Chương 74: Reborn as the Dragon — Chapter 74 - Hunting Time — Steel and Blood

A thunderclap of a dragon roar split the night like lightning, jolting every creature in Silvermoon Forest awake. A cluster of bats tumbled dizzily to the ground, then shrieked and thrashed back into the air in a flurry of wings. The drowsy human soldiers jolted upright. Weimons tore himself from his afterglow. Mei Magogoko, who hadn't felt much of anything, blinked at the darkness.

"What was that?!" Weimons yanked up his pants and ran out of the tent. The night was black as ink. The moonlight barely reached the ground. WHOOSH, A dark shape screamed past overhead.

"It's the Black Dragon! Alert!!" Weimons spun toward the shadow flashing across the full moon, bellowing at the soldiers around him. The whooshing came again. The Black Dragon had dropped low. It was diving.

"HISSSS—" Pale green dragonfire poured across the sky and swept through the camp in a torrent.

"Scatter! Spread out, don't bunch together!" The soldiers scrambled in every direction, completely off-balance. Some were already burning. Pale bluish-green flames crawled up their bodies as they screamed and ran for water, and in their blind panic, they stumbled into their comrades and set them alight too. WHOOSH, Su Nian banked once through the sky and dove again. He was doing it deliberately. Herding the humans, pushing them toward the Kobold traps. His head tilted back slightly.

Pale green magma bubbled up along his jaws. A low, wet gurgling rose from his throat. He picked his target, a knot of soldiers straining to push a ballista into position. He let loose. HISSSS, A streak of bluish-green fire carved straight through the crowd. Dozens of arrows came back at him, snapping against his belly and wings. They left faint white scratches. Su Nian barely registered the impact. He was not the same weak dragon he'd been. The camp sprawled too wide to blanket with one breath.

Each pass only scorched a small patch. And these soldiers weren't raw recruits, either. You didn't get assigned to a dragon-slaying expedition unless you'd earned it. These were veterans, hardened, disciplined men. And Weimons commanded real respect. So after the first wave of chaos, the army pulled itself together. They tightened into a square formation and withdrew from the sections of camp still burning, leaving the fire behind them. More than a dozen ballistae rolled out into position.

Su Nian climbed higher immediately. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. He remembered those machines. Back at the Anlius palace, when he'd taken Anna, those same ballistae had nearly killed him. The bolts were as thick as a man's forearm, barbed, trailing ropes. One solid hit would ruin his night. Charging in now would be stupid. While Su Nian watched the soldiers, Weimons watched the sky. He'd lost over three hundred men.

Many of the survivors were burned. Barely a dozen ballistae remained; the rest had gone up in flame.

"This isn't the same Black Dragon." Weimons' voice was flat and hard. The one he'd seen before had a skull face, skin stretched over bones, and nothing in its arsenal but acid breath. This was different. This dragon's muscles coiled under its scales like iron cable. Its body was larger, its neck short and thick, its jaws broad and heavy. From its skull rose a crown of curved demonic horns. An aberrant Black Dragon. Aberrant meant dangerous. Aberrant meant trouble. Weimons didn't understand it.

Anlius was a backwater kingdom. How had two Black Dragons appeared there in succession? What kind of cursed luck was this?

"Gougouzi." He kept his voice level.

"Next time it dives and winds up to breathe, I need a spell shield, fast. Right now the only things that can actually threaten it are the ballistae and your Fireball. But if it won't close the distance, we can't touch it."

"Oh... okay..." Mei Magogoko nodded, still not entirely back in her own body. The Black Dragon's sudden appearance had knocked the sense clean out of her. In the chaos of the battlefield, she'd caught one glimpse of its eyes, pale gold, carrying nothing but killing intent and cold contempt, and the image had burned itself into her mind. You couldn't understand it from a description. You could know, intellectually, that Black Dragons were terrifying. But standing in front of one was something else entirely.

It was like being shoved into the lion enclosure at a zoo and left there. Every instinct in her body screamed at her to run and never stop. The ground shook.

"RUMBLE—" Deep. Rhythmic. Like an army marching. Weimons had no time to think about it. The Black Dragon was diving again.

"Adjust the ballista angles!" At his order the soldiers cranked the weapons upward, tracking the dragon's movement across the sky. They aimed ahead of its line of flight, intercept the body, not chase the tail. Hit it in the chest and belly if they could. The dragon dropped closer.

"Mei Magogoko, shield — now!" Weimons roared. Mei Magogoko's hands moved on instinct, the words of the spell already leaving her lips. An elemental shield snapped into place, ten meters wide, covering the ballista line. Her other hand had already begun pulling fire together for a Fireball.

"Come on," Weimons growled under his breath, watching the dragon descend, measuring the distance.

"A little closer. Just a little closer. Keep coming, " The Black Dragon reached the edge of effective range. And stopped. Wings spread. It pulled up, climbing again without ever entering the kill zone, casual as a hawk riding thermals. Playing with them.

"Damn it!" Weimons slapped his thigh. He hated the thing's patience. Its intelligence. High above, Su Nian switched to Draconic and called out to his forces.

"All monsters, hit the ballistae. They haven't had time to reset their firing angles."

"Charge in. Wreck them."

"ROAR, " The answer came from every direction at once. Pairs of eyes blinked open in the surrounding brush, hundreds of them, red and hungry, packed so densely together that the undergrowth seemed to breathe. The soldiers felt it before they understood it. Scalps crawling. Hackles rising. The wind picked up. Leaves spun through the night air. The insects went silent.

"Monsters, there are so many monsters, gods above, ""By the Great Emperor Xiwei, what ARE those things?!"

"How, how is this, " The gnolls hit the formation like a wall. The soldiers had seen gnolls before. This was not that. These gnolls stood over two meters tall, their grey manes thick and gleaming, every muscle on their bodies twisted into ropes of hard tissue. Their arms were as thick as a soldier's thigh. Black water pythons coiled around their necks like living scarves.

The lead gnolls rode rock-armored crocodiles, massive animals, low to the ground, moving with a speed that made no sense for their size, covering the distance to the ballista line in seconds. And behind the gnolls came something worse. Blazing Rabbits. Riding spear boars. The boars were enormous, bigger than any warhorse, bristling with tusks, eyes fixed and bloodthirsty. Their backs humped into muscle ridges that a man could hide behind.

And crouched on those ridges sat Blazing Rabbits built like nothing that had ever appeared on a dinner plate, eyes vicious, bodies swollen with muscle that had no business being on a rabbit. The soldiers had half a second to stare. Then the monsters were through the shield and among them. CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. The ballistae shattered. Wood splintered. Metal bent and screamed. The siege weapons went to pieces in seconds.

One Blazing Rabbit, gold chain around its neck, cigarette clenched in its teeth, had already pinned a soldier to the ground and was methodically beating him. Every ballista. Gone. Su Nian bared his teeth in a grin that showed the full length of his fangs. His wings snapped open. He dove.

"Awaken, the hunt begins!"

"Heh heh heh..." ➤ Next: Flashbang