Chapter 63

  The {voidstalker} loomed over the battlefield like an iron sky, delivering death to everything within a ten-mile radius. Peals of energy came down from its hull like great showers of superheated sparks, tearing up swarms of mutts with every strike, whether they be aerial or bound to the surface. Only the mutt hydras were resilient enough to endure the rain of molten electricity. They healed too quickly to sustain permanent damage.

  Dalex didn’t have to direct the {voidstalker’s} attacks. Now that it was close enough to see through the mutt distortion, Seventh handled all of the targeting. Still, so close to the surface, the {Newton’s hammers} lost their oomph. They still hit the ground with a powerful smack, but no more than a large conventional bomb. Dalex quickly stopped calling for them, saving that resource for another time. The {voidstalker’s} other skills more than made up for their loss.

  But even with the powerful vessel settled right on top of the mutts, it wasn’t enough. Seventh’s targeting was not perfect, especially at the edges of the {voidstalkers} range. Packs of mutts spilled past her defenses, and the mutt hydras simply trundled through, only marginally slowed down if she managed to destroy a foot or a leg.

  And the mutts just kept coming. This was taking too long. What was happening to Batulan-bar?

  How was Hitasa? Was she in danger? Since he met her, Dalex had always been there to protect her. She was strong, he knew that, but personal strength could only get a person so far.

  Dalex soared back and forth under the {voidstalker’s} barrage of fire, cleaning up whatever Seventh couldn’t touch. He popped the mutt hydras as quickly as he could. Though the {voidstalker} had access to the {creation’s split} spell, Dalex hadn’t given Seventh permission to use it. He didn’t want her blanketing the entire region with [nuclear bombs]. Thus, the hydras were all Dalex’s responsibility.

  The local human Deldloo still fought on the ground. His village was surrounded by craters and burning land, but he had managed to keep any mutts from setting foot inside the village proper. Dalex had stopped paying careful attention to him, but every time he checked back to see if the man was still alive, Dalex found more mutt corpses. Deldloo seemed incredibly powerful by Gaia Eta standards. Dalex wondered just what he was doing out here, living among elves and beastkin in “squalor.”

  Dalex dropped by the village again to pop another mutt hydra that was getting too close. A second was a few miles distant, making its way toward the village, but it would take some time to arrive. Dalex used that chance to {fly} around the perimeter, blowing away the {voidstalker’s} leavings.

  But he miscalculated.

  By the time he finished clearing out the perimeter and came back to the village, one mutt hydra had made more progress than he expected. It was too close to the village for Dalex to safely pop it with a {creation’s split}. Deldloo—Dalex had taken to just calling him Loo at this point—and his home would be consumed in the explosion.

  Dalex sighed. The buildings would have to go. He projected his voice again so the human would hear him. “Get out of there, Loo. You’re too close.”

  But the man didn’t move. He stood his ground, facing down the mutt hydra. Dalex was just about to go down and snatch him away forcibly when he heard Loo’s voice, surprising given the man was too far away to be heard under normal circumstances.

  “Stay where you are, Dalex of the Expedition Seven!” he shouted. “I will handle this one.”

  Dalex frowned. Loo seemed perfectly capable of handling a few mutts on his own, but the man was delusional if he thought he could tangle with the hydra variant. He must have seen the sheer force it took to defeat one.

  “Forget it,” Dalex called, descending toward him. “You can’t—”

  Wait, was Loo a little bigger than he had been before?

  Dalex stopped in the air and used {far sight} to get a closer look. Sure enough, the man had noticeably grown in size, and he was still growing larger, bursting out of his clothing. His skin looked different as well, almost scaly.

  “Oh,” Dalex said.

  Loo’s voice rang out over the battlefield. “You are not the only one here capable of great magic.”

  The man grew and grew, and the scales became more pronounced, turning a bright crimson red. His legs became thicker, and both his feet and hands sprouted claws the size of Loo’s human form. A long and wickedly pointed tail snaked out of his backside. An enormous pair of wings unfurled from his shoulder blades. And all at once, Loo was no longer shaped like a man at all, but had taken on his true form.

  “Oh, damn!” Dalex said.

  The dragon Deldloo, now of a size equal to the mutt hydra, crashed into his six-headed foe. The two giant beasts clawed and bit at each other. The hydras teeth glanced off Loo’s armored scales, while Loo’s claws tore great furrows in the hydra’s skin, coating him in its gray blood.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Dalex circled around them, watching the brawl unfold.

  “I had my suspicions about his true nature,” Balgoth said from the compartment behind Dalex.

  “Oh, hush,” Dalex said. “You had no idea.”

  Loo opened his jaws wide and latched them around the base of one of the hydra’s heads. With a mighty tug, he ripped the head away as if he were pulling a weed from loose dirt, even bringing the roots with it in the form of veins and arteries that dangled from the bottom of the neck. More gray blood rained down on Loo’s body, covering his crimson scales.

  “That’s nasty,” Dalex said.

  All he heard from Balgoth’s compartment was furious note taking. A bit of hope surged over Dalex’s fears. With a powerful dragon on his side, perhaps he could round all of these mutts up and be back to Batulan-bar, to Hitasa, in a matter of minutes.

  But of course, the mutt hydra’s head grew back. Loo let the severed appendage fall to the ground and went on grappling with the near-immortal beast. While they fought, Dalex continued his work of cleaning up all the other mutts, popping another three mutt hydras trying to skirt around the {voidstalkers} zone of destruction. He kept close tabs on Loo the entire time, finding it difficult to tear his attention away from the brawl.

