O-O-O
Ice cracked, crunched, and shattered into boulders large enough to crush small villages as massive tusks smashed and speared the icebergs floating in the way of Drago's fleet. The water churned and splashed in the massive white dragon's wake, chunks of ice floating behind him, drawn in by the rush to fill the void only to be rammed moments later by the armored prows of the leading ships of the armada. The sky was still cloudy and snow was gently falling, but the frosty mist of ice particles kicked up by the sheer amount of destruction floated over the front half of the armada like a fog, further obscuring everything.
Aboard the ships, hundreds of soldiers stood at the ready. In the air, armored dragons bearing restless soldiers swarmed, eagerly anticipating the inevitable response to such a direct assault. The ice nest was a shape in the distance, slowly growing clearer as Drago's dragon battering ram forced a way through the normally impenetrable ice field around it.
The armada would reach the ice nest soon enough, if nothing stopped them.
Maour didn't quite know what Drago intended his forces to do once they reached the ice nest. It wasn't like a human stronghold; there were no fields to raze, no homes to ransack, no forests to burn. The only fortifications were made of ice, and while breaking them down would be helpful in the moment…
The living mountain in front of the fleet ducked down to hoist a smaller iceberg to the side, tusks digging under it to lift its bulk out of the water, and the air itself shook as he tossed it out of the way. He inhaled and subsequently sprayed a massive torrent of water at it, splashing the freezing liquid over the cracking bottom of the iceberg just before it all froze solid, stopping the iceberg from breaking apart and continuing to block the way in smaller pieces.
If the other King could do that, breaking down the mountain was a very temporary setback, nothing more. And Maour didn't even want to think about what such a huge spray of instantly-solidifying water would be able to do to any unlucky dragons caught in its path.
'I am not getting anywhere close to his face,' Von muttered worriedly as she swooped back over the armada. She was higher than most of Drago's dragons, all the better to fully appreciate the scale of what was happening. Much of what was below them was shrouded in ever-increasing amounts of icy mist, but one did not need good eyesight to see what was happening.
"Nobody is that stupid," Maour agreed. He could see indistinct shapes flying up above the nest, grouping together and swarming. It wouldn't be long now; for them to even be visible from here, there had to be scores of them, maybe hundreds. A small cloud of scales and fire and teeth, growing larger by the moment.
Then, even as he watched, the cloud moved as one, away from the nest and toward the invading fleet.
"They come!" one of the dragon-riding soldiers below yelled out. His voice was puny, heard only in the brief and rare pause in the thunderous grinding of icebergs. But dragon communication had no such limitation, and his dragon must have passed the word for him, because all of the armored dragons in the air began flying more purposefully, keeping above the fleet but falling into routes that would take them out over the ice to either side, as well.
Maour knew that Drago had been fighting this particular nest's dragons for a while, much longer than he'd personally been there to witness, so he assumed there was some reasoning behind the way the defending dragons were spreading out to guard the airspace to either side of the fleet. If he and Von were meant to be fighting in the battle proper he might have been compelled to ask someone before the battle started. But he and Von had a different purpose.
Two different purposes, in fact. One set by Drago, and one by their own motivations. They were here to counter the dragon rider and potentially the Skrill. To take the battle to them.
But they were also here to find and save Toothless. Maour had no intention of forgetting that, not even once they were busy dealing with the rider. "Remember, once they've reached the nest-"
'We break away, either down or lose the rider, and find our brother,' Von growled. 'Yes, I remember.'
O-O-O
The attacking dragons came as a group, but when they arrived they immediately split up.
Von had eyes for only one dragon amidst the horde, but she noticed how the battle below was joined; it was impossible not to acknowledge the flashes of fire in the air, the sparks and lava-like rain falling, the blood flashing red against the white of the ice all around them. The rider and their four-winged companion flew above it all, well out of range of the suddenly-developing carnage.
Well out of range of all but Von and Maour. The rider stood astride the four-winged dragon, their strange staff in hand, solemnly staring their way. The four-winged dragon was trying to glare a hole in her head with pure willpower as they glided closer.
