Biomass stored:

  268.2 KG

  Biomass required for evolution: 300 KG

  It was time to fill up the biomass reserve. I wasn’t likely to see another buffet this size in the near future, so I chose to take the classic approach to an all-you-can-eat: keep going till I puked.

  The others were all doing well enough. Pete had eaten fifteen people I’d seen, so the real total must be much higher. Without my magic or my breath attack, I took to swooping low over head, tails flicking down to spear people and bring them up to their crunchy end in my jaws. Crimson orbs fell from the sky, and Lille seemed to be surrounded by a cloud of flying spines

  I watched as Bargleblaster landed gracefully, catching a pair of knights, one in each foreclaw, and shovelling them into his mouth. This was all a bit much. I liked my life as an entrepreneur, my time with Esme, and making money. Did people taste nice? Sure. But there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead already scattered about like discarded dolls. The arrival of the TOTS had turned this from a fair fight to a massacre.

  Being a dragon really was cheating. Only the most powerful of the humans stood a chance against us, and our own human powerhouses had cut through the lesser mortals to meet their counterparts and keep them busy.

  I curled around, smacking the ground behind me with my tails and scattering the enemy like bowling pins. Bargleblaster roared, unleashed a stream of brown fire to one side of me, and I banked slightly to avoid his field of fire. God-forged scales or no, I had no intention of getting any of the stuff on me.

  The blast suddenly shot up into the air, which was weird because we were the only aerial combatants…

  I turned sharply, speartips bouncing off my belly scales as some brave idiots decided they stood a chance, then accelerated quickly. Where Bargleblaster had been was a massive hole, brown flames licking out of the top of it that suddenly cut off.

  I pulled up, aligned myself carefully, then tucked my wings in as I dove into whatever pitfall the kid had triggered. This, it turned out, was not my brightest idea. My claws and tails dug into the tunnel walls to slow me down as I headed nose-first towards a dazed-looking Bagelbonker.

  “Bob?” he muttered as I came to a stop, starfished above him, bits of stone raining down from my deathgrip on the stone and packed dirt.

  I mugged furiously, trying to suggest he got his arse moving. I really did not want to have to explain to Dagrun that I lost one of her flock. Do dragons have flocks? It didn’t seem scary enough to be our collective noun. Focus Bob!

  “Feet are trapped in stone.”

  “Habe dich!” a voice chuckled evily from the shadows.

  My head snaked down and looked about. The shadows were moving, and soft hisses and clicks drew closer as dwarven mechs began to emerge from the wider tunnels below ground. I really wished I had my voice. For once, I had a great comeback for whoever had just spoken.

  I dropped down and barrelled forward. Seeing as that dick Gigglesworth had robbed me of my ability to chat, might as well get stuck in. I stabbed half a dozen tails into the stone around Bargleblaster's front legs, no doubt giving him an unpleasant close-up of my ruined rear end as I slithered over him. My jaws snapped forward, leaving trails of sparkles that cast a glimmer of light and let me see my enemies.

  The bearded ones retreated at the light, blinking and raising their hands to cover their eyes. I caught one and swallowed him whole, ignoring his brief squawk.

  Dankest Dwarf level 26 slain.

  Gold earned!

  One thousand, one hundred and twelve gold added to the Hoard.

  Biomass stored:

  412.8 KG

  Biomass required for evolution: 300 KG

  Most of the biomass had come from the humans above that I’d been shovelling into my face like I was a wood chipper and they were delicious, juicy branches. The dwarf had yielded relatively little, barely twenty kilograms. But that was hell of a lot of gold.

  My glowing purple eyes scanned around the suddenly nervous dwarves as dollar signs seemed to float over their heads in my sight.

  A mech raised a fist and blasted me with foul-tasting steam. My secondary eyelids clicked closed, and I pushed forward. My claws sliced through the armour, exposing the delicious innards, like I was cracking a hazelnut. I had to work a claw inside the opening in the suit to fish him out, but I was once again rewarded with a pittance of biomass and over a thousand gold.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  A blast of brown fire shot past me, scroching some of my feathers and leaving behind an even more evil odour Bargleblaster rushed past me, much to my annoyance, and began laying waste to the regular dwarves.

  I worked quickly, racing against the younger dragon to get as many kills as I could. I stopped bothering to eat; gold was more important. Bargleblaster did not, much to my satisfaction, so I was able to get another thirty dwarves before what was left slipped away down tunnels too small for us to follow.

  I glared at the dark as the tasty and highly valuable prey escaped. I shoved my snout into one, but I couldn’t get my horns to fit, and my shoulders were far too big. Bastards!

  But wait! When that pixie-shit had the slave-chain on me, I’d still been able to shapeshift. My body shrank down, becoming merely mammalian, and I hurriedly pulled on a pair of trousers.

  “Jesus, Bob. Have a bit of decency!” Bargleblaster complained. “No one needs to see your meat and veg.”

  “So don’t bloody look… Oh, great, now my voice comes back!”

