Chương 172: Chapter 170 – Dragonguard

Cole turned his rifle up. Dozens of armored humanoid forms with reptilian snouts slowly descended, despite having no parachutes. Instead, they had glowing crystals mounted to heavy abdominal harnesses. Most of them carried firearms and started to fire down with the bap-bap-bap of low cyclic rate automatics with muzzle flashes that snapped and popped with sparks like electrical shorts. Rounds cracked off the stone fortifications around them. Exposed from above as they were, even primitive firearms could be lethal.

Cole burned a partial charge of his ability to mark the incoming soldiers. The sky filled with red silhouettes from the incoming troops. They must have jumped from the dragon's back. He fired up at the nearest drop trooper. Two of the shots skipped off what looked like stone armor, but one found a weak spot at the shoulder and zipped clean through, redirecting to the nearest target. The soldier's arm went limp and it dropped its weapon to the ground.

Cole took aim at the harnessed crystal, next, and shattered it with a follow-up shot. The trooper dropped like a rock, roaring in panic until it struck the temple flagstones, head first. The rest of Cole's team followed suit, returning fire from the ground. Cole felt the pop of an ability next to him as Wayland reached a hand up, and several of the incoming drop troops spasmed in their gear as the blood curse tormented them. Cole kept firing, rifle powering up as he scored several kills.

But the draconic troops were tough enough to shrug off most hits and started to land, taking cover or switching to melee weapons. And they were big, at least two meters tall and heavily armored. One of them set down near Cole and sprayed at them with its automatic, but Nutmeg and Clove hit it from behind. Another pair landed on the roof of the temple and laid down fire from the elevated position. Howie sent a pair of grenades up that silenced their guns.

More still touched down in the plaza, and the fight turned to a brutal melee where the draconic soldiers had a clear advantage over the smaller avian Starlit. One of troopers landed almost on top of a temple guard near Cole, armored neck to shin in stone armor that looked like overlapping obsidian plates. It swung a long, wooden paddle with sharp black shards embedded down its length. The blow cut the temple guard entirely in two and then the humanoid dragon turned to Cole and roared.

It wasn't any prettier up close. Cole shot it through its open mouth at close range, dropping it like a sack of dirt. Another brought a two-handed maul to bear, crushing a Starlit beneath it before Alexa and Archie brought it down with fire from behind. A wave of pressure hit Cole from Howie's mortar, and a shell went straight up and split into dozens of motes amid the falling troops. The glare illuminated a pair of soldiers on the roof behind their position setting up a crew-served weapon.

Cole grabbed Wayland and pointed up to the temple roof.

"You're with me." Without waiting for an answer, Cole burned two charges and shot them up into the air, passing several startled paratroopers coming the opposite direction. They rose over the roof of the temple. The crew weapon team spotted them immediately and tilted the barrel of their gun up, but Wayland was faster. His curse hit the gunner, who slumped forward, struggling to right himself. Cole fired down as they arced over the position, hammering the paratroopers from above.

He increased their gravity at the apex, shooting them down into the nest. They landed, blasting out a shockwave that knocked the second paratrooper off the opposite side of the temple, shouting as he spun down the side of the structure in his anti-gravity harness. Wayland pulled his spear and drove it through the neck of the weakened gunner, missing a step as he did so.

"Level-up?" asked Cole.

"My second one already since the fighting started," said Wayland. Cole looked down at the crew-served weapon, which looked carved from stone, rather than metal and had embossed imagery of angular dragons with exaggerated features, like an Aztec mural. The gun itself had the pearlescent shine of an otherworld armament.

"See if the LF Key transferred to you when you killed the gunner," said Cole. He grunted with effort and dragged the dead gunner's body away from his weapon. Wayland knelt down in his place, taking up the two handles that were created for bigger hands. The dragonguard machine gun trailed a belt of glowing crystalline rounds at least the size of the. 50 cal rounds that protected the portal pits at the DOR compound. Cole took up the slack on the belt as Wayland turned the muzzle toward the remaining paratroopers.

The gun thundered; not firing bullets and tracers, but jagged arcs of electricity that burned holes right through the heavy armor of the draconic soldiers. Cole fed the belt, making sure it stayed straight and true. His own weapon curled out a tentacle toward the belt with an impulse of greedy hunger. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. With their own crew-served weapon turned against them, the remaining paratroopers in the temple plaza fell quickly.