"I don't see any Skrill," Maour said tersely, his knees digging into the saddle. "Don't engage yet."
As if she would ever get into a fight when there could be Skrill hiding somewhere. Her father had taught her better than that. The clouds were not that far above her, and she was ready to drop to either side the moment anything came down out of them.
A few tense moments passed as they slowly closed the distance, neither she nor the four-winged dragon flinching from their path. The fight continued below, the massive King continuing his ice-moving rampage unmolested.
Then lightning flashed, silent and deadly, originating from one of the flying dragons in the airborne melee and detonating on the King's scaled back. Two more strikes surged out, and then a belated fourth, all coming from what Von had assumed were large Monstrous Nightmares scattered about the fleet. They'd been fighting without any visible lightning, not even the normal ambient pulses that tended to crackle over their bodies.
It was a clever bit of camouflage, but it had bought them only a single unhindered strike, and the King did not so much as pause to acknowledge the ineffectual bombardment. All of the armored dragons converged on the sources of the lightning, and more struck out at those in the air–
The four-winged dragon surged forward, a veritable tornado of fire blasting from his maw. Von twirled to the side, then dove further out of the rapidly-expanding path of the flames, surprised by the sheer volume of fire. The seeking cloud of fire expanded toward her again – the four-winged dragon undoubtedly turning to track her as he flamed – and she dove again, sacrificing more height to get out of the path of the heat.
And more importantly, to gain sight of him again. She had a shot built up in the back of her throat by the time his flames faded away, and she wasted no time letting it loose at his exposed underbelly.
He saw it coming, but unlike his flames, hers were not so slow and easily dodged. He folded his wings in and fell, but she had anticipated as much – it was always easier to flee downward than any other direction – and her shot detonated on his back, too far down to kill the rider but strong enough that the lithe figure bounced off the back of his head and into empty air.
Von knew better than to think that was the end of anything, and sure enough the four-winged dragon stooped to dive after his falling rider. She took advantage of his momentary distraction to close the gap between them, flying for where she thought he'd catch up with his rider, not far above the highest dueling dragons. Two armored Gronckles were battering a Nightmare into submission, preventing a dangerous rain of heavy liquid fire, but other than that there was nobody close enough to interfere.
She built up another blast in her throat, aiming to put a hole in one or more of those four wings when the dragon tried to arrest his fall. He caught up to his rider, turned into an impressively tight twirl just as he caught them, the wings came out–
A half-formed premonition flashed through her mind, something formed of experience and paranoia, and she twisted at the last moment, flipping forward and using the tips of her wings to drag herself around in the air and fire at the bright light forming in the maw of the Skrill that had come up behind her, all in one breathless moment of panic. Her fire shot out, intercepting the Skrill's lightning blast halfway, and a crackling sphere of something bright erupted from where the two clashed.
It was better than being struck out of the sky just like she had intended to do to the four-winged dragon in turn, but the shockwave hit her all the same and she couldn't fully maintain control of her flight, sacrificing yet more elevation to protect her wings. She flailed at the air, Maour's weight thankfully still on her back, and fell right into the low aerial battle above the fleet.
Things were moving too fast for her to fully think about her next actions; she brought herself out of her fall just short of crashing into the back spines of an armored Monstrous Nightmare, accidentally smacked his head with her chest, and immediately swooped into an unlit cloud of explosive gas from the Zippleback that the Nightmare had been trying to bring down, spotting a brief glimpse of two necks and four beady eyes before the green cloud got in her own eyes and made them water. She was out of the cloud before it could be lit, but that was pure chance, not any conscious choice.
The wind whipped at her face as she flew blindly forward. Maour yelled something unintelligible – something never meant to be a proper word at all, else she'd have understood him whether or not she actually heard him – and his weight yanked at her back, pulling the saddle by the tethers connecting them and jerking her backward. Blood splattered all over her, and something hit her tail, knocking her even further out of anything resembling a sustainable glide and down even further.
