Milo
(You guys have NO idea how much research I've done to make this stuff.)
"This wind is terrible." Milo heard Sidewinder mutter.
"I agree" He replied, beating his wings a bit faster. The wind was just slight turbulence so far, but he could tell it had the potential to get worse.
Kite and Tradewind had shot ahead of them long ago, Kite being a SkyWing, and Tradewind being enough of one to keep up with her, if not go a tad faster. Of course, Kite had challenged her to a few races on the way, and Tradewind had happily obliged.
It's nice to see they're becoming friends though, whether or not it's because of competition.
Now I need to think about where MY friends are. My other friends. The ones that can't decide on what movie to watch. Ever. The ones that always have something stupid to say, or something rash to do that possibly wrecks everything.
Yeah.
I miss 'em already.
Milo had engaged in a few conversations with Sidewinder, as he was the only one Milo could actually match the flight speed of.
"So," Milo began. "This weather, huh?"
Sidewinder laughed. "Yes. I'm pretty sure it'll calm down. At least, I hope it does."
"Yeah…" Milo trailed off. "And if it gets worse?"
Sidewinder stared ahead thoughtfully. "I think Kite would warn us if something like that was ahead."
"And Tradewind." Milo reminded him.
"Right, her too."
As if on cue, the two shot out from the stark clouds overhead.
Kite beat her wings back to a hover in front of Sidewinder as Tradewind did the same to Milo, who watched and mimicked her movements.
"Yes?" Milo asked.
Kite huffed frustratedly. "Storm ahead. Big one. And even though it doesn't look very safe to fly to, but there's a grove in the valley below it. We can hopefully take shelter there."
Sidewinder glared at Milo accusingly.
Milo hung his head, laughing. "Oh boy, I jinxed us."
Kite narrowed her eyes at him. "Yeah, thanks for that."
They touched down into a clearing at the center of the grove, Tradewind mentioning her distaste for mud.
"Well, it's so weird." She answered after Milo had asked her on it.
"Why? I mean, I don't LIKE it, but it doesn't bother me. It's like uh, a rock. It's just there. I don't care about it. So why does it bother you?" he asked, puzzled.
"Because it does." she huffed, obviously not wanting to talk about it anymore.
Well okay then, fine. I'll just, splash you with mud or something and you won't see it coming until it's too late.
They ventured into the trees, avoiding the slightly drizzling rain. The ground was all mud and stone, easy to slide on, and it looked like most of the rocks in the area has been uncovered more recently, and small craters filled with water showed it's been raining a lot harder not to long ago.
I hope nobody got caught in that. That'd suck to go through.
He stepped over a recently fallen snag, which had been torn apart by the rain, and splintered everywhere by what Milo assumed was from it impacting the ground. Only the larger, foot-long pieces remained, as the others had undoubtedly been washed away.
"Well this is nice." Sidewinder muttered, shaking water droplets off his snout.
"Yeah, let's get some better shelter." Kite said, jerking her head at the fog-encompassed trees.
Tradewind said nothing, only muttered a few words that she intentionally meant for nobody to hear with her head staring down at the ground. Probably complaining something about mud again.
"What?" Kite asked her accusingly.
Tradewind's head shot up. "I said, 'Hey look, tracks' and you guys never listened, so I guess it WASN'T IMPORTANT"
Kite wrinkled her snout. "Tracks are alway important. What kind are they? Or if you don't know, how big are they?" she asked quickly. "We might not be alone in this place, whether that's good or bad, I don't know."
Might be some SkyWings-OH STOP THAT ALREADY, SUBCONSCIOUS THINKING.
"One of the pairs is pretty large, it's still bigger than mine after being caved in by the rain. The other one's smaller than mine. So, um, what's that mean?"
Kite tapped her chin, flinching when a water droplet landed in her eye, causing Milo to have to hold in a snicker.
"The first one's a MudWing, I can assume." she said, glaring at Milo.
"And the second one?"
