All The Skills - A Deckbuilding LitRPG

Book 5: Wing Purple (2)

Arthur focused on a cluster of people that seemed to be heading back in their direction. That would make sense if they realized what was going on and were returning to save their farm and families.

But even as he and Brixaby closed in with the other dragons behind, he saw the cluster halt. One of the dots made as if to break away. The dot didn’t get far from the others before it suddenly disappeared from Arthur’s map.

Someone had just tried to run, and they had been killed.

He directed Brixaby faster toward that direction. And soon, they broke through to a meadow with a disaster about to happen.

About ten men and boys were gathered together, back to back, with basic weapons and slings. Surrounding them were three scourglings.

These scourglings were scouts—much larger than the ones in the oncoming wave. Nearly ten feet tall at the top of their tiny heads. Their slashing arms glinted in the light as if they had been somehow reinforced with metal.

The bodies of two farmers lay in the dust, and the rest of the scourglings were closing in, looking as if they were ready to pick off the rest of the group one by one. The farmers, for their part, were doing the best they could to defend themselves.

Someone had a card of fire and had drawn a circle around them. Unfortunately, that meant they were choking on smoke and the ring could only last for so long. The flames were lowering. It needed a lot of fuel to keep going.

Their ring was seconds from being breached.

“Hold on,” Brixaby yelled.

Knowing that tone of voice, Arthur gripped his neck ridges in front with both hands, legs clamped tight to his neck. That and all of his Dragon Riding skill let him keep his seat.

Brixaby dumped his speed in a hairpin turn that brought him just above the heads of the farmers. The whiplash was so strong that Arthur was nearly flung away. He kept his seat by a hair.

Then Brixaby let loose his Stunning Shout at the nearest scourgling. It slashed through the air like a knife. The scourgling it hit blew apart in two separate pieces.

The other two scourglings whistled in fury and raced forward. Arthur grabbed for one of his butcher knives. There was no need. A second later, a purple blur flashed past him, and one of the scourglings was suddenly without a head.

That purple blur resolved into Sunny, who now held a sword that was wet with scourgling ichor. She and her dragon had some kind of speed power.

One of the farmers gestured sharply with his arms, and a tree bent, cracking, to grab the final scourgling and entangle it in its branches.

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That gave another farmer a few seconds he needed to throw fire right below its legs. The fire caught on the leaves of the forest and leapt up toward the trapped scourgling.

Its whistle turned into a shriek. Then within a few seconds, it was no more.

But there was no time to celebrate or even take a breath. Distant whistles became louder and more noticeable in the bare moment of calm. By the sounds of it, they were already at the farm. Arthur hoped that everybody had been evacuated in time.

“Pick a dragon and get on,” he told the farmers. “We’re getting out of here.”

“My family’s back there,” one man pointed back toward the farm. “We have a ranch—”

“I know, that’s where we came from, they sent us your way,” Arthur said, relieved that he had found the right group. “You were hunting out here? Are there any others?”

The man’s face grew grim. “None alive.”

Then he turned and grabbed the shoulder of a boy who was looking down in shock at one of the fallen men. “I’ll do it, Dirk.”

He bent and gestured to the glowing patch right above the man’s back, as he had fallen on his face. Two cards rose up, and the man grabbed them before pressing them into the boy’s hands. “He would have wanted you to have these. They’ve been in your family for generations. You’re the man of the house now.”

That seemed to break the dam on the boy’s shock. He started to sob quietly.

Arthur looked away, feeling like he had just seen something he shouldn’t.

The other farmers were hurrying to the purple dragons, though he noted that nobody picked him and Brixaby. It probably had something to do with Brixaby showing his teeth.

“Sir.” Sunny gestured to the bodies of the scourglings.

He stared at her blankly, unsure of what she wanted.

Brixaby was quicker on the uptake. “Harvest from the one that you killed only, and let the farmers harvest from the one that they took.”

She scowled. “But we just saved these people. This is legal loot.”

Arthur felt more than saw Brixaby wavering at that—technically, Sunny was right, and her reasoning spoke to Brixaby’s inner greed.

With an internal sigh, Arthur dismounted and went to the scourgling Brixaby had taken down.

It yielded three Uncommon shards. No wonder Sunny wanted the harvest. That was an entire cycle’s work right there.

“You heard him,” he said to Sunny, and then went to the scourgling the farmer had taken down himself.

It was burnt to a crisp, and he was lucky that there was a viable harvest at all, but it yielded a whopping four Uncommon shards. Turning, he walked back to the man who was still comforting the boy.

Arthur held out the shards, and the man took them, a little amazement in his eyes tinged with wariness.

“Get him on a dragon,” Arthur said. “We have drinks to calm people back at the hive.” He paused. The boy looked thirteen or fourteen. Old enough to take cards into his heart deck, if barely. “Make sure he adds the cards in his heart deck first. But hurry, we need to leave.”

As if to punctuate that, there was scourgling whistle, close enough to startle a few purples into flight, apparently before the passengers were ready, as Arthur heard yelps of surprise.

“Let’s go,” Arthur said, and turned back to Brixaby. As he remounted, he said quietly to his dragon, “I just got three Uncommons from that scourgling, and four from the farmer’s.”

“Yes,” Brixaby said, “this eruption is much stronger than the last.”

Then his dragon gave him a significant look. Arthur knew he was thinking about when they would return to this eruption after this was all done with.

Soon I’m going to have more shards than I know what to do with, Arthur thought with a grim smile. How’s that for the blood price?

Even though the scourglings were growing closer, he held Brixaby on the ground to make sure everybody got a seat and that none of the small dragons were overloaded. Thankfully, more than enough had followed them on this jaunt.

According to Call of the Heart, there were more people in the forest, and Arthur planned to use his Personal Space for them. The next dot was less than half a mile away.

“Sunny, get this group back to the hive and meet up with Griff on the return. You two keep clearing out survivors from the farms.”

She nodded, but then gave him an assessing look. “And you, sir?”

“We’re going to stay back and look for any survivors in the forest. Get going,” he said quickly before anybody could lodge an objection.

The purples launched into the air.