A ragged cheer went up from the circle of Drako soldiers. Arrows flickered out of the shield wall, as archers took advantage of the distraction we had provided and used it to thin the wildmen even more.
As I passed over the top of the caravan, I saw one burly wildman dressed in a bear skin take an arrow through the mouth. The tip stuck out though the back of the warrior’s neck in a spray of bright blood, and he fell thrashing backward.
I could feel the excitement and the thrill of battle coursing through Garth’s mind, and was aware of it as surely as if I was feeling it myself—which I was, of course. The young dragon flicked his body sideways to avoid a thrown spear. While I clung to his sides with my knees, I released a couple of rogue Shadow Spheres into the press of wildmen. Shrieks of dismay rose from the enemy horde as body parts disappeared.
Together with the three other dragonmancers, we dived and swept around the mass of wildmen like swallows picking off flies over a river. Bolstered by our appearance, the Drako Academy’s soldiers broke their shield wall and attacked their besiegers. The clash of arms echoed amongst the strangely even hills, as wildmen met the soldiers of the Academy.
As I turned Garth with my mind, I saw Saya backflip off Scopula from a height of about fifty feet and land in the middle of a bunch of the wildmen like a goddamn meteor. There was some panicked yelling, and the sound of steel ringing against steel. Then came a large spray of blood as Saya hit a wildman in the head so hard with the pommel of her sword that the bastard’s dome popped like a red soap bubble.
I grinned nastily, as testosterone and battle fury engulfed me like a red mist. It was that unique and quite indescribable sensation that most soldiers and fighting men the universe over must experience. It was the drive to kill and to win, not necessarily because you hate the people that are standing in front of you, with their crazy hair and their stone axes and their cruel eyes, but because of all the things that you care about that are behind you.
Dotted amongst the throng of wildmen were men and women wrapped in silver fox furs and riding on enormous, bristle-haired boars. Those wild pigs were freakin’ huge: yellows tusks like sabers, iron-hard hooves connected to leg muscles that could have kicked a barn door off its hinges, bulging eyes, foam-flecked lips, and a thick reek hanging over them.
I singled out one of those motherfuckers for special attention.
Garth and I flew low over the skirmish, which had quickly become a full-on pitched battle. I stuck my spear out and hooked one of the war-hogs in the meat of its shoulder with the billhook part of my spearhead, along with its accompanying rider. Garth growled and tilted sideways as he took the combined weight of the hog and the rider, but it was only for an instant.
At a telepathic suggestion from the more experienced Noctis, the younger Dragon banked hard right. With a flick of my wrist, I released the barb that was sunk into the hog. The war beast and its rider careened into a bunch of bowmen who were aiming in our direction. The boar smashed squealing into the bowmen. Its heavy, fat ass broke bones and ruined days as it tumbled into them. The rider was flung from the wreck, like a driver being ejected through a car windshield. The wildman had his face split in half by the axe of one of his unsuspecting comrades who happened to be standing near with the blade of their weapon turned outward. Brains and blood showered the wildmen nearby.
Garth and I turned back to where the main press of fighters were mingling around the caravan and trying to brutally murder each other. I saw Penelope darting over the melee, firing down spells, as her dragon occasionally stooped its swan-like neck to rip the head off of some unsuspecting wildman.
Penelope’s organic, flower-based spells had been the cause of some derision when we had first started training, but over the course of the last two months, she had perfected them. Now there was little room to rib her about her flowery spells.
As I watched, she aimed her fingers at a cluster of wildmen who had encircled a squad of Drako Academy fighters. In a beautiful burst of destructive life, vines erupted from the earth. They twined their ways up the legs of some of the wildmen, holding them in place so that our soldiers could hack them down. More creepers choked our enemies, constricting their chests and throats, strangling them, crushing them to the ground.
One particularly enthusiastic vine wrapped itself around the waist of one woman with no teeth and white hair that stuck out in tufts from her scabby head. The vine squeezed her so hard that she was pinched in two, hot entrails spilling out over the ground while she shrieked wordlessly. Other enemy warriors suddenly found flowers growing out of their mouths; drowning and suffocating on petals while pollen spilled from their nostrils.
A flash of red skin caught my eye, and I turned to see Tamsin spin her spear around her in the same way that Black Widow might have, if she were to ever give up killing people for a living and take up ballet. The hobgoblin’s spear swept and spun in blurring circles, slashing through throats, cutting through tendons, and spraying blood and gore in all directions. Tamsin cast her weapon like an Olympic javelin thrower so that it punched clean through two wildmen. Then, she jerked her hand backward, and the spear
