Magda raised her hand and fired nine light-blue darts formed of magical energy, targeting three of the soldiers that had gotten closest. Each took three to the chest in rapid succession, Magda calmly selecting her targets and unleashing her magic at them, one right after the other. Each collapsed in turn, sputtering blood and groaning in pain.
The remaining men rushed them, raising a terrible battle cry as they charged. Anatoly hurled forward to meet them, stretching out with his axe, and bringing it down on the nearest soldier as quickly as possible, sacrificing balance for first blood. The blade cleaved into the man’s shoulder, driving him to his knees, wounding him seriously but not fatally. Anatoly nearly stumbled, going to one knee, bringing his axe in and then thrusting out into the midsection of the next nearest soldier, stabbing the top spike through his belly and out his back.
Soldiers collapsed in on him from all sides. A battle axe across the right shoulder turned him away from his attacker. A sword thrust into his left side staggered him, knocking the wind out of him despite the protection of his armor. Another sword thrust to the back drove him forward, opening his guard and slightly stunning him. A giant of a man stepped up in front of him with a war hammer held high. All Anatoly could do as the hammer fell was lean into it, take the blow on his dragon-scale helm, and hope to remain conscious.
He was driven to his hands and knees, his axe clattering to the floor beneath him, his head swimming in confusion and pain. The man with the hammer smiled down on him, raising his hammer for a second blow … but then he stopped, the war hammer slipping from his grasp and clattering to the ground behind him as he staggered to his knees, an arrow through the neck. Another fell a moment later with a shaft through the head to the feathers. He’d made the fatal mistake of separating from the group attacking Anatoly just enough for Abigail to feel certain of her shot.
Magda completed her spell, brandishing a longsword of blue-white magical energy and charging into the fray. She circled just behind the nearest soldier attacking Anatoly and stabbed him through the heart, drawing the attention of the man Anatoly had first wounded. Holding the wounded man’s eyes, she casually circled another soldier and killed him with one stroke of her conjured sword.
A soldier grabbed Anatoly, ignoring the commotion taking place in the background, and pulled his head back, exposing his face to two soldiers standing before him. Anatoly came up on his knees, bringing a knife up in each hand, stabbing under each man’s breastplate into the soft flesh of their lower bellies. Both men shrieked in sudden agony, spasming backward and collapsing to the ground in writhing pain.
The man behind him raised a knife but fell with an arrow through the skull. Anatoly staggered to his feet, war axe in hand, and scanned the battleground. Magda killed the last of the men confronting them with a well-placed trust to the heart. Seeing the enemy dispatched, she let go of her blade and it fell to the ground, vanishing before it hit.
Abigail beckoned to them.
The aerie was now home to a confused, mostly aerial battle with the drakini trying to attack the soft membranes between the bone struts on the dragons’ wings. Unfortunately for the drakini, the dragons were very good at killing them when they got anywhere close. All four dragons stood, back to back, in the center of the aerie and fought the drakini and any soldiers that were fool enough to charge into a dragons’ lair.
Anatoly was wounded, Abigail could tell from his gait, but he was still alert and deadly. A drakini made a run at them, attempting to latch on to Anatoly with its hind claws and carry him into the air. Anatoly kept walking like he didn’t notice the impending attack until the last moment, when he ducked under its feet, flipped his axe up and hooked it over the drakini’s wing, dragging it to the ground and stabbing it in the back of the head with a dagger before retrieving his axe from the corpse.
Another drakini dropped straight down on top of Abigail, crushing her into Ixabrax’s back spikes and cutting through her armor where his talons dug into her shoulders. She felt the warmth of her