Jason Hightman by Samurai

Author:Samurai
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Asia, Fiction, Parents, Animals, General, Fantasy - General, Fathers and sons, Science Fiction, Magic, Mythical, Animals - Mythical, Juvenile Fiction, Fantasy & Magic, Samurai, People & Places, Action & Adventure, Family, Fantasy fiction, Dragons, East Asia, Fantasy, Children: Young Adult (Gr. 7-9), Children's Books - Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 9780060540166
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-08-09T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

BEWARE OF FALLING SERPENTS

THE JAPANESE SERPENT TUMBLED through glass into the office building, where a shocked late-night worker stared up at him from a desk covered in coffee cups.

At first, the Dragon looked like a well-dressed young citizen who had somehow fallen out of the sky and through his window. But as the worker watched, the intruder took a quick moment to catch his breath, and suddenly arrows began to appear on his body. The Serpent’s cloaking magic was wearing thin from pain, his true form quickly becoming visible: a full-fledged Dragon, silver and gold, and armored with natural plating, arrows sticking out of its arms, its back, its side.

Just as abruptly, a group of black-clad Samurai tore through the shattered glass wall, along with a woman armed with a set of mechanical claws that whirred with little spinning daggers, jutting out from all angles.

The office worker nearly fainted as he saw the Serpent back away from the human attackers, and clutch its arms over its chest. It chanted in a half-Japanese nonsensical speech, an insane language, but its words seemed to cause the room to quake.

Shards of glass on the floor rose up and swirled into little tornadoes that began cutting at the human soldiers. But the woman threw out her arm—hissing in speech as fantastically strange as the Serpent’s—and the glass shards twirling viciously around the room came together and formed into the vague shapes of men.

The jagged, glass-shard figures began to take swings at the Dragon, slashing at his armor. The Dragon threw them back with some kind of magic, but two of them flung themselves upon its back, shattering and stabbing tiny shards into its thick hide.

Furious, the Dragon roared, and rushed the innocent office worker, throwing him back toward the glass men. The glass figures collapsed around the worker, giving no serious cuts. But getting the man out of harm’s way slowed the warriors down.

Aldric had joined them from behind, slipping on the glass as he entered through the cracked exterior wall, the way they’d all gotten in. Now he saw his target escaping.

The Serpent rampaged through empty offices, knocking through cheap cubicle walls in the blue dimness of fluorescent lights, as Aldric and the Samurai pursued it, firing whenever they could get a shot.

Taking the lead, Aldric sent a bolt directly into an unprotected spot on its wounded back, and the Dragon wailed, racing on its thin Serpentine legs—one real, one made of metal—clattering over glass and plastic as it threw down anything in its path.

The wound immediately began leaking fireblood in a dazzling spray of light, streaming from the back of the Creature.

The flying blood burned Aldric as he ran through it, chasing the beast charging through the offices.

It howled in fury and blew off the elevator doors up ahead, and as Aldric got there, he could see the elevator was gone—the Dragon was climbing up an empty dark shaft, firelight from his wound sprinkling down in a cascade.

Sachiko and the other Samurai clattered up around Aldric.

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