Chapter 145 – The Black Shadow on the Tower

By the sentry towers on the riverbank, hordes of soldiers were hiding behind stone walls or anything else that could be called cover, and from the woods the soldiers who, like Jace, had just come over to support them rushed toward one of the collapsed pieces of rubble between them.

Over there a knight-like officer’s in full body armor greeted the soldiers as they quickly crossed the gentle slope and approached the bunker.

Jace joined them, running and looking up and around but not seeing the dragon.

It wasn’t really hard to tell, as he soon noticed that the distant Lordaeron soldiers were all staring in unison in one direction – the top of the sentry tower.

As Jace realized he could judge the dragon’s position from their sight, he felt a man grab the back of his neck by his cloak and yank it back so hard that he stumbled and nearly fell on his back.

When looking up, he was seeing a dark shadow emerging from behind the palisade wall of a high sentry tower.

Even with the sun at his back, he could see the creature’s yellow reptilian eyes staring intently at him; it was a large, serpentine head, but this one was all but so large that it made Jace a little giant-phobic.

The oppressive feeling of his opponent’s size, far beyond that of a normal creature, sent chills down his spine in the heat of the flames burning everywhere, having never witnessed a giant monster up close before. “Get out of here, Mage!”

Jace rolled over, sliding out with the force of the person who had just yanked him, crawling backward on his hands and knees for a while before he felt his ass fly up in the air as if he’d been kicked violently behind him.

Before he could fall to the ground he was engulfed in a ball of flames, the reddish, blackened flames curled over his head, the heat wave pushed him to the ground and rolled around several times before he came to a stop.

He stumbled to his feet and ran a few steps to jump behind a wall, turning back to eye a soldier in lockjaw armor not far away burning with flames running wildly toward the creek.

“Shit …… shit …… shit …… shit ……”

Jace patted the fire at the unended end of his hair, chanting his native tongue as he pressed himself against the stone wall, his hand could feel it getting a little hot from the flames on the other side.

It was then that Jace felt a fiery pain in his lower arm, which turned out to be because it wasn’t covered by the cloak when he fell just now.

The cloak had turned from dark brown to red, and just now, it was estimated that if it wasn’t for the protection of this item, the entire back might have suffered.

“Bind his movements with a deceleration spell! Mages!” On the other side a Knight Captain shouted, “Don’t be intimidated by his flames!”

Jace hadn’t noticed where there was a mage, in fact he didn’t even dare to poke his head out right now, and the soldiers with bows next to him were pressed against the wall without probing.

They shouldn’t dare go out there either, Jace told himself. However out of nowhere came a cry, “Archers stand by!” , these soldiers immediately rushed out of their cover and drew their arrows and strung their bows.

These Lordaeron soldiers defending the town of Southsea were undoubtedly veterans who had fought in the Orc War a few years ago, and the Hillsbrad Hills were the battlefield on the entire continent where the Red Dragons were most frequently involved in the war.

The people here definitely wouldn’t question whether or not the orcs rode dragons in battle or not like the people in the Stormwind Kingdom, because most of the locals had seen the scene of the red dragon whizzing past overhead already.

To them, the black dragon was just a darker colored red dragon.

Jace watched as these fellow townspeople aimed fearlessly at the sky behind him, and couldn’t help but gain the courage to poke his head out as well.

Now he saw the dragon in full view.

Covered in dark brown scales, the black dragon used its four sharp, sharp claws to pick at the walls of the ramparts to move its body, scraping and scraping as debris and dust rained down.

A giant wing like a dark purple canvas, one flapping outward and one wrapped around the sentry tower along with its four legs, was a gecko the size of a bus.

The thin, exaggerated tail was pestled in the sky, with only the spindle-shaped tip with a few protruding spines twitching every now and then, like some sort of deterrent.

His high cocked head was aiming at a few fleeing soldiers on the river’s edge, raging black smoke rolling out from between his scaled lips, and transparent saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth as it trembled incessantly. This cunning fellow was obviously using this sentry tower as a cover to maneuver around the soldiers who were besieging him.

Whoosh!

The soldiers let loose their arrows, and one arrow sliced across Jace’s face screaming straight up high, and Jace didn’t even have time to look at where they landed before the ear-piercing motion of arcane energy scraping through the air approached again at speed from behind.

He raised his head as a constant stream of arcane missiles swirled and swooped straight at the black dragon, who was keenly aware of the threat behind him, and that raised wing deflected in the direction of the missiles and shook violently, and all of them suddenly shook and cracked into arcane dust and dissipated in mid-air.

The black dragon turned its head to the source of the missiles, its belly bulging and turning red, then turning to its throat, and Jace watched as several mages had fled in different directions using a variety of strange displacement spells ……

Bluff!

A cloud of charred black flames hurled through the crimson lava, exploding instantly on contact with the ground, and Jace hastily grabbed his cloak to cover himself as the heat blasted into him like a strong man had pushed him against a wall and hit him solidly.

In fact, compared to this intuitive flame explosion, those remnants of the crimson colored Shadow Corrosion emanating a purple aura on the ground were even more terrifying.

Jace saw a mage near the explosion who hadn’t managed to get away in time wailing in agony, the bare skin of his burnt pants already purple and swollen, soon to be necrotic under the damage of Shadow Corrosion.

He fumbled around in his bag for a while, gripping the last remaining bottle of his Shadow Protection potion and tucking it into the straps of his vestments; while he didn’t know if it would block this black dragon’s damage (of course it wouldn’t at all), at least some was some.

Without realizing it, Jace, nestled under the sentry tower, was the closest person to the black dragon in the entire clearing.

He didn’t dare to poke his head out, because once he was discovered he would surely die the fastest as well.

Some of those archers who had been hiding with themselves earlier had been saved from blast wounds into the forest, while others had moved behind another piece of low wall to wait for an opportunity to attack again, and the sound of clinking arrows hitting rocks and scales continued to be heard overhead.

Suddenly the black dragon roared violently, and Jace cocked his head and glanced over his shoulder to find that some lucky archer had just happened to shoot an arrow deep between the scales of the black dragon’s abdomen.

However, upon closer inspection, there were already quite a few arrows that had been shot into the skin, it was just that this black dragon was too big, and these arrows never caused any fatal injuries, but only slowed down his movements.

What about those mages? Where’s the promised slowdown spell?

The black dragon saw the attacks on him getting harder and harder, and whimpered in pain so much that he couldn’t stop himself, immediately moving his claws again, climbing and shifting to the other side of the sentry tower, stomping and scraping down rocks that rained down so hard that Jace had to hold his head and nestle under a corner for a while to hide.

In the afterglow he glanced up at the black dragon, only to realize that the membrane of that retracted wing of his had been badly torn, a series of scars spreading all the way down to the piece of ribcage where the huge wing was attached, the very same ghastly wounds inflicted by the dwarven griffin rider earlier. Damn it, where had Grid gone?