I Died and Became a Noble's Heir

Chapter 716: Armies Collide Part I

Saphira’s consciousness fractured.

Even as her blue scales flared with the intensity of command, even as she transmitted orders across the secure channel to stabilize the fragmenting formations, a singular thought bloomed in the depths of her awareness like a poison flower.

The portals. Why had so many opened empty?

Jack had deployed his creatures, but the sheer number of apertures that had torn reality open had far exceeded the number of soldiers that had actually emerged.

She had counted. In the midst of coordinating defensive positioning and attempting to establish some semblance of tactical cohesion, she had counted the portals. She compared that count to the creatures that had materialized.

The mathematics didn’t align.

Dozens of portals had bloomed open with nothing but darkness beyond them.

Beyond the fissures in reality lies only an expanse of emptiness, hinting at destinations beyond her current comprehension.

Her golden eyes narrowed as she processed the implications. Jack had a reserve. He had purposely held back forces. Jack had something else planned that she hadn’t yet perceived.

What was he doing with those unused apertures?

The question consumed a fraction of her consciousness, perhaps a second, perhaps less.

But in combat at this scale, a second of divided attention was an eternity.

It was the difference between a dragon maintaining perfect spatial awareness and a dragon whose peripheral vision had narrowed by just enough that incoming threats could exploit the gap. It was the difference between life and death.

Five Disaster-class dragons that had been positioned at the vanguard’s forward edge didn’t wait for explicit authorization.

The lead dragon’s muscles contracted with explosive force. Its wings folded inward against its body, transforming it from an airborne creature into something more akin to a missile.

Its talons extended fully, spreading wide as the creature prepared for impact. Its jaw began to open. Not gradually, but in a violent, unstoppable motion that revealed teeth the size of swords and a gullet large enough to accommodate creatures a quarter its own size.

The dragon descended.

It moved with the weight of gravity itself, accelerating downward as it shed altitude. The air around it began to shimmer from the friction of its passage.

Its scales, already radiating with the intense heat that characterized dragon physiology, seemed to burn brighter as the creature poured power into this single act of predatory violence.

The ground beneath its target began to tremble as the dragon approached, small stones and debris lifting into the air from the pressure differential created by such a massive creature moving at such tremendous velocity.

The minotaurs had a single heartbeat to react.

Twenty of them stood in the target zone, creatures ten feet tall, their bodies dense with muscle, their weapons held at ready.

Their consciousness processed the incoming threat with the cold clarity of soldiers who had trained for combat across countless battlefields. But training meant nothing when faced with a Disaster-class dragon executing a diving assault.

The dragon’s jaw closed.

The motion was catastrophic in its finality. The aperture simply consumed the space where the minotaurs had been standing.

Twenty creatures were drawn inward by the pressure differential created by the closing of such an enormous mouth. Some of them attempted to resist, attempted to anchor themselves against the pull, but the force was too overwhelming. They were drawn into the darkness of the dragon’s gullet.

The dragon’s throat convulsed.

The creature’s muscles contracted around the minotaurs, crushing them with pressure that transcended mere physical force.

Bones splintered, organs ruptured, and muscles tore. The minotaurs experienced a half-second of consciousness as their bodies were compressed and broken, their flesh torn against the serrated edges of the dragon’s teeth, their blood flowing down the creature’s esophagus and into its stomach.

And then they ceased to exist as independent entities.

Blood sprayed outward from the dragon’s mouth, thick, arterial blood that painted the creature’s scales and the surrounding landscape in shades of crimson.

Chunks of flesh hung from the dragon’s teeth like grotesque decorations.

Bone fragments were caught between the creature’s teeth, pressed there by the force of the bite.

The dragon’s entire frame convulsed as it processed the meal it had just consumed, and its body began the biological process of breaking down the flesh that had been consumed.

Four other dragons executed identical assault patterns across different sectors of the minotaur formations.

The second dragon’s descent created a pressure wave that knocked smaller creatures backward.

Its jaw opened with mechanical precision, the lower mandible extending downward while the upper jaw remained stationary.

The aperture that formed was perfectly calibrated to consume the maximum amount of prey in a single bite.

Twenty minotaurs were drawn into darkness. Their screams lasted perhaps a fraction of a second before being cut off by the closing of that massive mouth.

The third dragon’s approach was slightly different. This creature had curved slightly during its dive, positioning itself at an angle that allowed it to rake its talons across a cluster of minotaurs before delivering its bite.

The talons, each one twice the size of an average human, tore through the air with tremendous velocity.

The passage of a single talon eviscerated three minotaurs, their bodies torn open from sternum to groin. They collapsed, their internal organs spilling outward, their consciousness fragmenting as their bodies experienced trauma that transcended survivability.

The dragon’s jaw closed around the remaining creatures in the target cluster.

Another twenty minotaurs vanished into the darkness of the dragon’s gullet.

The fourth dragon executed its dive with mechanical precision. Its trajectory was calculated to maximize the number of creatures it could consume in its initial bite.

Its jaw opened to its absolute maximum aperture, a space large enough to accommodate an entire house. Twenty minotaurs were pulled inward. Some of them managed to lodge their weapons against the creature’s teeth, attempting to use the mechanical advantage to resist the closing of the jaw.

But the dragon’s bite force was measured in thousands of tons of pressure. The weapons splintered. The creatures were drawn inward. The jaw closed with finality.

The fifth dragon’s approach was the most direct.

This creature dived straight downward toward a cluster of twenty minotaurs that had been positioned at the very center of the formation.

It exhibited no tactical sophistication. It rapidly descended and opened its maw. The minotaurs managed to raise their defenses.

They vocalized in distress and attempted to escape. However, they were unable to successfully execute any of these actions. The maw enveloped them as they were assimilated.

The sky erupted in chaos for three seconds.

Five dragons, each one having consumed twenty minotaurs, now needed to return to formation.

They banked hard, their wings spreading to maximum extension, their musculature contracting to provide the lift necessary to arrest their descent and begin climbing back toward the group.

Blood dripped from their mouths. Chunks of flesh hung from their teeth.

They were satisfied because they had been fed. They had demonstrated the ease with which they could destroy the creatures that Jack had summoned.

But they had made a critical error.

In their focus on the act of consumption, in their singular attention to the prey that had been vulnerable, they had abandoned all awareness of the space immediately around them.