Chương 225: 37. Inferno at the Bottleneck 1

How many times had I been up in the sky now? Second? Third? Fourth? Honestly, I'd lost count. Once you've been hauled aloft by enough different dragons in a short enough span of time, your brain simply gives up trying to file the memories properly. The conclusion is always the same anyway — high, very high, and the wind so strong it feels like someone's dragging a freshly honed razor across your face, one layer at a time.

I clung to the saddle with both hands, the bag of thunder-bombs Lei Lian had shoved at me pressed against my chest. I felt less like an ambassador and more like a particularly anxious piece of hazardous cargo that happened to breathe. The blue dragon beat its wings, cutting through the night wind as it pressed down toward the sea along the high air outside Drake Tower. Soon, I saw it — what everyone called the Bottleneck. It wasn't a poetic name.

At least, not in my current state, with my mouth halfway to being rearranged by the wind. From up here, the waters off the Port of Isca Apubra, which had looked open enough at a glance, suddenly pinched tight where bare reefs jutted from both sides — squeezed into a shape that genuinely resembled a gourd being strangled at the neck. The outer sea's waves and the inner harbor's currents crashed together in that narrow stretch, tearing at one another in a churn of white foam and wild undertow.

Just looking at it made you feel like even the sea god himself would rather take a different route home after his shift. The moment I saw it, a half-drunk conversation with One-eyed Maro surfaced in my memory. He'd been hugging a bottle and his personal gospel of seamanship — a subject he considered entirely his own property, thank you very much — and had leaned in, conspiratorial, to tell me about something interesting in the waters outside Isca Apubra.

"The Bottleneck isn't something you see every day," he'd said, swirling the bottle, his one eye narrowed like he was still deciding whether I was worth the extra sentence.

"Most of the time those reefs stay submerged, playing dead, quiet as corpses. But on certain days, they just rise up on their own — like something down on the seabed rolling over in its sleep — and squeeze the whole outer sea into that ugly shape." I'd asked, offhand, "So what do you do? You can't exactly call a general holiday and have everyone sit on the docks staring at each other." He'd snorted, as if I'd asked something beneath him.

"You seal the port. Obviously. What else? Isca Apubra closes down and reroutes to the southern backup harbor when that happens. That stretch is too dangerous — whirlpools and undercurrents all through the reefs. One wrong move and your ship either capsizes or goes straight to reincarnation." Then he'd lowered his voice, like the sea itself might be listening.

"The old-timers say those reefs aren't reefs at all — they're the breathing organs of something on the ocean floor, surfacing for air. Who knows. What I do know is, the ones who don't believe it tend to die fast." At the time, I'd written it off as a story meant to unsettle an out-of-towner. Looking down now, I had to admit — sea legends are mostly not worth the breath they're told with, but as landmarks, they have an irritating habit of being exactly right.

"Do you see it, Cedric?" Lei Lian's voice pulled me back from Maro's wine-and-brine-scented face. I followed where she pointed. And nearly convinced myself I wasn't looking at ships at all — that the Yanxia Empire had simply decided marching on land was too slow, torn down their own city walls, bolted wheels onto them, and rolled the whole thing out to sea.

"Lei Lian!" I jabbed a finger at the dense mass of shadows beyond the Bottleneck, screaming over the wind.

"Are those actually ships, or did the Yanxia Empire decide walking was too slow, tear their city walls apart, slap wheels on them, and just push the whole thing over here?!" What had risen on the horizon wasn't sail-shadows. It was a fleet of moving fortresses. Massive tower ships rode the waves, their tiered eaves stacked high as city rooftops, hulls broad enough to serve as a floating stretch of wall in their own right.

Crimson banners snapped violently in the sea wind, their shadows — thrown by firelight and darkness together — looking for all the world like sheets of fresh blood hung from the masts. Those towering hulls carved the already unfriendly night into smaller, meaner pieces, dimming even the fires still burning on the water.

