Page 27 of FoolSilver
Caspian snarled from the deepest part of his warrior form, a fury that went beyond battlefield rage into something personal. The leader of the mutant pack—larger, its eyes burning with a red intelligence the others lacked—fixed its gaze on Caspian and mimicked his snarl.
A mockery. A challenge.
“They’re lab mutants!” Aelindor called. “Killing strikes only! Neck or heart. Nothing else will put them down.”
A blink, and they were on us.
Aelindor’s wind hit first.
He threw both hands forward, and a concussive wall of air slammed into the frontline with the force of a hurricane. Without it, the Spartans would have been overrun.
Mutants scattered, cartwheeling through the air. The ones still standing kept coming, even as the Fae heir broke their charge.
It wasn’t the first time I’d fought a mutant. But it was the first time I’d fought a battle.
Aelindor led the charge. He moved like water through stone—fluid, inevitable, finding every gap. His longsword was an extension of a mind that had spent centuries perfecting the art of killing. A mutant lunged for his throat; he sidestepped, pivoted, and opened its neck to the spine in a single arc that didn’t slow his momentum. Already past it. Already cutting down the next threat.
Caspian fought beside him. Where Aelindor was precision, the wolf prince was violence. He drove his claws into a mutant’s skull and was already swinging for the next before the first hit the ground. His jaws found a beast’s throat and tore it out. His claws opened another from hip to shoulder. The corrupted wolves died at his hands by the dozen, and the fury behind every kill was personal.
They both shielded me. Every time a mutant flanked us, one of them closed the gap.
The Spartans surged forward. Corporal Enna hit the line at a dead sprint, a short sword in each hand—ducked under snapping jaws, drove her blade up through a beast’s chin into its brain, pivoted to hamstring the one behind it. Two kills in ten seconds. When a horn ripped her shoulder guard clean off, she shifted her grip and kept killing.
Two mages anchored the center. The earth mage slammed her palms into the ground, and stone spikes lanced upward, impaling a beast and sending the second tumbling into a Spartan’s axe. The fire mage hurled bolts that punched through a mutant wolf’s skull on impact. When a beast broke through and raked his ribs open, the earth mage pulled him behind her and raised a wall of stone.
A gray mutant wolf lunged low at Caspian’s blind side, hugging the ground, jaws aimed at the tendons behind his knee.
Protective rage burned in me, and I threw the chakram.
Coldiron took over. The disc accelerated, correcting its trajectory mid-flight, and hit the mutant in the chest at full velocity, punching through hide and warped ribs into the heart. The beast crashed two feet from Caspian’s heel.
Every mutant on the field turned its head toward me.
Close to a hundred beasts, mid-combat, pivoted in unison, red-black eyes locking onto me with a coordinated focus that had nothing to do with animal instinct. They yowled—a single, eerie, harmonic note from every throat at once.
Then they charged. All of them. At me.
Aelindor and Caspian closed ranks in front of me like a gate crashing shut. Aelindor’s fighting shifted, faster, rawer, the elegant precision abandoned. He was no longer conducting. He was defending.
“Take Max off the field!” Aelindor roared.
Marco the vampire fought toward me from the left flank, every strike a kill. But for every mutant he dropped, two more surged past.
The dragon’s shadow fell over us.
Drakken dove out of the smoke-stained sky, wings tucked. He didn’t breathe fire—too many Spartans in the melee. Instead, he hit the horde like a battering ram, talons tearing a mutant across the spine and sending it flying thirty feet.
Then his talons closed around me.
My feet left the ground. The earth dropped away at a speed that turned my stomach.
“No!” I kicked against his grip. “I can still fight. Put me down!”
Below us, two mutants leapt for my dangling legs. Caspian’s jaws took the first through the throat in mid-leap. Marco intercepted the second, sending his side knife sailing through its jaw, its claws missing my ankle by inches.
“Dragon!” I roared at the underside of his jaw. “They need us down there! Throw me on your back and we’ll both fight.”
One golden eye swiveled down to glare at me.
