“But how are you going to incubate an egg?” Atrax asked. “You can’t just sit on it until it hatches or keep it tucked into your coat – you’d break it eventually.”
Xander spoke up. “I could probably rune up a little holder for it to keep it warm. Still no guarantee it will hatch though, you know. We don’t exactly know the perfect temperature and conditions for a sea drake egg. We ought to try and emulate the nest as best we can. If there’s more than one, maybe I can set a few different temperatures. But, uh… what would we do if there’s more than one that hatches?”
“We could always sell them,” Graffus offered. “I’m sure there’s a few tamers around that would jump at the chance to get their hands on a baby sea drake.”
“I suppose it’s better than letting the eggs die…” Gabrelle said, thoughtfully.
“Okay then. Seems like we have a plan of action for what to do after we take out the sea drake. But uh, how do we do that?”
The plan was rather straightforward, though Xander wasn’t exactly happy about it. He would be the bait, which, he had to admit, made sense as he was fireproof. He would keep the thing occupied so that Frazay could line up a shot of her entangling vines. Then the rest of the team would engage, doing their best to keep behind the dragon, where it couldn’t breathe flames over them. Atrax would be using his pyrokinetic abilities to help shield the party from any flames that came their way. Xander, of course, intended to try and just fill the dragon full of holes with his rifle, but Frazay had warned him that sea drakes were extremely agile, and he might have a hard time getting a shot off on it. Not only were they agile, but dragons were known for their tough scales, to the point that they were considered to be an upgrade from steel. Xander sensed an opportunity for a new material to add to his repertoire when Graffus had mentioned the scales…
Xander had a backup plan in case Frazay was unable to bind the dragon down, or it took wing, but he’d need the help of his golems. With that in mind, he figured that an extra set of hands, or rather, two extra sets of hands would be helpful. “Where’s Juniper? I think she might come in handy.”
“Oh, she’s in my room,” Atrax answered. “I was having her collate some of my notes into a single notebook. She’s quite handy for rote tasks like that.”
“Makes sense. We should bring her and the other two golems along for extra support. Plus they can carry stuff for us.”
“So we’re settled on the sea drake contract?” Graffus asked the group.
A consensus was quickly reached that they were, indeed, settled on the sea drake, and so they brought the slip up to the desk to receive additional details and register for the contract. Unfortunately, the details were sparse. The only thing that hadn’t been included in the short description of the contract was the specific location of the dragon’s supposed nest.
“You be careful, now,” the man who had registered them for the contract said as they were leaving. “That thing’s killed several fishermen already.”
The mercenaries exited the guild, and decided to split up to do their shopping for the journey. It was only a few days’ worth of travel, but all of them, minus Xander, admitted that they needed to top up on food before they could leave, and each of them had a few other errands they wished to run. Xander didn’t mind, though. It would give him time to make his own preparations.
While the rest of the mercenaries went about their errands – Xander had left Freyja with Gabrelle, so that the cat would get some more time outside – Xander was in the inn, sitting on the floor of his and Gabrelle’s room. Around him were lengths and rolls of steel cable. He’d created a few hundred feet of the stuff, and now was working on some steel javelins which he could attach the cables to. His hope was that, if Frazay’s skill did not work, then he and the rest of the team could use the javelins to pin the beast down. The heads of the weapons were barbed, so that they would not easily pull free once they were embedded. If the drake took to flight, the three golems could be used to hold onto the cabling and act as anchors, reeling it back to the ground. Once the lengths of cable were attached to javelins, ten in all, he engraved a few gathering runes on each weapon so that they would not decay as the golems carried them over the next few days of travel.
It wasn’t long after he finished the javelins that his teammates began to return one by one. Atrax was the first, having only needed to buy food. Frazay was last, coming a full hour later than the rest of the team. She had apparently been scouring the blacksmiths and fletchers in the area to find the highest quality arrows she could.
They had an early supper, putting Freyja up in her stall to eat her meal, before turning in early. They planned to leave by dawn, and put the town behind them in search of the drake. Xander found himself thinking over the contract as he laid in bed, Gabrelle snoring lightly next him. Everyone had seemed so nonchalant about taking a contract to kill a dragon. Large than a gryphon was… pretty large. And it could breathe fire, and it was fast! Had there always been this much room for error in their contracts, or had his experience with death opened his eyes to just how haphazard life as a mercenary could be?
