COLIN POV

Maybe a week later, Sage and I were standing on the beach by Monte Carlo at the forefront of an army as an invading fleet sailed up to our shores. Victoria had gotten tired of waiting. Her island was now only a short distance from ours, easy to cross the Wash with a fleet of ships.

She was sending everything she had. Hundreds of ships floated at anchor a little ways out. They were disembarking units onto smaller dinghies and rafts. I had a wall of turrets along the shore: ice to slow, lightning to stun, fire to burn, straight up force to repel and knock back. Some of mine were tuned for maximum distance. Her ships were anchored just past their range.

I waited until the first boats were loaded, then directed my turrets to start firing. A lance of light shot out from the turrets toward the boats. One connected, sizzling and sending up a plume of water around the boat. It vanished into steam and smoke. The others seemed to bounce off of shields in the air above the boats.

"They're protected," I called, in case anyone hadn't noticed. Sage had an army ten units deep on the beach. Rok'gar was on my left. Like me, most of his work had come before now. I could feel the frustration boiling off him as he stared out.

"Hold tight,” I told him. "We'll hit them with that one-two punch in just a minute."

He growled, bouncing on the balls of his feet, tossing his weapon from one hand to the next. "Let them come. I will rip their throats out."

All our allied minds, even the ones not so keen on fighting, were arrayed and waiting. They understood this was a fight for existence. Victoria had made it clear she was not interested in alliance, only in consumption. There was Abe Lincoln holding a musket next to Socrates with a dagger and a cup of poison. I wasn't sure how he planned to get the enemies to drink. He looked a bit worried. Alexander the Great was arrayed in bronze armor right beside Sergeant York in his old-fashioned greens. Further down the line, Susan B. Anthony was waving a placard and shouting something I couldn’t hear over the sound of my towers.

The boats were still being filled from the ship, but now the first of them were rowing toward us. I fired more shots from my cannons. Again, Victoria's shields caught most, but I destroyed another load of units as they approached us.

"Ranged, ready," Sage called, and our crossbowmen and longbows bent their arrows and fired. We had several squads of muskets, too, but they weren't very accurate at this distance. Sage was holding them in reserve.

Streams of arrows hissed out toward the enemy. Some fell harmlessly into the Wash, swallowed up in white. Others fell among the boats and exploded. Rok'gar had done the arrows himself. These first sets were designed as hull piercers. If we could damage the integrity of the little boats, the Wash would do the job work for us. it did seem to work in a few cases. Four boats broke up and disappeared, their units tossed into the Wash where they floundered for a few seconds before sinking without a trace.

The archers fired again. I fired my cannons at the same time, hoping that Victoria's shields would be stretched thin. We got a few more, but now the nearest boats were almost on us.

"Muskets!" Sage bellowed, and a roar of musket fire went up like a wall. Victoria's units hit the beach. They were dressed like British Grenadiers, carrying muskets with fixed bayonets. They raced toward us as our musketmen fired another barrage. A few fell, and the wash caught them and dragged them down, but most of them made it onto the beach.

"Fix bayonets!" Sage shouted. Our musketmen swapped.

Now my lightning cannons came online, zapping the invaders as they hit the edge of the shore. Some were stunned, but there were so many of them. They threw a barrage of grenades at our retreating forces, taking out dozens of units. Victoria had hundreds of boats with thousands of men, and they just kept coming.

"Archers, fall back," Sage ordered, still calm. She had her lariat out, but she wasn't even bothering to use Tame. She could take at most a dozen of them. And what was the point? There were hundreds, and they were just coming and coming.

"Fall back," I told Rok'gar. "We've lost enough. I'm ordering some more units built at the barracks. You'll need to equip them."

He growled, "A warrior does not retreat from battle."

"Come on, Rok'gar, we need you getting the reinforcements ready,” I told him. He took a deep breath, lowered his weapon, and nodded. Falling back from the beach, he sent me a quick message. "If anything happens to Sage—“

“It'll be over my dead body," I assured him.

I quickly queued up some heavily armored swordsmen and decided it was time to play my trump card, one that hopefully Victoria hadn't taken into account. I ordered the defense turrets surrounding our structures to move forward while at the same time the line on the beach sent death into our enemies. I had another 40 turrets surrounding Monte Carlo that I hadn't dared move until we were certain where Victoria's attack was coming, as well as turrets ringing the rest of the promontory here. Gambler had grown his boundaries so that we now connected with our six allies, forming a star-shaped island. And I had turrets everywhere.

The turrets moved forward to the very edge of the water. Now her ships, which had been anchored just outside their range, were in range. The turrets shifted their aim from the troop-laden boats to the large ships that lay beyond. A wave of cannon balls, lightning bolts, ice blasts and balls of poison fell on Victoria’s ships. Then another.

