Dragon Conjurer 6, page 22
“Oh, man, sooooo goooooooood.” Nick’s whole face lit up with the mention of his dream girl, and he threw a chef’s kiss into the air. “She is absolutely, completely fucking perfect.”
“I told you.” I smirked. “What did you guys do?”
“Oh, you know I don’t kiss and tell,” Nick said as he casually propped his hands behind his head, but then he burst into laughter. “No, that’s not true at all. It was fucking amazing, we went out to the courtyard and played around with our powers for a while. Then we sat on a bench and just talked for hours. Literally. Hours. It was like some shitty romcom, but I dug it because it was my shitty romcom, you know? She even grabbed my arm when she laughed, and no shit… my heart skipped a beat several times.”
“That’s so cute,” Steffi giggled.
“I’m glad you’re happy.” Nala smiled.
“We’re coming in for a landing,” the pilot announced and interrupted my digging for details.
“I want to hear more later,” I said, and my best friend nodded and winked at me.
Binta grabbed a small black bag from somewhere and passed out the same tiny earpieces we’d used in the training room.
I pulled my headset aside to jam one into my ear, and then I leaned over to gaze out the window at the uneven terrain below.
The helicopter’s rotors kicked up every bit of dust in a fifty-yard radius as we touched down, and all I could see around us were the huge, dark silhouettes of the crocodile monsters.
“Everybody, out, now!” the pilot shouted at us as the dark shadows of the creatures started to lurch toward us. “Move, move, move!”
We all pulled our headsets off and quickly freed ourselves from the seatbelts, and then Bo yanked the helicopter’s door open. The rush of wind from the helicopter rotors slapped me in the face, and I had to squint against the spray of dust.
“Keep your eyes open,” I said to my team as we jumped out of the chopper one after the other. “We don’t have all the information about what’s out here.”
Ronin formed her white astral armor over herself as she hopped down to the ground. Then she projected a very classy-looking cutlass in her right hand and a dagger that was almost the length of her forearm in the other.
Steffi stretched her golden wings out and fluttered quickly into the open air. She hovered low to the ground until she was well out of the reach of the chopper’s racing blades and immediately started blasting golden balls of energy out at the Dingoneks around us.
Nala raised her hands, and a little hill of earth rose up beside the helicopter that my earth-bending girl rode like a wave out into the jagged landscape. A trail of dust and weirdly-levitating rocks the size of soccer balls followed the dark-haired beauty. A moment later, one of the stones flung forward over Nala’s shoulder and slammed into the roaring open mouth of a crocodile-walrus monster.
Elisabeth hopped onto the ground, and in the middle of her first step, her body began to elongate into a heavily-armored freshwater crocodile. The French beauty’s fierce nose stretched out into a flat snout filled with two-inch long teeth, and her arms shortened and thickened as she lowered down onto all fours. A long, thickly-scaled tail stretched several feet out from Elisabeth’s backside as she started to gallop out into the battlefield.
Bo took hold of Binta’s hand and telekinetically lowered them both to the ground, and then I jumped down behind them, and Nick followed quickly after me.
The wind of the helicopter intensified for a few seconds before it died out slowly as the pilot maneuvered into the air just in time to narrowly miss being chomped on by a Dingonek’s enormous tusks.
“Bianxifa! Trylle frem!” I shouted.
Beyblade appeared in a bright flash of orangey light, and Nick didn’t hesitate to hop up on the fire dragon’s back as he checked the tranq darts in his gun.
Thor appeared beside Beyblade in a burst of indigo light and took a powerful step forward as he quickly took stock of what we were dealing with here.
“Come on, buddy,” I said to Thor as I started to move forward to better assess the situation at hand.
My team was already hard at work battling the Dingoneks, and that’s definitely what these monsters were. The lizard-like monsters were larger than any crocodiles I’d ever seen before, and their front legs were a fair bit longer than their stubbier hind legs. They raced across the uneven terrain easily like beetles scuttling on the ground, and their long, forked tongues slipped out like snakes sniffing the air. The Dingoneks had tusks that were easily as long as my entire arm which they bared aggressively at my team.