She frantically pumped her wings, twisting around to avoid falling with her back to the ground, and blinked to clear her eyes just in time to see the still-unfurled sail she was headed straight for. Rather than trying to avoid it, she just tried to angle herself so she hit paws-first–
The canvas fluttered and folded around her. She desperately scrabbled for purchase anywhere, to climb out of her entrapment, but she fell down, unable to breathe as she held onto whatever her claws could find.
A Skrill screeched overhead and something exploded very close by, but the answering rapid-fire snapping sounds of crossbows and other, more heavy-duty weaponry being fired reassured her enough that she could take a moment to calm down, get her bearings, and drop down to the deck.
She saw through bleary eyes a couple of soldiers manning a net-throwing machine, and another two tossing water on a burning chunk of wood and metal. Every blink brought them into clearer and clearer focus. Her heart was hammering away in her ears, and beyond that the King was still smashing ice in the distance, but she was fine. She wasn't hurt, though after that horrible turn of events, not being hurt was a miracle.
Another bolt of lightning struck at the prow of the ship, throwing wooden splinters everywhere. The net-launching soldiers gamely flung another net in that general direction, but they only got a wounded Nadder who was being brought down anyway. The chaos of battle continued unabated.
"You good?" Maour asked. "I'm singed but fine. Good thing you noticed that Skrill… We should have known he wasn't going to ignore us."
'Same one?' she asked, feeling peculiarly lightheaded. And angry, and ready to rend flesh to bloody ribbons the moment a valid target presented itself, but those feelings were probably normal in the middle of a battle.
"Pretty sure," he confirmed. "We're hunting the rider… He's hunting us."
'Good,' she snarled. 'It'll keep him where we can see him.' This wasn't going to stop her. Not by a long shot. She hadn't put her best paw forward by not anticipating such a thing to start with – the other Skrill really were ignoring her presence on the battlefield, maybe that had given her a false sense of security – but that didn't mean she had lost.
"Going back up?" he asked, his voice surprisingly steady.
'Do I have a choice?' she huffed, shaking her wings out. 'I'm not playing that game again, though.' She'd had enough of fighting a two on three battle with those particular three. 'He wants us, he's going to have to come get us.'
"And the rider?" Maour asked.
'Them too,' she responded. The sky above them was filled with criss-crossing blasts of magma, so she waited, poised to leap up at the first opportunity. A flight of arrows further delayed her, so she kept talking. 'They know they're bait. Ignore them, and they'll try to regain our attention.' That trick with the Skrill had been too easy, too perfectly set up; maybe it was improvisation but it was improvisation with a preordained goal in mind. One Skrill had hung back, the four-winged dragon had acted without worrying about opening himself up for a fatal strike… He knew he was going to be covered. He probably would have given her a false opening if she didn't make one for herself from the start.
The sky cleared, so she took off. The fight was just as hectic as before, though all of the most aggressive risk-takers on either side were dead or captured, as the fights taking place all over the armada had taken on a much more careful quality, dragons flying mostly out of range of the armada's ranged weaponry and moving in small groups. There was still a constant give and take of projectiles going both ways, nobody could fly at a constant elevation and properly fight an airborne enemy, but both sides had settled into an extended grinding conflict, rather than a quick and bloody raid or raid defense.
A few of the unarmored dragons fired on her when they saw her – she fired back at a Nadder who almost spiked Maour with a rain of quills from above, concussing the birdlike dragon – but most did their best to not attract her attention, or were too busy to notice her presence.
It was the latter group she set her sights on, quickly picking out a distracted Monstrous Nightmare engaging two similarly long-necked dragons she didn't have a name for. She flew up under them right as one of the armored dragons swooped down to slash the Nightmare, and Maour lashed out with his scythe at exactly the right time, tearing a gash in the Nightmare's unprotected wing before he even noticed their presence directly under him. A splattering rain of burning liquid splashed down behind her as she beat a hasty retreat, outflying his agonized retaliation.
"Do that enough and they'll have to try and get our attention again?" Maour asked.