"Eh, it's up for debate. Let's just get to some shelter, and I'll work on it there while you guys rest. I need something to do."
They escaped the light shower, and realised the forest inside was just as destroyed as the outside. Fallen trees occasionally were spotted, but branches and leaves, as well as portions of other tree littered the dampened forest floor.
"More tracks." Tradewind said suddenly, straightening.
"And more defined, not destroyed by the rain. Yes, the first pair was definitely a MudWing. I'm not sure about the second pair though, they're none that I recognise." Kite said, kneeling down to get a better look at the second set of talonprints.
Sidewinder peeked over Milo's shoulder to get a glimpse, which Milo then moved aside so he could see.
"Oh, cool. Tracks." He mumbled.
"Brilliant observation, detective." Kite muttered.
Suddenly, the sound of something large falling snapped everyone's ears in that direction in a confusing unison.
"Did you hear-" Tradewind began.
"Yeah." Milo answered quickly.
Sidewinder shuddered. "That was just um, probably a branch, or a tree falling. W-we don't need to check that out. R-ri-ight?" He stammered nervously.
Kite grinned. "Well now we HAVE to check it out, because personally I find it pretty entertaining to see Sidewinder jump at shadows."
Sidewinder moaned, looking like he wanted to lock himself into a panic room stuffed with pillows.
They quickly traversed through the forest, but with an added caution, as there might be more dragons in the forest ahead than in their small party.
Branches snapped overhead, sending fractured twigs raining onto them from above.
"It's like that one Jurassic Park movie…" Milo murmured.
"I don't know what that is." Tradewind whispered.
"I'll show you when this is over." He replied, grinning.
Kite quieted them and pointed above her grimly.
She glared at the branches above her, then exhaled flame from her mouth into the canopy, lighting the area in a warm orange glow. A body fell out of the hole the fire had bored through, slightly ablaze.
It was a MudWing, but a dragonet, smaller than Milo.
But it wasn't even bothered by the fact that it was covered in burn marks. And….
Oh my god…
It's eyes had no pupils, nor whites. It was covered in pure red blood. Nothing else.
I know what this is. No. How in the hell did it get here? I thought they eradicated it!
This virus… we have to find a way to stop it from spreading.
"Kill it." Milo said instantly.
"What?!" Everyone else said in unison.
"I'll explain later, kill it! NOW!" With that, Milo tackled the snarling MudWing, clawing at his belly.
The dragonet broke away from him, then suddenly lunged at Sidewinder, who instinctively jabbed his tail at the attacking MudWing.
His tail missed, and the dragonet ignored him too, engaging Kite and then firmly lodging his jaws into her left arm.
She roared, slamming him into a nearby tree. The dragonet didn't flinch, which didn't surprise Milo.
Suddenly, heard heard something strange. Like when you unplug a compressor, only it lasted a second longer.
Sidewinder roared in fury behind him, barrelling towards the dragonet on Kite's arm.
Woah….
Sidewinder was enveloped in a red crimson glow, small flickers of lightning coursing out of his eyes , which were startlingly white. He pried the dragonet's jaws apart with ease, then promptly threw the MudWing into a tree, resulting in the audible 'snap' of bones shattering. Sidewinder, literally glowing with rage, grabbed the dragonet by the neck and slammed it's head into the tree, then snapped its neck. The dragonet stopped snarling as his tail, legs, and head went limp.
Sidewinder spun around.
Is he going to attack us..?
The SandWing's knees buckled, and Sidewinder slumped against the tree, unconscious.
Everyone was silent in shock.
"Well," Kite said suddenly. "I no longer doubt his nightmare was just your run-of-the-mill nightmare now. Not a single doubt. Because that-" She wiped the blood away from her arm, then looked up.
"That was scary powerful."
"Yeah...I wonder why he can do that. I think it's emotionally triggered-oh." Milo cut off, glancing at Kite's wound.
"You might want to check on him." Tradewind suggested.