I looked over and watched Ronin extend her cutlass out toward the armored chest of a crocodile-walrus monster. The Samurai warrior braced her feet wide apart, and she defended herself with her extra-long dagger as the Dingonek lunged and parried at her with its enormous lizard claws.
Steffi hovered well out of reach from the eight foot tall leopard-spotted lizards as she blasted golden balls of energy in a rapid flurry of sparkling light. The fairy-girl absently threw up a round shield on Nala’s side to block a harsh spray of sand and small rocks thrown up by the lashing movement from the spiked tail of a Dingonek.
“Thanks for that,” Nala said through the comms.
“You’re welcome,” Steffi called back.
Nala shaped a rock into a more aerodynamic form and flung it straight into the open mouth of a tusked monster a dozen feet away from her.
The Dingonek’s beady eyes went wide as it began to choke on the football-sized stone, but then it hunched its shoulders and slammed its tusked jaws down on the rock so forcefully, it exploded into a thousand little shards.
Elisabeth used her surprisingly agile crocodile body to scurry rapidly between the legs of a Dingonek, and she tore at the inner ankles of the beast with her snapping jaws on her way through.
The Jungle Walrus roared with anger and lowered its head down to watch as Elisabeth galloped away between its hind legs.
The gurgling death scream of another Dingonek caught my attention, and I spun quickly to see Ronin spin in an artful attack as she sliced through the thick, armored hide of the monster. Her white astral blade cut clear to the bone and flayed the beast’s flesh open as buckets of inky-black blood poured down and stained the uneven earth at its feet.
Thor snarled at my side, and I turned back to find three of the enormous leopard-spotted monsters approaching.
The Dingoneks were a few heads taller than me and bared their white tusks aggressively as their forked tongues flicked out at Thor.
I felt an almost imperceptible mental nudge from my storm dragon as he flicked his indigo eye at me for his orders.
If we hadn’t been in the middle of an intense and dangerous mission, I would have been baffled by this return of my mental communication with Thor, but my battle instincts were in high gear.
“Do it,” I practically whispered.
Thor sucked in a huge breath, and indigo electricity arced across his back as little sparks began to snap out of his nostrils.
The approaching Dingoneks paused in their movements, and the smallest of the three took a half-step away from Thor’s menacing stance, but it was too late.
The air crackled as Thor released the billions of joules of energy from his mouth in a blinding flash of indigo lightning. The energy sizzled into the mouth of the lead Dingonek and jumped out of the beast’s beady eyes to hop into its two companions.
All three of the crocodile-walrus monsters seized, and their bodies twitched violently as the extreme electricity coursed through their muscles, their organs, and out their feet to disperse into the ground below, and the beasts collapsed onto their bellies.
The lightning had wounded them severely, but they weren’t dead just yet.
“Finish them off,” I told my dragon.
Thor pounced forward and snatched the lead Dingonek up in his razor-sharp teeth, and he crushed the monster’s vertebrae like a toothpick. Then he let the beast’s corpse fall to the ground like a ragdoll where it landed with a dull thud.
My storm dragon quickly finished off a second Dingonek by tearing its long neck right off its shoulders. At the same moment, Thor sent another smaller burst of lightning into the face of the remaining Dingonek that still struggled to regain its footing.
“Keep it up, buddy,” I patted Thor on his shoulder and turned to survey the battlefield.
The chopped-up, electrocuted, battered, and generally mangled bodies of the SUV-sized monsters laid in various states of death all around the craggy earth around us.
I turned around in a small circle and searched for the Aigamuxa, which had been the start of this mission, but it was nowhere to be found. All I could see was a seemingly unending mob of the Dingoneks streaming out from the craters in the near distance.
They scurried rapidly toward us, but my team was fighting them back as quickly as they came and dropping their numbers one by one.
Bo struggled in a touchless wrestling match with one of the Jungle Walruses, and the tall guy got the upper hand by mentally lifting a huge boulder and slamming the stone down right on the monster’s head. A sickening crunch echoed out amidst the crashing sound of rock on earth as the Dingonek’s skull was crushed like a peanut shell under the boulder. The beast’s back foot twitched a moment longer before its body finally went entirely limp with death.
