Chapter 9- Bend Not Break

  Eric looked across the combat training hall as an attendant approached. “Honored Rider, we have set the difficulty rating to seven as you requested.”

  “Thank you, that will be all for now.”

  Eric only arrived at the academy a day ago, and when he spied on the void dragon’s bonded, he was thoroughly unimpressed. He was small, middling in his courses, and had none of the connections. He had heard this tale before: some poor kid gets a lucky break, finding an egg. He gets an inflated ego and thinks himself above the others until the world comes crashing down hard on him.

  Eric would avoid Jett Knight if he didn’t need his dragon to venture into the void. After thinking about his dilemma for a day, he came to one conclusion: he would need to break the young man’s ego. Once he did that, he could take the pieces to build Jett into what he wanted.

  He heard the sharp click of the door opening, and in walked his sponsee. The man jogged over to him with a grin, like the two of them were friends. Eric’s eyebrows drew together.

  “You’re late.” Eric spit.

  “Sorry, I just got the message-”

  “Sorry, Honored Rider Franklin.”

  Eric saw the look of incredulity on Jett’s face. Good. He wanted to draw it out. Wanted his ego on full display; it would make it much easier to crush it.

  “Sorry, Honored Rider Franklin.”

  Eric noticed how there was no excuse this time. The boy had some steel in him. Unfortunately for Jett, Dragons ate steel for breakfast.

  “I have not determined if my patronage is well placed. I have reserved the combat room and placed it at a low setting. I want you to clear the course.”

  He stood there, eyebrows climbing. “Honored Rider Franklin, I don’t have my gear-”

  “Your state of unpreparedness is not something I want to waste all night talking about. You will find a suit in the changing room along with a practice rifle.”

  Eric had hedged on the young man not coming with his gear, so he prepared a muffled suit, a suit that dragon riders trained with that severely limited their ability to sense their environment. He also had the training rifle and sidearm set at half power, locked in single-shot mode.

  He watched the boy run out of the changing room with a smile. He would let the kid get his butt kicked a few times, clear the course, and then spend the next week putting him through intense physical training.

  Five minutes later, Jett emerged from the room and approached the entrance to the course. Eric hit the red button, and a buzzer started. Eric expected the young dragon rider to bowl in, trying to brute force his way through, only to find himself swarmed by the course’s bots.

  Instead, Jett began sweeping the first room with his rifle, clearing corners and checking for traps. Eric had been around enough Federation troopers to recognize what his protege was doing.

  Jett opened the door to the second room, spotting a spider bot and blasting it with his rifle. The program had the spider bots swarm forward. When his rifle didn’t fire, he dropped it, blasting the next with his pistol, and when that didn’t fire, he started smashing the spider with his hands.

  Soon four spiders lay at his feet, and to his surprise, the course didn’t register any confirmed hits. If it had, he would have seen it on the screen, and that area of Jett’s suit would’ve crystallized, making him unable to move the limb.

  Jett walked over, picked up his rifles, cursed, and then loaded them. He finished sweeping the room and headed for the next one. The door flew open, and Jett dodged aside right as a turret began unloading. Three spider bots began to swarm, but this time Jett took each one out with his rifle. Then he grabbed a spider bot, wrapped the strap of his rifle around the bot, and threw it into the room.

  The turret followed the gun. The spider bot gave it just enough pause so it didn’t fire, though it never would have worked if he put the spider bot on himself. The turret moved back, but Jett had already drawn his pistol and fired.

  Eric gritted his teeth. The boy was no commando, but he had some skill. Enough that he was actually making it through the course. His entire plan to crush the boy’s ego was backfiring. Now the snot-nosed brat would think himself high and mighty. Good thing he told Jett the course was at a low setting.

  Jett scanned and cleared each room, only taking a hit to his left arm and right leg. Once he finished the course, Eric called out to the attendant to raise the difficulty to ten. Jett’s suit reset, and the walls of the course descended into the floor.

  Over the intercom, Eric announced, “Good job. Then again, if you couldn’t do this much, I would have regretted sponsoring you. Reset, and I am raising the difficulty.”

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  Jett waved and jogged across the arena. As the walls went up, Eric saw the first room and grinned. The buzzer sounded, and Jett came face-to-face with a security bot.

  The bot was two feet taller than Jett, but more importantly, had the thin shimmer of an aura shield. It was a poor mimicry of a dragon rider’s aura, but strong enough that it would take stronger caliber weapons than Jett had on hand.

  Jett felt psyched. He stumbled through the first course, but he had gotten out the other end. His weapons had thrown him off; his shoulder-mounted weapon had a much higher rate of fire, but in a way that only made it more fun.

  When he heard he was going to try out a more difficult course, he was excited by the challenge. His sponsor had a block on his shoulder, and Eric planned to show him he wasn’t a pushover.

  Then the doors opened. He saw the shimmer of a shield and knew he was in trouble. Anytime he saw a security bot half as capable as the one before him, he booked it. He wasn’t about to tangle with it, but that was salvaging, and here he didn’t have a choice.

  He fired a shot, the shield barely warbling as it absorbed his laser fire. He tried alternating his rifle and pistol as he dodged and rolled out of the way of the bot’s wrist-mounted automatic lasers.

