Oath of the dragon, p.1
Oath of the Dragon, page 1
OATH OF THE DRAGON
DRAGON OATH™
BOOK NINE
TALIA BECKETT
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This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2024 Talia Beckett
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LMBPN Publishing
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Las Vegas, Nevada 89119 USA
Version 1.00, October 2024
eBook ISBN: 979-8-88878-529-4
Print ISBN: 979-8-88878-961-2
THE OATH OF THE DRAGON TEAM
Thanks to my JIT Team
Jeff Goode
Diane L. Smith
Sean Kesterson
Dorothy Lloyd
DEDICATION
To Little Jamie. You’re the youngest member of the family, but in plenty of ways very much part of it. You see the world in a unique and wonderful way and I couldn’t be more proud of you.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Connect with the author
Books by Jess Mountifield / Talia Beckett
Other books from LMBPN Publishing
CHAPTER ONE
Alarms blaring to signal the enemy was on their way had been a sound I had needed to respond to for over a century. It wasn’t new.
Over the last two years, I had heard it on five different planets, however. After hearing it on Earth and protecting the planet for so long I had opted to protect the place I called home by seeking the source of the threat instead of waiting for it to come to me.
It had taken me on a journey through my sector to the place I was now. I was on Zuria. A planet that we had come to barely more than two months earlier and from where we’d beaten the main corrupted entity away only a month ago.
The shadow dragon had fled through the portal to another planet. I hoped it was the final of the planets in my sector. The sixth one that had effectively gone missing. However, we had no way of being sure unless we went through the portal to it and rescued someone who could remember.
At least, I thought that was what we would need to do. I couldn’t be sure. This was an entirely new situation. The planet had been lost from the Protectorate, and I would be the first dragon to ever attempt to get it back. Like I had all the rest of them. For the most part, I had succeeded. In the last year or so, I had regained control of Havilah and Ashaire and helped Ranoctil begin taking back Moreleon.
Now, I was on Zuria, the fifth planet in the sector, and one I had been struggling to clear. While it made sense to be here, and I was capable of holding the planet, the enemy wasn’t making it easy.
The corrupted could infect and decay so much, and they were relentless. I had almost lost Earth to them, and only because Scarlet had arrived when she had and helped kill them all could I sleep.
Given how broken my sleep was while I was on Zuria and in this particular fortress, I was starting to wonder if I would ever be free of the enemy. The alarm continued to blare for some time as I pulled my armor on and grabbed my sword and shield.
This wasn’t a drill or a friendly visit. It was the enemy.
This wasn’t one of the many allies sending us supplies or swapping some of their dragons for ours to give us fresh people. This was the same few people guarding the same portal pathway from the same enemy.
Putting armor on in a hurry was something I had practiced so many times that I knew I could do it fast enough to get to the portal room before anything came through.
Still, it was close. The fortress wasn’t large, but the passageways were winding, one of the easiest ways to make it easier to defend while it wasn’t as big as others we protected.
I reached the portal room to find Sienna and a few other dragons there already. I suspected a lot of them had already been awake. No doubt some of them were guarding it and had been in the portal room from the beginning. They were already standing on either side of the portal, ready to attack any creature that came through.
Even if I hadn’t connected to the portal with my mind and checked where it was coming from, the blaring alarms let everyone know this was likely to be an attack. I drew my sword as Matraphiel went to one side of the portal room and flew up to a small ridge on the wall. Lityria, our second sphynx, went to the other side.
Matraphiel, my companion since I had been a fully-fledged member of the Protectorate, could create illusions and aid in battle in many ways. We had found Lityria on the current planet, hiding among the Grantin, the sentient and dominant species on Zuria.
The first creatures through the portal were shadow catchers, a common tactic of the enemy, but the guards on either side struck out and lopped their heads off swiftly.
We had trained everyone to know how to get on top of a portal attack and kill as many as possible as soon as it came through. It allowed us to have a small number of guards in each portal room, and know that it gave the rest of the squad stationed in each fortress time to get their armor, shields, and swords and get to the fight.
As such, I could hang back, make sure I had a good grip on my shield, and take my time approaching the fray. I didn’t like to wait and watch for long before I helped, and with this particular planet, I didn’t have long before the guards had too much to handle. Smaller creatures came through the portal, rushing out in large numbers.