But still her small boats came. Now with the cannons retargeted more were reaching the shore.

"She strikes here because that's where I am," Gambler told me. "She hopes to decapitate our alliance. However, as long as one of you three is alive, some portion of me will be intact. Fall back and we may rebuild."

"That's a terrible idea," I told him. "If we lose our base, we'll have lost too much. I'm not going to let her take it. Or you." I sent him reassurance and prepared for the next wave to hit the shore.

They just kept coming. Victoria seemed to have more units than I could count. They were targeting our turrets, and one by one, they fell. I tried to repair them, but it took time and attention. I built new ones behind the line of battle, burning our ethereum like water. It didn't matter if we had a reserve at the end of this. What mattered was that we were alive.

Sage threw units into the battle. I had to keep an eye on her army count and train new supply. Meanwhile, back at our base, Rok'gar was sweating and swearing as he equipped the newly born units for battle. I knew that because he kept up a steady stream of messages to us, I think for reassurance to himself that we were still there.

Sage was maneuvering like a general, ordering this group forward, pulling that group back. She had taken out groups of every single type of unit we could make now and knew what they did as well as I. Our allied minds fought hard, easily the match of any squad of units, but there were only so many of them, and we were losing them.

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I called to our alliance, asking for more support. Gambler's allies were hesitant. "What if she attacks us while our units are there?"

"She won't," I said. "She's committed everything here. Help us, and we can smash this attack once and for all."

"I'm sending help," Jolly said.

“Agreed," said Anita. After a moment, the other three signaled that they were also coming to help, but I wasn't certain I believed them. I made a note to take what I could get and threw myself back at it.

After an interminable while, though they were pushing us back at the bank, I started to get hope. "There have been fewer boats landing," I said. "Don't you think, Sage?"

She hesitated as she sent men forward, then nodded. "Agreed," she shouted.

I looked out across the Wash. Hope rose from our fighting and the chaos of the battle. But there were fewer ships still unloading., but many of my towers were gone. We were burning through them, but we had a chance. I shouted the news to our alliance, who replied joyfully. I was already starting to think about our counter. We needed to strike Victoria while she was weak.

And then the smoke parted, and I saw what lay beyond the ships. My heart fell. Eight long, grand dragons. They were hovering over the wash. Not flying, just hovering. They were Asian-style dragons, long like snakes, all different colors, twisting in the wind.

"What the hell are those?" I asked, not expecting an answer.

Gambler gave me one. He sounded sad. "Those are the fragments she's enslaved. She's made them into weapons."

I swore. "All right, Rok’gar, get back here. We've got a fragment fight coming in," and all eight of the dragons dove for our beach. I redirected our remaining towers toward the new enemy. Everything that could target air units fired on the first two. Lightning stabbed, blades of ice sliced.

I swapped out abilities and equipped one I never thought I would have to use: Tower Overload. I selected two of my towers and activated it. They exploded, but the single bolt of electricity they each shot sizzled through the air toward the dragons, zapping into the first two. The pair of dragons screamed and fell into the Wash. They didn’t come back up. But there were still six more, and that ability had a five-minute cooldown.

"I'm out of tricks," I told Sage.

“But I’m not,” she said as she focused her remaining archers on the next dragon. They shot it full of arrows, but it swooped in over our heads and fired a line of acid onto our troops. Everywhere it hit melted instantly.

"Fall back!" I yelled. I grabbed Sage and pulled her farther up the shore, even as she was ordering our units to intercept the dragons. Two more swooped in overhead. They were heading for our base.

I didn't have enough air defense. It was a foolish oversight, but none of our enemies so far had air units, so I'd kept it to a bare minimum, never expecting this.

“I need to get us more firepower! Can we hold them here just a bit longer?”

“Hell yes!” Sage’s eyes blazed fiercely. She raised her lariat.

My heart pounded. "You think you can?"

"I can try," she said grimly. "I won't be able to use the multi-target, but I can try."

I sorely wanted to stay and watch, but I couldn't. I teleported back to our base. Swapping in my Customized Defense Matrix skill, I ran to the nearest tower and manually changed it from ground-focused to air, as long-ranged as possible, and ordered it to fire missiles, not bullets. They had a slow rate of fire, yes, but packed a hell of a wallop. It took a few seconds to reconfigure the tower, then I was racing to the next. Meanwhile, I watched the sky.

Rok'gar had come out of his forge. He was holding a long, thin tube, as tall as he was. It took me a moment to recognize a rocket launcher. "I've got more of these. Can you build me units that'll use them?"

I paused for a second and queued up a battalion of combat engineers. Although they were mostly for building defenses, they had a buff to Use of Engineered Weapons, which this definitely was. Rok’gar peered at me. “Where's Sage?"