"Yanxia tower ships..." Lei Lian murmured — and for the first time, real weight entered her voice. Then, immediately:"Cedric. Change of plans." I knew it. The scariest words on a battlefield aren't "we're finished." They're "change of plans." Because the first one is at least honest. The second one usually means someone's decided you're going to survive — in a way you won't enjoy.

"When I call it," Lei Lian said, flattening herself along the dragon's neck and tightening the reins, "throw them in numerical order."

"Wait, what num—" The blue dragon surged before I could finish. The headwind doubled, then doubled again. I nearly swallowed the rest of my sentence whole, and could only clamp my legs around the saddle and hug the bag of thunder-bombs to my chest like a family heirloom. From a distance, the tower ship had simply looked big. Up close, I realized it wasn't a ship at all. It was a wooden fortress that had learned to row.

From above, the first thing that registered wasn't the deck but the layers of overhanging eaves, the dense grid of arrow slits, and row upon row of ballista ports gaping like beast maws. Behind every wooden wall, arrowheads gleamed with cold light. Between every walkway and corner, armored soldiers ran. The Yanxia sailors on the upper decks had already looked up at us, and even through the dark, I could feel the cold, precise quality of their attention.

From the command tower rising at the ship's highest point, war drums rolled, low and heavy. One beat. Another. Each one landed in my chest like a hammer, dull enough to make my heart ache with the rhythm.

"Hold on!" Lei Lian's shout cut like a blade. At her command, the blue dragon folded its wings and dropped — a lightning-wrapped boulder plunging straight for the tower ship's uppermost deck. I became immediately and intimately aware that my stomach and my soul had decided to evacuate in separate directions. Wind sliced my face like knives. My ears filled entirely with the scream of tearing air.

I pressed flat against the saddle, legs locked, arms locked around the bombs, and from a strictly technical standpoint, I had become something very close to a terrified monkey clinging to a tree — except this tree could fly, and also produced lightning. The tower ship rushed up to meet us. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. Eaves, masts, and banner-shadows that had been mere outlines from altitude were now alarmingly distinct.

The Yanxia sailors had clearly noticed their uninvited guest, because the drums abruptly shifted from ominous to frantic.

"They're turning!" Lei Lian shouted, weaving the dragon through a serpentine maneuver that seemed to slice the very air.

"Ballistae rising!" I glanced down and felt my scalp try to leave my skull. Around the command tower, several massive siege ballistae were slowly elevating. Their armor-piercing bolts were as thick as a child's arm, heads gleaming with a distinctly unfriendly light. If one of those connected, forget being an ambassador — my corpse probably wouldn't even manage to maintain diplomatic dignity.

"Lei Lian!" I bared my teeth against the wind.

"Go for the command tower! Straight in!" She didn't look back. She just drove the dragon's head down. The blue dragon folded its wings again, becoming a charged meteor aimed squarely at the ship's most ornate, almost provocatively flammable-looking eaves. Then the whole ship woke up. Mid-deck, lower decks, both flanks — every arrow slit erupted almost simultaneously.

Heavy Yanxia bolts and fire-arrows rose like an inverted black storm, shrieking through the night, sealing what little escape route we had left like a lid nailed shut over a coffin. Facing a barrage dense enough to turn an ordinary drake into a pincushion, Lei Lian's expression didn't so much as flicker. Her eyes darkened. She pressed herself lower against the dragon's neck, slapped its scales hard with one palm, and spoke two words.

"Thunder Roar." The blue dragon threw back its head and screamed. It wasn't an animal's cry. It was thunder itself. Blue-white lightning erupted from between its dark scales in an instant — a thousand silver serpents waking at once, racing and coiling across its entire body. A heartbeat later, a violent field woven purely of crackling current snapped open around us. BOOM. The incoming storm of arrows slammed into the field. Heavy iron bolts warped and glowed red the instant the current touched them.

