The enemy didn’t get any sleep, but neither did the good guys.

  “Can you tell him to make the explosions smaller?” Hand complained.

  Lockso grunted and nodded. He was stretched out on the ground, leaning back against a wagon wheel with the rim of his hat pulled down over his eyes. “Noisy.”

  “An aerial bombardment is always going to be a bit loud for anyone nearby,” Tim pointed out. He reached into his lab coat pocket and pulled out some kind of thermometer. Whatever it was for, I was fairly confident he was checking how cold the air was.

  “I’m out of bombs. So it’s kind of quieter,” I offered with a shrug.

  “Lord Champion. I think the soldiers are slightly more disturbed by the nightmarish screams as Pete and… Lille, was it? Pete and Lille… indulge themselves.” Captain Jardin was pale; her right hand rested tightly around the hilt of her undrawn sword.

  “There’s a well-established theory that sentients aren’t completely cut off from their senses when they’re asleep. We’ve all listened to something, drifted off and then dreamed about whatever it was. We just tone down our reactions. A sleeping man who hears a tiger snarl is going to wake up pretty damn fast,” Tim said abesentmindedly.

  “So the troops are all currently dreaming about dragons eating people?”

  “Maybe not all, but certainly some of them, Bob. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. I’ve been conducting experiments with the unibunnies assigned to become pilots. Repetitive programming while asleep before they’re installed in their chassis seems to increase how well they adapt to their new state.”

  “You’ve got a bunch of bunnies that are being forced to listen to you telling them to do what they’re told while they’re asleep before you lop their limbs off and stick them in a robot body?” I raised an eyebrow at the orlic.

  “Not at all. I use your voice.”

  “Oh, great. How the hell do you use my voice?”

  Tim pecked at his wrist pad, and a tinny version of my last sentence played back out loud. “I record everything.” A lime green shrug followed his declaration. I’d created a monster, or rather, I’d made a space for one to thrive. He turned back to his magical thermometer and his wrist pad.

  “Jones, are your… guys? Ready for a night attack?” I asked.

  The lanky human looked at me flatly. “You gonna stop bombing the place you want us to attack?”

  “You and the orlics need to get out there and do what you do best. War crimes. I don’t care if they’re trying to sleep, or take a shit, or even on the job. We need to hit them hard while they’re distracted.”

  “WAR CRIMES!” rang up around me as the dwarves and the orlics both took up the cry, then fell silent and glared at each other.

  “For gods sake, you’re on the same side here. If there is one thing you can both relate to, it’s your fondness for atrocities! I’ll get Jace to stop bombing them, and I’ll try to get Pete and Lille back on the leash as well. When I get the TOTS back in the playpen, you guys should move out. Tim, Lockso, send the bunnyborgs out with them as well.”

  Lockso raised a finger to the brim of his hat in a lazy salute but otherwise didn’t move. Tim glanced up and nodded before resuming whatever he was working on.

  I beat my wings and skimmed over the tops of the walls. Pete and Lille were in their own unique ways equally terrifying. Foot-long spines coated the ground between the tents and fires that the enemy had set up closest to the walls.

  She had planted rows of spikes that now covered the ground like young corn just getting started. I ignored the bodies, or parts thereof, she had left in her wake and headed towards Pete. Lille was currently circling above me, preparing for another run, Pete was…

  “PETE! I bellowed as I landed next to him. The-Floor-Is-Lava sent me tumbling backwards and dancing to the side as the snarling silver dragon rolled in my direction like a biological wrecking ball.

  He had left ruin in his wake. Tents torn and shredded, ground churned to oddly pink-looking mud, men and women running screaming from his presence. There weren’t many bodies, though. His crimson-painted jaws explained that conundrum.

  “You’ll get fat!”

  Green eyes turned slowly to me as he paused in ripping apart an unlucky cavalryman who’d chosen to camp in the wrong part of town, then they narrowed. A low rumble echoed out, his chest visibly vibrating.

  “Easy, kid. I’m just saying you’ve done what you need to. Chi said she wanted to speak to you, best not to keep her waiting, eh?”

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  “Where is she?” His little-boy voice was incredibly sinister coming from blood-soaked jaws. The cavalryman he had pinned to the ground under one claw coughed, raised a hand towards the moon, and died. No doubt wondering why his murderer sounded like his balls hadn’t dropped yet.

  I raised my head and pointed my nose at the shape of Chi floating above us. “Best not keep her waiting. You know how she gets.”

  The boy winced and nodded quickly. He swiped at his jaws, cleaning them on the back of his forelegs as best he could, then bounded into the sky. I hoped Chi would at least back me up, stopping what amounted to an overgrown child eating their way through hundreds of humans ought to be a karmic feather in my cap. I chose to ignore that I had unleashed said scaly tot on the people in the first place.

  Lille was far more reasonable. I asked nicely, and she very meekly retracted her rapidly regrowing spines against her white scales and flew off up towards where Chi was wrangling Jace. Sorted. Everything was…

  Bloody Barglebaster erupted from the dirt. He was bloody not only in the figurative sense but also literally. I don’t know when the green dragon decided that tunnelling was a good idea, but he had taken to the tactic with gusto.