"That's the idea," Von said grimly. "Or the Skrill will just find us first." The intermittent flashing of lightning near the front of the armada gave the location of the other Skrill. The King soldiered on despite their repeated blasts at his head and face. Throughout the entire fight, neither he nor the armada had slowed their approach. She was impressed that the sailors could keep their ships going the right direction amidst all the chaos and violence, let alone at the same speed as before.
The battle, or at least her part in it, quickly fell into a perilous pattern of violence and paranoia. She flew around, keeping to the no-fly-zone excluding the unarmored dragons for the most part, looking for vulnerable targets. Whenever she spotted a good one she went up, engaged where they least expected it, and either disabled them herself or let Maour do it, whichever was quicker in the moment.
Neither she nor Maour struck directly lethal blows, and the fall to the ships was survivable, but she was under no illusions as to their ultimate effect. She was faster and subtler than any of the armored dragons, and some of the unarmored dragons even hesitated upon seeing her, two major advantages that let her slip in and out of fights and end them decisively every time. If any single dragon could be said to be making a difference in the overall flow of the battle, it would be her.
If it weren't for the occasional bolt of lightning aimed her way, she might have believed the Skrill had given up on avenging his past defeat. But though he dogged her throughout the battle, he couldn't get too close or fire accurately; the armored dragons prioritized Skrill wherever they could, and every time he struck he was forced to fight off whole groups of enemies converging on his location. Von would have expected devastating explosions of lightning to drop the attackers like rain from the clouds, but none of the Skrill were doing anything like that in this particular battle. It was snowing, but there was no lightning in the clouds and the battle was inevitably going to go long. A Skrill without any lightning in reserve would be as good as dead, and she supposed her opponents knew that and were conserving their power.
That would stop if the Skrill ever felt their side of the fight was losing too badly, and she kept a very close eye on any flashes of lightning, regardless of whether they were aimed at her or not. The battle was big enough that she lost track of her harassing Skrill several times, and he her, so it was a broken-up game of hunter and prey between them, occurring in quick bursts between her attacks on less dangerous dragons and her short breaks on the decks of various ships throughout the armada. Then she spotted a tawny four-winged silhouette on the other side of the fleet, near the King and the constant head-splittingly loud crashing of icebergs. They'd made themselves scarce, but they hadn't left the battle entirely.
She dropped lower, so low she had to sway from side to side to avoid masts no matter which direction she flew, and made for her as of now oblivious targets, entirely aware that the Skrill hadn't fired on her for a while. She once again stalked her prey, and once again another hunter stalked her.
Exactly as planned.
O-O-O
"Never," Ruffnut yelled as she clubbed a Gronckle across the brow, "eat," she swung again and then had to step back as one of Eret's bulkier crewmembers dove off the mast and drove an elbow into its head in a single glorious piledrive, "hagfish!"
The Gronckle collapsed, her eyes rolling back into her head. One more thump of a blunt club between the eyes finished the job, just as the sailor flopped off the Gronckle, clutching his not so gloriously mangled arm. As it turned out, putting his entire body behind a drop onto a hard, scaly surface was too much for a mere mortal elbow to withstand. Or a mortal arm for that matter. Or shoulder.
"It makes your breath stink," Ruffnut concluded, breathing heavily through her mouth. The other sailors tossed a net over the Gronckle's now-limp bulk and hurriedly began the process of shoving said bulk into a cage. Somebody went to the downed sailor and lifted him up by his good arm.
"He's gonna need a shoulder hook," she said to nobody in particular. That arm was not going to be okay.
Something exploded on the ship next to theirs and drowned out any reply she might have gotten. The smell of Zippleback gas filled the air, and an unarmored, two-headed shape flew overhead, trailing an ominous green cloud.
"Hit the deck!" Eret yelled from somewhere behind her, and a lit torch arced up toward the cloud. Ruffnut dropped into a congealing puddle of blood without a second thought. The cloud exploded a heartbeat later, high enough above the ship that it didn't do any damage.
"Get the cage below deck!" Eret ordered, striding into the small cloud of falling embers to slap the cage's bar latch down. His left arm was bare to the shoulder, which would have made Ruffnut a lot happier if it wasn't also severely burned, and his bulging muscles were only somewhat marred by the ugly blisters peeking out from red skin.
