I grinned proudly before I turned to Goldie, and I silently instructed her to tear apart the hideous calf-headed vipers with extreme prejudice.

  My wind dragon narrowed her eyes at me with clear ferocity, and then Goldie launched full-force into the battle. She dove on the giant vipers with a fervor that made me eternally glad she was on our side of this monster war, and my eyes went wide with fascination as I watched Goldie rip through the snake creatures with glee. She really seemed to have tapped into her ferocious dragon-nature lately, and it was wild to see the difference in her demeanor in moments like this, compared to the laid-back and almost aloof way she was in her downtime.

  My pearlescent dragon used her powerful jaws and sharp fangs to rip the Viborons into shreds as she moved through the battlefield, and she left a trail of slimy green snake pieces behind her. A shudder of grossed out pride ran through my spine at the splotches of green slime all over her scaly body and the trails of fluid that ran down from her jaws.

  Meanwhile, Ky continued to blast the Draugrs and any Viborons that came close enough into frozen statues, and while the skinless monsters steadily cracked out of the thick layers of frost, the giant vipers remained encased in the ice. The section of the battlefield behind my ice dragon was steadily turning into a macabre garden of strange snake statues like something out of the Greek legend of Medusa.

  I smiled with pride as I noticed that Ronin was working her way through the garden of ice sculptures and piercing a long, astral rapier-style blade into the hearts and brains of the encased monsters. I knew the chance that these monsters could survive through Ky’s frigid ice was low, but the heat of this South American forest was intense, and I was glad that my Japanese warrior wasn’t willing to take the chance.

  Thor worked simultaneously to eliminate the two kinds of monsters with his lightning attacks, and Beyblade was trying to keep pace with him. My fire dragon was doing a great job on incineration duty, and I could already notice a vast improvement of the air quality around us. The smell of burned flesh wasn’t that great, but it was much more tolerable than the rotting decay that the Draugrs emitted, both in their undead and dead-dead states.

  I was satisfied with the way my ice, fire, and storm dragons were working to destroy the blackened Draugrs, so I turned my focus to the vipers. I grabbed Zofia’s attention and instructed her to blast out a full mind-confusion attack on as many enemies as she could manage. Then my gloomy-purple dragon’s bright red eyes glowed with intensity as her entire body started to vibrate, and the Viboron were instantly affected by her assault.

  My team took full advantage of the sixty-second attack and took out as many of the calf-headed snake monsters as they could reach, but it was like they just kept coming. I couldn’t tell where they were all coming from, it felt like the monsters were slithering out of the ground itself, and we were hardly making a dent in their numbers, even with all my dragons out to play.

  Still, my ladies were working non-stop to slice, dice, and dismember the twenty foot long snake monsters, and the bodies were piling up around us. The ground was becoming slick with the gallons of green slime that poured from every wound the giant vipers received.

  Nala and Steffi were able to stay above the fray, and Elisabeth’s massive weight from her rhinoceros body gave her a slight advantage over the slippery terrain, but Ronin’s feet were less stable as she moved through the ankle-deep puddles.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Nick muttered, and I could hear the tremor of panic in his voice again as he fired his gun down at the Draugr.

  Things were getting dire, the monsters had a huge advantage in their numbers alone, and the Draugrs’ sickening smell of rotting and burning muscle and bones was a highly-effective passive assault on all of our senses.

  I gagged harshly as another waft overpowered me, and I knew I needed to do something, anything to end this fight faster.

  Then I figured it was time to try something a bit drastic.

  What we needed was more dragon power, so I wracked my brain quickly for any kind of summoning words that could work. I even reached out to Thor through the web of energy on my back to see if he had anything brilliant to offer, but he was too engrossed in his efforts to electrocute a Draugr into submission.

  A Welsh word popped into my head after a minute, and I decided to just go for it. After all, the worst that could happen was nothing.

  “Dewch yma!” I grimaced as I butchered the Celtic words and forced myself to wait, and I willed a dragon to appear before me.

