Nest Under Siege
Dragon Approved™ Book Four
Ramy Vance Michael Anderle
The Nest Under Siege Team
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Kathleen Fettig
Misty Roa
Dorothy Lloyd
Diane L. Smith
Deb Mader
John Ashmore
Larry Omans
Angel LaVey
If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!
Editor
The Skyhunter Editing Team
This Book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2020 by Ramy Vance & Michael Anderle
Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design
http://jcalebdesign.com / [email protected]
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
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First US Edition, February 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-1-64202-726-6
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Author Notes Ramy Vance
Author Notes Michael Anderle
Other Books by the Authors
Connect with The Authors
Chapter One
Alex watched the orcs standing outside of the room through Gill’s holographic display. At first, she stared at the screen through Manny’s eyes, but the detail was too much. Manny saw everything. Every little hair on their chinny-chin-chin… (Seeing gave so many of the stories she knew new context.)
She switched to her own eyes, dulling the sight through her HUD.
She held her breath, trying to make as little noise as possible. It didn’t matter that they were all huddled in a room. It just meant that if the orcs heard them, they were all dead.
After a few minutes, the orcs wandered away and continued on down the hall.
Alex let out a deep sigh as she leaned back against the wall and tried to catch her breath. “How many do you think there are?” she asked after she was sure she could breathe regularly.
Gill looked through his HUD, changing between different cameras throughout the Wasp’s Nest. “There could be hundreds,” he murmured. “There’s a lot of these guys.”
Jollies fluttered around the room manically before finally going into a fit of hiccups and retiring to Alex’s right shoulder. “What should we do?” Jollies asked.
Alex looked from Brath to Gill as the two young men thought the question over. Gill was the first to speak. “We should watch for a bit longer,” he suggested. “It doesn’t make sense to run out there until we know what’s going on. I mean, if we had gone out earlier, we’d be…” He ran his finger across his neck
Alex nodded in agreement. “Yeah, you’re right. If we had gone out, we’d be dead by now. There’s no way we could have taken that many orcs.”
“What do you mean, taken? Were you thinking about fighting them?”
Alex shook her head. She knew this wasn’t VR anymore. This was real life, and real orcs were very capable of killing her.
One-lifers. Guess we’re all one of those now, she thought with a heavy sigh.
For a moment, Alex thought back to Middang3ard VR. She had been a hero there, ready to step into danger at a moment’s notice. People knew her throughout the game as someone who would not walk away from a fight.
Yet here she was crouched in a room with a bunch of teenage boys, shaking with fear. How the mighty have fallen, she thought.
Brath was pacing, his arms folded over his chest, his body language expressing how unhappy he was with the decision to stay and hide. “How long are we going to be doing this?” he asked.
Gill lowered his visor and met Brath’s eyes. “It would be a mistake to go out before we have properly assessed the situation,” he reminded the other rider. “Haven’t you been paying attention to anything during our tactics lessons?”
Brath sat down on his bed, his arms still crossed. “Yeah, I pay attention,” he muttered under his breath. “I thought the first word of that class’s name was ‘Battle.’”
“Yeah, it is. And the second word is ‘Tactics.’ Arguably, it’s the more important word. Let me just see what else is going on for a while, all right? Then we’ll discuss what we should do.”
Alex sat back and listened to Gill. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. Who died and made these guys the bosses? she wondered. They’re not even asking for Jollies’ or my opinion.
Brath stood back up and continued pacing. He looked like he was going to say something else but was concentrating very hard on not speaking. His face had gone red from concentration.
Jollies, on the other hand, wasn’t trying to hide how worried she was. The color of her skin kept fluctuating between deep blue and purple.
Alex tapped Jollies on the foot, hoping to distract her from her fear. Maybe distract herself as well. “Do all pixies change color like you?” Alex asked.
Jollies looked up suddenly as if she had forgotten she was resting on Alex’s shoulder. “Huh? Oh, yeah. It’s like an emotional thing. Kinda like how you humans have mood rings. I’m one big mood ring. It helps pixies empathize with each other. Totally inconvenient when talking to non-pixies, though. Makes lying harder. You’ll never catch a pixie playing…poker? That’s the human game, right?”
Alex reached over to Brath’s bed, grabbed a pillow, and threw it at Gill. “Hey, do you have any cards in here?”
Gill hardly responded to being hit with a pillow. He looked away from his HUD visor for a moment before returning. “Yep,” he replied. “Over there, on top of my dresser. Why?”
Alex got up and grabbed the cards. They weren’t like any cards she’d ever seen in Middang3ard before. They
