Max
“Wild horses,” Caspian said, dropping to one knee and pressing his palm to the trembling earth. His ears pricked. The wolf read ground vibrations like a spider reads its web. “No. Mutants. A horde of them, running in formation. Coming from the south, the Haven.”
“They’ve broken through the southern border,” Aelindor said. His voice sank to a deadly quiet register.
The three heirs placed themselves in front of me. No discussion. No glance exchanged. Their bodies simply rearranged into three walls of muscle and power, a barrier between me and whatever charged toward us.
Caspian shifted to his warrior form. His body expanded, dark fur erupting over his shoulders and forearms, his green eyes drowning in silver. When the shift finished, he stood nearly nine feet tall. Claws the length of daggers. Jaws that could bite through iron.
“Mutants coming!” His voice was a bass growl.
“Messengers! Inform the outpost and villages,” Aelindor ordered.
Two jeeps roared to life and tore away, Stormglass headlamps cutting the gray dawn.
“Spartans! Battle ready!” Drakken bellowed.
A dark wave crested the southern horizon. It surged toward us, a storm of teeth and claws, black bodies and matted fur, red eyes holding nothing but hunger.
The ground shook. Hundreds of clawed feet pounded in near-unison. Guttural howling rose from beasts whose vocal cords had been twisted into instruments of terror.
Blades sang. Crossbows locked. A battle cry erupted from the ranks, raw, throaty, defiant.
My blood boiled with a savage anticipation.
Drakken shifted.
Where the wolf’s shift was violent, the dragon’s was cataclysmic.
His human form dissolved in a blast of heat and golden light.
Black scales layered into interlocking plates, obsidian edged in molten gold.
Wings unfurled, blotting out the weak dawn light.
His head was the size of a siege engine, jaws lined with teeth that gleamed like polished swords.
The dragon’s eyes swept over me like twin furnaces before he launched into the air with a single thrust. The downdraft knocked me back a step.
Magnificent and terrifying. The dragon was a thing of raw power that made the earth itself flinch. And both the beast and the man inside it were assholes.
“Major Frost, escort Cadet Max off the field,” Aelindor ordered.
“I can fight, sir.” The words came out before I could weigh them. “Please. You’ll need every soldier.”
I tore the armguard from my forearm.
Coldiron exploded to life. Not a whisper this time. Hundreds of Coldiron particles blazed to consciousness like stars igniting in a dark sky. The armguard glowed silver-white, and the metal screamed in savage joy.
Kill! Kill! KILL!
Frost stepped back. He couldn’t help it. The Spartans closest to me did the same—a ripple of unease as the Coldiron’s killing intent pressed against their awareness. This wasn’t a single drop of sentient metal anymore. This was hundreds of them, activated and bloodthirsty.
I commanded the metal to change. The armguard rippled, split, reformed. Iron flowed between my hands like liquid, dividing into two identical shapes that hardened in my palms.
Two chakrams, ten inches in diameter, hummed against my skin.
“Alchemist,” someone breathed.
“I don’t even need good aim, sir.” I grinned at Aelindor. “Coldiron will find the target for me, and when the chakram makes a kill, it’ll return to my hand. And I assure you, Coldiron chakrams can shatter any metal and cut through any beast’s hide.”
Aelindor studied me for half a second, weighing merit against risk.
“I’ll watch your six,” I added.
“You stay behind Caspian and me,” he said. “You do not leave our side.”
“Deal, sir.” I raised a chakram, setting my stance. At least this time I didn’t say “it’s a date.”
Let’s go kill some mutants!
I just needed to be careful. The DarkVeil Coldiron had a different temperament from their brethren from Crimson Ridge—more volatile. I’d have to keep them on a tighter leash.
Drakken’s dragon hit the horde first.
Golden fire erupted from his jaws, carving a burning trench through the heart of the charging mass. Mutants screamed, a wet, shrieking sound that wasn’t entirely animal. The dragon banked, circled, and made a second pass. Another trench. Another wave of screaming.
He was trying to thin the horde before they reached us.
As the smoke cleared, what we were fighting took shape: mutant wolves.
They were massive—the shoulder height of a war horse, sheathed in coarse fur, hides thick as boiled leather. Claws like curved blades. Fangs dripping viscous saliva. Twisted spikes jutted from their skulls and spines, designed for goring, for tearing a soldier’s guts out mid-charge.
Their red-black eyes churned with manufactured madness.
They’d been made to mock Caspian’s species. Wolves corrupted into weapons.
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.
“Afraid you can’t keep up with a first-year cadet on your back? Too heavy and clever for the mighty dragon?”
Smoke poured from his nostrils. And then his talons loosened.
He flipped me. One claw opened, then the other caught me mid-air with a precision that was almost insulting and deposited me on the broad plane of his back between his shoulder blades.
I grabbed for purchase—a ridge of raised scales along his spine, each the size of a dinner plate and edged in gold. I hooked my foot under a scale and locked my ankle in place. The edge dug into his hide. I didn’t care. The beast was tough enough, and he could take it.