"She's taming a dragon."

Rok'gar's mouth hung open. He stared at me, shook his head. "I thought she was the sane one. All humans are crazy." And he disappeared back to meet our new engineers, and I raced to the next tower.

Sage sent back a message, and I could hear the laughter in her voice. "It worked! I'm having to direct it manually. You should see me, Colin. I'm riding a dragon."

"Fuck!" I stopped dead in what I was doing. “Riding a dragon?”

"She's riding a dragon?” Rok’gar said. “Was this your idea?”

“Of course not,” I snapped. “Sage, do you have any idea how dangerous that is?"

"Yes. But Colin, I'm riding a dragon."

I couldn't help her. I had to do what I was doing. I turned back, racing from tower to tower. "Have the army fall back to the base. We need to lure them in."

"I'll get them over there," Sage promised.

Rok'gar's new squad of engineers hurried out of the barracks, each carrying a rocket tube. I set them up just behind the towers. I had moved everything we had into a line between our town and the beach shore. If the dragons swooped in from the back, they could lay waste to us from there. That's why I was counting on Sage to lead them into a trap.

Our defenders were racing back toward the safety of our base. I watched them come. Victoria's army scrambled after them, badly depleted now, and four dragons danced overhead, swooping down and shooting at our people. Some of the allied minds ran in. I spotted Plato and Abe Lincoln, but many of them, I feared, were lost.

I wasn't worried about that. I was worried about Sage. As I raced from tower to tower, my eyes searched the sky, looking for her dragon. It would be the one marked in green as an ally. And here it came, behind the others, looping, whirling, diving, driving them forward with flame breath. There was Sage atop it, whooping and hollering, with one hand against its neck, the other raised high like a cowboy riding a bucking bronc. Her face and hair were lit from behind by the white-purple glow of this place.

I stood stock still. Rok'gar came up behind me and thumped me in the head. "Less staring, more fighting," he snapped. "Rocket men, fire!"

The engineers dropped to a knee, raising their tubes. A barrage went off all at once, aimed at the dragons. The missiles shot forward, leaving little smoke trails in the air behind them as they raced for the dragons. I watched in glee. My towers stabbed up with lightning, ice, and fire, converging on the nearest pair. The dragons were hit with forty or fifty different things at once. They fell, crashing down on the army below, most of which unfortunately was ours, but some was theirs. My units stopped fleeing and turned to butcher the dragons.

"Again," I ordered, cueing up any tower that hadn't already shot for the second. The rocket men fired. I fired. Sage dove in with her dragon, adding acid breath to the mix. The other two fell, and I cheered triumphantly as Sage swooped overhead.

"That's only six," Rok'gar bellowed. "Seven with the one Sage is on. Where's the eighth?"

Sage pointed. I couldn't see, but she was pointing back out to sea. "It's fleeing! Victoria's fleet is leaving!"

"Mop up everything on the beach," I ordered. "We should be able to claim the ethereum from the ones we kill. We need to build a counter-army now. She's overextended. Clearly, she threw everything she had at us. How long can you keep that thing Tamed, Sage?"

She dropped it down to the beach and smiled. “I Domesticated it. He’s going in my second pet slot."

"You can make that a pet?" So far, she had only Domesticated one of the crabs we'd killed when taking over Monte Carlo on Gambler's behalf. She had two more slots, but said she was saving them for something good.

"I sure can." Her smile faded. "It takes a lot of ethereum to have it out. Like ten ethereum per minute. So I'm going to put him away as soon as we get this cleaned up."

I laughed. Sage wasn't the one who did the unit building. "Ten ethereum a minute for something that effective is cheap," I said. "And once we conquer Victoria, it's going to be downright free."

"Before you put it away, I wish to examine it," Gambler said. "Land it here by my shell."

Sage landed the dragon by the mollusk's shell as I took over, ordering the army to finish off Victoria's units. I also immediately reset all of our defenses, just in case we were wrong and she had another army waiting to go. I didn't think she did, though. She wouldn't have thrown in her captured fragments if she wasn't desperate to end this battle.

I was busy queuing up orders for boats and units for the invasion when Gambler spoke to us again.

"We must strike hard and fast. Victoria has support from a Dominator. That's how she was able to weaponize these fragments against us. Usually, if a fragment cannot come to an accord with another, it must merely consume it. To twist and to turn these into weapons requires Dominator technology." He indicated the ring around the dragon's neck that Sage had been holding onto. "That is Dominator work.”

“Can you remove it?"

"When Sage puts it into her storage, that should do it." Sage wrinkled up her nose, concentrating. A moment later, the dragon disappeared, leaving behind the ring.

"Well," I said, studying it. "That puts an interesting spin on things."

"I suggest we move up our timetable," Gambler said, "before her allies have time to react."