Chapter 691: Competitive Dragon Cleansing (Patent Pending)

They launched.

Two hundred dragons rose from the field in staggered waves, green light trailing from their wings like banners made of emerald fire. Stealth was dead. Stealth had been murdered by a Gamma whose magic had opinions about visibility and whose opinions were non-negotiable. What replaced stealth was spectacle, and spectacle had its own tactical value because an enemy that was staring at a wall of green light was an enemy whose focus had been disrupted.

The first arrows flew at the same moment the fleet made contact.

Green magic surrounded the arrows the instant they left the bows. Every shaft, every head, every feather wrapped in Gavriel’s Fae energy without his conscious input, the magic treating every projectile launched by a Drakenfell warrior as something that belonged to it and demanded protection.

The arrows hit Dark Fae riders.

No ash. Serena’s gold arrows converted Dark Fae to dust on contact. Gavriel’s green did something different. The Dark Fae crumpled. Died. Fell from their dragons the way anything dies when an arrow punctures something vital. But the bodies stayed intact. No chain reaction. No cascading kills to neighboring riders.

And no explosion.

Nothing happened.

The combustion that had turned every previous Dark Fae engagement into a minefield, the detonation that killed the attacker and everything within twenty feet of the attacker, the reason Tiberon had needed Serena’s arrows in the first place, was gone. Neutralized. Gavriel’s green wrapped the Dark Fae death like a containment field, absorbing the detonation energy before it could reach the blast radius.

Dexmon: Green on the arrows is working. Dark Fae are dropping clean. No detonations. Repeat: zero detonations.

The mindlink erupted with confirmation from every unit. Spotters were firing into the fleet with a freedom they had never experienced in a Dark Fae engagement. Every previous battle had required distance, caution, the constant awareness that killing your target might kill you too. Tonight the math was different. Tonight killing was just killing, and killing was something the Draken Forces were very, very good at.

Spotters dropped first. Tiberon’s doctrine executed flawlessly across every dragon team, the nervous system of the corrupted fleet being severed one set of eyes at a time. Riders followed, picked off by spotters whose accuracy had been trained on Drakenfell’s ranges and tested on three previous sieges and was now operating at a level that produced results Serena would have approved of and Hyran would have called adequate.

The fleet’s formation fractured. Dragons without spotters drifted. Dragons without riders lost direction entirely, hovering in confused clusters, their corrupted instincts telling them to fight and their biology telling them the things directing the fight were gone.

Dexmon: First wave spotters are down. Eighty percent of riders eliminated. But the second wave is coming. I sense them.

Tiberon: ETA.

Dexmon: Thirty miles south.

Tiberon: Start cleansing. We need these dragons grounded before the second wave arrives.

The clock started.

Gavriel was already moving.

He stood on Solara’s back the way Serena stood on dragons, except worse, because Serena had been standing on dragons mid-flight since her first day in Drakenfell and Gavriel had been doing this since forty-five seconds ago and the learning curve was a vertical line with zero mercy.

Solara banked toward the nearest riderless water dragon. Gavriel looked down at his green glowing hands. Looked at the gap between Solara and its back. Looked at the gap again because the first look had produced a number he found personally offensive.

"Fuck I hope this works."

He jumped.

The gap was twelve feet. The wind was forty knots. The rain was sideways. The dragon was moving. Gavriel Sterling, whose athletic resume included graduating top of his class in combat and zero hours of dragon-to-dragon transfer training, hurled himself across open sky with the specific energy of a man whose plan was "land on the thing" and whose backup plan was "scream."

He landed. Both boots hit scales. His hands slammed flat against the dragon’s spine.

Green magic erupted from his palms on its own.

The dragon’s eyes flashed emerald. The corruption recoiled from the contact point, dark veins draining of color, the magic retreating from Gavriel’s green the way shadows retreat from a torch shoved into a cave.

BUCK.

The water dragon’s spine arched like a cat encountering something annoying. Gavriel’s boots left the scales. His body went vertical. His arms windmilled. His dignity died somewhere between the second and third rotation.

"FUCK. FUCK. FUCK. FUCK."

Each word corresponded to a full rotation of his body in the air. Four rotations. Four profanities. A one-to-one ratio that spoke to remarkable consistency under duress.

Below him, Hale Ironholt dove.

His dragon, Kronk, folded his wings and dropped like a scaled boulder. Hale’s hand closed around Gavriel’s forearm mid-fall with the casual strength of a man whose grip had been calibrated for catching heavy objects and whose heavy objects now included Gammas.

The catch was clean. The landing on Kronk’s back was graceless. Gavriel hit the scales chest-first, slid two feet, and stopped with his face pressed against a ridge that smelled like dragon sweat and regret.

"You good?" Hale called over the wind.

"Define good." Gavriel’s voice was muffled by scales.

"Still breathing."

"Then I’m great."

Meanwhile, Dexmon watched the entire performance from Velkaris’s back.

"LAND!" he roared at the cleansed water dragon, pushing every ounce of Dragon King authority his blood carried into the command.

The dragon obeyed. Its wings folded and it descended toward the field with the confused, grateful compliance of a creature whose corruption had been removed and whose body was finally listening to its own instincts again.

One down.

Forty-nine to go.

Fuck.

Dexmon looked at the remaining dragons clustered in the sky. Then at Gavriel, who was peeling himself off Kronk’s back and already looking at the next target.

Dexmon’s jaw set.

He was not about to let Gavriel Sterling outperform him at dragon cleansing. The Crown Prince of Drakenfell had been riding dragons since he could walk. His blood carried the Dragon King’s authority. His mate was the Draken Prime. If anyone was going to be jumping on corrupted dragons and purging dark magic through their palms, it was going to be him, and it was going to look better.

Dexmon jumped from Velkaris.

"SHIT. FUCK. FUCK."

The landing was harder than expected. His boots hit the storm dragon’s back and his knees buckled and he caught himself with one hand against the ridge of its spine, which was the kind of save that looked intentional from the ground and was absolutely, categorically accidental.

Gold surged from his palm on its own. That was good because Dexmon had no idea how to get it to do that.

The dragon’s eyes blazed gold. The corruption burned away. The dark veins dissolved.

"LAND!" he bellowed, already looking for the next one.

The dragon descended. Dexmon ran along its spine at full speed, reached the tail, launched himself at the ice dragon twenty feet to the left, hit it with both palms, gold erupted, corruption fled, eyes blazed.

"LAND!"

Two in thirty seconds. He was already scanning for three, entirely too pleased with himself.

Through the mindlink, Hale’s voice arrived with the casual, deadpan delivery of a man whose job tonight was catching falling Gammas and tracking statistics.

Hale: Gavriel just cleansed those three, Commander. For you to command to land.

Dexmon’s head snapped toward Gavriel’s position. Across the sky, the Gamma was cleansing a fourth dragon already.

The son of a bitch was faster.

Hale: Also, I think his green works quicker than your gold. Just an observation. Do with that what you will.

Dexmon launched himself at the next dragon so hard he almost overshot it.