Chapter 717: Armies Collide Part II
Chapter 717: Armies Collide Part II
They had locked their attention onto their feeding, which meant their consciousness had narrowed to the immediate vicinity of the ground.
They had created a tactical gap around their bodies, spaces where danger could have been waiting, perfectly camouflaged, perfectly patient.
The Panthers emerged from invisibility.
They had been invisible not through magical concealment, but through a form of predatory camouflage that transcended mere optical tricks.
They had positioned themselves on the bodies of the diving dragons before the assault had even begun.
Clinging to scales, anchoring themselves to the ridges that ran along the creatures’ flanks. They had waited in perfect stillness as the dragons dove and consumed and committed fully to the act of feeding.
Now they revealed themselves.
The first Panther tore the eye from its host dragon’s socket.
The attack was so sudden, so violent, that the dragon’s scream bifurcated reality itself.
The creature’s consciousness registered the destruction of sensory input on one entire side of its head in the same instant it registered the presence of something on its body that it couldn’t see or fully comprehend.
The Panther’s claws, each one capable of slicing through hardened scale, raked across the soft tissue surrounding the eye socket with methodical precision.
The creature’s muscles contracted around the eye, tearing it free from the optic nerve that connected it to the dragon’s brain.
Blood fountained outward from the empty socket.
The dragon’s consciousness fractured into cascading layers of pain and confusion. It banked hard, trying to dislodge the Panther through violent maneuvers.
It rolled its entire massive body, using the ground as a reference point to create rotational force. But the Panther clung.
Its claws remained anchored deep in the dragon’s flesh. It simply repositioned itself as the dragon rolled, maintaining contact with the creature’s body even as the world spun around them.
The Panther’s jaws opened.
It bit downward, finding the junction between scales where flesh was exposed. It tore a chunk of meat free, spitting it outward before latching onto a new section of tissue.
The dragon’s screams intensified as it felt multiple puncture wounds opening in its body, as it realized something small and vicious had somehow managed to embed itself in its physical form and was now systematically destroying it from the outside in.
The other four Panthers executed identical assault patterns with mechanical precision.
The second dragon felt its wing membrane being shredded. The creature’s consciousness registered the progressive destruction of the structure that allowed flight.
The Panther’s claws hooked into the delicate tissue between the wing bones, ripping and tearing with focused violence.
The dragon’s attempt to maintain altitude became increasingly difficult as the wing’s structural integrity was systematically compromised.
The third dragon felt something tearing at its spine.
A Panther had worked its way along the creature’s back, positioning itself directly along the vertebral column. Its claws sank between the segments of bone, finding the soft tissue that connected each vertebra to the next.
It tore downward with the force of a creature that understood exactly how to maximize damage to a dragon’s mobility. The dragon’s hindquarters began to fail. Its ability to maneuver became severely compromised.
The fourth dragon felt claws find its throat.
The fifth dragon felt teeth sink into the junction between its head and body.
All five dragons were now crippled, bleeding, and dying.
Three of them managed to limp back toward the formation despite their injuries, their massive bodies leaving trails of blood and flesh across the borderlands.
The other two crashed, their broken bodies cratering into the ground, their impacts shaking the earth beneath the minotaur formations.
Dust and debris exploded outward from the impact zones. The ground itself seemed to collapse inward under the weight of such massive creatures striking it at such tremendous velocity.
The formations began to advance.
But not all of them.
The remaining dragons holding position suddenly began receiving contradictory orders.
Saphira’s voice cut across the secure channel with the force of absolute command. Her shoulders tightened. Her claws dug into the stone of the command platform. Her blue scales flared with the intensity of her frustration and her rage.
"Hold position. All units, maintain formation integrity. Do not engage without explicit orders."
The instructions came too late.
The damage had already been inflicted.
The Panthers had already revealed themselves. The minotaurs were already advancing. And worst of all, the dragons that had maintained position were beginning to question whether the orders being transmitted through the secure channel were actually optimal.
The five dragons that had dove to feed had violated explicit instructions. They had acted independently. And they had suffered catastrophic casualties as a result.
However, a number of the younger dragons had observed their unauthorized descent. These younger dragons had noted the effortless way the prey was consumed.
Consequently, some of the younger dragons interpreted the absence of immediate repercussions for defying orders as an implicit endorsement of independent action.
Five more dragons descended without authorization.
They saw wounded prey.
They saw an opportunity. They executed diving assaults identical to the ones their predecessors had performed moments before. But this time, Voidweaver was already in motion.
The spider had been waiting at the periphery of the formation, its massive form anchored to the ground by legs thick as tree trunks.
It had been tracking the engagement with the cold precision of a creature whose entire existence was calibrated around the mechanics of entrapment.
It understood how prey could be ensnared and held in place while predators circled for the kill.
As the five new dragons began their dives, Voidweaver launched itself upward.
Its legs moved with the fluid grace of something that transcended mere size. Each movement was economical, precise, and designed to cover distance with minimal wasted effort.
The creature’s body rotated as it accelerated. Its abdomen twisted, positioning itself for optimal thread extrusion. Its consciousness was singularly focused on the task at hand.
The creation of a web that would capture and hold the diving dragons.
Its abdomen contracted.
The motion was subtle, barely perceptible, but it initiated a cascade of biological processes.
Void Sillk began to extrude from the creature’s spinnerets. Not ordinary spider silk, but something far more substantial.
The strands that emerged were thick as a ship’s rope, glossy black, and faintly luminescent.
They were woven from shadow itself rather than simple biological material. They were strong enough to hold a Disaster-class dragon. They were resilient enough to withstand dragon fire. They were absolutely indestructible to anything less than a creature of Sovereign rank.
The web spread across the sky.
It didn’t manifest in a neat, geometrical pattern. It was chaotic, organic, designed to trap and confuse rather than to create an aesthetically pleasing structure.
The strands crisscrossed in impossible angles, creating pockets and tangles that would ensnare anything moving through them at speed. The spacing between strands was calculated to present minimum visual obstruction while maintaining maximum structural integrity.
The five diving dragons didn’t even register the web’s existence until they were already colliding with its strands.
Saphira only thought, as she jostled herself back from her inner thoughts about Jack’s army, how such a small force could take down such powerful dragons so quickly.