Kaz leaped backward just as the owner of the green eyes lunged forward, revealing the largest fuergar Kaz had ever seen. Like the lopo, this beast was larger than Kaz would have thought it could possibly grow. Its body was as long as his, with a tail that doubled that length. Its protruding incisors were copper mixed with the deep gray of iron, as was its fur, and Kaz knew from experience that iron fuergar were among the most difficult to beat. Their iron-sheathed bones were dense and resilient, making them hard to damage with a physical weapon.
The dragon hissed at something behind Kaz, and he glanced back just in time to see that he was now encircled by smaller fuergar. They, too, had their teeth bared, and he knew that they’d take any opportunity to attack. He couldn’t retreat, and the large fuergar would tear him to shreds if he stayed.
Kaz glanced around desperately. He had his knife, his dragon, and at least a dozen attackers surrounding him. The light cast by his orb flashed in the large rodent’s eyes as it dashed forward again, and Kaz pushed power into his legs so he could jump out of the way. As he moved, he caught a glimpse of a spot where ore had been eaten away from the area above, leaving a sort of ledge overlooking the open area below.
Normally, he’d never be able to jump up to the ledge, but he already had ki empowering his muscles, so he bounded forward, having to spin past snapping teeth as he went by the lead fuergar. His claws caught at the edge of the projecting shelf of stone, and he pulled himself up and onto his belly with a grunt. The dragon clung to his fur, its wings flapping as it tried to maintain its balance, and he reached up to steady it as he scrambled to his feet, almost dropping the knife he’d barely managed to hang onto in the process.
The fuergar paced along at the bottom of the wall, its chest rumbling with a low growl as it swayed back and forth. Smaller fuergar tried to scramble along narrower ridges in the wall, getting close enough to lunge at him, but after he cut one and barely missed another, they became more wary.
He needed to deal with this, and he needed to do it quickly. If the rodents decided to all rush him at once, there was no way he’d win, and it was only a matter of time before they built up the courage to do so. Briefly, he wondered if he could turn his ki ball into a weapon like Gaoda’s, but he had no idea how it was done, and he’d probably only get one chance to do it wrong. Plus, while he’d had enough ki to get up here, his channels were now drained, and he’d either have to push his core to spin energy out faster, which required focus he couldn’t spare, or drain himself to exhaustion, which would likely make him faint.
The large fuergar lunged at him, hissing, and its claws scratched at the wall as it tried to scramble up. One paw caught the lip of stone, and Kaz stamped his foot on it as hard as he could, producing a squeak and the sound of the giant rodent falling back to the floor. Kaz dared to peek over the edge again, only to see teeth coming straight for his face as the beast leaped at him again.
He yelped, pulling back, then felt sharp teeth catch at the fur on his leg, scraping the skin beneath. He swung at the smaller fuergar which had crept up on him while he was distracted, leaping from one of the precarious projections in the wall. His knife sliced through it just as it had the first one, and he shoved the parts off his ledge with a paw.
If he had hoped to distract the monstrous creature below with an offering of fresh meat or a warning that the same could happen to it, it didn’t work. The thing just growled louder, and he heard its claws scraping at the wall with renewed vigor. Three toes scrabbled at his ledge, and he kicked them off again, but eventually it was going to get both paws up there, and then he’d be done.
He needed something. A distance weapon, a plan, an escape route… just something. His channels had refilled a bit, so he pushed energy into his light, making it pulse a bit brighter so he could see what was around him.
He had definitely found the fuergar den. Had, in fact, wandered straight into the heart of it, instead of finding the very edge, as he’d hoped to do. He’d gotten too used to having the humans there to take care of any creature that might be foolish enough to attack them.
The increased radius of his light revealed six mother fuergar, crouching in their nests, mewling pink and copper babies crowded around them. Most of the babies didn’t even have fur yet, so there was no way they could run. No, he’d just blithely stepped into the one place the usually cowardly rodents would fight to defend.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered to the dragon as he stamped on the iron fuergar’s paw yet again. The thing was horribly persistent, and he could see that his safe haven was now completely surrounded by rodents clinging to the tiniest ridges of stone in the walls to each side of him. He couldn’t even jump over the fuergar below, because the large one would just snap him from the air as he passed.
