“Sabina, get inside and take over piloting,” Dys immediately took command. “Eir, stay inside by the door, be ready for healing. Kerr, get all the archers on deck. Don’t shoot unless the dragons charge the airship. Sorcha, hit everyone you can with endurance regeneration. Sev, Noct, you’re both with me. Anyone who doesn’t have a weapon or a spell with range, keep clear for those who do and be prepared in case of a rough landing or impact.”
“And you,” Syd grabbed Maeve by the collar of her shirt. “Inside. Now.”
At the same time as Jadis gave her commands, Wilhelm gave his own.
“Tiernan, give wings to Halvor and Rein. Jocelyn, prepare a holy barrier, but don’t use it unless needed. Amarantha, we need stat boosters. Ludger, Lucia, stay with the ship.”
As both spoke, their companions moved in a flurry of activity as they rushed to competently comply with their orders. Jadis was somewhat surprised to see that the Hero and his party were in a similar position to her and her companions, in so much as an aerial battlefield put them at a disadvantage. Not all of their number were capable of flight, nor did they have enough resources to account for everyone who didn’t have their own means. Still, the fact that Tiernan did have a spell to give himself and two of his fellow companions the ability to fly was impressive. Jadis hoped Aila would soon be able to do the same.
While Sorcha repeatedly used her wand to cast invigorating blasts of witchy magic on all of those who were present, Amarantha’s cauldron began spewing out a green and blue cloud of sparkling gas. Despite the wind, the cloud didn’t blow away or dissipate but instead sought out everyone nearby and flowed inside bodies in a weirdly ghostlike fashion. Jadis could feel the difference the moment the aerated potion slipped through the gaps in her armor and sunk into her skin. She could feel both her Strength and Vitality become boosted, and her stamina felt even further charged, as though the reservoir of energy inside her had doubled.
She wasn’t the only one to feel invigorated, either.
“Ja! Endelig en kamp!” Halvor shouted as he leapt up onto the edge of the railing while brandishing his two axes. “Ha! I have been idle too long!”
“Wait, I haven’t finished casting the spell you dolt!” Tiernan shouted as the crazy barbarian leapt into the sky. “Shit!”
Halvor went a lot higher and farther than Jadis would have expected, even considering his supernatural Strength. She figured the leap had to be assisted by some kind of a skill. A second after the Berserker took to the sky, an ethereal green glow surrounded the man. In a flash, the magic shifted into a pair of nebulous wings that were the color of the sky on a stormy day. Shouting with apparent glee, the barbaric maniac soared on ahead, his flight aiming straight for the two approaching dragons.
“Fucking idiot,” Tiernan cursed as he moved his hands in another wizardly spell, this time aimed at Rein. “I’m going to just let him fall one of these days.”
Jadis had cast her own wings by that point, all three of her selves having exited the airship in all of the rush. Aila had followed Jay out onto the deck and the redhead had her staff in hand.
“I can hit the dragons if they come close, but our balloon is vulnerable to attack from the breath dragons can spew.”
“I’ll try to keep them away,” Jay told the mage. “But I can’t promise anything. We should have Sabina fly us closer to the ground, just in case we need to bail.”
“We’ll do that,” Aila nodded. “But maybe I should ride with you? One of you can carry me while I cast spells.”
“No, you should take me, instead,” Meli interjected as she came up behind the redhead. “If you can take me closer to them, I might be able to speak to dragons.”
“You can do that?” Jay asked, thinking back to the Dryads in Weigrun and the great ice dragon, Vetregin. “Will they listen to you?”
“Possibly,” Meli shrugged. “Dragons are magic beasts. I am a Dryad. They might listen to me.”
“Might.”
Meli shrugged again.
“I cannot control magic beasts. They may ignore me entirely.”
“Alright, well, it’s worth a shot,” Jay said and took Meli up in one arm. “Aila, if this turns bad, I’ll be back for you. Let’s hope these dragons are reasonable.”
As all three of Jadis took to the sky, their spectral tendril wings glowing in the fading light of dusk, she saw Wilhelm leap over the edge of the airship deck. Unlike Rein, who was right next to him, he did not have any magic wings. However, before he had fallen even a dozen feet, a large winged quadruped swooped by and the Hero landed on the beast’s back. Taube, the Hero’s griffon, had been following the airship the whole trip thus far, and Jadis was impressed to see how well the man and his pet bird-lion worked together.
“And away we go!” Tiernan shouted as a glowing platform of purple lightning shot him like a rocket past Jay. “Gods, I love flying!”
Altogether, including herself in the count, their aerial team consisted of Severina, Noct, Tacitus, Wilhelm, Tiernan, Halvor, and Rein. Ten people against two dragons didn’t seem like good odds, until one remembered that almost everyone involved were powerhouses that could be considered small armies unto themselves. Jadis hadn’t seen Tiernan, Halvor, or Rein fight before, but if they were anything like Wilhelm or Ludger, whom she had fought beside in the past, she had every confidence in their abilities.
That said, since there was a possibility of not having to fight the duo of giant winged lizards that were on a crash course with the Leviathan, Jadis used all of her magic-powered flight speed to race ahead of the others. While her Dys and Syd selves shouted explanations to the rest, Jay carried Meli with great speed towards the two dragons. As they got close, she was finally able to get a good look at the beasts.
Jadis had seen two dragons in her life thus far, and by the fortune that fell over her life, she had fought both of them. The first had been Vetregin, a massive ice dragon whose wings had blotted out the sky above when he passed overhead. Jadis didn’t have a precise gauge for the ice dragon’s size, but he had made a blue whale seem stumpy by comparison. The second dragon had been the withered and possessed black dragon that had tried to kidnap Alex. That beast had been relatively small compared to Vetregin, but whales were still the only comparable animal when it came to size.