Kite nodded, then walked over to Sidewinder and began checking for any damages that might contribute to his loss on consciousness.
"What was that? You need to explain what that was, because that wasn't normal behaviour. For you, or that poor MudWing." Tradewind said sternly.
Milo sighed.
"Someone bad's here."
"What!? Who?" She asked, alarmed.
"A group, not my friends, people who want them dead. They helped develop a nerve toxin that would be used in infantry units, making it so they couldn't have the willpower to fight."
He paused.
"But something went wrong. The toxin did the exact opposite, putting almost every part of the subject's mind into a coma except for the reptilian region, which would send anyone infected into an insane level of rage. They don't feel pain, and will fight anything that breathes. Eventually the infection will evolve to a point in which they will kill anything but other infected subjects, kinda like zombies except they can still use weapons and fight efficiently." he finished grimly.
Tradewind frowned. "What's a zombie?"
Milo grinned. "I am SO bringing a Tv next time I come here."
The rain had stopped, and the winds were cool and calm.
Sidewinder woke up not too long later, and his condition was pretty interesting, to Milo anyways.
"And you remember nothing of doing that?" Kite asked incredulously.
Sidewinder shook his head slowly. "Noooooo…. I just remember seeing you getting attacked by that MudWing, and then waking up. Nothing else. What happened?"
The SandWing had went through a slight changes from his recent surge of violence. Milo noted that his leg muscles had gotten significantly more defined, his claws no longer a dull grey due to wear, but now sable, and seemingly very sharp. His eyes were slightly brighter, with an odd green tint, which was strange to see for most, because of SandWing's eyes always being an almost bottomless gaze of steely black. More notably, his massive scar on his shoulder had begun to fade away.
That string of rage he unleashed… I wonder how he's able to do that….
"You were like, glowing red. And your eyes were pretty scary, with like, no pupils and stuff." Milo told him.
Sidewinder's eyes widened in surprise. "R-really?"
"Yeah! You killed the dragonet pretty brutally though."
"I did that?" He gasped.
"Yes."
Milo wondered why he looked so terrified, his power was the perfect amount of protection they needed.
"What's wrong?" Milo asked, sitting down next to him. Tradewind sat in front of them, and Kite was sitting on Sidewinder's opposite side with a peculiarly somber expression.
Sidewinder sighed. "Do I tell them?" he asked Kite. She nodded back.
"Alright," he curled his tail around his front legs. "Before we went to find you, we set up camp where you left us."
Tradewind was confused on this. "Wait, he left you and you set up camp? Why?"
"Shhh." Kite whispered.
"Sorry."
"I had a….nightmare, you could say. Not a normal one though. I started out in a green field below some mountains, then the farther I continued on, the landscape became more desolate. I began finding destroyed buildings, and some white shapes in the ground, which I'm now beginning to think were bones… anyways, I eventually entered a cavern system. That's when things turned for the worse." he coughed nervously.
"I saw you dead, Milo. Kite too. Both killed brutally." His eyes drifted to the crumpled body of the dead MudWing.
"Behind me appeared a dragon. A hybrid, like Tradewind. But he was different. He...he could do things that only NightWings could do, like read minds. He did that. He read my mind. He said he was the son of a NightWing and a SeaWing, and he mentioned something about 'immense power' and how I had inherited it. He said he wanted to form an alliance of some kind, saying that my power was perfect as the second half of his needed strength."
Milo blinked. "Jeez, thirty-five pages in and NOW we get a bad guy."
Kite stared at him quizzically, but he didn't elaborate on his comment further.
(HA!)
"He called it Adrenaline," Sidewinder continued. "Like it wasn't a occurance in your nervous system, more like he was listing it as a whole different substance. He said I was the first in many generations, and then I asked him about your bodies and he said…" he trailed off.
"What?" Tradewind asked anxiously.
"He said that Sidewinder would kill us." Kite finished for him, giving him a sympathetic smile.
"Yeah." Sidewinder gulped.