  From above, now that I was looking for it, I could see where he’d treated the soil as just another medium to fly through. Holes like giant moles had grown annoyed at the surface world, lines of raised, disrupted dirt stretching away from them where he had tried to fly underground before resurfacing. There were dozens of them below me.

  As he emerged from the brown, he began spewing more brown from his nostrils. I pitied the ones caught on the periphery of his breath attacks. Those wounds were definitely going to get infected.

  I stooped and beat wings to hover above him, my own presence finally breaking the morale of the sleep-dazed defenders trying bravely to resist the young psychotic.

  “Binglebop! Give them a break! We’re going to send the ground pounders in!” I called, sending a flash of my own fire at a group of crossbowmen who didn’t seem as shaken as the rest.

  “Fuck off, old man!”

  “I was twenty-five when I died, you ass! Just because I didn’t know my rizz from my skibidee doesn’t make me old!”

  Bargleblaster charged forward. He must have picked up some kind of evolution that involved flying through the ground. His wings kept dipping in and turning the sod over like a ploughhead, or a ship cutting through waves.

  I flapped along behind him, keeping pace and occasionally melting any knots of resistance he didn’t notice in his rampage. I needed some way to get him to stop so we could send in the ground troops to, well, to commit war crimes, but mostly to actually rout the enemy.

  “I am going to see Dagrun as soon as we’re done here, Kelvin! Don’t make me have to explain what you’re doing to her!”

  His head snapped round. Some poor woman, her armour torn where his teeth had pierced through, dangled from his jaws like he was a dog with a toy.

  “No needf fer thaff.”

  “Put the lady down, and go join Chi. Please.” Saying please offended me on some level, but the other dragons weren’t my minions, and I couldn’t just order them around. They were more like biological nuclear warheads I could sort of aim at my enemies, sometimes.

  The green dragon gave the woman a vicious shake, which was probably a mercy in all fairness, and spat her out before flapping up towards the sky. I landed and looked down at her.

  She had fancy armour. It was gilt-edged and made of what looked like decent steel. Flutes and scrolls had been worked in around her shoulders and breasts. To eat, or not eat? That was the question. She was probably doomed, blood flowed out around her, and she snatched each breath like it might be her last, never getting a proper lungful.

  She was an Umbrati, worked for one of my enemies, and had rather stupidly tried to fight Bastardbouncer singlehandedly. The reptile part of me rejected the prospect of eating her on general hygiene principles. Bargleblaster had shit-fire for his breath attack, and I doubted he bothered to floss anymore.

  But as I raised a claw to turn her to paste and end her suffering, the mammal part of my psyche rebelled. Regret hadn’t featured much in recent events, hiding in the corner of my mental menagerie and trying to look unthreatening. I sighed.

  “Augendae Vitae! Abnegant Mortem! Sanara Vulnera! Systema Tarda!”

  It was dumb, but I scooped this one victim of my war machine up into a claw and cradled her against my chest as I flapped up and headed back towards the town. The healing spells stopped the blood flow, and as the only things that had stabbed into her had been Pete’s teeth, there was nothing to block the effects of the healing spells.

  I’d get her to Nim, the cleric from the Fighting Dolphins. If this woman lived or died, at least I’d done what I could.

  “Who dat?” demanded Geeku as I descended at the rally point, clouds of dust flying away from my wingbeats. “Can I has ‘er?”

  “No, you can’t bloody have her. Where’s Nim? If she’s got a healing spell available, I need her.” My serpentine neck twisted back and forth as I looked at my minions staring at me with various degrees of horror or bewilderment. “I’m not building a larder. She got hurt, and I helped her. If she doesn’t make it, hey, I tried.”

  “Are you’se going to do that fer a lot of ‘em?” asked an orlic that towered over the rest. Easily seven feet tall, and broad with it. Thick muscles rippled across his body, and as per orlic custom, he was only wearing an armoured cock sock.

  “No, Bone-an the barbarian, I’m not. Geeku, Jones, go do your thing and drive the rest of the army off. I’m getting sick of this bullshit.”

  “Bob… I think you might have to give her back,” Tim said hesitantly.

  I glared at him as the dwarves and orlics, accompanied by the bunnyborgs who were no doubt eager to indulge their macabre corpse-scuplting, charged up the wall's ramps towards battle. “Why? If she doesn’t get healed, she’ll just die. I can’t exactly land next to their medical tents, assuming they have any, and drop her off.”

  “You didn’t bother to use your identify spell on her?” he asked, giving me a green froggy grin.

  “No, I didn’t, Kermit the chode.” On the plus side, my banter skill seemed to be levelling up. Maybe doing a good deed predisposed me to be more of an ass for a while?

  “Just check her, Bob.”

  “Speculator Visus!”

  Lady Eleanor de Fallade

  Dank Paladin

  Level 74

  STR 157 AGI 44 MAG 90 ARM 247

  “Shit. I just kidnapped the Comte’s daughter, didn’t I?”

  “That or his wife,” Tim said cheerfully.

  No good deed goes unpunished.