Thinking back, all of the contracts he’d taken had had a significant amount of unknowns. Why did that bother him so much more, now? Mulling it over, Xander started to realize something. He was scared not of being injured himself, but that something might happen to one of his teammates. He’s just found them again, and the prospect of seeing one of them burned to a crisp by some kind of dragon was not something that he wanted to see happen. Could Gabrelle heal burns? Surely she could. If Xander still had lungs he would have taken a deep breath, held it, and then slowly released it in an attempt to calm his overactive mind. Since he couldn’t do that, he tried to at least direct his mind to something productive: thinking about how to kill that dragon even faster.
Most of Xander’s ideas ended up suffering from the same problem that their currently existing plans had: the dragon would be hard to hit. Between that and the fact that he’d never gone up against, or even seen, any type of dragon before, he was at a bit of a loss for what else to do. His best bet would be to remain flexible, he felt, so that he could adapt to whatever came.
That morning, they quickly ate and packed their traveling gear. Freyja and all three golems were collected, and Xander cast [Golemancer] on Juniper, who had now fallen behind on the tally of casts of the ability. He wanted to try and keep his golems roughly equal in terms of ability. He was realizing that after about five casts, the returns of the ability were diminishing, especially considering the mana cost of the ability after so many successive casts on a golem, but he was hoping that there was still something to be gained by stacking so many casts of the ability on his golems.
Freyja was armored up, and showed her excitement to be out on a journey again. The big cat rubbed up against Xander as he contended with her movement while trying to put the armor on, like dressing a squirming child. The golems were holding three javelins and their associated steel cable each as a rolled bundle which their arms were put through, and Xander carried the last one wrapped diagonally across his own chest. He’d explained his backup plan to the rest of the team when they’d questioned the cabling and the javelins, and they’d been pleased with the addition of a backup. Gabrelle had purchased another horse in the city the day before, and was riding it alongside Atrax and Graffus’s horses, and Frazay’s stag. Xander, between his spider legs and his rune powered body, was plenty capable of keeping up with a horse by himself, without even mentioning his wings. Lynx could as well, though Juniper and Atlas would likely be outpaced by a galloping horse.
The streets were much quieter this early in the morning, and the mercenaries quickly found themselves outside the city. Freyja, no longer needing to act as a mount, ranged further away from the party as she burned off some energy, though she returned frequently. The golems trod mindlessly, but efficiently, behind the five mercenaries. They followed the road Northward, where one could see the land slowly rise.
As they rode, and the land began to rise, the shore became obscured by the hills and cliffs that began to take form on the coastline. Taking wing, Xander was able to see that this rise continued beyond site, and that there was a small range of mountains in the distance, hugging the coastline. He could see nothing large in the air or on the ground that would indicate a dragon, though, and relayed his findings to the rest of the team.
“Oh, those mountains?” Atrax had said when Xander inquired about them. “That’s the Shattered Hammer mountains. Legend has that it was formed when a magical weapon was destroyed during a battle between two powerful foes. At this point no one is sure if it was a spat between two gods, some kind of divine artifact breaking, or if it’s just a completely natural range of mountains, but I can tell you that almost no one lives out there. There are quite a few nasty creatures that inhabit those mountains. Well equipped mercenary teams occasionally travel out that way to bring back monsters or their corpses for study or for alchemical purposes, but it sees little travel beyond that. Trade routes make a wide berth around the mountains to avoid anything that lives in the range. Entirely possible that our drake hails from that area.”
There were still two days left before they would reach the cliffs faces that supposedly housed this sea drake, but the mercenaries were taking no chances. It would not do to be ambushed in their sleep by petty brigands or some other creature while on the hunt for a dragon. As such, Xander volunteered to take over the night watches, partly because he didn’t want his teammates to lose out on sleep, but mostly because he was embarrassed at the prospect of entering Gabrelle’s tent in front of the entire team. He knew it was silly, and that Frazay already knew – hell, she might have already told the rest of them and explained it for him. But he still felt quite a lot of trepidation over it. So, he and the three golems slowly patrolled the immediate area of their camp. Freyja came and went through the night, at one point dragging the remains of some strange, winged creature back to the edge of the tents where she finished consuming it.
Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.
The next two days of traveling went without issue. Nothing in the area threatened the decently sized group of mercenaries, golems, horses, and giant cat, and they had yet to see any sign of the drake, though they remained on alert for any movement from above, especially on the third day of travel. Nearing the area on the map that had been marked as the approximate area of the nest, they left the road, which had departed somewhat from the cliffs that made the coastline and started to head for the marked area.