Ruffnut sprang to her feet, brushed the congealed blood off of herself as best she could, and lent her help to the cage-pushing along with the remnants of Eret's crew. He'd started the day with over a dozen sailors and a few designated 'trappers' who were basically hunters who didn't go for the kill, but only five of them were still up and on the ship. A few had gone to reinforce other, less fortunate ships mid-battle, one had gotten carried off by a tricky Nadder, and the rest…
Well, the lucky ones were below deck and still in one piece, too injured to do anything useful. The unlucky ones were below deck in many pieces, or in the ocean somewhere behind the armada.
The cage thumped onto the makeshift ramp down into the hold. They'd started out with eight cages, all empty, but this was the last one.
"That's trapping done for today," Eret huffed, wiping his brow as they returned to the deck. The dragons tended to go for the ships with visible crew fighting back, so nothing had happened to the ship in their absence. The sail was even still intact, again because the dragons were targeting the people, not the ships themselves.
Little details like that made Ruffnut wonder how smart the masked rider really was. Surely they had to know that the easiest way to slow the fleet down and stop the advance would be to sabotage their ability to sail… Though that wouldn't stop the massive hunk of ice-breathing destruction leading the armada, so maybe they didn't think it would be worth the effort. Stopping the King would kill the armada's advance in a single blow, but they hadn't made any progress toward that, either. They were just flying around and killing en masse with no larger strategy.
Not that she was looking an eight-legged gift horse in the mouth. If they wanted to go for a good old-fashioned bloody brawl instead of tactical strikes, so much the better.
"Shouldn't have been trying to take 'em alive in the first place, not in this mess," one of Eret's men said rebelliously. He spoke too quietly for Eret to hear him, but Ruffnut was right behind him.
"If you don't want your share of the pay for live captures, just keep complaining," she told him. He spluttered something indignant in reply, but with all the massive crashing noises constantly coming from the front of the fleet it was easy to pretend she hadn't heard–
A small meteor crashed into the deck in front of her and kept going, right through the empty space between her and the complaining sailor. It went straight through the wood and clanged off the top of one of the cages in the hold below.
Ruffnut absently put out the flickering embers that had landed on her tunic, her hand shaking slightly. The very tip of her boot was smoldering, and if she took a step forward she would fall right into the hold."Do we have anyone watching the sky right now?" she croaked.
"On it," the complaining crewmember squeaked, scurrying away to the unmanned ballista.
One upside of life or death battles where death might come instantly; even the stupidest soldiers knew to save minor complaints for after the battle. Now if only the same could be said for minor heart attacks…
Ruffnut stumbled down below the deck with the excuse of checking for fires to smother before they got out of hand – and there were two small blazes caused by the cooling lump of Gronckle lava that some enterprising Gronckle had dropped from afar – and made a beeline for her hidden bottle of dragon-strength alcohol. If there was ever a time to try some of it for herself, it was now, when her nerves needed calming. Or burning with liquid fire of the probably nonlethal variety; she wasn't going to be picky. Not much scared her, but near-misses with completely random instant death made the list.
She managed to get the cork out of the bottle with her hands; whoever had put it in last clearly didn't understand the need for hammering corks home lest they pop off when one's dragon did a backflip on the flight back to the secret drinking spot. The fumes alone made her head spin, and they smelled quite a bit like the battlefield above with a gaudy floral undertone…
Two of the six unconscious dragons groaned, and one even began to stir, knocking their tail against the bars of their cage.
"Knocks them out and wakes them up again," she mused. Her hands were still shaking, she noticed. "I don't even want to know what this is made of."
'I see bright colors,' the semi-conscious Nightmare rumbled unsteadily. His tail continued to thump erratically.
Ruffnut eyed the half-dozen paces that separated her uncorked bottle and the Nightmare. She was having serious second thoughts about drinking any of it, near-death experience notwithstanding. There was stupid and reckless, and then there was ingesting substances that could do that to a much larger creature while in the middle of a battle. That seemed like it would be Tuffnut's thing.