The fire-arrows, bound with sulfur and powder, detonated mid-air. Explosions chained together around us, the night blooming with lethal, brilliant light. Molten iron and burning splinters rained down — only to be flicked away by the lightning still crawling across the dragon's hide. For one delirious moment, I was genuinely convinced — it wasn't us diving toward the enemy. It was the entire night sky, crashing down with us.

"Now!" Lei Lian's voice cracked like a whip. Riding the gap Thunder Roar had torn through the arrow-curtain, she forced the dragon's head lower still, trailing the last of the lightning, and drove us straight for the command tower's peak. Into the blank, horrified stares of the sailors below, I yanked the fuse on the first thunder-bomb.

"Our turn to return the favor!" First. Second. I hurled them down, hard, in the order Lei Lian had marked for me. The first two punched through the command tower's wooden walls and detonated inside. The proud structure looked like it had taken a fist straight through its guts — splintered wood, fire, and screaming all burst outward together. The third I dropped dead center on the upper deck.

The shockwave threw a crew mid-reload off their feet; some scrambled clear on hands and knees, others simply went over the rail into the sea. Four and five went into the enclosed compartment beneath the second-level walkway — packed, as it turned out, with fire-arrows and reserve munitions. The moment the bombs hit, the whole level came alive like a maddened fire-beast had been stuffed inside it. Bulkheads blew apart. Flame jetted from every window and crack. The tower ship groaned with a sound like bone snapping.

As for the sixth — it clipped the rail and spun wide. I'd already chalked it up as a miss when it landed squarely on the deck of a nearby escort ship that had been sailing a little too close. I looked down at the chaos boiling up beneath us and nearly laughed. Six for six. I wasn't naive enough to think six thunder-bombs could sink something that size outright. But teaching them exactly what "overwhelmed" felt like tonight was more than fair return on investment. The best part came next.

Following the fire's spread, I noticed the Yanxia tower ships and warships were chained to one another with heavy iron links — presumably to hold formation through coastal swells and the narrow channel. A perfectly sensible tactic. If tonight they hadn't been facing a lightning-breathing dragon, six thunder-bombs, and a harbor full of lunatics who'd already burned the outer sea once. Now, those chains were kindling. Fire raced hull to hull along the links, the boarding planks, the gunwales.

Flames leapt higher, smoke rolled black, and the whole enemy formation writhed like a single fire-serpent thrashing on the water.

"Any munitions left?!" Lei Lian called back, dragging the dragon up through smoke and heat.

"Thunder-bombs are gone!" I hugged the empty pouch, then remembered what was strapped behind me and twisted around to slap the two heavy oak casks.

"But we've still got two barrels of fire oil!" One of Isca Apubra's specialties. Doesn't go out in water. Burns hotter and longer than some noble tempers. Lei Lian's mouth actually curled, just slightly, at that. Not a smile of pleasure. The cold, sharp look of someone thinking good — we can commit one more atrocity.

"Perfect," she said.

"Back to the Bottleneck." The dragon carved a turn so tight my organs filed a formal complaint, then dove — trailing lightning and smoke — back toward the narrowest, most treacherous stretch of the channel. The Yanxia vanguard below clearly hadn't yet grasped what had just happened behind them. Several large transports had already pushed into the inner harbor mouth, unloading soldiers and light infantry in an unbroken stream.

They had no idea their command tower was now splinters and char, and even less idea that a genuinely lethal line of fire was about to be drawn right beneath their own feet.

"The fools up front are still dreaming," Lei Lian said, eyes locked below — and for the first time all night, real killing intent edged her voice. Wind howled past my ears.

"Cedric!" she shouted.

"I'm dropping altitude! When I call bank, stab both casks open — both of them!" A steel knife had already been pressed backward into my hand before she'd finished speaking. The blade was cold against my palm. My insides were colder.

"Is my job description not a little excessive today?!" I yelled.

"Survive first. File your complaint with Her Highness afterward!"

