As Flash hit the floor hard, the pain escaped his mind and tore through his body. Rolling instinctively, he managed to just about get to his feet. In a split second he took in everything around him. Not thinking it could get any weirder, suddenly it just had, with one of Tank's rugby playing friends' heads poking over the wall of the bazaar, shooting some kind of liquid by the look of things from a very strange rifle. He watched as... JANICE of all people leapt from the roof of a building behind the dragons guarding the prisoners. JANICE!! Sweet little... JANICE!! Of one thing he was bloody sure... she was most definitely not a dragon, and most certainly was a human. What in the hell was going on? Humans saving dragons?! The world had turned on its head, and he had a pretty good idea who was behind it all. That damned shopkeeper almost certainly had a hand in it, and as he watched Richie slice a very seductive looking dagger across the chest of the torturing dragon with the whip, he came to the conclusion that she was almost certainly up to her neck in it too.
'Time to act,' he thought. 'But what to do?'
Gee Tee was spent, drained of every last ounce of energy, having tried his best, realistically he'd done more than he could have hoped to do. Collapsing to his knees, too exhausted to even stand, he knew that he'd given them all the best chance he could. It was impossible for him to do any more. Now it was down to them, they had to make all his effort count for something. Slumping to the floor, he caught sight of Tank, head flopped in front of him, still as death itself, swinging back and forth. As his eyelids fluttered, one last thought consumed him.
'Please, please, please don't let us have been too late.'
Hook adjusted the pressure on the rifle, before changing his aim towards the guards furthest away, wondering where the hell Janice was. Although the plan was a little sketchy, he was pretty sure she should have been on the scene by now, and the bazaar should have been full of huge dragon sized lollies. With a limited view of events he supposed she could have been crouching down somewhere making her way towards the action, but still... time was running out. For their part, the guards had murderous looks in their eyes, some even drawing deadly looking, black swords from their scabbards.
Janice had tiptoed up to the nearest dragon guard, all the time being watched by the captives. Things were in full swing now, with Richie battling the evil looking dragon with the energy whip. Looking down at the guard's thick, scaly tail, the young bar worker noticed some of the scales glistening more than others, the thick heavy water standing out in the bright light. As she reached out with Fu-ts'ang, the guard started to turn around. Janice looked up, terrified, into huge, snarling jaws. Without thinking, she dived forward, touched Fu-ts'ang against the heavy water on the dragon's tail and then rolled away across the cobbles. Before the guard could react, solid ice began to form across the whole of his body, starting at his tail before working its way up to his head. And it wasn't just him; three of the other guards, to which the same water was connected, also found themselves frozen in place. Janice smiled to herself. It had worked. She'd done it! Only then did she realise a huge, dark shadow had enveloped her, blocking out the bright light that she'd only just got used to. Looking up into the almost alien face of another guard, she watched helplessly as he drew his sword and raised it above his head to strike.
Flash looked around, trying to decide on a course of action. For the most part, things seemed to be under control, or so it appeared. Not unfamiliar with the organised chaos of conflict, having fought in three hardcore dragon versus dragon battles, he was fully aware that events can change in a split second, and how taking a moment or two to try and grasp the overall picture can pay huge dividends. The most obvious thing for him to do was to try and get Tank down from where he was hanging as his friend looked drained of life. But it would take a while, and was it the right thing to do? Taking a step forward with a view to doing just that, an eerily familiar sensation tickled his neck, something he'd felt many times before, usually in hardened battle, and it nearly always meant danger. Turning, expecting to find an imminent attack, instead he glimpsed what was going on fifty yards or so away. Watching intrigued as Janice pressed something against a dragon's tail, he was amazed to see what happened next. But then he recognised the danger... a dragon guard was coming up behind her from one of the alleyways. Guessing it was one of the dragons who'd been dispatched to check out the loud boom, finding it was a diversion and then coming back, what was patently obvious was that Janice only had mere seconds to live. Anger, magic and power stirred deep inside him as he shot off in her direction like an arrow being fired from a bow.
Richie slashed the dagger wildly across his bulging underbelly. The look on Casey's face gave her a certain satisfaction. Not only surprise, but fear as well. She could always tell when he was afraid, and he was afraid now. As she whipped the dagger round to strike again... it happened! Gee Tee's slowing mantra that everyone had been encased in ceased. In all honesty, she was surprised he'd lasted this long, unable to imagine how much effort it had required to hold the mantra over such an area. Even in her past, full on dragon life, she probably wouldn't even have attempted to cast such a thing. As this thought shot through her brain, Casey suddenly became alert, fast and understood what had gone on. Instantly Richie threw herself backwards as the magical whip came screaming through the air only inches away from where her neck had been. Her back flip wasn't perfect. Clumsily, she crashed to the cobbles, landing hard on her right shoulder. Pain exploded within it, but she knew better than to dwell on it. Movement, movement was the key. Staying flat, she rolled across to one side and came up on one knee. Casey was in the process of pulling the whip back over his shoulder again, and so she lunged forward and sliced the laminium dagger through the sinew of his left wing. A very unflattering squeak spluttered out of the injured dragon's mouth as she once again shot back out of range of the deadly looking whip, in two giant bounds. By cutting the sinew in his wings, she'd left him with little option but to fight, knowing that now escape was all but impossible for him (as there was simply no way he could take to the air), the chances were he'd become more desperate and infinitely more deadly. Slowly, the pair circled each other, Richie holding out the jewelled dagger in front of her, while Casey's whip dragged across the cobbles behind him. Both dragons had murder in their eyes.
As he brought down the sword to cleave Janice in two, the sneer on the dragon guard's face was all encompassing. Her entire life didn't flash by, a grinning skeleton with a scythe didn't appear, and there were no last regrets. Mainly because a speeding blur picked her up and lobbed her onto the relative safety of the roof of the nearest single storey building. As the guard's matt black sword clanged off the cobbles, the blur resolved itself into... FLASH! Missing one human target made the guard angry. Really angry. And he sure as hell wasn't going to miss another. Using all the agility he had, he was on Flash in an instant. The ex-Crimson Guard was defenceless, or so it looked. But then again, he had been in the Crimson Guards, and being defenceless wasn't something they'd ever been accused of, well, not by anyone still alive that is. Swinging his blade towards Flash's head, the guard put all the strength he had into the attack. Rolling forward, Flash tucked in and sprang up, putting all his energy into the jump, popping up inside his opponent's defences, at about head height. As he reached the apex of his jump, he stuck out his index and middle fingers and with as much power as he could muster, jabbed them both into the guard's left eyeball. A squelch, followed by the guard's enraged howl, echoed off every corner of the bazaar and got every being within the confines of the square looking in their direction. With his enemy distracted for a moment, Flash rolled across to the edge of the bazaar and scooped up the juiciest lemon from a group of them littering the floor near an overturned stall. Determined to press home his advantage, he swiftly crept round the back of the flailing guard, and having ripped the lemon in half, jumped onto the guard's tail and sprinted up it. Knowing exactly where his target was, he reached around the tormented dragon's head and pulled the lemon back onto the dragon's one remaining good eye. Feeling it impact, he squeezed the lemon for all he was worth. In his wildest dreams, he couldn't have imagined his efforts being so well rewarded. The sound was surreal. It was so... alien, like nothing he'd ever heard. Somersaulting back to the ground, he kicked the guard in the back for good measure, sending him off in the direction of one of the houses on the edge of the square, effectively rendering him out of the fight and of little danger to anyone. Turning back to size up the chaos, Flash swallowed awkwardly as he did so, noticing a large contingent of guards having left their prisoners bound, sitting on the ground, now heading his way, as if to avenge their comrade.