I soon planted my shield and shifted to one side of it to block off more space with my body. We didn’t want to let these dog-like creatures out of the portal room and into the rest of the fortress, where they could begin to decay the building and do damage. It could be fixed if not many managed it, but it was dangerous if too many got past us.
Douglas was soon on one side of me, but Kryos hadn’t appeared yet, so Sienna brought her shield up on his other side. The corrupted minions came at us, angry and aggressive, even for the enemy. We cut at them, and I even kicked out at another, catching it in the side and sending it back toward the guard nearby.
More and more dragons and soldiers came into the room and joined in the fight, turning back the enemies and making it easier and easier to pen them in. Within five minutes, I could pull back behind my shield as enough dragons arrived to form a semi-circle of shields and hold the enemy in the room.
It wasn’t long before the portal was large enough that more and more enemies came in. If we worked together, we could still contain them and kill them before the battle grew out of control, but the longer the portal was open, the larger it would get, and the more creatures would come through.
Several times, during attacks in the early days of holding this fortress position, I had tried to combat the mind on the other end of the portal and keep it from growing, but it required a lot of magic and put pressure on my mind. Sienna had encouraged me to let the enemy through while we could handle it so we could kill as many of them as possible.
She had enough of a point that I conceded it would be better to kill the enemy quickly and get back to our lives. And given the frequency of attacks in the month since we’d taken the portal area, we needed to make them stop so we could rest and focus on the planet we were on.
Having to defend against the enemy coming through the portal and so many corrupted on this planet had been a challenge over the month. I had been torn in my focus, but in the end, I decided I would let Sienna and Jace do what they did best while I did what I do best.
For the most part, Sienna was running the two fortresses on the planet at each portal site, while Jace, backed up by Cios, was trying to take more ground and equip and train the Grantin. The latter was having mixed results, but it was important to us not just to win a planet and take it but to help the locals take it for themselves.
The clans didn’t exactly work together well, however. They needed encouragement.
Which was another reason I was in the portal room, attacking the creatures coming through. The handlers were beginning to come through now, and I had stepped out of the semi-circle
For several weeks, the corrupted had sent through a lot of the tree-like handlers, but they were often freshly corrupted, and we purged them and freed them. Almost all of them had then turned and rushed back through the portal, where we couldn’t protect them.
After that, I had no idea what had happened to them. They might have caused some damage, but it was most likely that they were now either dead or they had been corrupted all over again. We had managed to keep a couple of them, but I liked to think healing them caused havoc on the other side.
Either way, the enemy had learned to send us other handlers. They were more likely to be handlers we saw in other places and must have been corrupted much longer ago. This time, they were almost all the tentacled type. I quickly ducked and rolled, using my shield as a springboard to get back to my feet.
I cut the first tentacle off as Kryos finally came running up and joined me. He ducked under an attack to get to me, and I slashed at the limb as it came toward me next, then lifted my shield to block another to protect him.
“I’m meant to be protecting you, not the other way around.” Kryos shook his head at me, and I chuckled. We were soon working together to cut the handler to pieces, but no sooner had we managed to kill it than another came through the portal close to us. And then another.
Douglas came out to join us and help. A lot of extra tentacles came at all three of us, and it made it hard to do much but dodge and block to avoid being clobbered. Here and there, one of us got some damage in, but it was far harder and took us some time to get the first tentacle out of our way.
I was able to get a second from the same creature, and then Kryos broke off to one side, getting in close to that handler to finish it off. It left me to focus on the closer one with Douglas. While the soldier had been training to use a sword far more lately, he wasn’t as skilled as me and Kryos yet.
We’d found that the handlers needed a lot of bullets to do enough damage and deliver enough magic. Shooting was less effective when we weren’t curing the corruption with serum. It meant a lot of our soldiers were also training to use melee weapons, and while I carried a gun as well, it was needed far less.
Thankfully, the training was paying off, and Douglas and I made short work of the handler between us. This one had been corrupted for so long that every limb we cut off turned into smoke, and the body became the tiniest amount of leftover matter.
I whipped the air around to clear some of the smoke and get an idea of how many enemies were left. The portal was still open and large enough that lots of enemies were coming through. This was a big attack, and it wasn’t over.
The handlers had slowed, and it was minions again, but there were a lot in a great variety, some creatures coming through that were native to other planets in the sector. All of them had been corrupted for some time. There was no saving anyone.
