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THE SWORD

While holding the charred wing in one talon, Dr. Terrible carefully licks the meat juice off the claws on his other talon.

“Not bad, Gork,” he says. “Rather tasty, actually. You might be useless as a dragon. But you do have a nice flavor. You know, come to think of it, I should’ve just cooked you and eaten you when I found you here all those years ago.”

Then he smiles and whisks his spiked tail around behind him.

“Oh well,” he hisses. “I should look on the bright side. I guess this way there’s much more meat to go around. Back when I found you, you wouldn’t have amounted to much more than a snack.”

Now if this invisible restraint weren’t clamped down over my throat right now, I would scream. Instead, I screech in the back of my throat. I thrash around in midair.

Now Dr. Terrible opens his ghastly beak to take another bite of my smoldering wing.

But then ATHENOS II’s voice booms, “That’s ENOUGH!”

And suddenly a green tentacle shoots out of the far wall and zooms right at Dr. Terrible. The tentacle is clutching a flashing silver sword.

The tentacle is whizzing straight for his long neck.

Swoosh!

And with one clean slice of the sword, Dr. Terrible’s monsterish head goes flying off his long neck and tumbles to the chamber floor.