Sly remembered how to run.

  New gouts of dragon-fire like napalm sprayed in all direction, intense and white-hot. Weeping, he was amazed to see a hall built into the cavern: massive columns like oaks, a fireplace the size of his living-room, and scattered burnt and blackened shapes that might once have been tables or chairs, or untold people caught in the act of feasting. The floor was an eruption of tile, torn, broken and upturned but glorious in blue-green tints, and what he’d thought were stalagmites were fine stone pedestals, use and function lost in time. The pool lay under ruined plaster, and chunks of carved marble stood proud at its edge.

  Sly’s skull crashed with agony as he ran for cover, what there was in this dining hall of lost kings. The colossal columns gave the best protection, and one was a short dash away, so he sprinted, and as his feet pounded so did his head. His arm came up as though by habit and he frantically pulled the trigger on the Sig.

  Ba-BOOM! – Ba-BOOM! – Ba-BOOM!…

  He winced with each shot but remembered to count, each round precious to him as he had just thirty-four; thirty-three, thirty-two left...

  At least the creatures felt the bullets hit. One, the size of a leopard with a great white’s maw, dropped with a black hole in its skull’s beautiful hues. Sly wasn’t aiming, the dragons were so closely crowded that one dropped or flinched with each muzzle-flash. The injuries only slowed the rest, teaching the horde caution.

  They responded by reverting to flame, and more flame. Sly sucked in his breath, made himself small behind the pillar as liquid fire sploshed and lit the inside of his skull even with his eyes clenched shut. He screamed obscenities until it stopped, then hurried to find somewhere, anywhere else to go.

  When he saw the dark crack in the wall ahead, he threw himself at it.

  The opening appeared to be a line in the stuff of the mountain but as he grabbed it, he realized it was some kind of door disguised to look like stone, or stone given the purpose of a door.

  Either way it was irrevocably stuck.

  Sly threw his weight at the door but it wouldn’t budge. Whatever counterweight or mechanism had once, ages past, helped the heavy block to move was now broken or scorched away. The gap was reasonable for a slim boy. Sly was neither slim nor young.

  Thirty-one, thirty.

  The dragons were wary, but bullets alone hadn’t scared them off. He hurriedly took off the black cloak, pitched it through the breach, then tore at Velcro straps and shucked off the armour, which hit the floor like a small unconscious child, discarded. Sly ignored the loss and threw himself at the crack, taking his last chance of life. Frantically he thrust his left arm into the dark doorway, wedged his shoulder in and shoved. His right hand and the gun remained in the great hall, and he fired again.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven.

  His shoulder and left leg went in, and he wriggled his hips and sucked in his breath. Twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four.

  Ba-BOOM. A small dragon howled as its shoulder tore away and he couldn’t help but sympathise. Twenty-three.

  And there he stopped with a terrible thought. Each clip of nine-millimetre ammunition held not thirty-four rounds, but seventeen. The second clip was on his belt, now on the wrong side of this immovable door. Even if he could change the clip one-handed, he couldn’t do it without giving up on squeezing through.

  That made the count not twenty-three but six. The bullets in a revolver, the eggs in a box. His hips went through in a painful wrench. Now all that was left was his head, and he was ecstatic because if shoulders and hips fit, his head should follow. He shuffled his hips and fired again. Five, four, three.

  There, that should give a breathing space, he thought, even as the roar of flame lit the chamber like a white-phosphorous grenade. He screamed, pain sloshing and sticking against the stone side of the door as he wrenched himself at the gap, losing skin. Whether it was a cupboard or a servants’ corridor it was his salvation, so he ripped himself bloody, staggering into the chamber.

  Once there, he cried out in horror and rising pain and his knees shook.

  His face was agony.

  Sly quivered uncontrollably. His right hand with his gun was scorched but the sulphurous stinking flare had struck the crack in the wall where his face had been wedged. The gout had melted the skin on his face like a grilled cheese sandwich, and he knew he’d never forget the ugly smell of scorched, melted hair.

  He writhed, wailing in shocked torment as external flames continued to light the room. Eyes wild, he glimpsed a section of the room blackened to charcoal where dragon-fire squeezed past the stone in ages long past, but a quadrant was untouched. Fine furniture, a cabinet, many wooden bookshelves, all undamaged except for heat-blistered wood. Books on the shelves, unclaimed by the fire.

  And, in the corner, a thick iron-bound wooden door.

  Another sheet of flame lit the room like lightning. Shaking, in the light he saw a body, what had once been an orc lying half in and half out of safety. The corpse was half immolated, much of it little more than a pile of ash. The rest survived intact, a mummified skeleton, a few fabric strips, skin-wrapped bones, an earring punched through a pointed, desiccated ear. The creature’s broad skull was on the safe side of the line. With a shudder and a whimper of pain, Sly wondered how horrible that would’ve been, knowing your body was gone. He cackled madly.

  I’m Harvey Dent but at least I’m alive.

  Then the sleek, predatory head of a smaller drake silently entered the room and Sly yelled in panic. Ba-BOOM! – Ba-BOOM! – Ba-BOOM!

  The gun clicked empty, but the drake was writhing, dead on its feet.

  The deafening eruption of noise still in his ears, Sly fumbled for the second clip. He ignored the lesser pain of his arm, so grateful that his hand was intact. The empty clip fell, bounced off the tiled floor even as the small drake slumped in the doorway, its death clenched tight in ebon talons. The new clip slotted in. He racked the slide in sudden dark, queasily preparing his next shot.

  Seventeen, now. My last magazine.

  Another hot-orange billow of flame raged outside, charring the doorway anew. He had seconds to get to the door before more lesser dragons ventured inside, but in that second of light he saw the outstretched arm of the dead orc on the ground. His eyes tracked where the fingers reached, to a bag, a satchel of old, dried leather, and a glass vial, spilled on the floor. He recognized the bottle’s distinctive design. Gutlat had taken one like it, a red potion bottle.

  This one was mottled with age, but half full.