  There was no bright flash of light or loud vacuum of air around me this time. There was just… nothing. It was like the time in the library when I’d tried to summon a dragon out of curiosity, except this time, I felt desperation creeping into my bones.

  “Dewch yma!” I tried again with a different interpretation of the unfamiliar language, and for a second, I thought I felt something, but when no dragons appeared, I had to force myself to accept the truth.

  It hadn’t worked, and there was no new dragon coming to save us.

  “Fuck,” I growled under my breath.

  My palms got sweaty, tension started to work its way through my mind, and I just wanted to crawl up inside myself. Terrible thoughts of self-doubt started to nag at my mind like a dozen voices shouting that I couldn’t do it, and my heart started to pound with fear.

  Maybe I wasn’t like Lia at all, maybe my problem wasn’t going to be too many dragons, but a hard limit on how many I could summon. The possibility that Zofia was the last dragon I would ever be able to conjure dragged through my brain like a poisonous fog, and my knees trembled beneath me.

  “Fuck, fuck!” I whispered to myself as panic started to rise like bile in my throat. My breathing grew ragged, and my head spun with terror, and it was like all my recent nightmares were unfolding before me.

  The stomach-turning smell of charred flesh and rotting corpses was suddenly overpowering as the constant snarling, growling, hissing monsters swarmed around us, and I collapsed onto my knees in the dirt.

  Then Zofia stepped close in front of me, and she nudged her snout gently on the back of my slumped shoulders. I forced my head up, and I gazed up at her bright red eyes that seemed to glow in the fading light. My mind-control dragon blinked at me with that same air of Zen-filled peace that I’d always just identified as part of her personality.

  As my dark purple dragon stared at me, I felt my heartrate start to slow to a normal rhythm, and there was something really calming about my mind-control dragon’s presence. I took a deep breath as my spooky dragon and I stared at one another, and as my mind slowly started to settle, I reminded myself of the impact that the Draugr’s hideous smells and mind-powers could be having on my mental state.

  Determination started to spread through me as I realized this was all just another layer of this crazy fucking attack, and it pushed the panic and fear out. Then I clenched my fists and nodded firmly at Zofia.

  There was no time to get another team out here to the middle of butt-fuck nowhere, and I knew that we had to take care of this. Now. It was up to us, and I was not about to go back to AIMM with my tail between my legs, or worse, allow my team to get hurt.

  I returned to my feet and gazed around me.

  Ky had moved in closer to me as I’d had my short-lived mental breakdown, and now he stood with his back to me opposite where Zofia was positioned. My ice dragon looked out of the corner of his sapphire-blue eyes at me, and his stance relaxed just a fraction when he saw that I was back on my feet.

  I’m okay, buddy, thank you. I silently assured my ice dragon, and Ky gave me a pleased look before he turned back to flash-freeze a Viboron in its slithery tracks.

  My confidence was still a little tenuous, but the fissure of panic that had seeped into my mind had been firmly shoved out thanks to the calming presence of Zofia.

  “Keep it up, guys,” I said to my team. “We’ve got this, we just need to keep pushing their numbers down.”

  “And stay back from the Draugrs,” Nick added. “The smell of those fuckers is intense. Beyblade’s working to burn their bodies into ash, but there are just so many of them, it’s taking time.”

  “Hai! It is disgusting!” Ronin grunted, and she held her double-bladed astral staff in one hand and produced an astral short sword in her other hand. Then my samurai warrior extended her arms out to the sides and thrust the blades simultaneously into the throats of a pair of Viborons on either side of her.

  “Great shot, Ro,” I commended my Japanese teammate, and I looked over to see how Nala was doing.

  My earth-bending girl had turned toward helping Nick and Beyblade with the Draugrs, and I wanted to smack myself for not realizing how useful she could be against the rotting beasts.

  The slowly-shifting undead monsters might be resilient and immune to most attacks that weren’t fire-based, but there was only so much weight a body could withstand. Nala was using all her strength to crush the hideous creatures under tons of rock and stone, and it seemed to be working. It was expending my curly-haired girlfriend’s strength rather quickly, though, and I worried about how long she could keep it up.

