Dahei was still riding on the back of the old swamp dragon, his claws tightly gripping its wing bones while he beat his wings with all his strength.
No one knew what Benny had done earlier, but the old pterosaur would rather crash into the ground and be smashed to pieces than flap its wings to fly. Yet Dahei could not lift it either.
The two dragons, entangled together, fell like a passenger plane losing control, sliding helplessly toward the earth.
At this moment, the lush green cornfield below was only about four hundred meters away. There was no more time for Dany to show off.
But with her magic surging wildly, she still decided to act one more time.
Light on her feet like a spirit of the wind, Dany leapt from Dahei's neck onto the back of the old dragon. Then, moving up its neck with the agility of a martial artist using qinggong, she reached its skull in just a few steps. Lowering herself, she pressed one hand onto the pterosaur's brow.
"True Dragon Roar" activated. Her second soul, the Ring, merged with Little White and charged into the old dragon's spiritual sea. With practiced ease, she located the contract mark left behind by Balerion and shattered it. Something was off!
But she had no time to think it through. She immediately drew a strand of Dahei's spirit and combined it with her own Green Seer's second soul, forging a brand-new sigil. She burned it into the old pterosaur's mind.
It was hers now.
Dahei loosened his claws and released the old dragon.
"Shrraaah!" The old dragon let out a roar, beating its fleshy wings with all its strength. At fifty meters above the ground, it managed a glide, whistling past the cornfield as stalks, tassels, and broad leaves swayed noisily beneath.
Crouched on its neck, Dany raised a wave through the green sea below. She could even smell the sweetness of corn in her breath.
"Damn it! Balerion is ruthless."
Closing her eyes to analyze the fragments of Balerion's rune, Dany was shocked and furious.
He had altered the contract mark. Unlike her method of giving the rune the Green Seer's soul and the attribute of "immortality," he had instead set a time bomb.Whenever a pterosaur suffered soul or bodily injuries and lost the ability to fly, it would give up all struggle and hurl itself straight into the ground to die.
Just like the old pterosaur earlier—unable to break free of Dahei's grip, it had chosen death over survival. Survival would only have allowed Dany to capture it.
To put it simply, after Dany had once pulled off a "no guns, no cannons, the enemy builds them for us" at Tolos, Balerion upgraded his dragon "warplanes" with a self-destruct program.
"Shrieeek!" Dahei roared.
"Boom!"
"Gaaahhh—"
Dragonfire ignited the sky, and the pterosaurs' wails echoed for miles around.
Then came the sounds of bodies colliding, fangs tearing, and Dahei's furious roars again and again.
Dany looked up. The enemy's pterosaur riders were closing in.
Perhaps only at the very start of the mutation had the Shadow Wyvern riders been stunned for a moment. But after several months of rigorous training, these elite warriors quickly regained their composure. Following the tactics drilled into them by their instructors, they swarmed to besiege Dahei.
Just eight hundred meters above the cornfield, more than a dozen shadow dragons came from every direction—above, below, left, and right—like a pack of wolves surrounding a tiger.
And Dahei truly was as ferocious as a tiger.
If they had been the sturdier, stronger swamp dragons, Dahei would have fought a guerrilla battle, kiting them with his speed. But the shadow dragons were smaller, weaker, and their claws and fangs no match for his.
Facing the encircling swarm, he accelerated straight into them. Charging at three dragons rushing from below, he spewed dragonfire, roasting one into a dripping roast turkey. His tail then swung like a battle axe, severing the neck of another that was gnawing at his wing—cutting it clean through.
The rider screamed. Dragon scales flew. Blood splashed across the sky.
Meanwhile, another pterosaur bit into Dahei's left wing. Its dagger-like fangs tore three arm-length gashes across the membrane, spraying hot dragon blood that burned the attacker's mouth and forced it to let go—
"Crunch!" Unfazed, Dahei showed his brutal courage. Ignoring his wounded wing, without even a groan, he turned and sank his jaws into the enemy's neck.
It was like biting into a sausage.
"Shhhht!" Dragon blood gushed like a fountain, spraying from the severed neck and soaking Dahei's head and half his body red.
Then he spread his wings wide and broke out of the encirclement.
In one swift, deadly strike, the three pterosaurs from below had all been slain by him.
Even with several gaping holes in his wings, his movements remained swift, his flight steady.
Sweeping around in a half-circle, Dahei clamped a pterosaur's severed head in his jaws like a duck's neck snack and once more faced the flock head-on.
"Boom—"
Before a dozen charging pterosaurs, he calmly spat out a cluster of molten-red dragonfire, scorching the head in his mouth.
"Crunch, crunch!" It was like chewing on crispy biscuits as he bit down hard and swallowed.
Several pterosaur riders shivered, their hearts chilled. Almost involuntarily, they tugged on their reins, making their mounts slow.
Dahei did not roar again. Instead, he narrowed his eyes, beat his wings harder, and sped up.
Like light cavalry circling past a spear phalanx, he left behind only a rain of arrows and the cries of the fallen.
He carved a graceful arc through the incoming swarm, trailing a thirty-meter column of dragonfire behind him.
Miles away, the citizens of Meereen saw the whole sky dyed red—brilliant, vivid red, like the very blood of the heavens.
Another pterosaur, along with its rider, melted into dripping flesh and plummeted to the ground.
"Shhhht!" Dahei's neck was pierced, leaving a cup-sized hole gushing semi-divine dragon blood so hot it nearly scorched the earlier stains of enemy blood on his scales.
The delay caused by his dragonfire gave the enemy their chance. These pterosaurs were not like infantry without horses. One dove sharply from above, spearing toward his back, its beak-like hard shell breaking through even Dahei's armored scales.