"What's it like?" she asked. Up on deck, someone screamed, but a dragon's shriek quickly followed so she assumed they could fend for themselves for a little while longer.
'You're too little to be here,' the Nightmare grumbled. 'Cages are for big dragons… Not annoying talkers…'
"Yeah, not a dragon and not in a cage." She recorked the bottle and made to put it back in its hiding place, then thought better of it. Worst-case scenario if they got overwhelmed she could smash it on the deck and drop every dragon around. Best-case scenario, she could bribe Eret with it once the armada made it to the nest. He was going to need some sort of incentive to take his ship around and pick up some passengers…
Or he would need a quick kick to the head and an ultimatum once her crew got the ship safely out to the open seas. Pirate Queen Ruffnut had a nice ring to it.
Bottle in hand, she sauntered out to rejoin the fight. The nest loomed large in the not-so-distant distance.
O-O-O
Maour crouched low in the saddle as Von flew them towards the most dangerous part of the running battle. The Skrill were flittering around the massive figure of the King as he cleared the path, occasionally firing ineffectual lightning. The four-winged dragon and his rider were up over the King's head, in a very precarious position were he to ever look up from his self-appointed task and decide to take a break for violence.
He had yet to so much as swat a Skrill out of the sky. Maour was trying not to worry about what that might mean; they were attacking a rival nest, and this King had a habit of enlisting the willing among the captives, it might just be a strategic move… Or it might be something else. They were too close to finally being able to rescue Toothless for unknown complications to start popping up.
But at least the King's continued existence kept the Skrill mostly occupied. Only one was harassing him and Von, and if the way Von flew without checking behind herself at the moment was any indication, she was finally in a position to do something about that. Or she was going to put him in a position to do it…
He was ready if she did. She hadn't told him the plan, but there were very few things he could feasibly do while they were in the air, so she didn't have to. He had a sharp set of metal claws, she had the wings to get him into position, and other dragons had a conceptual blind spot when it came to the idea of danger coming from what would otherwise be an unprotected back. Maybe the four-winged dragon had trained himself out of that, carrying a rider who could probably be lethal with that staff if they tried, but the Skrill?
No, the Skrill knew that it was only luck that had thwarted his initial attempt to kill them, and he was spitting mad with tunnel vision for Von alone if he was anything like the rest of his kind.
Von flipped to the side to avoid a catapulted boulder that had reached surprisingly high, ducked down and pumped her wings to build up speed, then arced up, toward the four-winged dragon and the rider just out of firing range of the lead ship. Rider and dragon both had their back to Von, facing the King, and Von in turn had her back to the Skrill that was undoubtedly behind them, probably slightly below if he was willing to risk it, and closing in because every winglength between them was a fraction of a heartbeat more reaction time Von would have.
He didn't need to turn and look, and neither did Von. Enemies were always at their most predictable when they thought they had an opening.
Von built up a shot in her throat, took aim, and then immediately threw herself into a tight turn to the left. Not a dive, not a flip, but something that got her turned around fast without losing speed or control over her trajectory.
The Skrill was indeed lower than them, maybe two shiplengths away, lightning just building in his maw. Von fired, he fired, and the resulting expanding concussive blast boomed into existence close enough to the Skrill that it knocked him back hard and sent him tumbling.
Last time, they'd been caught unaware and the blast left Von floundering in the air. This time, she and Maour leaned forward and weathered the hit, like a heavy slap to the face coupled with a blast of hot air, and kept going with barely a pause. The Skrill was fighting to stay up, likely aware that if he fell too far he'd be pierced by a score of arrows from eager longbows and ballistae. He would recover in a matter of moments–
If they gave him the chance. Von had no intention of doing so, and Maour was ready to help her out. She flew right at the Skrill, going low at the last moment, and Maour did what he'd done to half a dozen dragons already that day, swinging the bladed end of his scythe out to drag a gaping cut right through where the membrane of the Skrill's left wing met his side, just under where the armpit would have been and all the way to the back of the wing. His hands burned as the resistance nearly tore the scythe out of his grip, and he clenched his legs as hard on the saddle as he could, seeking any additional grip he could find in the moment.