The dragon bit his ear. Not hard, but enough to be painful, and he yelped as he slashed at another encroaching fuergar. He tried to glare at the distracting reptile, but he didn’t have the attention to spare.
“What was that for?” he demanded, and over the bond that linked their minds, he saw the light rune. It hovered in his mind’s eye for an instant, then faded again.
Kaz struck at a particularly fast fuergar, cutting it, but not managing to kill it, and it latched its teeth into his arm. It was a small bite, but as his blood began to flow, he knew it was the beginning of the end. Each bite, each wound, would weaken him, until he grew too slow to keep the large fuergar from his ledge, or simply fell to its waiting jaws.
Again, the light rune intruded into his mind as he cut away the rodent that was hanging on his arm. He growled as he knocked two more beasts away from him and back down to the floor below.
“What?” he asked the dragon, sending frustration toward their link.
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He got frustration right back, as the rune brightened, then flashed in his mind. He blinked, then shook his head. “I don’t have enough ki left,” he told the dragon. “It’s refilling, but not enough.”
The tail wrapped around his neck tightened, and the dragon’s body plastered itself against him. The thread between them shuddered as half a dozen more filaments joined the first, then merged into a cord at least three times as strong as it had been. Power pulsed down it, refilling Kaz’s channels as he felt the dragon’s body go limp. It started to fall from his shoulder, but Kaz caught it, setting it gently on the ledge between his feet even as his body hummed, full and overfull of ki in a way he hadn’t been since he’d accidentally tasted the parent dragon’s blood.
His eyes shifted into that other sight, and he caught a glimpse of a spinning core in the leader fuergar’s belly as it lunged for him again. A few other fuergar also had cores, but theirs were just faint sparks beside the blaze of the largest fuergar.
His breath caught as all the power the dragon had given him began to fall away into the greedy emptiness of his link to the seed, and he pulled it back, pushing it into his muscles, then into the glowing ball of light at his shoulder.
Light.
He thought he’d never seen such a brilliant flash of illumination. His eyes burned, and his vision went dark in the aftermath, but pained squeaks from all around him indicated that he wasn’t alone in that. His normal vision was eclipsed by other, and all he could see were the guiding lights of the core-sparks all around him.
His hands moved faster than they ever had before as he yanked the carved blue stone tip from his knife. A flash of blue ki arced from his fingers to the stone, and he blinked, but he didn’t have time to think about it as he dropped the little piece of stone next to the dragon’s limp body. The small plink it made as it struck the stone seemed to echo in his overpowered ears, and then he was launching himself through the air.
His blade struck true, stabbing deep into the large fuergar’s body. He didn’t strike at its head or heart, knowing its iron-reinforced skull and ribcage would turn any normal blade away. While his knife was far from normal, he couldn’t be certain it would slice through thick iron-coated bones as easily as it had small copper ones, and his instincts told him that there was a better place to attack.
The tip of his knife thrust into the fuergar’s core, shattering it into a hundred smaller sparks that flickered and went out. The thing screeched, sending a pulse of pain through his head at the terrible sound, but Kaz had already won. He staggered back, his weapon tugging free of the collapsing body of the rodent, as the nest erupted into squeaking chaos.
Faint core-lights scattered. The fuergar, blinded and without a leader, ran into the multitude of tunnels leading away from the nest. Kaz was left, swaying and blinking, beside the fallen corpse of the enormous rodent.
Slowly, his normal sight returned, now that it was no longer overwhelmed by ki. He leaned back against the scratched and chipped wall leading up to the ledge, and his head tilted up as he heard a soft hiss come from above. The dragonling looked down at him, its eyes swirling with white and black in equal measure. It seemed as exhausted as he was, but once it saw it had his attention, it ducked backwards, then returned, clutching the carved stone cover of Kaz’s knife in its mouth.