Binta stood close behind her tall boyfriend as she wavered her fingers out toward two of the spotted crocodile-walruses.
I could only imagine what the light-manipulating cadet was showing the monsters, all I knew was that it was working.
The two Dingoneks tore violently at each other with their clawed, lizard feet. Black blood sprayed out in every direction as the beasts ripped each other to shreds, and large chunks of flesh plopped onto the ground around them. In less than a minute, one of the Dingoneks’ gutted bodies shuddered as it finally succumbed to death and dropped to the ground in a heap of ripped flesh and shredded muscle.
“Well done, my love,” Bo breathed heavily as he struggled with another lizard beast.
A blast of orange fire in the distance caught my attention, and I turned to watch Nick and Beyblade incinerate a row of smaller Jungle Walruses. My best friend plugged the Dingoneks with a single tranq dart, which wasn’t enough to take them down, but it made them clumsy. Then Beyblade blasted the stumbling creatures easily into charcoal.
The dead bodies were starting to pile up, but I still hadn’t seen the Aigamuxa. I wondered for a moment if the swarm of Dingoneks had driven the humanoid monster off.
I glanced around the battlefield again, and a swell of pride at my team’s strength surged through my chest.
Thor was electrifying Dingoneks like serial killers in an electric chair, and Beyblade and Nick worked as an impressively cohesive team to take out the walrus lizards.
Nala rained down a hailstorm of softball-sized stones on a pair of Dingoneks, and as their bodies were mashed and bruised like apples under her assault, I smiled at my earth-bending girl’s prowess.
Suddenly, my ears twitched with a strange rasping noise.
I turned around and tried to find the source of the weird croaking, rumbling sound, and I mentally ran through all the sounds I could identify in search of the cause.
I could hear Thor’s roaring and snapping electricity, the crash and thunder of Nala’s rock assaults, the rush and sizzle of Beyblade’s flames, the smooth slice and whoosh of Ronin’s astral blades through air and flesh, the roars and snarls of the Dingoneks, and the general heavy breathing and grunting sounds of battle.
The croaky noise continued, though, and I finally recognized the tone and inflection of a voice.
I looked around again for the source, and I knew it didn’t belong to any of my teammates and certainly wasn’t any human language I’d ever heard before. I focused on the sound and started to walk slowly toward the noise, and Thor instinctively stayed by my side and cleared the way when it was needed.
A gangly-looking Dingonek strutted out in front of me, and Thor quickly eviscerated the scrawny monster. As the beast’s thin body dropped to the ground, I finally caught sight of the Aigamuxa.
“Fuck,” I muttered to myself.
The monster looked much like a normal, dark-skinned man, except for the fact that he was close to twenty feet tall and as wide across the shoulders as two refrigerators put together.
More importantly, it was way larger than the brief had prepared us for, and it was doing a handstand.
The massive Aigamuxa wore scraps of tan fabric wrapped lazily around its huge torso, and its face was oddly human except for the blank patches of dark skin where its eyes should have been. The man-beast’s biceps and shoulders bulged with the strength it exerted to stand on its hands, and the Aigamuxa angled its legs around to survey the battlefield with the disturbingly human eyes that were located on the bottom of its feet.
I watched with dawning horror for a moment as the monster’s rasping, croaking voice began to make sense in my ears.
“Evade the black lizard,” the Aigamuxa said with authority. “Destroy the dark humans.”
A group of the spotted, crocodile monsters moved to surround Bo and Binta, and before I could even think the words, Beyblade banked sharply and angled straight for the pair.
Nick lurched slightly to the side as my fire dragon redirected instinctively to follow my unspoken orders and defend our MIA guides.
Then Beyblade sucked in a huge breath and blasted a river of fire out at the Dingoneks as they scurried toward the tall couple.
