“Missa Somnolenta!” called the lead rider, and waves of green magic rolled out from the Z-shaped sigil he crafted on his palm. I heard thumps behind me and turned to see that the humans had all collapsed, including my prisoners. They were snoring and farting peacefully.

  “Gonna have to do better than that, mate,” I growled and began strolling towards the enemy.

  “Shit! Ornamenta Nuda! Revelare Infirmitatum!” he shouted, pointing both palms at me. One hand was hidden by a complex sigil that resembled a grasping hand reaching for me, while the other was an all-seeing eye. My monocle vanished, and I blinked owlishly. I reached up slowly with one hand, just to be sure, and felt around my now bare throat.

  “Dual casting? Interesting. Have you realised badly you just fucked up yet?” I growled as I was forced to shift back into my dragon form by his second spell, scales glinting from the nearby fires. I unleashed Hunter’s Gaze and froze them all in place, then leapt forward, a powerful wing flap letting me cover the distance in a moment, and my jaws closed over his upper body with a snap. Even as I was chewing on this mage, a paw snatched his horse by the throat and slammed the screaming animal to the ground, breaking its neck. I could see his mates on either side. My eyes were set in a somewhat equine configuration, slightly more on either side of my head than the front, like a proper predator ought to have.

  Hydra-Picking-Up-Morsels sent my unbound tails flicking left and right to spear through the chests of the nearest soldiers. In seconds, the attackers had gone from twelve men and women to three left alive. I threw my head back to get my first victim's legs into my mouth, chewed noisily, and swallowed. Behind me, eight tails moved and twisted, a human being impaled on the end of each of them.

  Biomass stored:

  221.5 KG

  Biomass required for evolution: 160 KG

  Nine humans, various classes and levels, slain!

  Gold coins earned!

  One thousand four hundred and thirty gold coins added to the Hoard.

  Horse level 3 slain!

  Gold coins earned!

  Four gold coins added to the Hoard.

  The remaining Chippolata’s wheeled their horses about and kicked their heels against the animal's ribs while I was performing a macabre modern art installation. I twitched the muscles on my back and shot a column of green and orange fire that panned across the three of them. Six more kill notifications pinged in my vision, but I ignored them, just like I ignored the cone of burning dragon fire I’d left in front of me.

  Where the hell was my ascot of passing-as-a-human? I needed that bloody thing! I tried to search the bodies. Had the spell destroyed it? Where was the bloody monocle as well? I glanced around frantically, and a terrible thought struck me. The sigil had looked like a grasping hand. Had it destroyed the items, or just removed them from my person? Had I just eaten my favourite trinkets with the stupid mage, and would I have to wait until I shat them out? Would they survive a passage through my digestive system? Crap. Literally crap.

  I wouldn’t be fertilising the fields from on high for a while, I’d have to sieve through my poop to try and find the bloody things. With an effort of will, I returned to my human form. As long as no one mentioned shopping or tried to steal from me… or threatened anything I thought of as mine… Damn, the list of things that could set me off was worryingly long.

  A fresh pair of trousers and a tunic appeared, and I got myself dressed before moving back to check on my allies. The civilians and the prisoners were all out cold, snoring peacefully. The soldiers were twitching but not properly awake yet.

  I moved over to Johnson and rolled him carefully off the still-warm corpse he was using as a pillow. I shaped my fingertips into claws and snipped the bolt in his shoulder as close to his armour as I could. I didn’t dare to pull it out; he was squishy, and yanking bolts and arrows out of his wounds would likely cause him to bleed to death in minutes. He was going to bleed to death soon anyway if I didn’t do something.

  “What the hell?” grumbled the nearest soldier, who yawned as I kicked him awake.

  “You all went sleepy-bo-bo’s. Mage put you out. I need to get the captain back to town. Call your troops back and get the prisoners and civilians out safely,” I snapped. He opened his mouth to answer back, and I shot him a purple-eyed glare. He swallowed audibly.

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  “Sir, yes, sir!” he barked and began to wake his friends up. He was a lot less gentle when he woke up the prisoners. I knelt and scooped the captain up in a princess carry; the weight of his body and armour meant nothing to me.

  “Get the civilians back alive. Kill the prisoners if they give you any shit,” I called, suppressing an evil grin as the handful of conscious prisoners went pale.

  I bounded back to the town, leaving a cloud of dust in my wake. As I approached the walls, I heard a dozen thwangs as crossbow bolts were launched my way, and I spun round to take the handful of accurate ones on my back rather than using the good captain as a human shield like I ought to have done.

  I leapt onto the walls, paused for a second to punt Reg off to one side with a flick of my leg as he tried to reload his crossbow, and then sped through town to the only place I could think of in this situation. I kicked Mordechai the mad barber-surgeon's door open and staggered in. I dumped my burden on the couch, startling the kid, who leapt up and ran to the door to the back room.

  “Master!” he yelled as he swung the door open and disappeared inside. I reached around and started pulling out the arrows I could reach, then dropped them on the floor.