  “What on Earth is he doing living out here?” Dalex asked.

  “Perhaps he takes pleasure in torturing the peasants,” Balgoth suggested.

  “But it seemed like he cared about them. He and the villagers were fighting together before I showed up.”

  Dalex put his confusion aside for the moment. Something strange was happening to Loo. Trails of wispy smoke emanated from his hard outer layer, bleeding off of him like steam, but only from the places where the mutt hydra’s blood had touched him. Both he and the hydra reared up to claw at each other. Loo tore a great gash down the hydra’s stomach, spilling its innards all over the ground. The hydra struck second, unperturbed by losing some of its guts, and managed to scrape through the blood-covered scales of the dragon.

  Loo let out a howl of pain that became a deafening roar of fury. He flapped his wings once and leapt back from the hydra, landing just short of one of the houses on the village’s outskirts. The roof of the building partially collapsed.

  The dragon’s body glowed with light from beneath its scales, burning away some of the hydra blood coating them. But much of the blood remained, almost appearing as if it had permanently stained Loo gray in some places. Bits of matter were falling away from the dragon. Dalex couldn’t be sure if it was blood or something else.

  The light beneath Loo’s scales became blinding, and he let forth a rush of fire from his jaws, smothering the mutt hydra with a continuous torrent of blue flame. The blast burned straight through the hydra’s body, cutting it in half and slicing off three of its heads.

  Dalex realized he was cheering and pumping his fist in the air. The {celestial chariot} celebrated along with him, perfectly mimicking his excitement. It was still projecting his voice as well, so Loo could probably hear Dalex’s encouragement.

  The dragon charged forward again before the mutt hydra could fully pull itself back together. Loo clawed apart a fourth head and bit away a fifth, leaving the hydra with only a single noodle remaining.

  But Loo wasn’t fast or vicious enough. More heads erupted from the hydra’s neck stumps. Before its body could be fully cleaved in half, it stitched itself back together, becoming one whole creature again.

  And something was definitely wrong with Loo. Where the hydra’s blood coated him, his scales and skin were sloughing off in enormous piles of melted meat and keratin. His chest moved in and out with labored breaths.

  “Oh no,” Dalex said.

  There was nothing Dalex could do to help the dragon. The only way he knew to kill a mutt hydra was to vaporize it in one strike, and a {creation’s split} would almost certainly kill Loo at the same time, especially in his apparently weakened state. Any other spell Dalex might cast would be totally ineffective against the hydra.

  But the fight had not yet left Loo. He leaned into the hydra, pushing it away from the village while he continued to claw at its rapidly regenerating heads. The hydra bit at him, latching onto the base of Loo’s neck with one of its heads. The attached head thrashed around, drawing gouts of red blood from within the dragon.

  “Oh, shit,” Dalex whispered.

  “DRAKONFEER!” Loo roared in an almost human voice.

  The hydra continued to claw and bite, tearing off one of the dragon’s wings.

  “MEANS!” Loo continued, screaming so loud it threatened to burst Dalex’s eardrums.

  The dragon pushed and pushed, using all of its strength to move the hydra as far from the village as possible.

  “YOU!”

  The hydra dug a claw into Loo’s chest and dragged it down to his belly, disemboweling the dragon with one mighty blow. The light went out of Loo’s eyes, and he slumped against the hydra, no longer pushing. The sky above Loo and the hydra glowed a soft orange.

  Still, Loo let out one last roar, quieter than the others.

  “Burn!”

  As the dragon slipped off the hydra’s body, slamming into the ground, the light in the sky grew in intensity. It built above the clouds, near the nose of the {voidstalker}. Soon, a second sun lit up the cloud layer, and then it descended on the hydra in a wide cylinder of pure fire. The spell was utterly silent for a moment, and then air rushed into the fire and it became chaotic, swirling around in a maelstrom twice the size of the largest F5 tornado.

  The fire lasted for thirty seconds, burning the air and ground in a continuous inferno. Seventh even moved the {voidstalker} away from the blast, stating it was damaging the [stealth coating] on the vessel.

  When the spell finally dissipated, there was no sign of either the mutt hydra or Loo. Only a dark spot remained, charred as black as the astral void. No hydra heads. No dragon corpse. Not even bones. Though Loo had managed to push the hydra far enough away that the spell had not touched his village.

  The battlefield went silent. The ever-present din of the {voidstalker’s} engines continued, and so did its constant barrage of fire against the mutts, but Dalex did not hear it. If Balgoth was still scribbling in her notebook, he couldn’t hear that either.

  He left the site of Deldloo’s death to continue cleaning up the other mutts. More hydras appeared and he blew those away with a single use of {creation’s split} each. The {voidstalker} went on laying waste to the swarm.

  Dalex was not sure what to make of what he had seen. His first dragon encounter had not been what he imagined, and Loo had not died in any way he would have expected. Why had he lived among the people of this small village? Why had he sacrificed himself to save a handful of empty buildings? Were other dragons hiding among the people, disguised as humans?

  Deldloo had been powerful. That final spell had nearly matched {creation’s split} in terms of raw destructive ability. And yet the dragon had not been able to save himself.

  Dalex popped another mutt hydra while his mind ruminated on the issue. For once, another hydra did not come onto the battlefield as a replacement.

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