Chapter 5

  Fire washed over Dalex’s armor and fast-moving projectiles bounced off {wall of force}. Luckily, he had boosted all of his defenses to their maximum before departing on this mission. He didn’t take any damage, but, surrounded by orange flames, there was an alarming few seconds where he didn’t know where he was. That was probably the work of the Mountain Guard orcs still lingering among the Ulenbeter defenders.

  Things were off to a bad start.

  Dalex pushed off the wall and away from the {tomb seal}, {flying} out of the kill zone he had fallen into. He spotted the guards holding up the steel plate over the door in the seal.

  He cast, “{Telekinesis}!” and reached out with an invisible hand to grab the lip of the barrier and pull it away. The soldiers on the ground pushed back against the force of Dalex’s touch, fighting to keep the plate in place, but he was too strong for them. The plate fell back, revealing the hole in the face of the {tomb seal}, still open until Dalex cast {closeseame}.

  “Go, go, go!” Dalex shouted, and Hitasa and Seventh rushed past him through the air, pulling Balgoth with them and zipping through the opening in the disk one after the other.

  Dalex flew towards the door himself. The soldiers were struggling to lift the plate again to block him, but he was too quick for them. He dove through the door headfirst towards the crimson portal clouds lurking on the other side.

  When he was just about through the hole, something grabbed onto his leg. It pulled on him, but not hard enough to wrench him back to the other side. His {flight} spell lost some of its control and he rolled over in the air, dragging the new weight with him into the portal bridge. Dalex looked at his feet to see a man hanging on to his leg, only it wasn’t a man, but the rodent-eared beastkin.

  Dalex lost focus for a second and Erban’s weight dragged him almost to the floor of the portal bridge. Dalex tried to kick him off, but he was latched on too tightly. Hand it to the Second Captain of Whatever, he was strong.

  “{Closesesame}!”

  There were about as many guards inside the portal space as outside, and Dalex was now trailing a person-sized flag to show everyone where he was.

  “That’s Captain Tenggas!” someone shouted.

  “He’s flying!” a second person exclaimed in shock.

  “No,” a deep third voice corrected the second. “He’s hanging on to the target.”

  Apparently, they knew Dalex had the power to turn invisible, or maybe they had simply guessed.

  Dalex came to a sudden stop and flipped in midair, throwing Erban over his body and slamming the beastkin into the floor. Erban let out a sharp gasp and lost his grip on Dalex’s leg. Dalex pulled free and shot back into the air, but his little maneuver had given enough time for the guards in the portal space to line up a series of attacks.

  A more intense bombardment peppered Dalex’s {wall of force}, some of it reaching through to his armor. Lances of fire slammed into him and passed around his body, shooting into the depths of the clouds in the portal space. The clouds parted, revealing a deep blackness beyond them.

  In an instant, Dalex understood there was floor, but no walls surrounding the bridge between worlds, just a void that he didn’t want to enter. He suddenly wanted very much to be out in the open on the Gaia Zeta side.

  Dalex dodged out of the second kill zone created for him and aimed for a concentration of lantern lights in the distance straight ahead. Hitasa, Seventh, and Balgoth were far ahead of him. The defenders in the portal might have been anticipating only one enemy, and Dalex had given them a target. As he flew away, they quickly lost track of him, shooting magic and arrows wildly into the cloud matter of the portal space. A few of their attacks struck their allies, setting one of the rank-and-file beastkin soldiers afire.

  But Dalex was free. In just a second or two, he would flit out of this freaky place and into pure air to rejoin his friends.

  Something latched onto him again, this time wrapping arms around his waist. It was the same weight as before. Dalex didn’t even have to look down to confirm. Somehow, Erban had caught him again. The beastkin produced a knife from somewhere and jabbed it into Dalex’s armpit, probably hoping to find an opening in the armor. Unfortunately for him, while Dalex’s protective wardrobe looked like normal plate armor, it did not have such weaknesses.

  Still, the knife wasn’t toothless.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Dalex grabbed the knife out of Erban’s hands and tossed it away. “How do you keep finding me?”

  Of course, with {invisibility} still active, the beastkin hanging onto his waist couldn’t actually hear him. But still, he had something to say.

  “I won’t let you hurt anyone else.”

  The sentiment surprised Dalex. Most of the enemies he had faced since coming to the Gaia-BH1 system had been more focused on punishment, control, and pure evil. Hearing this soldier’s desperate insistence for peace was a breath of fresh air.

  If only Erban would just let go, he would get exactly what he wanted.

  Dalex grabbed the beastkin’s arms and pushed him off. Erban fell to the floor and tumbled along the portal space. His momentum carried him through the portal’s exit just a second after Dalex flew out of it. Dalex winced. He had given the poor guy a hard landing.

  Even more guards waited on the Gaia Zeta side of the portal. Because of the sensory-dampening effect created by the portal, no one outside was privy to the chaos inside the bridge between worlds, but Erban rolling into view told the guards everything they needed to do.

  Too late for them, Dalex thought as he rocketed up toward the overcast sky.

  “Dalex!” Hitasa’s voice appeared. “It’s a trap!”