The last few vaulted the parapets, deciding to take their chances in the city below rather than try to continue storming the temple. Reinforcements joined from within the temple, leaning over the ramparts and firing down at the retreating paratroopers with bolt-action rifles. In the sky above the city, the larger dragons had already retreated, harried by the Starlit fighters as the massive monsters flew out towards the distant floating mountain.

"Anyone injured?" Cole asked into his mic." Scrapes and shrapnel," said Roxy.

"Nothing my secondary class can't handle."

"A lot of the locals are bleeding," said Wayland.

"But I don't feel much from our team." His hands shook as he pulled a plastic baggie from his chest rig and stuffed something in his mouth. Despite what he'd already been through, this was a hell of a first off-world engagement. When Cole heard dragons, he wasn't expecting disciplined airborne infantry with automatic weapons and squad tactics. Anyone would be shook up after that.

"Good work," said Cole. He nudged the smoking machine gun with his foot.

"What are the chances you can lift that?" Wayland looked down.

"Shit, that thing's gotta be seventy kilos. I doubt Roxy could ruck that around." Cole knelt down, touching the stone receiver and using Field Strip to melt down the weapon. The belt fell away with what rounds remained in it, and after a moment's hesitation, Cole held it up to the magazine well of his rifle and let the squid gun strip out the strange munitions while he stuffed the machine gun's fire control group and feed ramp into his pack.

Back on the plaza floor, healers in priest robes had come out to see to the wounded temple defenders. There had been maybe thirty of the Starlit warriors before the dragonguard fell on them. Now there were only eighteen still on their feet. They were dragging the dead draconic troops to line them up against the wall, but it took three Starlit to drag each one.

"How come their bodies aren't crisping up?" Asked Wayland.

"They must not be monsters," said Cole. He frowned.

"At least, the Lewis Field doesn't seem to think so." Howie pointed down at the corpses.

"I think you're right, Cole. They have armor and weapons with decoration. That means a culture. Generational, not manifested." Cole walked over to Roxy, who was prying one of the crystals out of the drop harnesses along with a Starlit temple guardian who had collected several. She pushed it toward Cole. The pinkish crystal drifted lazily through the air, rather than arcing like a tossed stone. Cole caught it, then looked at the distant island.

"Guess this is how they get those mountains to float. What is it?"

"Try licking it," said Howie. Cole raised an eyebrow. Howie shrugged and held his hand out.

"I'll do it, can't hurt me." Cole handed off the crystal and Howie touched the tip of his tongue to it and then spit on the ground.

"Blegh. Thought so. It's salt."" Salt?" asked Roxy.

"Okay, magic salt."

"Let's link back up with the priest," said Cole.

"Howie, Alexa, overwatch on the plaza. Let me know if we get more dragons." It turned out that the priest had come to them. Ashfeather emerged from the temple with Moriarty.

"They'll not return for some time," he said.

"A storm is coming. The Thunderwinged must take shelter. Come, now that the danger has stilled I will take you to He Who Draws Salt from the Earth." Cole followed Ashfeather as the frail avian shuffled back into the temple, leading them deeper into the stone structure. The walls were carved with drawings similar to those on the Dragonguard weaponry, again reminding Cole of Mayans or Aztecs. They depicted warriors and hunters battling monsters.

One appeared to show a formation of Starlit aircraft, inset with the small, pinkish crystals. As they passed deeper, they met Moriarty and Nona, and all moved to one side of the corridor so that a trio of Starlit could drag one of the dragonguard corpses the opposite direction. Cole twisted his head to watch them go as he passed.

"A pair of them tried to sneak into the temple through a back entrance," said Moriarty.

"Probably trying to assassinate the Saltpeak god. Blink and I took care of them."

"This clutch is brazen indeed, to attack the temple directly," said Ashfeather.

"If you had not been here, they might have reached the sanctum." They reached an antechamber with braziers burning that did very little to stave off the chill in the air. The largest Starlit Cole had seen yet, a pair of black-feathered warriors at least a head taller than the rank and file temple guardians, stood before a set of sealed wooden doors; not just barred, but nailed shut from outside. Ashfeather knelt down before them, lowering his beak to the floor.

"What is he doing?" asked Cole.

"Praying," said Moriarty. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Then twenty. About the fifth time Cole looked at his watch, Ashfeather finally rose, turned, and bowed to Cole and Moriarty.

"He Who Draws Salt from the Earth bids you enter his altar. He would discuss the first heavenly warrior, Monica, and her journey. Come. Enter. Pay honor." Cole looked at Moriarty, who wiggled his eyebrows and grinned.

"This is further than I've ever gotten. Ready to meet a god, airborne?"