Chapter 68 - The Devouring Flames (2)

By now, I was half transformed, all of the dragon parts proportionate to my human form. A spiked tail of perhaps five feet length dragged itself heavily against the ground as I walked, and sharp talons along with scales replaced my human hands. Unlike human hands, dragon hands only have four digits, but they are as flexible and useful as any human ones. My feet became reptilian, three main, thick-pronged toes and a smaller fourth toe replacing them. My dragon wings, I had forgo, since they were more vulnerable to attacks.

To the assassins in front of me, no doubt, I must have looked like a black, scaly humanoid beast with a human head. Except this human head had two black dragon horns protruding from the sides, curving upward into sharp points which could act as small impaling lances. A pair of steady, glowing red eyes were also seen. They were eyes which could have easily matched the cold, dark eyes of the twenty assassins.

“Very brave of you to remain calm even at this point,” I said softly, knowing that they would be straining to hear my words. My voice had turned deeper and more bestial. Only the barest traces of my human voice remained.

A male that looked to be the oldest, perhaps a little less than thirty years of age, came forward from the circle of assassins surrounding me; they had taken as much distance from me as the circular perimeter of the pillar of flames I had created would allow.

He came closer until he firmly stood a few feet away from me. Then he opened his mouth to speak, “I kno—

Before the human male, whom I assumed to be the senior assassin, could even speak, I shot forth black flames which ate at his body, devouring his existence. It took only a few seconds of screaming before not even a small trace of his body or his weapons remained. Not even ashes.

The Flames of Interitum were unique, its fire devouring everything in its specified path until the caster chose to stop feeding it magic. The flames were one of the unique essences of fire and perhaps only I could use it.

My body centered firmly on the ground, and my talons gripped tightly against the floor, I shot forward like an arrow. I closed the distance almost instantly with my target; a young Novice assassin girl to my front.

I pummeled into the girl using mostly my shoulder, and she flew backward. Her sternum, including many of her other bones, cracked audibly. The distance she had been blown backward made her seem as if she was a small rag-doll that had been thrown. Her arching fall carried her past the twelve feet tall pillar of flames, and further past that, until she finally slammed against the stone wall, crumpling like a broken toy. A bloody, burning broken toy that had just turned part of the stone wall into a gory, stone wall.

I felt a thrown chair smash into five pieces behind my back, but the impact did not even give me pause. It felt like, to say the least, a small love tap. Two more thrown wooden chairs smashed into pieces against the sides of my body. Likewise, I was still unfazed.

Rather than being unfazed though, I felt doubtful of their intelligence. The assassins should have learned from the first throw that wooden chairs were ineffective against me.

A few of them tried to escape by covering their face and body with their cloaks, only to find themselves burning and screaming in agony as they dove past the pillars of fire. The flames, after all, were hot enough to melt through the stone floor, though they could not really see that since I had made the pillars wide enough so that nothing could pass through. All they could really see was a sea of fire surrounding them.

Still, it had been idiocy for the magic-less and unprotected assassins to even try to go through the flames. I was sure that they could feel the uncomfortable heat of the fire, even if they were standing far away.

I counted the ones still alive. Thirteen remained.

The next assassin to die was a young male with red hair. He threw small throwing daggers at me, but all of them missed. I was a blur to his human eyes, though I had to agree that he was at least trying—the arcs his daggers traced were high enough that they were aimed at my face, most likely my eyes.

Nearing him, I landed a sharp knee toward his groin, the force of it sending his body flailing more than seven feet into the air. The assassin landed back onto the ground, and I could have almost winced in sympathy had I pretended to care. He landed bad. Poorly. One of his arms had a white bone protruding near the elbow.

The assassin screamed in pain, but I ignored it, calmly walking toward his prone body while at the same time, daggers bounced off of my scaled skin harmlessly, only to clatter onto the floor.

The assassin clutched at his broken arm protectively, and though he saw me walking toward him, he could do nothing but watch. His poor fall against the floor had disoriented and injured him enough to crack bones.

I watched his prone body beneath me with indifferent eyes. Then I gave a stomping kick at the protruding bone near his elbow, breaking it off with a clean, sharp snap. His scream became high pitched, even louder than when he had first fell against the floor.