Milo shuffled his wings uncomfortably.
"I doubt that."
Well...I may be just trying to be supportive of the guy. You never know. If he were to become infected, there'd be no stopping him.
"Well, I don't know. I don't want to kill you, but I don't know what I could do to prevent it." Sidewinder worried quietly.
"As much as I hate to say it, it's a common known fact that fate is more-or-less set in stone. There's only a slight chance that what you were seeing was either this dragon lying to you, or maybe what said was open for translation." Milo told him.
(It was open for translation, obviously)
"Yeah. Maybe you're right." The SandWing mumbled quietly.
Tradewind's head shot up suddenly. "Do you see that?"
"What?" Kite and Milo asked in unison.
Tradewind leapt up to her talons and bounded into the nearby undergrowth, a cry of fear coming from within, which hadn't came from Tradewind herself.
"Wait, what?" came Kite's reply.
Tradewind came out dragging a NightWing by his tail. "Please! I have done nothing wrong, I'm just trying to find medical supplements for my friend! Don't injure me!"
A tremor of shock rattled through Milo's body.
Is it just me, or does that voice seem vaguely familiar…
"Is he infected?" Sidewinder asked quickly.
"No. He wouldn't talk if he was." Milo responded.
A look of confusion briefly passed over the NightWing's face, but was quickly replaced with worry.
"Who are you? What is this dialogue about mentioned 'infected'? I have almost- Oh." he glanced at the dead MudWing.
"That dragon was infected. I see." he answered sadly.
"Sparkwire?" Milo inquired.
"Wha-how? Who are you? How do you know my name?" the small black dragon asked, astonished.
Kite glanced at Milo questioningly. "You sure you can't read minds?"
He shook his head. "How'd you get here?" he asked, his tail lashing anxiously.
Something must have went wrong on the other end.
The smaller dragon shook his head. "No. First I would like to know whom I am interacting with." he demanded.
"It's Milo" Milo informed him, flicking his tail dismissively
Sparkwire's eyes widened. "You're alive!" He exclaimed.
"Yeah. What happened?"
Sparkwire flinched. "I need your assistance."
"What is it?" Kite growled, causing the NightWing to shy backwards slightly.
"Jake's wounded. I am unsure on the severity of his wounds, but they were caused by a dragon behaving very much like that one." he said, nodding to the MudWing corpse.
"Yeah…" Sidewinder mumbled. "Is the infection contact-transmitted?"
Milo shook his head. "No. But they retain all combat experience and motor skills, so we should probably step up our game sooner or later."
Sparkwire stood up, making sure to stay back from Kite and Tradewind.
"Follow me. He hasn't woken yet, and I can only hope he hasn't been attacked while I was gone.
He bounded off into the bushes.
Everyone looked at Milo expectantly.
"What?" He asked, a slight feeling of guilt seeping under his scales.
"Well, for starters, we don't know if we can trust this dragon." Kite began. "I know you haven't been here long, but eventually you're going to have to see that not everyone is true to their word, some dragons aren't who they say they are, and you can't save everyone. This war is the last thing we need to get involved in, and on the path you're going, we'll be seeing combat with the SandWing princesses very, very soon." she warned.
"Let's not…" Sidewinder muttered.
Milo shuddered. "I honestly don't even know much about this war anyways."
"Neither do I" Tradewind added in.
She grumbled. "I'll explain the important details later, let's just follow this NightWing before we lose him."
They arrived after catching up with Sparkwire, arriving in a small area secluded next to an overflowing stream.
Sparkwire gasped, then began examining the ground frantically.
"Uh-oh." Milo muttered.
"What is it?" Sidewinder asked curiously.
Sparkwire was hysterical. "Where is he?! He was lying right here, fast asleep…! He couldn't have possibly woken up, where?!" he fretted, a terrified shiver cascading through his words.
Milo grabbed his shoulder. "Dude, calm down. What's the problem?"
"He's GONE!" Sparkwire cried, sobbing.
Oh boy.