The girls stopped. Jes and Caera both blinked a few times, and all three ladies slowly turned their heads to face toward the cave exit, just slightly out of view around the curved stone wall.
“Uh…” He shut up as a quiet vibration filled the cave, so subtle he thought it was him and his aura. It wasn’t.
No one moved. No one said a thing. No one breathed. The vibration grew louder, harsher, and he slowly sat up. Vibration turned into a more consistent, thudding pattern, quiet and distant, but something that came and went with the cadence of a slow heart beat, or a marching war drum. Louder, and heavier, something deep and bassy that rumbled through the mountains, like a distant avalanche. But, it couldn’t be an avalanche, not unless an avalanche could play a beat.
The girls got up, took two seconds to wipe themselves off as best they could, grabbed their armor, and got dressed, skin darkening and hardening in seconds. His dick abandoned ship and shriveled down to its pre-death size, and now able to walk again without tripping over his third leg, David scrambled for his armor, too. Because he was an idiot, it didn’t cross his mind to at least wipe some of the cum off, and he put the skirt back on over the mess. And because he was an idiot, he got his broken, worthless sword, too.
“The fuck is that?” he asked. With the way they armored up quick, they had to know.
“No idea,” Jes said. So much for that.
Dao clicked a few times, shaking her head.
“It doesn’t sound normal,” Caera said. “Sounds like–”
“Oh shit.” David threw up his hands. “That invisible monster again?”
“Could be.”
Fuck. Double fuck.
“We sure we want to go investigating?”
Jes and Dao paused and looked to Caera. Caera paused at the cave entrance, looked down in thought, and looked to him.
“If it were just me, I’d say we need to investigate because this is our province, our hunting territory,” she said. “But, this thing is chasing you. What do you want to do?”
“I…” Shit, what did he want to? He wanted to know what the invisible monster was, so damn bad. He wanted to know what was out there making what was now obviously some kind of lumbering, heavy walking crunching thudding sort of sound. He also wanted to live, and not get crushed into pulp, or eaten, or who the fuck knew what would happen if the invisible monster managed to touch him?
But, it hadn’t managed to touch him. It hadn’t even been able to pick up a rock without it crumbling. If it was the invisible monster, maybe he was safe from it? Kinda?
“I guess… let’s go?”
“Listen to the conviction in that voice,” Jes said, rolling her eyes.
Caera grinned at him, and prowled out of the cave toward the weird sound.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Well, at least it wasn’t the invisible monster.
“That,” Caera whispered, “is not good.”
They stayed low. It was day time and the fire sky burned bright. Demons roamed the mountains, plenty of gliders, and plenty of others, too, but none of them were a threat. Every single one of them was either running back to the spire, or climbing the mountains to see what was making the noise from a safe vantage point.
If it weren’t for the whole ‘everything in the whole fucking universe was coming to kill David and Mia’ situation, he’d have opted for staying in their little cave. It had no remnants and no visitors. A perfect place to lay low, and have three amazing women with amazing bodies pamper the ever living shit out of him. But, nope, they were outside, lurking around in ravines, ditches, crevices, and every shadow they could find, as they headed toward the very loud noise.
There were plenty of giant boulders around, many pressed against each other with crevices underneath them, a perfect place to get under and into, if you were willing to risk giant rocks crushing you to death for a peek. They were. Each one of them found a rock, a shadow, something to stick their head around and look across the canyon.
It was a dragon. No, that wasn’t right. It didn’t have wings. But it wasn’t the wurm they saw before, either. It was bigger, and it walked on four legs. Jesus fucking christ it might as well have been a dragon considering how big it was, big enough each time one of its hands or feet landed, it made the ground rumble. Not Godzilla big, but big enough his brain struggled to accept the size of what he was looking at. Big as a blue whale? Maybe a little bigger? It was like someone had given an iguana enough drugs and radiation to mutate it to blue whale size, and cover it in the same sort of black spikes his girls had.
Those horns were big enough to rip a building apart in a single swipe.
“What the fuck,” he whispered. The girls managed quick glances at him, long enough to nod before looking back at the creature. They didn’t know what it was, either.
The creature moved at a leisurely pace, as if trying to stay quiet, but even its breathing was loud, like the quiet rumble of an ending volcano. Its belly was lower to the ground than he thought at first, making it look a little closer to a big lizard than an actual dragon. Its colossal tail dragged along the rock and stone behind it, but its belly never quite touched the ground. Its head almost looked like a classic Western dragon’s, but it had five eyes. Two on the side he could see, two probably on the other side, and one facing ahead. Snake eyes, with red irises so wide they hid any sclera, and a gigantic black vertical slit for pupils.
The beast wasn’t alone. A bunch of demons stood on its back, shoulders, and haunches. No imps or grems, but he spotted at least three gargoyles, a satyr, one tiger, a few vrats, a few brutes, a few breeds David didn’t recognize, and one tetrad. A woman, four arms, walking on raptor feet and with a tail. That meant a fujara tetrad.
A couple dozen demons, and each one of them wore gold and bronze armor, with hints of red. Not as much armor as the rider, but more than Jes, Dao, or Caera’s black armor, and they’d assured him aera armor was a lot tougher than meera armor. Caera had also said the only place you could really get it anymore was False Gate.
David grabbed Caera’s wrist, and nodded toward the head of the dragon beast. She nodded, her eyes already staring up at the figure who rode it, clutching reins between its titanic horns.
“The rider,” she said. “What the fuck.”
That was the rider, the man who’d killed a tetrad and his goons in a matter of moments. He wore his gold armor, full plate, with a skull-like helmet that hid his face. And even from so far away, David could feel the edges of his aura, the hunger for violence, the need for destruction. The demons near the rider had to be feeling it too, their faces locked in permanent rage, all eyes looking forward toward their distant target.
David ground his teeth until his jaw clicked.
“They’re heading toward the spire.”