  The sky was not truly overcast. For the second time that night, Dalex slammed into something solid and unforgiving. He bounced off a concave wall and saw bright lights for a few seconds. He had learned that, while his armor blocked most blunt force trauma, sometimes a big enough impact jostled him enough to hurt his neck.

  Seventh’s voice came next, “There is a dome over the portal exit site.”

  Rock chips fell around him. Dalex looked at the dented face of the barrier in front of him and followed it all the way to the ground with his eyes. The barrier stretched in every direction. Sure enough, the portal below him was at the center of a massive stone dome.

  “I swear this wasn’t here two days ago,” Dalex said.

  Hitasa chided him, “The next time you try to give away elements of our plans to put the enemy at ease, I’ll smack you.”

  “Fair,” Dalex said, scanning the space inside the dome to find her and the others. “Very fair.”

  While his friends were invisible to everyone else without some kind of magic detection, Dalex’s armor knew their location and highlighted them for him. He spotted the elf, [android], and demon floating just below the apex of the dome.

  “Have you tried punching through yet?” Dalex asked.

  “I’m still a little nervous about using some of these ‘lethal’ weapons,” Hitasa said.

  Which was understandable, especially since she was wearing the “heavy” variant of the {adamantine} armor, which had access to certain skills that might vaporize everyone and everything inside the dome. Of course, Seventh knew all of the skills inside and out, but she wasn’t always proactive when it came to using them against anything other than a mutt.

  Dalex backed away from the dome and summoned a {blunderbuss} into his hands. He fired once and hit the face of the dome with a wide burst of plasma. He had to wait a moment for the resulting cloud of dust and debris to dissipate before he could tell if he had created a big enough hole.

  “Dalex,” Seventh’s unconcerned voice spoke, “you have incoming.”

  He turned around just in time to spot a winged lizard the size of a double-decker bus soaring up toward him. It wasn’t nearly as big as Drakko, but it was still pretty big, and very fast. Dalex floated to the side out of its path. It had probably seen and heard him shoot the {blunderbuss}, but it didn’t actually know where he was.

  Except, its eyes followed him as he slipped away, and the dragon changed course at the last second, crashing into Dalex head on. It smacked him with claws as big as Dalex’s chest, swatting him toward the ground at blistering speed. He managed to recover control a few yards before crashing into the ruby platform.

  Dalex looked up at the little dragon and smiled, “You can see me, eh? Too bad for you.”

  Dalex and Hitasa’s agreement to avoid causing casualties on the Gaia Eta side of the portal extended to the Zeta side as well, but that agreement did not include dragons. If this wyrm wanted to die, Dalex would oblige the beast.

  The grip of the {blunderbuss} still clutched in his fist, Dalex raised the weapon and aimed at his airborne enemy. The dragon was currently diving toward him, wings tucked in for maximum terminal velocity. It let out a roar that echoed off the walls of the dome.

  Dalex fired once. The wave of plasma emitted from the front of the {blunderbuss} broke against a shimmering barrier surrounding the dragon’s body.

  He fired again, and the wave splashed through the barrier and over the dragon itself. The beast’s scales blackened and sizzled. The dragon let out another roar, this one filled with pain. But it didn’t divert course. It maintained its controlled dive, opening its jaws wide and showing its razor-sharp teeth. A glow blossomed from deep within its belly.

  Dalex calmly used the {astral mortar} to change the {blunderbuss’s} shape, turning it into a new weapon with a longer, narrower barrel. He took a quick breath and let it out, following the instructions Seventh had sent him about more precise shooting drills. The sights of the {coil lance} hovered over one of the dragon’s eyes.

  Dalex pulled the trigger. A burst of light and a slim projectile slug shot into the dragon’s mouth and down its throat, puncturing a dozen internal organs and passing out the other side to zip through the top of the dome. Instead of a stream of fire, the dragon belched out a cloud of blood. It lost control, flipping end over end a couple of times before belly-flopping onto the ground next to Dalex.

  The dragon tried to lift its neck, but its head didn’t leave the ground and then it slumped into stillness. Dalex shot it one more time between the eyes to be sure. The {coil lance} slug blew off the top of the dragon’s head and took a chunk of skull and brain with it.

  “Should have stayed in Honahlee, Puff,” Dalex said, letting the {coil lance} dissolve. Then he put his hands together as if praying and added, “Sorry, Puff. I shouldn’t compare an honorable dragon to one of these lesser beasts.”

  His penance finished, he looked up where the {coil lance} slug had pierced the roof at the top of the dome. All he saw was a clear, star-filled sky. The dome was gone. The dragon must have been the one to speak the word of power that created it. Dalex filed this new bit of information away for later. At least some spells stopped functioning once the caster was dead.

  “We’re moving south,” Hitasa’s voice said.

  Dalex looked around, trying to find his compatriots. How did they know which way was south? Then his armor picked out a few known stars and used that information to identify Gaia Zeta’s poles, at which point it displayed the cardinal directions in his peripheral vision. At the same time, Dalex finally spotted Hitasa, Seventh, and Balgoth. They were flying away from the portal, keeping close to the ground.

  Dalex took off after them, leaving the body of the dragon in his wake.

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