“Well Drenar, this plan failed,” Alex commented angrily in a wisp of silvery light. “Watch the axe, you can’t afford to take a two-year coma!”
“Get Jonaleth out of here and run! Nick, Levine, clear out the minions while I deal with Davos!” Drenar barked out, and everyone swung into motion. But Davos had already settled on his prize, and leered at Jonaleth, a manic grin behind that pale blue magitech visor.
“Should have known we should have killed you when we had the chance. Val didn’t want to piss off King again after she murdered one of his best agents. But this will make for a cleaner story!” Davos pulled the oversized bolt from his chest, blood dripping from the wound, and threw the projectile to the floor, and those glistening red eyes bored into Jonaleth, who was terrified.
“We’re all gonna die–”
“Shut it, naysayer!” Joey pulled out a compact launcher from her belt and fired off a canister at Davos. The canister air-bursted and coated that hulking menace in resin that rapidly expanded and hardened, and immobilized him in sticky foam. “Drenar forget heroics, we need to run! Focus on the mission!”
“What about the prisoners, the guards–”
“If we don’t find King, everyone dies!” She screamed out in fury, and he almost felt that forcible psionic impulse from her. She reloads the launcher while Davos struggles to move, and the resin cracks with one massive heave. “Drenar, don’t–”
He’d already made his decision. This man needed to die, or countless others would be slaughtered in his wake. He had already made it abundantly clear that the violence would continue until someone buried him. Drenar bowls into him, while Levine and Nick rush over to Joey, covering them quick-deploy spell barriers from a few devices they toss down.
Davos crunches against the concrete wall, his axe clattering to the floor as the resin snaps and breaks with crumbles of that material. Drenar doesn’t let up and uses his kinetically charged talons to cut through the armor, jarring his hand. That material is tough to cut through, and this man grabs his arm, holding him at bay.
Drenar looked on in disbelief as that man in oversized armor leered at him, that face slithering with something vile beneath the skin. “Wanna hear how your dad died? Protecting his woman. Toughest Valkyrie bitch in the world, and he thought he could slow me down.”
He grabs Drenar’s other arm as he tries to claw at that monster in a metal can, and holds him at bay. Drenar felt the talons on his feet skidding and tearing trenches into the floor. “Your father cooked himself alive trying to slow me down. It was utterly pathetic. He bought her maybe a handful of seconds as he burned his organs, destroyed his nerves, fragmented his crystalline lattice inside his body, all trying to save her.”
Davos flexed inhumanly strengthened muscles. Hydraulics lifted with the arm, and crushed down on Drenar’s arm. He put out a kinetic barrier to try to keep that crushing force from crunching through scales and bone, and Davos leered.
Small arms fire continues in the room, as more Ravagers pour in. Drenar swept the man's leg with his tail, trying to stagger him, but Davos was immutable and insanely strong. His hands burned from touching that metal armor, like there was something wrong with the way his claws gripped around that bright gold and silver armor, hiding the core of an utterly despicable human. He reared back his frost breath, and Davos seized the opportunity, breaking his grip and slamming Drenar through a support pillar.
His blast of frost exhaled harmlessly into the ceiling, and part of the structure collapsed as he tumbled past the pillar, screeching in a scrape of talons. This man was not human. He flings out an arm, now that he’s freed of Drenar’s grapple, and that crimson, bloodied axe flies to his outstretched hand.
“And then, when your dad was on the ground, cooking in his own juices, I chopped your whore of a mother’s arm off, and crushed it beneath my boot. I stood there, while I watched her lie on the ground, screaming.” Davos laughed maniacally, while gunfire and autobows flew through the air. "She never begged for mercy. Toughest foe I've ever fought, her title is well earned."
“Drenar, stop it!” Joey screamed out, even as Nick and Levine unfurled the one-time-use teleportal pad behind some makeshift cover. “Get out of there!”
Davos leered and pointed his axe at Drenar. He was going to need to go all out here against this monster, there was no choice. Davos could kill every single person in this room, and he knew it, as he spoke. “Then, that bitch damn near sliced me in half, from my balls to my throat. While missing an arm. That is the true peak of power, Rashalda, something you’ll never have!”
