Kingdom Come: Chapter 12

There were three main factors in aerial combat that made it radically different to ground combat: gravity, velocity and altitude. It was a bit like rock-paper-scissors. Gaining altitude meant sacrificing velocity, but having altitude gave you some key advantages. For one thing, your pointy-stabby bits – spear, dragon claws, etcetera – faced down toward the enemy when you were above them. You also had the ability to weaponize gravity by diving. Diving meant sacrificing altitude for velocity, which was great if you needed to evade or strike, but reducing altitude put you underneath the pointy-stabby bits of the enemy. From my earliest training days with Karalti, I'd somehow known this instinctively - that aerial combat was, at its heart, the struggle for altitude and velocity against gravity.

“Diving in three!”

I bent over the saddlegrips: knees tight, ass up, head down. “Ready!”

“Wheeee!” Karalti folded her wings and almost lazily rolled over into a plummeting, arrow-like dive. 

Gravity pressed me against her back like a huge crushing hand. I barely even had to hang on. A normal man would have passed out; instead, my magically fortified body shored up against the intense g-force as we hit a hundred miles an hour, then one fifty. The torque felt like it would tear my tongue out the back of my head. It was all I could do to stay focused on the target as the roar built in my ears.

There was no rush quite like it.

“WaaaaHOOOO!” The vultures swelled in size as we grew closer, and I felt the muscles of Karalti's body flex beneath the saddle - my queue to cling on with all my strength as she snapped her wings out to full extension and leveled. “Fire!”

Karalti’s jaws parted, and blazing liquid fire boiled out. The stream hit one of the monsters square in the back, ripping a line of oily, sticky flames along its body. Before it had even finished screaming, my dragon struck it with her hind feet, flexing her killing claws deep into its body.

[Sneak attack! x3 damage!]

[Ghost fire does 1010 damage!]

[Gore does 216 damage!]

[You killed Kalxat!]

[Congratulations! Karalti is Level 9!]

The Kalxat didn’t even have time to cry out – its head shriveled and its skull charred. The body went limp, and it spun out of the sky like a thousand-pound hunk of meat. Karalti swelled in size underneath me, the saddle adjusting to fit. Even as she was growing, she rolled and pulled us away from the other eight pissed-off birds. Screaming with rage and confusion, they swirled into formation and chased us up into the sky.

"Jump now!" Karalti cried. “While we have altitude!”

My heart was pounding so hard that I could barely hear the roar of the wind. I tried to leap off from my sprinter’s crouch, but then I saw how far we were from the ground and my legs locked up. Fuck. We’d never actually done this before. In Taltos, I'd trained by jumping onto enemies on the ground from anywhere between five to a hundred feet. We were at around three thousand and climbing. I’d skydived before, but this time, there was no parachute.

“Hector!” Karalti seesawed out of the way as one of the Kalxat shot past us, leaving a gut-churning stench in its wake. I managed to stay on her back as she swung back and righted. Breathing. Focus on your breathing.

“Sorry. Try again.” Breathing through nose and teeth, I opened and closed my hand on the saddle grip until I could let go of it. I looked down her back, and saw a pair of malicious, glowing eyes gaining on her tail. “Okay, here comes the next one!”

“Go! I’ll catch you!” Karalti's back became rigid, giving me a stable platform to spring from. 

I had to trust her. 

“Okay, fuckface! Time to die!” I got to my feet, and before I could scare myself into another freeze, I triggered Jump and sprung out into the open air.

Shit. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. The Kalxat got real close, real fast. I landed on the Spear, plunging it into the Kalxat’s back in a blaze of dark fire.

[Jump deals 640 damage!]

[Kalxat takes +150 Fire damage!]

[You have been exposed to Terrible Stench!]

Suddenly, my fear of falling was irrelevant. 

I’d only smelled one thing as bad as this monster, and that was when my friend’s dog had eaten cat poop and then vomited it onto his sofa. We’d literally run out of the room, coughing and weeping and retching at the smell. Coughing, weeping and retching was exactly what happened now as the Debilitating Nausea debuff appeared. My stomach twisted around the half-digested remains of breakfast.

“SCREEEE!” The bird, bleeding toxic sludge and mana, bucked its entire body. I lifted up, flailing in the air, then slammed down belly-first onto its back. One scrabbling hand caught a handful of stinking, oily feathers just before it rolled out of its formation with another short scream. My stamina bar drained with the effort of holding on as it see-sawed violently from side to side.

Karalti wheeled above us, executing a sudden hairpin turn that took one of the vultures by surprise. The bird tried to backwing, desperate to get away from the plume of sticky, napalm-like fire that slashed it across the chest and belly and set it ablaze. As it fell away, screeching in agony, two vultures closed in on Karalti.

"Left and right!" Seizing a moment of steady flight, I reared up, and plunged the flaming Spear of Nine Spheres down like a butter churn. It swung as the blow came down, and instead of driving the blade into its body, I whiffed through the feathers of its wings instead.

