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

suddenness that was as terrible as anything that I had ever seen, the wild dragons made their move.

Both wild dragons had maneuvered Antou and Hulong into the far corner of the fortress, on the opposite part of the wall to which I now crouched unseen. The silver and the black let loose with jets of flame at the same time. Having nowhere to go, Hulong dropped onto the open and unmanned stretch of wall, landed with a crash of splintering stone, and shielded herself with her furled wings held above her.

The twin jets of white-silver fire from the silver dragon and orange flame that issued from the Opal Dragon enveloped dragonmancer and dragon.

Chapter 23

“No!” I gasped to myself.

I barely felt the first drop of rain fall from the cloud layer that Pan had created above the battlefield.

“Don’t despair yet!” Noctis told me sternly.

The flickering, incandescent flames died. The black and silver dragons snapped their maws shut.

Hulong, her wings singed and smoking, unfurled them. She extended her long sinewy neck to shoot fire at the wild dragons in return. Antou uncurled like a fern frond and stood high and proud on her dragon’s back, raising a warhammer in her hand. The weapon glowed with a cold white light.

I had had no idea that a dragon’s wings could so effectively protect it from other dragon’s fire. I wondered, briefly, whether that went for all dragons or if Hulong had some special ability.

Antou bellowed a challenge at the wild dragons. Hulong gathered her breath and readied to retaliate and—

—that was when the golden Sun Dragon reared up from the wall, where it had clearly been creeping upward, out of sight of Hulong.

The Sun Dragon let loose with a blast of fire that hit Hulong clean in the throat, lapped over the back of the white dragon’s neck, and engulfed Antou.

Hulong screamed as her dragonmancer was incinerated in a second. Even a dragonrider, tough and magical as they are, cannot withstand a sustained burst of dragonfire. They are, at the end of the day, made of muscle and blood and bone, like any other being.

The Imperial dragon was forced backward under the onslaught of the Sun Dragon’s fire, its keening scream changing to an awful gargling that could be heard even over the din of the ravening kobolds. The silver and black dragons flapped in closer, as Hulong was forced backward under the shadowy archway of one of the crumbling towers. They opened their mouths and added their jets of withering flame to that of the gold dragon.

With a final blinding flash of light and a high-pitched screech, Hulong burst apart under the onslaught of enemy fire. Scales and scraps of leathery skin flew in all directions, but mostly the dragon looked to have been completely consumed. All that remained of dragon and rider were streaks of white that had been blasted under the overhanging arch of the ruined tower. Streaks of white that I dimly realized must be dragondust.

“Fuck,” I said dully, and I felt my dismay echoed by Garth, Wayne, Pan, and Noctis.

It was only then that I realized that a steady, cold rain was falling. It was crazy, of course, seeing as we were however many miles under the earth, but there it was: rain.

Above the battlefield, thunder grumbled and the rain began to fall harder.

The chaotic noise that the kobolds had been making faltered. Peering down at them from my perch, I saw that the lizard-like creatures, despite their gods having just taken out an Imperial dragonmancer, seemed discomposed. They stared fearfully up at the gathered storm clouds and chattered to each other in their harsh tongue. They looked like they had never seen rain before and did not know what to make of it.

“They haven’t seen rain before,” I breathed, still in a daze at having witnessed one of my fellows die in front of my eyes. “We can use that.”

I turned my attention back to the wild dragons and saw that they were eyeing the battlements hungrily.

The black Opal Dragon turned away and let loose a long, deep roar. Immediately, the kobolds rushed forward. The scaling ladders that we had seen from our vantage point were shoved through the press of lizard-men. A few were raised out of the throng, a couple of axe-wielding kobold warriors clinging to the tops.

The rain lashed down from the cavern roof. It looked like it could keep it up for hours. It pinged off my armor and ran down my face, sticking my hair to my head.

More ladders were raised, pushed toward the walls by many kobold hands. The lizardfolk were growling and croaking, bloodlust evident in every syllable of their alien tongue.

“No, you don’t,” I said, spying the red-haired figure of Elenari striding across the top of the overhanging curtain wall and rallying her troops. “You’ll not take her too.”

I implemented the next stage of my plan.

I recalled Pan to her crystal, and Wayne appeared in her stead, crouching next to me like some huge gargoyle out of a nightmare.

I patted him affectionately on the flank.

“Do your thing,” was all I said.

“You got it, old man,” Wayne’s voice rippled through my mind.

In a burst of fog, he was gone.

Like a staccato blend of smog and flack explosion, Wayne appeared and disappeared, reappeared and disappeared, in the blink of an eye, all the way down the length of the wall, just under the parapet.

Boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof-boof.

Every time he materialized and vanished, he left a hanging cloud of fog in his wake, so that soon the scaling kobolds couldn’t see the defenders on top of the rampart. For their part, the defenders simply had to wait for a disoriented kobold to show its head through the smog layer, and then lop it off with a sword or axe.

The dragons,