Davos hefted that axe with all his might, and Drenar barely deflected it in time with telekinetics. The massive blade sliced through another support column and the ceiling groaned from the overload reaching a critical state. Drenar skidded to the side as the debris rained down, pinging off his scales, and Davos reached out and the axe flew back to his hand, like the worlds most demented boomerang.
“I had Valkyries scouring the world for me for a long time, kid. That bitch was not worth the trouble I was paid to manage, and killed almost sixty of my men. Four dragons, fifty-plus personnel, and a bunch of vehicles, she slaughtered them with the same zeal I did! Your mother was a ruthless killer, just like me,” Davos snarled, eyes alight with malevolent intent.
He was done listening to this monster and lashed out with a plasma grapple, trying to overwhelm that man’s armor and trying to bind him in place. He heaved with all his superhuman might and used his telekinetics to smash that man into the ground, skidding across the floor, and through a support column. Davos merely laughed like a demon through the partial collapse of the floor above, and sunlight started filtering through the massive, twisting debris as part of the room collapsed. The prisoners had been lucky to avoid the area, but a few of the Ravagers had not. Debris piled down on them, and they screamed.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Drenar knew there was only one way to kill this man–tear the bastard’s head off. But Davos would not be easily deterred, and ignited the thruster on his back, screaming at Drenar like a human missile armed with a deadly blade. He pivoted and smacked Davos mid-air, deflecting the blow so that it was just barely deflected by his arcane barrier, but it still left him reeling from the impact.
If his arcane barrier hadn’t held, it would have taken his arm clean off. Davos rolled across the floor and was up in an instinct, and nimbly dodged another plasma grapple.
“Drenar we’re almost set! Fall back now, you stupid, stubborn teen!” Joey shouted out, even as she opened fire on more Ravagers in the hastily spray-marked armor. Blood and ammo casings were littering the floor beneath Drenar’s clawed feet, and the violence of this increasingly devastated room was sickening. The prisoners had fared badly, and he regretted that backup wasn’t coming.
Davos was there in an instant, cleaving down with all his might, and Drenar, even with his telekinetics, barely held that axe at bay, with his claws, grappled around the haft. A man his size was stronger than a dragon, and blackened spittle frothed from his lips. “You’re nothing like your mother, kid. And when I’m done with you? Your friends are gonna die, one at a time. You, the Luminaires, those pesky Valkyries? Everyone will bow to the Gilded Empress, or be crushed before her!”
Davos landed a kick that nearly toppled him, with his tail barely keeping him from falling over. He used the maneuver to swipe laterally, keeping him at bay. Joey was still pleading not to die for a lost cause, and he was grimly aware he needed one weapon to end this man, one that was in Angela’s hands right now:
Luminari.
Davos opened a port on his arm, and Drenar swerved to avoid the glowing flechettes. They impacted errantly into the wall and the floor, and detonated in bursts of blue energy. Shrapnel pinged off his scales and one lucky piece bit into his flank. Davos smashed him aside with inhuman strength, bearing down with the axe, even as Drenar raked a lucky blow that tore through the armor on his shoulder and neck, shearing through it. Blackened blood dripped from the wound, and Davos was undeterred, bearing down with all that armored weight, while Drenar scrabbled to keep that deadly execution axe away from his body. It glowed with an unnatural light–
Just like Val’s sword.
Davos leaned in, putting all his weight in, and autobow bolts and fireballs pinged off his armor, in a desperate attempt to dislodge him. Those broken, stained teeth break into a leering grin, while he desperately tries to keep from becoming a dead dragon, despite his strength. Davos bore down, bleeding, and leered at him with a manic grin.
“And after I’m done with you, I’m going to go kill that little slip of red that wandered in here, against monsters who can eat her in one whole bite. I’ll carry a memento of Joey, when I strip her down for all the world to see in her furry, mangy, ugliness, and I’m going to make her into a pelt. The humiliation will be televised, and when I’m done having my fun with her, I’m going to feed her to my dogs. They sure do love their meals with an extra dose of rats–”
Fury coursed through Drenar in an instant, his blood boiling with a surge of mana the likes of which he’d never felt. He screamed in rage and charged everything he had into his telekinetics, shoving the axe aside at the last second, and it clipped into his shoulder, shearing through scales and muscle.