[Kalxat uses Contagion!]

“Kalxat uses WHAT?!” As greasy flames caught its feathers, foul smoke boiled up into the air - and to my disgust, the fire drove out a cloud of hopping, slithering parasites that blew into my face and clung to my armor. The ones that found skin bit and stung, and another debuff icon appeared in my vision.

[You take 5 bite damage!]

[You have contracted Wasting Fever! Strength and Stamina will begin to decrease!]

[Warning! You have blood poisoning! -2 HP per second!]

Wasting Fever!? For the first time in a long time, I felt panic: real, honest-to-dog panic. I was sick. It was killing me. Every instinct I had told me to let go, get away, claw the bugs off my skin. 

Before I’d even started hyperventilating, the Kalxat shored up until it was nearly horizontal, then folded in the uppermost wing and rolled back the other way to try and jolt me off into the open air. I was suddenly pinned by gravity against the crawling mat of flea-like parasites seething in the vulture's feathers. Too frightened to let go, too panicked to stay, I was paralyzed.

Karalti thundered down, slamming into the badly-injured vulture in a tangle of jaws, claws, and wings. The weakened Kalxat took two sets of talons to its exposed belly. It screeched, and then - to my horror - opened its beak wide and vomited. Karalti bellowed as acid and bile struck her in the neck and chest, and a disgusting, nauseating cloud of hot mist blew back over me. 

[Karalti takes 225 acid damage! HP: 974/1199]

[Karalti is immune to poisoning!]

[Karalti is immune to Wasting Fever!]

“Duck!” The dragon twisted her head around, jaws gaping. I dropped down against the vulture’s body just as oily white flames erupted overhead, engulfing the Kalxat’s head. The bird screamed as Ghost Fire stripped the feathers and flesh from its skull. Its wings spasmed and then folded, flapping limp as the scorched, disemboweled monster tumbled bonelessly from the sky.

“Fuck fuck fuck FUCK!” I dry-heaved from the smell – half-digested shit, now with the added aroma of burned feathers, stomach acid, and charred meat – but let go and threw my limbs out like a skydiver. Drag ripped me up into the air, away from the dead monster as it spiraled like a falling star to the earth far below. “Karalti!”

Karalti dodged the remaining Kalxat as they dived, one after the other, screeching and reaching out for her with hooked talons. She swooped in, snatching me up by the back of my Cossack Harness with one back foot while I clawed at myself. Bugs were everywhere. Even in the places where there were no parasites, my skin crawled. The Spear hung from the securing cord around my wrist, dragging us down. Karalti was carrying this fight. I had to get my shit together.

The Kalxat saw their opening. They dived again, belching plumes of acid at Karalti as she struggled to gain altitude. The dragon barrel rolled to evade their claws and breath weapons, and for a horrible moment, I was sure the straps of my armor were going to crap out. “Use Split Turn! Get some momentum and throw me at one of them!”

Karalti roared, folding her wings and diving sharply just as three vultures charged from either side. She barreled out of the maneuver, struggling for breath, and then executed Split Turn, which allowed her to make a supernaturally sharp hairpin turn in the air. At the apex of the turn, she me go. I used Shadow Dash, briefly dematerializing, and then Jump. The double dash landed me right above one of the Kalxat, and I hit my newest ability: Master of Blades.

“Tarn takhran, shitbirds!” I caught the Spear in both hands, and as I did, raw power shot up from the weapon from my fingertips to my back. For a moment, I felt like a spider at the center of a freezing cold web of energy – a web which caught me in mid-air and halted my fall. The energy divided, forming patterns like a great mandala that appeared at my back, then contracted into six lances of Darkness deeper than the ruddy night sky around us. They rained down on the screeching Kalxat, impacting them so fast they blew out the other side into clouds of violet, crackling electricity. Black bolts of it rebounded back to me, slithering over my body as I burned the rest of my AP and triggered Glassbreaker.

Fuck your disease! Fuck your War! Fuck you all! The power was pure rage, sharpened and focused from the blood it had already tasted. I flung it out with a hoarse roar: a rain of smoking violet knives that chased the birds like homing missiles and simply shredded them. 

Feathers, flesh and blood blew apart into the wind and rained down, the shockwave powerful enough to propel me back up into the air. The world seemed to slow, the seconds rolling by like syrup.

[You have killed Kalxat!]

[You deal 2176 damage!]

[You have killed Kalxat!]

[You deal 3966 damage!]

[Karalti has killed Kalxat!]

[You have killed Kalxat…]

Holy shit. My eyes widened as the notifications rolled in.

There was a blast of fire overhead. I glanced up as a shadow fell over me. It wasn’t Karalti. It was the other Kalxat, dead and burning. Without thinking, I Shadow Danced out of the way – or tried to. Master of Blades had sucked up all of my AP, which I realized just as the tumbling bird clipped me. It spun me around, then nearly tore my head off as a strap caught around my neck and shoulders and dragged me down toward the earth.