  “Mordechai! Got an injured man! Get your arse out here!” I shouted.

  He appeared, shrugging into his lab coat and adjusting his multi-lensed glasses.

  “What happened? Bring him through into the back!” he snapped, and I fought down an urge to eat the arrogant human trying to order me about, then picked Johnson back up. I shouldered the door aside as it swung closed behind Mordechai and paused. It looked like a mad scientist's laboratory.

  Glass tubes were filled with murky liquids, and things moved in their depths that I had no interest in investigating further. Rows of gleaming tools, all dedicated to the single function of parting flesh and bone, were racked in neat lines along one wall.

  “Put him on the table, face down.” I did as asked with a snarl, and far less gently than I probably should have done.

  “Fix him. And don’t take anything off you don’t need to. Pull out the bolt and stop the bleeding,” I ground out.

  “Gedrik, fetch me the tinsnips.” Mordechai rolled up his sleeves, pulled a pair of clips from his pocket, and snugged them around his arms to keep the sleeves in place. “Ah, thank you, boy.”

  The surgeon started at Johnson's waist and quickly cut the back plate from bottom to top. It took some work to slide it off the stub of the arrow sticking out of his back, but Mordechai managed it without disturbing the wound.

  “Boy, get an iron in the fire, quickly. A number seven, I think.” Mordechai looked up at me, and the lenses flicked back from over his eyes, and for the first time, they looked to be normal-sized, and the contrast with the massive orbs I was used to seeing was shocking. “He’s going to buck when I pull it out, and he’s too strong for the boy to hold down. Help me?”

  Gedrik had selected a shiny silver rod from an array of similar tools and placed one end in the hot stove in the far corner of the room. I stepped up and slipped my hands inside the clam-shelled armour to brace Johnson’s chest and keep him firmly in place.

  Mordechai leaned in close, his glasses flicking lenses in and out as he examined the injury from all sides. He hmm’d and haw’d for a couple of minutes.

  “You can see the blood pooling beneath him, right?”

  “Nothing we can do about that la-” he paused as he glanced up and saw my face, “-sir. He’ll make it or he won’t. We pull this thing out too soon and he’s dead for sure. It’s spelled. He’ll stay unconscious till it’s removed. How are we doing, boy?” he called over his shoulder.

  “Eam Retuliant!” Gedrik muttered, and the stove flared brightly. “Few more seconds, master.”

  “Ok. Hold him steady.” Mordechai picked a pair of pliers and slipped them into the wound on either side of the shaft. As he closed the handles, the tip spread wider and wider, pulling the wound open. Once he was satisfied, he started turning a cog at the end of one of the handles, and a secondary set of jaws slowly closed against the wood impaling Johnson. “This is going to hurt, and he’ll wake up as soon as the spell breaks. Are you ready?” He gave me a very serious look.

  “Yes.” I pressed down firmly on Johnson's shoulders.

  Without any further ado, he worked the pliers slowly from side to side, gradually easing them backwards. Johnson groaned in pain and started to fight against my grip, but I was too strong for him. His shoulders stayed pinned in place, but his legs began to kick and thrash.

  “Kelsy!” he wailed as the spell on the arrow broke. “Ah shit, Kelsy!” He had gone very still, despite Mordechai still easing the arrow out of him. “Bob?”

  “I’m here.”

  “What happened to the rest of the Stompers? Are they alive?” His pain tolerance was impressive.

  “As far as I know. They all got put to sleep, I ate–deliberated–with the enemy and woke the lazy buggers up. They should be coming back with the prisoners and the survivors. I brought you ahead as you were dying.”

  “And now I’m fine?” he asked hopefully. I watched as Gedrik approached with a glowing brand and winced. I pushed down even harder. This would be so much easier if I could just use my tails to cocoon the idiot.

  “Nearly! This might sting a bit!” Mordechai chortled as he took the glowing metal from the boy and plunged the tip into the open wound on Johnson’s shoulder.

  I had never heard a sound like it. His scream was shrill and girlish, and it was in time with the bucking and kicking as his body convulsed. Smoke, steam, and the smell of burnt pork filled the air as the surgeon pulled the no longer quite so hot rod out of the man’s back.

  “Florence wept! By all the gods!” he gibbered as he fought for self-control. His limbs stilled, the spasms passing, but smaller twitches continued to force me to lean down to hold him in place. Minutes passed as Johnson’s breath steadied. Gedrik and Mordechai avoided meeting my eyes as they cleaned the wound, making Johnson shudder as they swabbed it out with some foul-smelling, lime green solution.

  Eventually, the pair helped Johnson to sit up, carefully sliding the remains of his plate armour off his front after they snipped the straps they’d missed in the urgency from before.

  “Dammit.” Johnson tried to roll his shoulder but winced and stopped. His right hand came up and rubbed gently around the injury. “Thanks for getting me out of there, Bob. What was the situation like when you– WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO YOUR EYES?”