  “I thought you were just being an ass and refusing to speak to me,” Bargleblaster admitted.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I fell in the hole, I’ve been a bit carefree with the poo-fire, and you don’t seem to like me very much.”

  I snorted, shrugged a tunic on and turned to the dark tunnels that still echoed with the sounds of heavy footsteps running away from me. “I don’t, Barkingboob. Your name is annoying for a start, but I would be more than happy to go on at length about your shortcomings after I go kill as many of those ambulatory sacks of shinies as I can. Get back to the surface and stay in the air. Let the others know as well.”

  I took off at a run, bare feet slapping the cold stone and muck, my way lit by the trails of sparkles that drifted from my skin. Side tunnels. I cocked an ear and listened, holding my breath for a second. I clapped inside the entrance, an explosion of lights chasing the sound down the tunnel for a short distance.

  Moving on, I repeated the process, checking to listen, clapping to make sure, then charging ahead. The network was extensive; normally, I’d assume it had taken months to dig it all out, but I had a feeling these bastards could mine quickly. Diamond picks all around, no doubt.

  I emerged into a wide room, dimly lit by flickering torches in the distance, and I had finally found my prey. A dozen mechs were formed up in a neat row, and behind them the regular dwarves waited. The mech in the front stepped forward and slammed its mechanical arms against its chest like a gorilla giving a warning signal.

  “Which one of you reckoned you had dick?” I snapped, preparing to charge. Not my best work, I admit. “Time to add you all to my hoard, methinks.”

  The other mechs took up the beat. Then the dwarves behind began slamming their axes and maces against their metal shields. The noise was deafening, echoing back and forth in the low-ceilinged room.

  “Dankest stone and darkest steel!” they started chanting in the offbeats between the thunderous crashes. Bits of stone and dust shook free from the roof, pattering down around me, the noise lost in the cacophony.

  Then the bastards charged me.

  “Mortem Fucem! Mortem Fucem!” I bellowed, and the floating crystal-things materialised. They immediately started blasting at the closest dwarves, throwing them backwards when the blows weren’t immediately fatal.

  “Missa Vivica!” I had to reshape the sigil for the spell. I knew the words would be right; the system was nothing if not stupid about using pig Latin for spells. The original sigil had been a single hand reaching up through what was probably meant to be the ground, but just looked like a squiggly line to me. So I added more hands. Lots of hands.

  New Syntheticus unlocked!

  Missa Vivica

  All of my mana vanished. That was expensive… Ah, no, the bloody dwarves had been dumping their own dead, as well as others, down here. Either this was some kind of loot room or the Dankest Dwarves had some pretty unsavoury reason for collecting hundreds of dead people. Either way, with a collective groan, my new army rose to its feet, if they still had them, and walked or crawled towards the still living dwarves. And they didn’t stop screaming abuse at me as they did so.

  “You bastard! Send me back!”

  “I’ll eat your heart, you villain!”

  “I was having such a lovely time in heaven.”

  The complaints were more terrifying than the fact that they were an army of undead clawing down the dwarves, ripping them limb from limb despite their frantic efforts to break away and flee. They were stuck between me and the zombie horde, and indecisiveness is a shitty choice in that situation.

  It didn’t last long. The final mech tried to lumber past me, so I jumped on it, shaped my fingers into claws to slice through the stone and metal to find the squishy thing cowering inside.

  “Send us back!”

  “Shut up!” They all went quiet. “Jump up and down three times.” Thump. Thump. Splat. “Don’t jump on those of you who don’t have feet. Or legs.” This was weird. And strangely exhilarating. Sure, I’d torn their souls through reality and back into the broken bodies they used to inhabit, and unimaginable torment, but… it was also an opportunity.

  “You, what’s your name?” I asked as I pointed at a relatively intact dwarf.

  “Jurgen Halbbart of the Gruseliger Schatten clan,” he ground out through clenched teeth. I blinked, then shrugged. Whatever.

  “Right, Jurgen, you’re going to lead this lot up and fight for the good guys. Anyone in black and grey, bad, white and yellow, good. OK? Lovely. How the hell do we get out of this place?”

  “There’s a door back this way!” called another dwarf from the back of the crowd.

  “Thanks, and shut up. Only Jurgen talks. Lead on, little dude.”

  Jurgen scowled at me. His cheeks were ruddy, but the blood must already be draining down to his feet. Despite there not being very far to go from cheek to toe, the sliver of flesh between beard and helmet looked much paler than I was used to from the dwarves I’d met before.

  He plodded away, dragging his left leg as the bone had been broken. My new friends followed behind him as he led us up a winding staircase wide enough for five dwarves to move side by side. This had definitely not been dug out recently. The smooth flagstones that lined it were worn in places from regular use.

  “What’s up with these tunnels? Did they just happen to pick this spot for a battle?”

  “Course not. We’ve been down here for years, waiting for our chance to have a go at the sparkly assholes.” He paused to look my glittering form up and down with a sneer. “You think it was an accident we were waiting for you?”