The Skrill shrieked, blood splattered across Maour's front, and Von wheeled around to watch as he fell into the clutches of the armada.
She turned just in time for both her and Maour to catch an inferno straight on.
Maour instinctively shut his eyes and the momentary searing heat he felt even through his helmet proved that a very good reaction. He threw his armored forearms up in front of his head, blocking the bulk of the flames. Von dropped them out of the range of the flames, but his face was lightly scorched and when hastily blinked the smoke out of his eyes, he did not see the Skrill tangled in a net on the boat below. Nor did he see the four-winged dragon and rider.
'No!' Von screeched, stooping down to dart toward the edge of the clear channel the armada was sailing through. The four-winged dragon was flying there too, low and dragging a flashing bulk of screeching fury through the sky.
Maour clenched his teeth at the sight; the rider and their dragon had single-handedly saved the Skrill and maybe kept him in the fight. He wished Toothless was with them now; just having someone in the air to watch their back would have prevented this.
But it wasn't necessarily a loss, and Von was quickly closing the gap. The rider was standing still, facing them even as their dragon flew the opposite direction. That odd staff was pointed right at Maour, as if to warn him off.
Like he cared. He wasn't even here for the rider or the Skrill. He was here for his brother, and they were nuisances standing in his way. If he wasn't worried about them following, he'd ask Von to abandon this stupid fight altogether and head for the nest. But that would surely end in disaster with enemies like this able to follow and strike the moment someone he cared about was vulnerable.
"Ground them," he said through gritted teeth. "If you can't kill, then break one of those wings. Break a leg. Keep them on that iceberg." Von probably knew as much, but it bore repeating in the brief moment of pursuit before his able-bodied and mostly unburdened sister caught up to the bulky dragon hauling his weight again in the form of a singularly ungrateful Skrill. They needed to put the four-winged dragon down, whatever that ended up meaning in the moment.
They intercepted the four-winged dragon just as he reached the edge of a stable iceberg too far to the right of the King's direct line to the nest to be bothered with. He dropped the Skrill over the iceberg and flared his larger pair of wings up, slowing drastically, and Von overshot her intended interception by a winglength at most. The Skrill blasted an anemic bolt of lightning up at them as he fell but Von was already gone, and she returned with a small bolt of fire that sent him spiraling down on his injured wing, snarling all the way as the tear undoubtedly widened.
They were close to the ice now, close enough that Von had to pull up lest she crash into the unforgiving white surface. The four-winged dragon tried to snap at her tail, but he was still slower than her and she just flicked it out of his reach before twisting up and away. A second quick blast – she wasn't bothering with truly dangerous shots that needed buildup, resorting to small concussive blasts that wouldn't do more than bruise but came out nearly at the speed of thought – sent the four-winged dragon turning to one side to avoid having an eye burnt out of his head, and then she was dropping onto his back, clawing at him and the rider.
He hit the ice with a skidding series of thumps, and Von hopped off, but something dragged at her and she yelped. Maour saw the end of the rider's thankfully blunt staff jab his sister in the neck, perilously close to her pressure point, and realized that either Von had grabbed the rider or the rider had grabbed on to her. He leaned forward and swung his scythe down, jabbing at where the rider had to be with the point, but he didn't hit anything.
Von opted to do the smart thing when stuck with a passenger clinging to a paw, and landed heavily on the ice. The rider scuttled out from under her with a speed on four limbs that didn't seem natural for any human to possess and reared up to jab at Von's neck again.
Maour leaped down and intercepted the blow with his boot, stamping on the staff right at the midpoint. The rider dropped it before the pressure could snap it in half, but he had to step back and abort his followup swing to avoid getting his eye gouged out by a handful of unhealthily long and untrimmed nails.
Von's head slammed into the rider's midsection, sending them flying backward, knocking their head on the ice and skidding a good ten paces.
A brief moment of stillness came and went. The rider was sprawled out on the ground, motionless, the four-winged dragon was still trying to climb to his paws after his much more brutal crash landing, and the Skrill was behind them.