It was there that they finally began to see signs of the drake. There were odd patches of scorched ground amongst the scrub that grew near the cliffs, and other areas of churned dirt, as if a large animal had rolled or rooted in it. Picking up these signs, Frazay took the lead and began to use her tracking skills to zero in on the location of the drake. They tied their horses to one of the few trees in the area, and proceeded on foot, doing their best to remain as quiet as possible. The golems were the least successful of them at being quiet, but with orders to avoid any bushes and patches of scrub that might make noise, none of them managed to alert the drake, which remained unseen. Finally, Frazay held up her hand for them to halt, and they formed a huddle, speaking in hushed tones.
“As best I can tell,” Frazay whispered, “its den must be in the cliffs around here. It’s likely there’s some kind of cave in the cliffs that we’ll have to draw it from.”
“And that’s my job, right?” Xander asked.
“Yes. We’ll all take cover as best we can in the brush and trees and you’ll try to draw the drake out and keep its attention while I try and ground it.”
“Alright. I’ll just wait until I can’t see you guys anymore.”
With that, the party began to hide. The golems were ordered to walk into denser patches of scrub and then lay down while Frazay melted into the landscape and from Xander’s sight due to her abilities. Gabrelle found a tree to crouch behind, obscuring her from line of sight of the cliff face, while Atrax and Graffus both found bushes to shelter behind. Freyja slunk behind a portion of scrubby trees, vanishing from sight. Soon, Xander was the only one out in the open. Looking around, satisfied that his teammates were not immediately noticeable, he moved to the edge of the cliff and thought a moment on the best way to create a loud noise, before settling on something that didn’t require him to drop his rifle, which he’s taken out from his inventory.
Pouring more mana than he ever had before into the runes that he used to mimic speech, he began to yell at an ear-piercing volume. “COME ON OUT, YOU BIG-ASS LIZARD! WE GOT BUSINESS AND FIGHTIN’ TO CONDUCT!”
He waited for a moment for anything to happen. Nothing presented itself to his yell, it seemed. He stepped closer to the edge and looked over, seeing nothing. Taking a step back, he was about to yell again when a flash of blue rocketed up past the cliff’s edge, and Xander was forced to stumble back, dropping his rifle and catching himself with the legs on his pack as what he assumed must have been a tail lashed out and struck him with significant force, even through his armor. Looking up, he could see, undulating and flitting about in the sky above, the sea drake.
It was a classical fantasy blue for a dragon, but that was about where the resemblance ended with what Xander had imagined. First off, Frazay had been… lenient when she described it only a little larger than a gryphon. This thing was long, looking like some combination of a European dragon and a Chinese dragon. If he had to compare it to an animal he’d seen before, it was like a long-tailed lizard, but winged. And giant. Xander estimated the thing to be nearly thirty feet in length.
This drake could not hold still, either. Its two large wings beat furiously, and its entire body managed to undulate, keeping it in constant movement as it zipped back and forth above Xander, like some kind of hellish, reptilian hummingbird. It must have some kind of latent magic, because there was no way in hell something like that should be able to move as it did.
Xander’s thoughts were cut short as he looked up at the dragon above him, as it opened its mouth and bathed him in flame, holding still for the first time since it had appeared – just for a moment – though Xander couldn’t see it through the fire. Frazay took this moment to attempt her shot, but the moment of stillness had already passed, and the creature had returned to undulating even as it breathed more flame at Xander. The arrow passed through the coils of the creature, and alerted it to the presence of other beings on its territory.
Leaving Xander, who the beast assumed to be burnt to a crisp, it darted through the air towards where the arrow had come. Frazay, now revealed as she’d stood to take her shot, began to fire more arrows at the drake as it closed the distance between them with frightening speed. Xander took wing, following the drake as he ordered the golems to stand and move to follow the drake as well. A ball of flame streaked through the air from Atrax as it curved to intercept the drake. It was unharmed, the flames washing harmlessly over its scales, but it served a sufficient distraction to halt the beast for a moment, giving Frazay an opportunity to flee and create more distance, as Xander neared the drake again.
“GET BACK OVER HERE!” He screamed at the thing, pumping mana through his speech runes until they could hold no more. The drake, startled by the noise, as well as the appearance of a foe in the air, turned its attention back to Xander. He was close enough now that he could uncoil the javelin from his chest, and he did so, the cabling dangling below him as it fell to the ground and dragged along as he and the dragon flew circles about each other, similar to two animals circling each other on the ground.