  He needed something and tried to dredge up anything that would help him. After another dodge and roll, he could only think of one plan, though it was a poor one. Laser rifles were nice in numerous ways, one of which was how hard it was to jam one, but you could jam a laser rifle. Essentially, half fire the round in the chamber, reload, and then the next shot makes the gun explode.

  Not something anyone would ever want to do, but it would make his rifle into an impromptu bomb. He overloaded it, threw it at the bot, and then fired his pistol. The explosion knocked Jett off his feet, and once he looked up, he could see the shield warbling.

  He felt a few spots on his suit harden, simulating minor bruises and cuts, but nothing that would impair him. Unfortunately, the shield on the bot started recovering from the angry red storm back to the serene blue. Jett fired his pistol again, barely slowing it down.

  “No! He called out and summoned his strength to punch it.”

  It was borne from desperation, but it was all he had left. He reached out and hit the shield. It was like hitting a brick wall, and his hand started crystallizing. He roared and hit it again and again, then spikes of black shot from his fist, skewering the bot. It tried to move, but anywhere the black spikes touched, it severed the metal.

  Then he felt utterly exhausted, and his vision faded to black.

  He awoke to a feeling of warmth wrapped around his body. He opened his eyes to find himself back in his cave with Layla wrapped around him. A giant tongue smacked him in the side of the face.

  ‘Don’t worry momma, I’ll take care of you.’

  Jett felt too exhausted to try to push her away.

  “Good, you’re awake.” Jett looked across the room to see Honored Rider Franklin.

  “What happened?”

  “You blew up school property, then overtaxed your core. I brought you back to your dragon so you could absorb some aura to help you recover.”

  “So I guess I didn’t pass?”

  The dragon rider scoffed, “Passable… for now. They won’t be letting you back in anytime soon. You will need to spend the next few days around your dragon as much as you can to help you recover.”

  Jett nodded, and Eric continued, “I would tell you not to use your aura again until you have developed more, but I get the feeling you don’t even know what you did.”

  “I shot lightning out of my hand somehow. I’ll try not to do it again.”

  “See that you do. While we are talking about things not to do. Don’t tell anyone your dragon is a void dragon. It’s been painstakingly hard to convince the college to edit their system to log her as a black sky dragon.”

  “You did what!?” Jett gritted his teeth and tensed. He immediately felt the aching soreness across his body.

  “Kid, do you know what everyone would do if they found out you had a void dragon?”

  “Give her the correct food instead of fighting me all the way?”

  “Well-”

  “Allow her access to the flight deck so she can practice flying through space?”

  “I see-”

  “Actually, give me the gear I need. Do you know how many times I have called the support line to make sure they ordered her a training space harness instead of a sky harness?” Jett scoffed.

  “Enough! I get it. I will make sure your dragon gets the proper food and equipment, but we need to keep her quiet. The corporations will want to dissect her, the federation will want to conscript her, and that if you don’t get kidnapped by someone else first.”

  “Look, I get it, when I had Layla checked out, Medicorp wanted to buy her off me to dissect her. I don’t care about the fame, but Layla and I aren’t going to be left alone. We need to get stronger.”

  Jett noticed Eric’s disposition change, becoming less hard. “I can help you with that.”

  Eric exited the cave, clenching his hand to keep it from shaking. He had been a dragon rider for over a century. He was close to being able to form a second layer to his aura barrier and could tank hits from the mightiest of dragon riders, but void lightning was different. For a moment, he had forgotten he was in a void dragon’s lair.

  He walked five minutes across campus to a reserved room in a restaurant. There, Steve was waiting for him.

  “That bad, huh? What did he do? Storm off and throw a fit?”

  “Worse, he’s actually decently competent. I think I messed up.”

  Steve shrugged, “He’s getting a sponsor; he doesn’t have much room to complain.”

  Steve’s mouth forms into a thin line. It was true that the kid was getting a chance that anyone else on campus would kill for, but he could’ve handled it better.

  Steve saw his senior rider slumping and tried to pivot the conversation, “So, the kid is a natural dragon rider?”

  “Oh no. All the things you would want out of a dragon rider, he’s bad at. He actually yelled at me today. No sense for politics, no control over his core, and he’s never even gone on a test flight before.”

  “We can still drop him. Maybe come back when he’s had a few years to incubate at the academy.”

  “What he’s good at is all the other things you can’t train in a dragon rider. Situational awareness, thinking on his feet, and a fire that could pop an Aegis-class ship.”

  “Well, that’s good because I just got word of another freighter hit.” Steve pulls out a pad and makes a swiping motion toward Eric.

  Eric pulls a small pad from his pocket and begins scrolling through the long-range reconnaissance report. “Another void dragon?”

  “No, but something else from the void crawled in there. The federation is asking if we want first crack at it.”

  “How long?”

  “They plan to monitor it for at least a week. Then, if we don’t want to take a look, they will call open season.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Nothing too big, but your boy was a salvager, right? Maybe this is the perfect chance to see if he has the drive of a dragon in him or if he’s just a pup getting his feet under him.”

  Eric observes the hole in the side of the craft, spanning three floors, trying to peer into the black and see what creature is lying in wait.