I didn’t worry about too much at all.
Then, in a rushing rustle of wings, Noctis was falling parallel to me. Vaguely, I heard his calm old voice echoing through my head.
“Mike, get on!”
More to stop the nagging than anything else, I stirred myself to one final effort and reached out to pull myself onto Noctis’ back, while the ground rose to meet us at a speed that might have alarmed me had I not been so dazed.
There was an earth-rocking crash as the headless Opal Dragon came down and flattened about fifty hapless kobolds and one of the enormous bonfires, in an explosion of dust and rock and swirling embers.
Then Noctis and I were rising, rising, rising.
Looking down, through vision that was becoming less and less blurry, thanks to my dragon-enhanced powers of recovery, I saw Imperial soldiers standing on the top of the wall. Many were still fighting, cutting down kobolds that were suddenly bereft of the will that had been pushing them. Some though, were pointing up at me with their swords and spears, waving and flinging their helmets into the air. As the ringing in my ears subsided, and my hearing returned to normal, I heard what the survivors were chanting.
“Noctis! Noctis! Noctis! Noctis! Noctis!”
In a vaguely stupefied fashion, I leaned down and slapped the Onyx Dragon’s haunch.
“You hear that, my friend, they’re cheering for you,” I said.
Noctis angled his nose slightly. I got the notion that the sly bastard was going to treat the forces on the wall to a fighter jet-style flyby.
“No, Mike,” my blood-bonded companion said, “they’re cheering us!”
Chapter 25
By the time we returned to the Galipolas Mountain outpost, news and reports of what had transpired down in the Subterranean Realms had already arrived through a relay of messenger-drakes.
Once the three wild dragons had fallen, the kobolds took little encouragement to tuck tail and run. They saw the Opal Dragon come down like the Hindenburg, crushing dozens of their fellows, and was more than enough for them. They fled, trampling one another in their haste to get the hell out of the ginormous cavern. Many shook clawed hands up at the magical rain clouds that must have seemed to them doubly as ominous by the time that battle was done. Those few on the wall that were not cut down or skewered by the bitter blades of the Imperial troopers threw themselves from the battlements.
Saya had also gone on ahead on Scopula, bearing the dragondust that had been left behind by the four dragons who had died in the battle. A small flour sack of the stuff was tied to her belt. Being Saya, she had not wanted to leave the rest of us, but I had insisted that she get the stuff safely back to the Dodge City camp as quickly as possible.
“Go!” I urged her. “We don’t know if the kobolds will be back or if any more of these damned wild dragons are going to come out of the woodwork. That dragondust is vital. We must keep it safe. We have to ensure that Antou and Hulong didn’t fight and fall for nothing.”
Saya had bitten back the retort that I just knew she wished to throw at me, mounted Scopula, and taken off.
For such massive beasts, the dragons, both wild and allied, had left only a small amount of the potent aphrodisiac powder behind them. With the magical rain that had continued to fall for at least an hour after the last kobold was dispatched, some of the powder had been lost. Although, for the victory that we had snatched from the jaws of defeat—quite literally in my case—I reckoned that was a fair trade.
It took us a lot longer to make our way back through the tunnels than it had to traverse them. Ashrin and Jazmyn were exhausted from the time they had spent making use of their Titan Slots. It was clear that, as helpful as being able to utilize the very body of your dragon was, it wrung a dragonmancer out. I saw then that it was one thing to learn how to activate the magic of the Titan Slot, but it required substantially expanded mana reserves.
I was also feeling dog-tired. It was a weariness that was incomparable to anything I’d experienced in my life since then. It was an exhaustion of the morning after a weekend-long bender, the soreness that follows a good fight, and the deep-down bone-weariness that comes after spending an entire night running from the LAPD.
My dragons were similarly fatigued. Noctis told me that it had to do with the way they had all transferred their mana to Garth just before I tapped it to use the Forcewave that had killed the Opal Dragon. Apparently, such a feat of mana transference and leeching took its toll on every member of the party involved. Even Noctis, who I guessed must have a mana reserve that surpassed the rest of my dragons put together seemed a little enervated.
Noctis also said that, when the dragons had recovered, they were likely to have all gained access to new Slots.
Happily, we were now in no rush. No one needed saving. There were no resources that desperately needed to be located. All we had to do was get home in one piece, and there were still plenty of surviving Imperial soldiers who could help us make sure we did just that.
Will, the wisp and Diggens Azee also accompanied us on our way home. Where they had come from I had no clue, or when. It was nice though, to have the little spectral floating light along with us. He reminded me of a dog, a little Jack Russel or something. Diggens simply tipped his hat at me and said, “G’day, fella. Looks like you’ve been