Thankfully, it didn’t try to eat it, instead opting to drop it on Kaz’s head. He yelped, and a moment later, the dragon itself followed, flapping its wings twice, giving it just enough lift so that it didn’t smack into Kaz’s face. Kaz caught dragon and stone, though the dragon’s wiggling nearly made him drop both.
Once the little creature was safely ensconced on his shoulder again, Kaz lifted his blade, fitting the cover back onto its tip. He wasn’t entirely sure why, only that it felt right that the blue stone should be in place whenever the knife wasn’t in use. That done, he looked around.
The mother fuergar had run with all the others, leaving many of their babies behind. The helpless things wriggled and squeaked, and Kaz felt no urge to hurt them. Honestly, they looked strangely similar to newborn kobolds, and Kaz hoped the mothers would come back to nurse them when he left.
Several adult fuergar lay broken on the stone where he’d kicked them after they tried to sneak up on him. The fall had killed them, and he picked three of them up, tying them to his belt by their tails with shaking fingers. He turned to leave, paws dragging, when the dragon chirped again.
Kaz stopped, blinking, and the faint image of a golden circle intruded into his mind. He just stood there, not sure what the dragon was trying to say, before it finally clicked. Reaching into the pouch at his waist, he pulled out the second of the two rings Lianhua had given him.
There were anywhere from five to twelve babies in each nest, but Kaz was worried about using the ring on one of them. Their eyes were still closed, and they were mostly hairless. If the mothers didn’t come back, there was no doubt that they would die on their own. Lianhua had said that both people wearing the rings had to be alive for them to work, so it wouldn’t do any good to put the ring on a pup too young to survive on its own.
Then his eye caught on a particularly plump and well-developed rodent-pup. Its eyes were open, and it watched him with a gaze that held the first glimmers of understanding. It had to be very nearly ready to leave the nest, but it wasn’t quite old enough to flee with the adults. Kaz pulled a little more ki from his nearly-empty channels, diverting it into his eyes for a moment, and saw that this fuergar, along with a few others, had the tiniest flicker of a core-light.
Kaz glanced from the rodent to the dragon. He would have only one chance to pick a good creature to place the ring on, but fuergar were survivors. This one was fat and healthy, and clearly the most mature of the lot. If he left it some food, with the ring’s regeneration and protection functions, it was quite likely that it would survive, even if the other fuergar didn’t return. Certainly, the pups were cuter than adult fuergar, so perhaps it might be easier to convince the humans to let him keep his new ‘pet’.
“Is this one good?” he asked the dragon, and it stared at the fuergar for a long, considering moment. Finally, it bobbed its head, and he got a distinct feeling of approval through their bond.
Stepping over to the nest, Kaz crouched down. He quickly grabbed the pup’s paw, slipping the ring onto it even as coppery teeth tried to bite his hand. As soon as the ring was on, it tightened down to fit perfectly onto the little copper-pink leg, which transformed from fuzzy rodent-leg to scaly dragon-leg right before his eyes. On his shoulder, the dragon’s weight shifted, and he looked at it as he stood back up.
A copper-gold fuergar pup looked back at him, its beady eyes filled with excitement. He felt the image of dragon-as-rodent stretch as the dragonling examined it, seeming satisfied with the result. A new image, containing the vague shape of a blue kobold and four humanoid figures, coalesced in his mind. The blue blur held out a blob with a rodent-tail to the ‘humans’, who nodded their heads in vigorous approval.
Kaz snorted a laugh. “I doubt it will be that easy. You need to go back in the bag until we can ask Lianhua how to handle introducing you to the others.”
Li bared its teeth at him, clicking angrily, and Kaz sent the picture of the kobold and the humans back to it, only this time when the kobold held out the rodent, one of the humans chopped it in half with a long blade. This made the dragon hesitate, then sigh deeply.
Kaz nodded in satisfaction. Pulling his pack around, he tugged out several mushrooms, a handful of moss, and two small bunches of lichen, all of which were edible. After piling all of this around the little pseudo-dragon, he held the bag open for Li, who reluctantly climbed back in.
It was time to get back to the humans, and find out whether he had done enough to save Lianhua or not.