But Davos had made a fatal error, and Drenar capitalized on it by grabbing him, and piercing through him with his kinetically charged claws into that narrow, exposed section by his neck, and tore him open brutally. A spray of blackened blood gushed from the wound, and Davos staggered back. It was enough of an opening for Drenar to blast him backward with a charged kinetic burst, collapsing another pillar and sending him through a wall, where a pile of debris fell onto him.
He grasped at that cut on his shoulder, and could feel the fiery might of something burning through him already. “Joey, teleportal, get it running–”
She dashed over to him past the gunfire, meeting him halfway as his arcane barrier pinged hits from small munitions, and coated the wound with a canister of green liquid. He nearly retched, the pain was so intense, and screamed. He hadn’t screamed in pain in a long time, but this was bad, and he staggered.
“Just a scrape, if it was manticore venom like I think it was with your mom, that should neutralize it!” Joey insisted, and had to guide him to the spinning teleportal where Levine, Nick, and the others were waving them on urgently. “C’mon Drenar, keep moving, we’re almost there!”
A shattering of stone and twisting metal got Drenar’s attention, and they both looked on in horror as that metal-clad menace shoved aside the debris. An eerie slithering sound filled the air, and Drenar held his head. That maddening noise spiked through his brain like hot daggers, and even Joey almost fell to the ground, screaming.
But that wasn’t the worst part. Drenar dared to look at that fatal wound stitching together with shadowy black tendrils that erupted from the flesh like a tumorous mass, and the partially lopsided neck of Davos righted himself, and grinned.
“You can’t kill me, dragon-kin. Not even your fates-damned mother could kill me, Rashalda.” The words Davos uttered were an affront to reality, screeching nails on a blackboard, and Davos grabbed his axe, stalking toward them. “You and your pathetic friends can run, but me and Val will find you. We’ll find your hidden goddess, and we’ll drain her dry, and the Gilded Empress won’t have to hide in plain sight anymore.”
He drew a ragged breath and pushed Joey aside. “Get Jonaleth out of here alive–”
A thud of talons scraping across the ground and burnt orange scales caught Drenar’s eye, and he turned to stare at Jonaleth, staggered, and winding up with a closed, clawed fist. “Drenar, get back.”
He could feel the charge of mana in the air, and the earth rumbled and cracked. Polished, stained tiling split open, as the earth opened up, and Jonaleth smashed down a fist, and a fissure opened through the room, catching a few of the Ravagers off-guard. The displaced earth blocked Davos, who cleaved through it in frustration, but the terrain was impassable, and he started bashing away the debris.
“Drenar, move your ass! You wanna live to see the end of this, move!” Jonaleth screamed at him with all the fury of a Valencian Red. It shook Drenar to his senses, and he stumbled forward, with Jonaleth and Joey’s assistance.
“Everyone, five seconds!” Levine screamed out, firing futilely at Davos who was slowly bashing his way past the ruined room, but the bullets from his rifle were ineffective. Nick loosed a torrent of fire that should have cooked that man, but Davos laughed in a shrill, manic tone. Val had been using the same tone, delusional as she was, in the power core of Asqualia.
Drenar shot one last scathing look at Davos, his talons on the teleportal platform and wrapping his body protectively around Joey, and he pointed a clawed finger at that monster. “The Luminaires always find a way, Davos. And we will find a way to stop you.”
"You can't stop what's coming, Rashalda. No one can."
The world flashed with white, as the prison, and the carnage, were replaced by shocked faces of SAF and Valkyries in Nick’s barn, and someone screamed for a medic.
He slumped, and finally noticed the searing pain in his arm, and the nauseous feeling that was seeping into the pit of his stomach. Davos had fractured a bone with his inhuman strength, and he broke down, in tears.
He’d been utterly powerless to stop the monsters, this time.