed deftly on the battlements. She’d barely landed when she suddenly hurled a ball of crackling energy at the Opal Dragon as it flashed past, but she missed. The ball of magic shot past the black dragon’s tail and exploded against the far wall in a shower of fragmenting rock.

Then, Antou resummoned her dragon, Hulong. Leaping onto its back once more, the dragonmancer attacked the silver and black dragons.

I watched, captivated, as the three dragons fought their mid-air battle. Dragonfire flashed and tore apart the murky, smoky atmosphere of the gargantuan cavern. Shrieks and howls rent the air.

The three beasts and the dragonmancer battled it out for what felt like whole minutes, but must have been only one minute at the most. The ferocity and intensity was something to behold; cataclysmic in its violence. Then, with