Chapter 137: Rider of the Bone Dragon

[Notification: Warden’s Mandate successfully activated on Legendary boss Valen, the Bone Dragon Knight. Legendary companion acquired.]

The chime rang in Kael’s ear, clean and bright, and a slow grin spread across his face.

"Finally."

Above the knight’s helm, the blood-red name that had marked it as an enemy faded and turned green.

The soldiers of the garrison hadn’t caught the change, and several of them continued to hack at the creature with everything they had, until Kael raised his voice and called them off.

The assault slackened and then stopped.

Valen, beaten to the edge of destruction, slid down from the back of the Frost Bone Dragon and dropped to one knee in front of him, head bowed.

The NPCs around them stared. Nobody could say precisely what Kael had done, only that a ranking undead boss, a warlord of the Hollow Legion’s cavalry, had just yielded to him like a hound to its master, without a sound, without ceremony, almost without anyone noticing.

Kael let the astonishment pass over him. He released Skyborn Awakening, and the crimson flame around his body drained away.

It was a glorious state to fight in, but costly. He had burned through fifty-three points of Bloodline Power in the short time he’d held it, out of a pool of a thousand that could not be refilled except by the slow passage of hours.

It could only be used sparingly.

He turned to practical matters. As Elara’s guard captain, he gave the nearby soldiers their instructions, sending them back to their posts, and ordered a team of them to draw the two wyrm-slayer bolts out of the Frost Bone Dragon’s ribs. Then he opened Valen’s profile.

[VALEN, THE BONE DRAGON KNIGHT]

Bloodline Tier: Legendary

Constitution ★★★★★★★★★

Strength ★★★★★★★★★★★

Agility ★★★★★★★★★

Spirit ★★★★★★★★★

Skills: Wyrmshade Carnage (S), Glacial Breath (A), Lethal Lunge (A), Frostbind Thrust (A), Dragonrush (A), Lancer’s Cut (B), Rime Ward (B)

Thirty-eight stars total. Four fewer than Wraithlord, which put Valen a clear step behind his best front-liners in terms of long-term growth.

What it had was level. Valen had been a level 79 boss before the bond, and the Beastlord passive would give him another fifty percent on top of that.

With the right fusion and Skyborn Awakening layered over it, a companion like this could take on bosses past level 80 without much trouble.

The numbers made his pulse jump. He triggered Warden’s Mandate’s fusion to see what form Valen would take.

The result surprised him.

A mount?The option in front of him wasn’t a weapon at all. It was the Bone Dragon.

He hesitated for only a moment before the logic fell into place. Valen and the skeletal wyrm were technically two creatures, but the system treated them as one: they shared a single health bar in combat, and the dragon was, in the end, an instrument of war.

Something that breathed frost and killed was close enough to a weapon for the system’s purposes.

And since the whole thing was a game, whether it made sense hardly mattered. A dragon mount made of bone and ghost-flame was more than enough to justify itself.

His eyes lit up. He released Wraithlord’s fusion first, letting the spear dissolve back into the shape of his companion, then waited for the skill to cool.

When it was ready, he selected Valen.

Light closed around the knight and the beast.

Valen’s form went up in a blaze of spectral blue flame that poured along every bone of the great dragon, rippling through the skeleton from skull to tail until the entire creature was alive with cold ghost-fire.

The Frost Bone Dragon, already vast and fearsome, looked far more terrible wrapped in its new blue halo.

Kael vaulted onto its back.

A flood of icy power surged into him on contact, rushing through his limbs, and every attribute on his panel jumped.

It was a different kind of strength from Wraithlord’s: slow and heavy, relentless, a glacier given a heartbeat.

He couldn’t help it. He threw back his head and let out a long, wild shout.

Then he dug a Legendary level-50 spear out of his inventory, took the reins in his other hand, and hauled back.

The Frost Bone Dragon roared, burning wings sweeping wide, and launched from the rampart. A tremendous beat of its wings carried them into the sky, and then it tipped over into a plunging dive.

Below, a cloud of harpies with women’s faces was swarming toward the wall, shrieking. Elite monsters, all of them above level fifty, a nightmare for the average player.

Kael was no longer anyone’s average.

He drove his spear forward as the dragon fell upon them.

Lethal Lunge.

Streaks of pale blue light burst from the spear in a rapid series, piercing the flock in the space of a breath. Dozens of harpies came apart before they knew they’d been touched.

He swung the dragon down toward the ground and looked out over the undead army pouring toward the wall: a roiling sea, an endless supply of event points and Evolution Points waiting to be harvested.

His eyes burned.

"Glacial Breath."

The dragon opened its jaws, and a torrent of frost-blue fire rolled out, a pale, thundering stream that smashed into the horde below.

Kael held it steady and sent the dragon skimming along just above the ground, wings beating, and the breath ran on for seconds, scouring the field in a long unbroken line.

Where it passed, the undead disintegrated. When the breath finally guttered and the dragon swept back into the sky, a trench lay behind them, a scar of frost and shattered bone running for hundreds of meters across the plain.

He looped back and dove again, and this time his spear carved long arcs of light through the monsters before he swooped up once more.

On the ramparts, across all five galleries, hundreds of players and soldiers had stopped to watch.

They saw a lone rider on a ghost-fire dragon, tearing through the Hollow Legion’s army as though it were a field of wheat, and every one of them stared.

Then a shout went up, and another, and the shouts ran together into a long roaring cheer that rolled the whole length of the Bulwark of Ash.