  “Excellent, Nal,” I praised my ingenious earth-bender. “But don’t push yourself too far.”

  The dark beauty acknowledged my words with a single nod before she hefted another enormous boulder into the air and dropped it squarely on the heads of two Viborons that had slithered a little too close.

  I motioned for Zofia to come closer so I could climb up onto her back, and then we took off into the air together. Zofia had a smooth and fluid motion to her flight, and it was as curiously-soothing as the rest of my mind-control dragon. I silently instructed Zo to fly around the perimeter of the battlefield so I could take an account of the fight, and I was pleasantly surprised by what I found as we slowly circled around the area.

  Bodies and piles of ash were stacking up quickly, but so was the green slime that gushed from the Viborons’ corpses. My dragons had enough weight behind them and the advantage of their claws to keep them stable on their feet, and Steffi relied heavily on her ability to stay airborne.

  I silently instructed Goldie to try and blow some of the ash piles out of the way, and I watched for a moment as my wind dragon obeyed. Goldie took a deep breath and blew out a powerful gust of wind at the largest pile of ash that Beyblade had created from the dead Draugr bodies. The majority of the lightweight ash disappeared into the tree line, but a light dusting of black ash swirled around the battlefield like a flurry of macabre snow.

  Meanwhile, Nala could use pillars of earth and stone to stabilize her footing and move around the battlefield, but Ronin was struggling in the slippery layer of viscous bodily fluids that was quickly thickening on the ground. The green slime was well past her ankles in some places, and it was bogging her down to the point that Ronin was almost becoming trapped by her unstable footing.

  “Nala, can you give Ronin something solid to stand on?” I asked through the comms.

  “Definitely,” Nala answered, and she took a deep breath before she raised a stone platform with sheer sides that brought our Japanese teammate about eight feet above the fray.

  “Thank you,” Ronin huffed, and she took a moment to recover. Ronin’s astral blades faded away as she sucked in a few deep breaths. A moment later, she produced a lethal-looking astral spear and walked over to the edge of her stone platform.

  The Viborons were tall enough for their heads to come up above the top of the platform Nala had constructed, but they couldn’t manage to slither their huge bodies up onto it. Ronin used this to her advantage, and she thrust her white astral spear into the faces of any calf-headed vipers that dared to come within ten feet of the platform.

  “You know what you need?” Nala said as she watched the bodies of Ronin’s victims pile up around the platform. “A trench!”

  Nala thrust her arms forward and spread her hands wide in front of her, and a deep trench carved out around the perimeter of Ronin’s platform. Then the Viboron corpses fell into the deep, circular pit and freed up the space for more of the snake creatures to slither forward into Ronin’s blades.

  “Elisabeth, you good?” I asked my shape-shifting girlfriend.

  The leathery head of my French teammate’s rhino-form nodded once, and she snorted an affirmative response. Then Elisabeth rotated her head sharply to the side and jammed her large horn into the lower jaw of one of the Viborons.

  The snake-creature screeched in pain as my shape-shifting girlfriend stomped on the monster’s belly at the same exact moment that she jerked her head to the side, and the result was gruesome and highly effective. The Viboron was torn in two, and a waterfall of slimy green fluid sprayed out in every direction and all over Elisabeth’s gray skin.

  My rhino girl snorted with revulsion, but she didn’t hesitate to move on to her next victim.

  “Ew,” Steffi breathed with disgust as the slime rained down around Elisabeth.

  “I love it,” I chuckled with pride.

  Then a harsh wave of heat reached me, and I looked over to Beyblade who was in the middle of frying a handful of Draugr bodies into black ashes. A second later, Ky freeze-blasted four of the slowly-shifting creatures into frosty statues, and before they could change again and break free from the ice, Nala crushed them like grapes under an enormous boulder.

  “Damn,” Nala breathed hard, and she sank down to one knee on the top of her pillar.

  I could tell my team’s strength was wearing thin, and everybody was getting dangerously close to exhaustion, but it looked like we were finally starting to turn the tide in our favor.