I created a dense, circular fan of fire in my right hand and pressed it against the assassin's face. His screaming became even louder, and even more high-pitched if that was even possible. The smell of burning human flesh reached my nose, and his pleads and screams became weaker. It took only a few more seconds before the assassin fell silent. Dead as the dead.

You cannot say that I do not have a flair for killing my enemies in a variety of ways. It was just plain boring to kill them with a quick burst of fire magic, or even piercing them with earth spikes from down below.

From my periphery, I saw three assassins come sprinting toward me, their weapons drawn and held tightly in their hands. I let the three come closer until they were within reach of my spiked, black tail. Then I whipped at them in a half-circular arc using my tail, the three inch spikes piercing into them. The force of the swipe of my tail carried the body of the first assassin, causing it to collide with another, before sending them both away like thrown pebbles. They collided with a few wooden chairs, and caused the table to fall down together with them in a heap.

As for the remaining one, a black hooded female, I batted her sword aside with a scaled hand, and pierced through her throat with three of my talons. Then I used the talon of the smaller, fourth digit, similar to the thumb of a human, and grabbed at her neck before sending her flying at the next incoming wave of assassins.

I gave them a feral grin, showing off the sharp points of my teeth. Then I picked up the fallen sword of the woman I had thrown.

I met the standing ones' charge—the ones who had not collided with the thrown woman. All of them swore at me profusely.

Like my counterpart, I had memories of the swordplay he had learned from that human grandmaster called Kizam Vulcram. We were different though. Unlike my counterpart, I had extra memories, some of which were sealed, out of reach even for me. I also had red eyes, quite unlike his green eyes.

I deflected two of their sword strokes with an arm, and at the same time, cut off the head of an assassin, which went rolling down the floor. Before long, four more heads rolled down the stone ground, keeping the one head company. There were also a few separated limbs, so there was various company for the detached heads. The scarlet blood flowing from the various body parts dyed the floor into a gory mess.

The next assassin came at me with a longsword, screaming at the top of his lungs, anger most likely clouding his mind at the hopelessness of his situation. I backhanded him while easily blocking his longsword with my own sword.

I had held back my strength, but he still lost his balance, slipping on the gore the dead bodies provided. The assassin landed on his rump in a small puddle of blood with a small, wet noise.

Three assassins remained, the initial group of more than twenty assassins having been reduced into this lowly number. Two of the three were female assassins who looked to be around their middle twenties or so, while the other one was the male that had fallen onto his ass. He looked to be near twenty.

I did not trust the words of Veena, so I had kept three of the older assassins alive, so that I could ask them the locations of the branches of Malice. I already knew where a few of them were located at due to gathering information from my past human life, so if they were lying to me, I could easily torture the information out of them for doing so.

I turned to face the fallen male assassin and the two female assassins who were a few feet away at his sides. The two women had their weapons drawn and held ready, a short, curved sword, and gauntlets which had three knives attached at the end of their fists.

“If you wish to remain alive, I suggest you sit down on the floor,” I said softly in my deep, rumbling inhuman voice—a male dragon's voice.

The two females immediately sat down, not even caring that the floor which they sat upon was dyed with the blood of their compatriots. The male though...he did not really count, since he was already on his ass.

The expressions on their faces were unreadable. Well, perhaps I could notice a sort of nervous curiosity. They were like docile lambs awaiting slaughter.

“Very good. Now just sit there while I satisfy my hunger,” I said, picking up the closest human arm on the ground. It was the bloody, slim arm of a female assassin I had recently killed.

Then I took a bite out of the arm, my sharp fangs gouging out a chunk of still-warm flesh. The smell of blood coming from the arm, and the smell of blood from the general atmosphere had wet my appetite. It was similar to the pungent smell of raw iron and earth. The smell of a smithy.

“Hmm...not very tasty, but better than nothing, I suppose. Hunger is the best spice anyway,” I said to myself, knowing that the three remaining assassins were intently listening in on my words.

I looked around at the multitude of human body parts on the floor. I said, “You know, I have always wondered what happens after you die.” I left the last part of my thoughts unspoken.

I had a connection with death, after all.