These two new dragons were somewhere between in size. Not quite as colossal as Vetregin, but definitely larger than the decayed Demon dragon had been. The first one, the one that they had originally seen circling the mountain peak, was the larger of the two. The dragon had bright red scales on its back and sides, but its underbelly was a brilliant mix of yellows, oranges, and blues. The vibrant shades went from the tip of the red dragon’s tail all the way to where its neck and head met. The red dragon’s wings also had a mix of swirls and spots on the membrane between its wing bones, and the patterns reminded Jadis of a moth. That comparison was reinforced when she saw that the top side of the wings were the same dark red color as the rest of the dragon’s back; it was only the undersides where the nearly obnoxious shades of color were present.
The second dragon, who was lagging behind the first, was slightly smaller and had a slenderer build than its red companion. Its scales were ice blue, nearly white, but there was a pattern of emerald green diamond-shaped patches that went all along its back and sides, with greater density in the middle than further out. The ice blue dragon’s tail was also exceptionally long and whiplike compared to the red’s, and its tail’s color slowly changed in a gradient from blue to green the closer it got to the tip.
The closer Jay and Meli got to the charging dragons, the more details she saw. The red dragon had many thick, short horns crowning its head, while the ice blue dragon had longer, thinner spikes that moved almost like a porcupine’s quills. The red dragon’s eyes burned a bright golden color, while the blue dragon’s eyes were blood red. The most important detail, however, was that both dragons looked healthy and uncorrupted. If either were demonically possessed, Jadis couldn’t tell by her naked eye.
At that thought, Jadis recalled that she did not have to rely on her naked eye alone. Quickly casting Eyes of the Succubus on herself, she scanned the approaching Dragons for any sign of demonic magic. The spell didn’t reveal Demons specifically, but Jadis had been practicing, and she was getting decently good at telling the differences between types of magic. She felt that if there was a second source inside one or both of the dragons, she would be able to tell.
The magic auras of the two dragons flowed around them like great, multicolored storm clouds. For both beasts, the magic followed the color schemes of their scales surprisingly closely, though the magic itself was far more fluid. There was no sign of any separate or distinct extra magic within the aura of the red dragon, so Jadis presumed that the beast was Demon free. When she scanned the second dragon, though, she spotted an irregularity.
In the belly of the ice blue dragon, Jadis spotted an aura that was different from the rest. It was a mix of reds, greens, and golds, all swirling together in a tight bundle. While the colors were decidedly distinct from the greater aura of the blue dragon, the shape and overall feeling of the smaller bundle was the same. Jadis likened it to seeing a storm cloud within a storm cloud, as odd a thought as that was, since they were so similar.
“Shit, I don’t think that’s a Demon,” Jay said as a suspicion struck her.
“What do you mean?” Meli called out over the wind. “I don’t understand your words.”
“Meli, can you tell if that blue dragon is female?” Jay shouted her question, well aware that they were mere seconds away from making contact with the two gigantic beasts.
“I cannot be certain,” the Dryad shouted back. “I need to see the vent at the base of the tail.”
“Okay, well, get ready to check,” Jay adjusted her hold on Meli and her war hammer. “Because I think that blue dragon might be pregnant.”
If Meli made any response, Jadis didn’t hear it, because at that moment the red dragon opened its toothy jaws and let out an ear-splitting roar. The very metal of Jadis’ helmets rang with the howling noise, all other sound struck from existence as she was completely deafened. Clenching her teeth from the pain of just the dragon’s voice alone, Jay maneuvered so that her flight would bring her past the big red beast’s left flank. She wanted to get Meli closer to the smaller blue dragon so she could confirm her suspicion, if possible.
A moment before Jay would have dove past that huge red beast, she saw the dragon throw its wings wide, drastically slowing its forward momentum as the great membranous wings caught against the wind. In an instant, the dragon had gone from a sleek bullet to a massive kite in the sky, the whole of its yellow, orange, and blue underside on display. Since she had her Eyes of the Succubus activated, Jadis caught the millisecond that the dragon’s magic aura surged inward in response to the beast’s call for power.
“Watch ou—” Jadis didn’t even have the chance to finish her warning, much less move out of the way before the dragon’s magic struck.
A great flash of multi-colored light erupted from the scaly beast. It was like having a thousand strobe lights bursting in her eyes, and for a moment, Jadis thought she might have lost her vision entirely. She couldn’t even tell if her eyes were open or closed; all she could see was a swirl of burning colors.
Blinking her eyes as hard as she could to try and clear her vision, all three of Jadis pulled back in their flight, shooting straight up in an attempt to give her selves a second to recover from the debilitating magical attack. While Resilience helped her when spells struck her directly, it seemed that there wasn’t much it could do to lessen the effect of a stupefyingly bright light.
As she flew upwards, Jay felt a sudden hard pressure latch onto her lower legs. Blind and still partially deafened from the dragon’s roar, she instinctively curled up, protecting Meli with her armored arms. A second later, her body was jerked around like a ragdoll, before an even greater pressure pushed down on her whole body. Slamming her legs in what she thought was an upward direction, Jay pressed her feet into the crushing force while her back was stuck against something that was both hard and squishy at the same time.
As her eyes began to clear, Jay saw a confusing sight through the spots and colors still clouding her vision. Red and ivory surrounded her, with flashes of the ground and the sky caged on the edges of her sight. It wasn’t until the splatter of foul-smelling drool hit the front of her helmet that Jay put together what she was seeing with what had happened.
She was inside the maw of a dragon.
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