The Skrill was behind them.
But no lightning had come to strike them down.
Maour spun around, ready to do something to block the lethal strike inevitably coming for them. To throw his scythe, yell a warning to Von, or dodge out of the way as necessary.
There was no lightning coming for them. The Skrill lay in a crumpled heap at the end of a short furrow in the snow. His body was still and lacked even the smallest flicker of lightning.
Maour didn't believe it for a moment. "Skrill playing dead behind us," he whispered to Von.
'Four-wings is going to flame us the moment I make a move toward his rider,' she replied. 'I would just blast the rider, but I only have one good shot left.'
One enemy still capable of fighting for sure, and two that might be playing dead. Yeah, he wouldn't want her to use her last shot making sure the least dangerous of the three was dead either.
'We surrender.' The four-winged dragon's voice was low and he growled even as he capitulated. 'Do not strike her and I will not fight you.'
'Give me reason to be merciful,' Von snarled. 'You don't get to try your best to kill us and then expect to be spared the moment the tides turn.'
'Our fates rest in the talons of those other than us,' was the four-winged dragon's cryptic reply. 'Kill mine and I will not rest until I have killed yours, and that means you will not have time to flee before the battle of alphas is decided, one way or another. Fly away now and I will be stuck here to protect my human, not fighting or delaying you.'
'Hold out your wing,' she retorted. 'You cannot follow me if I slice it with a claw, but it will heal.' Such a cut as what she was describing would do what Maour had done to the Skrill if any weight was put on it, rapidly expanding and ruining the membrane of the wing. Maour was impressed with how quickly Von had come up with that solution; it was elegantly simple.
'I will do it myself,' the four-winged dragon responded. He then presumably began the process of somehow reaching his own wings with a claw, but Maour didn't turn to watch or even distract himself by checking Von's view of the scene. If the Skrill so much as twitched he would notice. So far the Skrill had laid deathly still, but that could still be a trick…
A trick that was rapidly outliving its usefulness as the Skrill's ally grunted in pain behind Maour. 'It is done,' the four-winged dragon announced. 'You bested us. Only because my alpha would not allow all of the Skrill to hunt you down immediately… but that does not change your victory over us here. Hope for your sake that your leader can do the same.'
'He's doing pretty well so far,' Von said defensively. 'Look, he's made it to your precious nest.'
Maour had his back to that, too, but the constant crashing of tusk on ice had stopped sometime during the last frantic clash above the iceberg, and not resumed.
A triumphant, challenging roar split the air. Maour turned just in time to see the King climbing up onto the small spit of land around the outside of the nest's icy walls. He reared up, tusks pointed to the skies as the leading ships in the armada made landfall. Then he dropped to all fours and swung his tusks into the side of the mountain, smashing a sizable hole in it.
Maour knew what throwing down the gauntlet looked like when he saw it, giant dragon or not. He also knew what worrying amounts of structural damage looked like, and the hole the King had put in the nest was a sizable one crumbling larger and larger by the moment.
"We're out of time, let's go," he snapped, vaulting onto Von's back. She took to the air without a moment's hesitation. They were both thinking the same thing.
Toothless was probably in there. He was definitely in the nest somewhere, grounded and vulnerable. And the three enemies most likely to follow and harass them while they searched for him were grounded, probably concussed, and…
The Skrill was still crumpled up in his impact site, unmoving.
"We should go back and make sure he's dead," he suggested.
'So he can leap up at the last moment and get in a close-range clawing? No thank you.' Von shuddered. 'He's not worth the risk or the last of my fire since you grounded him. Toothless needs us.'
"Good point." Even if the Skrill lived, they had much bigger problems still flying around. Alive or not he was at the bottom of the list when it came to threats now.
O-O-O
Author's Note: If anyone wants musical accompaniment for this chapter, I would suggest 'The Last Agni Kai'. Those who know the context that particular track was originally meant for can probably guess as to why, besides it sounding great. It's a bit placid when compared to the insanely loud, chaotic setting this chapter takes place in, so maybe add a crazy drum solo layered on top for 'authentic' musical accompaniment.