Will of a Prince

Chapter 203: Like Father Like Daughter

Jacob used all the effort he could to keep the monsters from jumping up and grabbing Maria. He flapped his wings with incredible force. The wind created from them even managed to push some monsters away when they were close enough. However, he couldn’t keep flying for long, and the horde beneath him didn’t seem to have an end.

As if to further his troubles more, the baby dragon kept trying to bite at the passing heads below him. Maria kept pulling her little head back as best as she could, but it kept slipping through her grasp.

"Jacob, she keeps trying to grab a road snack! How much longer?!"

Jacob could hardly talk through his haggard breaths.

"I can’t... I’m running out of energy... too heavy."

Maria looked around her in horror. There was simply far too many for them to take at once. Their only chance if Jacob dropped them was getting lucky. However, luck was going to have to be what they relied on, because Jacob slowly started descending.

"Brace yourself!"

Within moments of touching the ground, the monsters wasted no time in trying to attack. Massive claws and teeth tried sinking into all of their armor. However, their new dragon-scales were so incredibly tough that the teeth and nails shattered from trying to tear through it. This gave Maria and Jacob all the time they needed.

Jacob screamed out as loud as he could.

"STOP MOVING!!"

Immediately, hundreds of monsters around him stopped in their tracks, as if covered with a sheet of invisible ice. Maria took advantage of the opportunity and started to thrust her spear into as many monsters as she could. One thing she forgot to look after though was their new baby dragon, who jumped on a monster of their own and began eating its torso with avarice.

After eating the monster, something strange began to happen with its tiny figure. Its entire body grew a little larger, its scales glimmered with a strange purple hue, and its eyes glowed slightly. Jacob watched the reaction happen in his peripheral vision. However, nothing more came about from the reaction. As much as Jacob wanted to investigate what changed in the little thing, there was no time.

Jacob readied his hands and used his nails to shred through his enemies like paper. The onyx blood painted the fields a dark gray as it seeped from the corpses of fallen monsters. Maria and Jacob looked like a torrent of death cycling through the horde. Even the baby dragon was killing its fair share of enemies, helping to relieve some potential pressure that was sure to come.

Even after defeating the hundreds of still monsters, there were dozens more crashing over their fallen siblings, aiming to kill all three of them. The baby dragon was so preoccupied trying to finish eating another fallen monster that it never noticed the other ones about to attack it.

At the last moment, Jacob crashed his hand through three of their heads and grabbed the baby off the corpse before running towards Maria in a panic.

"If we can’t fly, we run! Just get away from here as fast as we can before we run out of energy! Can you handle another release?"

Maria looked at Jacob worriedly. She wasn’t sure if her body would be able to handle another use of her release power, especially because of how much she already over-exerted herself in the previous battle.

"I’m not sure. But if we don’t have a choice, I’ll do my best."

"Good enough. Help me hold the baby! I don’t think it’s warmed up to the idea of me holding it yet!"

As he was saying this, the dragon was chewing on his finger. If not for Jacob’s currently hardened skin, he would have lost a finger for sure.

Maria grabbed hold of Jacob and the baby and prepared her legs to take off. A red aura shrouded her legs before she yelled the words.

"Release!"

As she said this, all three of them were shot hundreds of meters away, leaving a small crater in their wake. After flying through the air for three moments, they all crashed into a heavily wooded area. They rolled on the ground before slamming into different bushes. The baby dragon was the first to get up and spit some leaves out of its mouth before sniffing around to looking for them.

It found a small shoe sticking out of a bush and carefully dragged the body out to see who it was. Jacob coughed and rubbed his eyes, trying to gauge his surroundings. He saw the small dragon was the one to help him out of the bush.

"Maybe this thing does like me after all!"

However, his hopes were quickly extinguished, for the dragon somehow managed to make a disappointed face while seeing who he found first.

"How is that even possible for you to make that face?! You could at least pretend to like me!"

Jacob looked around for any sight of Maria. Luckily, she wasn’t far from where they both landed. However, when Jacob found her crashed into a small tree, he noticed something horrible wrong with her foot. It looked like it was bent completely out of shape, as if a monster got a hold of it and tore all the ligaments attaching it to her leg. Maria was wincing, trying to hold back tears.