Their armored bodies shriveled and collapsed in quick succession under the consuming heat of Beyblade’s fire. Then their incinerated skin turned to ash and fluttered away in the wind, and the monsters’ corpses laid in the bright desert sunlight as their charred skeletons poked out from their destroyed bodies.
“Good job, buddy,” I murmured quietly, and I turned back to see the Aigamuxa’s reaction to Beyblade’s attack.
The giant man-monster bared its teeth in frustration and ordered another wave of Dingoneks to go after the other human females.
“Nala, Steffi, Ronin, watch out,” I warned my ladies. I knew Elisabeth would not be a target in her current crocodile form.
Steffi turned and fluttered higher above the ground as a swarm of the lizard monsters ran toward her and the others. My fairy-girl blasted out a rapid flurry of blindingly bright energy balls into the attacking creatures’ eyes.
Nala quickly erected a tall pillar of stone under her feet and rose herself well out of the reach of the monsters. Then she pierced long stone spikes straight up underneath the tender underbellies of the tusked crocodiles and skewered them up into the air.
Ronin spun and danced around like a ballerina of death as she slashed with her astral blades and chopped through the limbs and necks of the Dingoneks that made it past Steffi and Nala. Then Elisabeth ran up beside Ronin and began to chomp and tear at the feet of the Jungle Walruses.
Together, my four ladies plowed down the Aigamuxa’s second attack, and pride spread through my chest as I glanced back up at the twenty foot tall monster. Then a shudder raced down my spine at the hideous grin that spread across the Aigamuxa’s dark face.
A crooked row of pointed yellow teeth flashed as the Aigamuxa began to laugh.
“Corcotta,” the giant crowed with maddening laughter.
Confusion bounced around my brain for a second, and I wondered if I’d stopped being able to understand the monster. I turned back to glance around the still-roiling violence that spread across the battlefield.
The sheer number of Dingoneks had thinned out a bit, but they seemed to be getting desperate, and the lizard monsters fought with renewed ferocity.
The little baby hairs on Nala’s forehead were plastered to her face with sweat as she continued to launch intense volleys of rock and stone at the Dingoneks.
Steffi’s shoulders were hunched slightly as she worked to balance between offensive energy blasts and protective shields around herself and our teammates.
Ronin’s astral blades intermittently flickered ever so slightly at the edges, and her movements had become less flashy as she continued to cut down the Dingoneks with extreme prejudice. Beside the Japanese warrior, Elisabeth’s crocodile eyes appeared to droop a little with the exertion of tearing at the creatures’ legs.
Bo and Binta were still working back to back with each other to blind, confuse, and restrain the spotted crocodile monsters, and there was a large sweat stain clear on the back of the tall guy’s shirt. Bo’s entire face contorted as he reached toward the elongated throat of a Dingonek, and the beast’s neck visibly contracted under the MIA cadet’s telekinetic hold.
Thor was zapping the Dingoneks that moved within his reach where he stayed defensively by my side, and Beyblade, with Nick on his back, worked the perimeter of the battlefield. Together, my best friend and my fire dragon herded the Dingoneks back toward the killing spree of our team or turned them into charred husks where they stood.
I knew that if things maintained a status quo like this, we could beat the monsters back before much longer, but my team would be totally worn out by the end. I hadn’t seen any more Dingoneks approach the field of action, and I figured it wouldn’t be long before we had the situation well in hand.
Then a sudden, steady, rumbling sound of hundreds of feet stampeding on the ground reached my ears as a herd of what looked like wild hyenas raced toward us.
“Corcotta,” the Aigamuxa laughed in its croaking voice.
“Shit, we’ve got incoming!” I announced as I took in the lion-sized desert dogs.
The Aigamuxa cackled and croaked out orders to the literal monster armies under his command.
“What are those things?” Ronin huffed and slashed out at another Dingonek.
“Corcotta,” I answered in a dread-filled tone.
I guessed there were at least a hundred of them, but there were way too many moving way too fast to even try to get an accurate count.
Their wolf-like bodies were heavily layered with muscle and thick hair speckled with dark spots, and the herd of hyena monsters raced at us at top speed and launched immediately into the attack against me and my team.