"Arrrooooh!" Dahei bellowed in pain, his wings folding as his body shot down toward the ground like a missile.
But the attacking pterosaur lost balance, unable to secure its advantage, and was flung off his neck.
"Idiot, I told you not to charge blindly!"
Riding her newly tamed old pterosaur, Dany swooped in. Just as the enemy rider leapt over Dahei's spine, she vaulted nimbly, her jump lighter and easier than Brother Crow diving through a carriage window.
"Go, let Mother avenge you!" Dany leaned forward against Big Black's back, fastening her legs with the leather straps on the dragon saddle.
"Hissss—" The old Swamp Dragon was the first to charge into the flock of wyverns.
"Boom—" It smashed one wyvern aside, then clamped its jaws on another's wing, ferocious and unyielding. No, not just ferocious—recklessly fearless.
Its actions enraged the shadow wyverns. Like vultures swarming a carcass, their black scales and wings pressed down in a suffocating mass, nearly burying the mottled green of the old wyvern.
But Dany would never let her younger brother die in vain. In the next instant, Big Black arrived."BOOOOM!"
The azure sky erupted with a ring of milky-white shockwaves. Crimson rain poured down, corn stalks thrashed wildly, and green leaves turned faintly red—because it was as if a basin of blood had been spilled across the heavens, filling the world with red mist and fire.
Seven or eight wyverns, like flaming turkeys, screeched as they plummeted. The rest scattered like baseballs struck hard into the distance.
From the moment Dany mounted the saddle on Big Black's back, he had been holding back his ultimate move. A fireball of dragonflame swelled and condensed at his jaws.
By the time the Swamp Dragon was being mauled, and Big Black closed in on the cluster of black-winged wyverns above, the fireball had already grown to the size of a water tank.
Dany's Great Sorceress meditation technique had just advanced, doubling her mana. And now Big Black was in "Blacksmith" form. Together, their fused dragonflame fireball was unimaginably powerful.
It wasn't only the lighter shadow wyverns— even the massive Swamp Dragon, nearly fifty meters long, looked like a blood-soaked leather ball as it tumbled helplessly downward.
But he had received advance warning from the Dragon Queen. Curling his body into a ball, he braced himself.
The shadow wyverns tore at him with fangs and claws, raking a hundred wounds across the "ball." Scales shattered, flesh turned outward, and blood streamed, painting a miserable sight.
Still, he managed not to "gloriously" fall. Escaping the burning cloud of the exploding fireball, he spread his wings and staggered toward Meereen.
At this moment, the black-winged wyverns that had split into groups to hunt the four swamp guardians sensed the disturbance and flew back.
Dany had never intended to fight one against five. The four wyverns launched from Meereen were only meant to divide enemy forces, not to fight head-on. They simply lured them as far away as possible.
Baiting the beasts!Four dragons had lured away twenty shadow wyverns. That was how she and Big Black got the chance to "stab King Liao like Zhuan Zhu," while avoiding Zhuan Zhu's fate of being butchered by the king's guards afterward.
Now faced with twenty wyverns charging at them, plus eight or nine survivors from the earlier explosion, Big Black struck before they could regroup, picking off the scattered ones one by one.
With the Dragonmother aiding his output, dragonflame was no longer a straight fire column. It swerved left and right, surged forward and back, rose and fell at will.
Skimming past a wyvern ten meters off to the left, Big Black didn't even slow down or turn his head. A bowl-sized fireball roared out on its own.
The wyvern rider gasped, yanking the reins to make his beast dodge the blazing red orb. But suddenly—"BOOM!"
The bowl-sized fireball burst into seven or eight smaller ones, each no bigger than a child's fist. One splattered against the rider's face, igniting him into a screaming torch. The others struck the wyvern's head, wings, and spine, sending it plunging like a crippled plane.
"Thud—" It smashed into a beet field, carving out a massive crater. Dirt, beet leaves, blood, and flesh fountained ten meters high.
Even when the wyvern horde regrouped, robbing Big Black of the chance to pick them off, Dany could still kite them.
A strange spectacle unfolded in the sky.
A massive dragon mottled red, black, and swamp green flew ahead, with a dark swarm of wyverns close behind. The gap shrank: 200 meters, 150, 100, 50, 30…
Unknowingly, they crossed the HLJ's northern cornfields, streaked over red-and-green beet fields, and entered the rippling blue bay west of Meereen.
Ten kilometers deep into the bay, the wyverns drew closer, flying lower and lower.
"Something's wrong. What is she doing?" Wakanda's doubts multiplied, unease gnawing at him.
He was already leading, nearly close enough to touch the black dragon's tail.
"No, get out now!" He had just raised his crossbow to shoot at the "White Knight's" exposed back when a chilling tingle seized his scalp. His body shuddered, and instinctively he yanked the reins to turn.
"Whoooosh—"
The "White Knight" dipped her head. A crimson fireball surged past her spine, slamming straight into Wakanda's unguarded face.
He screamed as he melted. His wyvern's wings burst into flames, and the beast tumbled uncontrollably into the sea. At this low altitude, even suicide by crashing headfirst into the ground was impossible.
Dany had lured them here precisely to counter Balerion's "suicide command" imprinted in the wyverns' minds.
She intended to capture them alive.
"Swish, swish, swish!"
Wakanda and his mount were only the beginning. What followed was a rain of fireballs that filled the sky, searing itself into the surviving riders' nightmares for eternity.
The scene was just like the arcade game Raiden Dany had played as a child, when the fighter plane picked up the scatter gun and filled half the screen with bullets, utterly annihilating the weaklings of the first stage.
(End of Chapter)
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