Chapter 299
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The next day, after breakfast, I started my first shift patrolling the eastern wall with another soldier named Timothy, who, it turned out, was in a similar situation to my alias. He was an orphan from one of the cities, became a street urchin picking pockets and committing petty crimes as he got older, until he was caught. Since he was close to the age of enlistment, he was given the choice of hard labor in the mines or service in the army. He chose the army.
How do I know such lore on this particular individual? It was mainly because he just wouldn't shut up. Not wanting to be rude or make a kerfuffle about it, I kept my responses to monosyllabic answers and the occasional monotone “what, that's crazy.”
It was then that the voice of salvation from this chatterbox sounded in my head. {Just got word from the client, his daughter just left the nest and is heading to your location. He gave the old “mortals building things on our territory” and sent his daughter to deal with the keep you are in. She should be there in two hours or less.} Professor Sageira telepathically sent.
Sadly, my salvation comes slowly.
***
As I continue my patrol, I do not look to the sky for my target, for that is not how my target travels. No, today my target does not fly in the sky, nor does she crawl or slither on the earth. No, my target swims through the earth. Today, I will be fighting an Earth Dragon.
However, Earth Dragon is only what mortal academics name it. But among wyrm society and those more knowledgeable in Wyrm Lore, it would be more accurate to classify my target as an Earth Drake.
But just because it is a drake and not a dragon does not make my target any less dangerous. In fact, this job is likely to be far more tedious than beating down the frost and red dragon wyrmlings. After some research in the history books in my parents’ library and a conversation with Professor Sageira, I discovered that Earth Drakes are the epitome of toughness among wyrms. Whenever kingdoms encounter or are attacked by an Earth Drake, they need, at a minimum, siege weapons with enchanted projectiles or a team of mages highly skilled in siege spells, and that is just to chase the Earth Drake away. If they want to actually kill an Earth Drake, they will need to bring three to five times that number.
The secret to the Earth Drake’s toughness is their contact with the ground. Their unique physical and magical physiology allows them to draw in mana from any part of their bodies touching the ground, convert it into earth mana, and infuse it into their bodies, making their naturally tough bodies even tougher. And if that were not bad enough, they usually walk around armored in compressed stone that covers their tough skin.
Offensively, besides Dragon Tongue magic, they are innately capable of using earth instinctive magic, allowing them to literally overturn the battlefield if they do not just squish you first with a simple stomp.
As a whole, true dragons they may not be, but from what Professor Sageira tells me, even dragons would avoid tussling with an Earth Drake if it did not have to. That was just a very roundabout way for them to retreat, tired and out of mana.
But worst of all, I have to do this job without using Dragon Tongue Magic to avoid giving away my identity to my target. That was a huge handicap, especially when facing an opponent who could use Dragon Tongue Magic.
At the one-and-a-half-hour mark since I got the heads-up on my target’s arrival, I saw a disturbance in the distance. Birds in the distance took flight en masse, and as the seconds went by, more birds took flight, and that trail of birds fleeing was in our direction.
Deciding to use Timothy’s big mouth, I nudged him, pointed out the disturbance, and said, “Hey, something big is coming in our direction.”
That shut him up quickly, and once the scene registered in his mind, he started shouting to alert everyone else.
Soon, many soldiers, even the sergeant, were next to us. It was then that we began to see animals, big and small, pest monsters like goblins and kobolds, and even magical beasts, running toward our keep.
The sergeant took a warhorn slung by his side and blew on it, calling everyone to arms, kicking the whole keep into a frenzy of activity, and within a few short minutes, the walls were manned with bows and balistas drawn. But we had nothing to fear from all these creatures running at us, because they ran right past the keep. They were running from something.
A minute of tense waiting later, I saw nothing, but I felt it, as did all of us. The keep we were standing on began to tremble, and as the seconds passed, the trembling worsened until the archers on the wall had to unknock their arrows to grab hold of the wall for support.
And just before the tremors forced us to get on all fours, something breached the surface about three hundred meters from the wall. It was a huge head, followed by thick, powerful, stubby legs that pushed the rest of its body to the surface. When the full body was exposed, all seventy-five meters head to tail, I could feel the waves of mana in the air and especially in the ground moving toward the Earth Drake. As the mana coalesced around the Earth Drake, I could see the earth crawl up those four legs and harden, forming a second skin of earth as more dirt crawled up the body.
When the sergeant recognized the Earth Drake for what it was, he started shouting orders. “EARTH DRAGON! GET THE MAGES UP HERE NOW! LOAD THOSE BALISTAS, GO TO THE STORES AND GET THE ENCHANTED BOLTS!”
As the men scrambled, the last patches of the Earth Drake’s earth armor compressed. The Earth Drake was forced to open its mouth, splitting the earth armor at her mouth before unleashing a roar that shook every brick and stone of the keep, before announcing, [Flee, mortals, for I am Throgg, and you build your home on my ancestral territory. For this, I will tear down your walls!]
I sighed while trying to act busy while staying on the wall. Why do these wyrms always say something to opponents in a language they do not understand? Is she expecting these soldiers to understand and run?