  The Viborons’ numbers were finally dropping, and I couldn’t see any new calf-headed snakes joining the fray. There was a distinguishable edge to their mass of writhing bodies, and even the skinless forms of the Draugr appeared to be condensed into a small group.

  Hope ignited in my chest, and I knew that if we could keep our strength for a little longer, we would come out of this fight victorious.

  Then the Curupira released a deafening whistle that I knew would have shattered any glass within a five mile radius, and it scraped inside my eardrums like a cotton swab made of crooked nails and rusty knives.

  I instinctively moved my hands from where they were braced against the muscles of Zofia’s back and slammed them over my ears. I managed to peel my eyelids open enough to catch sight of the rest of my team, and while they were all clearly irritated by the high-pitched whistle, I could see that it wasn’t debilitating them as much as me.

  At the same time, all five of my dragons’ eyes closed in pain, and Beyblade nearly bucked Nick off his back as the intense frequency screeched inside his ears. My best friend lowered himself as flat against my fire dragon’s back as he could get, and he managed to maintain his seat on Beyblade.

  Ky shook his head in agonized irritation as he tried to force the sound out of his ears, and I realized that I was as affected by the Curupira’s sharp noise because of my connection with Goldie’s hearing. I debated with myself for a fraction of a second whether to call Goldie back in to protect my own ears, but I decided we couldn’t afford to lose her in the battle.

  Instead, I needed to stop the Curupira and its horrible, shrill whistle.

  But just as I was about to direct Zofia toward the flame-haired fairy monster, it let out another, even higher-pitched whistle.

  I jammed my fingers into my ears and tried to hold on to consciousness as the tooth-rattling sound assaulted my senses, but suddenly, I was falling freely through the air, and I was lost in complete disorientation for a gut-wrenching second until I slammed hard into the ground.

  I shook my head and tried to clear the haze of concussed confusion from my mind as I looked around me.

  “No!” I gasped.

  Zofia laid curled up in a tight ball about fifteen yards away from where I’d landed, and I realized that the Curupira’s whistling attack had knocked my gloomy-purple dragon right out of the air. Zo must have been so affected by the sound that she’d lost control of her flight, and we’d dropped out of the sky.

  I took a quick stock of my injuries, and I was grateful to find nothing broken. I’d jammed my left wrist awkwardly when I landed, and my entire body had knocked into the ground pretty hard, but I could move, and I didn’t find any blood. I would be really sore tomorrow, but I wasn’t seriously injured.

  Now, I just needed to be sure Zofia was okay, and my heart pounded in my chest as I shot up to check on her.

  The second I rose to my feet, a Viboron swiped its thick tail behind my legs and knocked me straight back to the ground. Its hideous, calf-head and viper body loomed over me, and the snake monster blocked out what little sunlight was left in the darkening sky.

  My head was still spinning from the hard crash-landing I’d taken, and it was all I could do to scramble backward away from the looming fanged mouth of the Viboron. My ears still rang painfully from the Curupira’s whistle attack, too, but a quick glance around told me that none of my dragons or teammates were close enough to help me.

  Chills raced down my spine as my throat clenched shut, and I knew I had to do something, and fast.

  The calf-headed viper’s mouth opened wide, and it hissed forcefully at me as it’s green eyes bored into mine. Then the Viboron sucked in a deep breath, and a translucent green liquid dripped from the creature’s large fangs. Its entire body shuddered with coiled tension, and something deep inside me told me this monster was about to try and eat me in a single bite.

  The next several seconds seemed to move in slow motion.

  The Viboron struck down toward my face, and at the same moment, my instincts took over.

  Then I reached up with both of my hands to catch the calf horns at the top of the viper’s head even though I knew it was stronger than me, but it didn’t matter. The web of Thor’s indigo power across my shoulders blared with sizzling energy, and I felt the same power surge through my muscles. I gritted my teeth as an electrical surge coursed from my fingertips, and the shock held the massive Viboron back from biting my head off.

 

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