The drake was letting out a deep, guttural hiss, that reverberated within the mercenaries’ armor on the ground. Xander cast the javelin at the beast, trying to speed and guide it with [Improved Ferrokinesis], but the throw went wide as the drake reacted swiftly to the thrown weapon, flitting out of the way with speed that should be impossible for a flying, thirty-foot-long lizard. Xander cursed to himself in his head. He was going to have to get a lot closer to this thing if he was going to be able to bind it up. Frazay was still firing arrows, the ethereal blue streaks marking them as from the bow that Xander had given her, but the few that managed to strike true were deflected by the drake’s scales. The dragon ignored her, still focused on Xander, who it deemed to be the greatest threat due to his ability to take to the sky. Besides Atrax, who had taken cover once again, none of the rest of the team had given away their position.
Xander ordered Atlas to uncoil and throw one of the javelins, not at the drake, but at Xander himself. He caught the projectile with [Improved Ferrokinesis] and guided it into his hand. The drake reacted to this with another bout of flame, which washed over Xander with as much effect as Atrax’s flames had had on the drake. Xander steeled himself mentally. If he could have, he would have taken a deep breath. Then, with a powerful flap of his black wings, he rushed towards the drake. Now that he was closer to the beast, he could see that its mouth, still hanging open from the blast of fire it had spit, was filled with daggerlike teeth, and its claws were similarly sized, curved protrusions from each of the thing’s toes. The drake apparently took this as a challenge and sped towards Xander itself.
The two collided in the air, a flurry of blue scales and black carbon fiber. The drake coiled its long tail around Xander’s torso and clamped its jaws down on his left arm, while Xander plunged the barbed, steel javelin into the scaled flesh that surrounded him, aided by [Shock and Awe]. Letting out a bellow, the drake tightened its coil around him and scrabbled its claws against his armor in an attempt to find purchase, jaws still tightly locked on his arm, attempting to rip it from his body. If he’d still been made of flesh, the drake would have long since succeeded in that attempt. The drakes violent thrashing and constant movement threw cable that dangled from its side this way and that. A particularly violent spasm, as Xander attempted to push the javelin deeper, threw a length of the cable into the air, where it was thrown over the drake’s right wing.
Seeing an opportunity, Xander let go of the javelin, now firmly lodged in the flesh of the drake, and reached out towards the swinging cabling using [Improved Ferrokinesis] once again to draw it into his hand. He pulled tight with his one free arm, forcing the drake’s wing to fold against its side as it struggle to keep flapping its wing. The drake was not able to break Xander’s grip, however, and with only one wing functioning, the two of them began to spiral to the ground, the drake still scrabbling for any purchase on Xander’s armor and trying to rip his arm off.
It was a hard landing for the drake, as Xander managed to end up on top of it as they corkscrewed into the ground. Its hold on Xander’s arm was broken, along with several of its teeth, by the fall. Xander ordered the golems to rush the drake and do their best to plunge more javelins through its scales before the thing could fully recover from its falls. Soon, it was sprouting several more dangling length of cable, which were dutifully being held taught by the three golems.
Panicking, the beast released its coiled grip of Xander, who quickly distanced himself from its whiplike tail, still holding onto his length of cabling. Between him and the three golems, the drake was nearly pinned to the ground as it bucked and flailed, belching flames at its metal tormentors. The rest of the team moved from their positions of cover and sprinted to the rear of the reptilian monster, where they reconvened with Xander, whose position put him near the near of the thing himself.
Frazay began to fire the steel arrows she’d purchased in town at the drake, her abilities allowing her to penetrate the scales that protected the monster. The drake thrashed and bellowed more, but was unable to fully turn its head to face Frazay or the other mercenaries. Atlas’s javelin had struck it in its long neck, and the cabling the golem now held tight in its hands restricted the movement of the drake’s head.
Graffus darted past the lashing tail of the drake, rotating his hammer so that the pick end was forward, and struck the haunch of one of the drake’s back legs. The pick ploughed into and then past the scales of the monster, and then into the bone of the leg, shattering it as the leg buckled, dropping the beast to the ground as it struggled to get its other back leg back under it.
Between being turned into a pincushion by Frazay, and being beaten to a pulp by Graffus, the drake finally succumbed to its multiple injuries, collapsing to the ground. Dropping his length of cable, Xander retrieved his rifle from where he’d dropped it and ensured the beast was dead with a shot through its head. Gathering together, Graffus and Frazay breathing heavily, they planned their next step forward.