We kept fighting, the portal spewing out more and more until finally, the mind on the other end let go. It didn’t stop the flow of enemies at first, but it was a sign this battle was coming to an end.
I cut through whatever was closest. I didn’t bother getting back in line while I could keep the enemy from me and had Douglas and Kryos out in the middle of the area with me.
It helped to break up the enemies as well, and I knew it would ease the pressure on the rest of the team. But there was still one more hurdle to come if this battle was like the others over the last week or so. Right at the end of the influx of enemies, there would be two more handlers. And these would be of a type of sentient race that looked more like a minotaur than anything else.
So far, we had killed them all. All of them were also long-corrupted, but they were strong, fast, and smart. If the tentacle handlers were difficult, the minotaurs were another level above. They weren’t fast like the morphlings and didn’t heal, but they almost always came through in pairs and worked in pairs.
Although I suspected I could fight more than one of them at once, I didn’t intend to if I didn’t have to. One was enough. They were also some of the rare handlers that could wield some sort of weapon. It was difficult to fight a creature that could fight back so well and had enough self-preservation to also dodge attacks, but they had still all fallen to us so far.
As I’d expected, two came through, one after the other, as the portal began to shrink. I shifted to intercept the first, banging the hilt of my sword against my shield to draw its attention. It took the bait and tried to charge at me. Wanting to break the momentum before I had to block and defend, I sent a small burst of magic at it.
The creature bellowed in pain, and its skin blistered as corruption inside it died, in much the same way it did with the morphlings. It couldn’t heal, however, and I quickly slashed as soon as it was in range, sidestepping as it skewered the air in my previous position.
Using magic to make my body move faster had become second nature and an automatic part of my strategy every time I was up against an enemy that could do more damage or was harder to cut down. It allowed me to dance around it and cut the creature open.
The shadow minotaur moved well and managed to turn slashes into shallow cuts all over my body, but it couldn’t escape well enough to do anything but delay the inevitable. It still took several minutes for me to turn the creature into a ragged mess. If I had the opportunity, I hit it with a little magic here and there as well, pulling a little from my armor.
Eventually, it slowed enough that I could slice its head off. A little purple smoke came off the handler, but only enough to let me know that we wouldn’t have been able to save it. It made me certain that wherever it had come from, it was probably the native planet.
Penthia had intimated this was the final planet in our sector that the Protectorate had “lost,” and we had managed to establish contact again, but she hadn’t visited since they had begun to come through the portal regularly, and we weren’t confident this was the last enemy holdout.
As soon as I’d defeated one handler, I shifted to help Kryos with the last one. He had already done a lot of damage, but he couldn’t use magic quite as effectively to speed his movements up, and it had made a big difference.
I roared and distracted his handler, slashing at its side. It gave Kryos the opening to kill it. This one let off a little more purple smoke as it fell, which I blew out of our faces. By the time we’d beaten the handler, the portal was far too small for any more enemies to come through, and there were only a handful of enemies left to fight.
The fighters in the room had done an amazing job of clearing through the waves of corrupted, and I could stop and get my breath back as they finished them off. This fight was over, but I knew it would only be a few hours before there would be another.
CHAPTER TWO
A lot of the fighters in the portal room were backing out and heading toward whatever duties or rest they were taking before the alarm sounded. I lingered, noting the mix of bodies left and how corrupted our enemies had been. It was clear that the enemy was throwing older corrupted at us. With the exception of the majority of the shadow minotaurs.
Still, what was left had to be cleared out of the room, and it was a disgusting task. We had a small team responsible for it, and what remained was always taken out of the fortress and burned to make sure nothing got out to infect anyone. It was the best we could do with what we had.
As someone came up with a large bag, I picked up one of the heads I had sent rolling from a minotaur and put it inside. With my armor still on, I was more protected against any lingering corruption inside the corpse. It couldn’t easily infect me.
Sienna also lingered to make sure that the room was fixed and to take account of how much magic we’d used. She soon made her way over to me. “You should rest some more. I’ve got this for a few more hours at least.”
I frowned, not sure I could go wind down now. Eventually, I shook my head. “I couldn’t sleep now. Not after that. I’ve had too much excitement and adrenaline to feel tired enough. I’ll sleep more once Jace is on watch here.”