"Shit. This really hurts. I’m sorry, Jacob."

Panic rose in Jacob’s chest, which he quickly tried to hide as he ran towards her to study the wound.

"Everything’s going to be okay. Don’t move it and I’ll try and make a cast for you."

As Jacob began to scurry around the area finding suitable materials, the baby dragon crawled on to her chest and started licking her face seeing that she was alive. Maria forced out a smile and patted its small head before wincing again in pain. The baby dragon appeared to notice her distress and looked at her curiously. It slowly sniffed her body from head to toe until it found the injury on her foot.

Suddenly, a strange glow started appearing from the dragon’s body. The same enchanting hue began to emanate off its scales before a purple liquid dripped out of its mouth on to her foot. Maria screamed under her breath, causing Jacob to turn his head in fear. He ran over to her while carrying a pile of wood and stone.

"What happened?! Did it bite you?!"

Maria grunted and stared back at Jacob.

"No. It dropped some weird liquid out of its mouth on me."

"That can’t be true. It would never try to hurt you... I think."

Jacob picked up the baby dragon who was still sniffing her wound lightly and looked at its purple eyes.

"Why are you causing trouble already? Can you stop trying to kill us for two minutes?"

"Jacob."

"I mean, we could have left you back there with those monsters! You could be at least a little grateful."

"Jacob!"

"But it looks like we’re stuck together whether you like it or not, so behave yourself! Please!"

"JACOB!"

"What?"

"My foot."

Suddenly, something strange began to happen to Maria’s foot. It looked as if it was twisting back into its original shape and mending itself under her skin. In no time at all, her foot looked like nothing had ever happened to it. They both remained silent for a few moments.

Jacob stared back at the baby dragon with a smile.

"I take everything back! You’re perfect!"

She burped up a small leg of one of the monsters as Jacob said this before immediately eating it again once it hit the ground. Jacob got a weird chill seeing the dragon’s hunger.

"Oh no. Maria, I think I have some bad news."

Maria looked at him slightly confused.

"What is it?"

"I think our baby inherited my appetite!"

Maria looked at him blankly for a few moments before bursting into laughter. Jacob hadn’t heard her laugh in so long that hearing it once more felt as refreshing as a long night’s rest.

"So, you like the dragon now?"

Jacob would never admit something like that to Maria, but the dragon was secretly growing on him every passing second.

"What? I would never! It’s still as hostile and dangerous as when we found it! I can’t allow myself to drop my guard until I know we gained its trust!"

"Then why are you holding it like that?"

The baby dragon seemed to be more comfortable letting Jacob hold them, but Jacob was grabbing on to it like it was a stuffed animal.

"Because I don’t want it to fall! It needs to learn to fly before I can let it go!"

"Right... Anyway, where are we?"

Jacob let the tiny dragon crawl out of his hands and run back over to Maria for her to pick it up.

"I’m not sure. However, I don’t think we’ve had a single good experience with forests, so let’s keep our guard up."

Jacob tried looked through the tops of the trees, but something seemed terribly wrong.

"Say, is it just me, or does this forest seem a little... quiet?"

Maria lifted her chin, trying to listen to any critters or animals in the nearby area. Nothing. Not even the sound of the wind was entering as deep in the forest as they were.

"I don’t think that’s what we have to worry about. Have you been keeping track of how far west we have been going?"

"I’m not sure, but it feels like we’ve been travelling for a while now."

"Exactly. We’ve been traveling all this way, yet we haven’t come across chrono kingdom or the wasteland yet. Isn’t that a bit odd?"

Well, you have to remember we were travelling for weeks to get here. It’s possible we turned a little bit too far north or south along the way.

"I see. We can try and figure out where we are after some sleep. My eyelids are getting heavier by the second."

Jacob stretched and let out a big yawn.

"Me too. Let’s just walk a bit further. The area up ahead is a little foggy, so it should provide us with some good natural protection."

Both Jacob and Maria were hardly inside the fog before they collapsed to their knees and leaned against a tree together. Jacob looked into her beautiful jade eyes and smiled.

"Goodnight, Maria."

He gently kissed the top of her head and allowed his neck to rest comfortably against the tree’s trunk.

Both of their muscles were beyond exhausted from the constant fighting, and within moments, both of them were put into a deep slumber.