"I knew the Dragon Kingdom's HR policies were fundamentally broken—!" The blue dragon went into a full dive. Fifty feet. Thirty. Ten. I could already see the whites of the Yanxia soldiers' upturned eyes, and the dawning not this again horror on their faces.

"Now! Bank!" Lei Lian wrenched the reins. The dragon's whole body rolled sideways, nearly perpendicular to the sea. The centrifugal force very nearly tore me off the saddle; I felt my soul trying to exit through my throat. Cursing fate with everything I had left, I drove the knife hard into the base of the first cask. A wet, tearing burst. Thick black fire oil sprayed out. I reversed the blade and punched the second hole.

Both barrels bled like wounded beasts, spraying that black, water-resistant alchemical oil under the combined force of altitude and airspeed. The blue dragon skimmed the inner channel at full speed, tracing a long, sweeping S-curve past the transports, the docks, and the ships crowding the Bottleneck's front line. Wherever we passed, we left behind a long, black, glistening scar. The air filled instantly with a thick, acrid stench that made my eyes water shut.

"Empty!" I shouted, gripping the drained casks and the saddle for dear life.

"One more stab and these become my coffin!"

"Good," Lei Lian said, flat and fierce.

"Light it." The dragon threw its head back. The lightning that had been running restless beneath its scales surged and converged, and several brutal bolts came slamming down like a whip cracked from the sky, driving straight into the black trail we'd painted across the water. BOOM— The fire came alive all at once. Not gradually — the entire line ignited in a single breath.

Dark red flame raced across the water and the piers like a row of hands reaching up out of hell, clawing forward into the transports and vanguard troops who'd only just crossed into the harbor and hadn't yet found their footing. The leading transports vanished into flame almost instantly. The soldiers aboard didn't manage full screams before they, and the rigging, cargo, and ladders on deck, became a single column of fire. And the truly catastrophic part was still coming.

The Yanxia troops at the front realized, with dawning horror, that their retreat was already burning. The bulk of the tower ships and warships remained jammed in the narrow channel — fire oil sealing the harbor ahead, chained flame spreading from behind — and when both fronts of fire finally met in the center of the Bottleneck, the entire waterway became a sealed, floating furnace. Towering eaves snapped and fell in the blaze; wooden walkways shrieked as they split.

Yanxia sailors leapt into the sea by the dozen, only to find the surface itself was burning, slicked in fire oil that clung and would not go out. The dark filled with struggling, burning shapes and a smell no one wants to describe. The blue dragon hauled us up out of the heat and smoke, back into clean air. I looked down. The entire Bottleneck glowed red — no longer a channel on a map, but a wound branded into the sea with hot iron, refusing to close.

"Back to the tower!" Lei Lian shouted through the wind, steadying the dragon. Her face was streaked with soot and sweat, but her eyes were burning as bright as anything below.

"Pity we only had six bombs — we could have bought more time!"

"This is enough!" I shouted back, hands still locked to the saddle, deeply committed to not being the one person tonight who survived the fire only to die falling off a dragon. I turned back for one last look at the sky burning red, and finally understood what we'd actually done. Not a rout. Not a slaughter. Not some heroic reversal of fortune.

From the start, Lei Lian and I had both known that two people, one dragon, six thunder-bombs, and two barrels of fire oil could never break the Yanxia Empire's fleet head-on. All we'd done was delay them. Burn them. Block them. Force them to choke exactly where they could least afford to slow down. Once the oil burned out, once the tower ships burned through, once their disciplined troops clawed their way back out of the chaos, they'd advance again. They'd always advance again.

But tonight, this channel still belonged to us. For this moment, the Port of Isca Apubra hadn't been fully surrendered. For this moment, before Drake Tower fell, we had used nothing but mortal minds, one thunder-breathing dragon, and a collection of items that should never have been entrusted to an ambassador — and pushed the Empire's advance back, just a little further. And right now, for us — buying even that sliver of extra time was worth an entire tower.