Gregor And The Code Of Claw by Suzanne Collins Read Free Book Online

body. It was a lot harder than it looked. The blade had to pierce the hide, then muscle, and then sometimes ran into bone before it could reach the vital organs inside. It took a lot of power. The lessons with the dead cows had always made Gregor somewhat queasy, but he was grateful for them now. Grateful, too, for the superiority of the sword he had inherited from Sandwich. Sandwich's sword was to a common Underlander sword as a steak knife was to a butter knife. It moved like lightning and slid far more easily across a throat, between ribs, through the joint above a foreleg. It could even cleanly cut off a row of rat teeth in one stroke. At least it could in Gregor's hand. Soon Gregor was covered in blood, and Ares's fur had become damp and sticky with the stuff, but neither of them had more than scratches. He didn't have to think about how to wield his sword; it moved instinctively from target to target. And every time it connected, Gregor became more confident, more powerful. He injured many rats, some of them fatally, he thought, although he couldn't be sure, but the numbers attacking him only increased. If he had needed the images of the mice and his loved ones to propel himself into battle, they were rapidly replaced by the desire for self-preservation. "You really have no idea how much they hate you, do you, Overlander?" Luxa had said to him when they'd been arguing about her starting the war. Well, he did now.
    "Man, these rats want me dead!" Gregor remarked to Ares when they had lifted above the fighting to take a breather. On the ground, a snarling group of two dozen rats ran to stay directly under Ares.
    "Has this only just occurred to you?" asked Ares, and Gregor could hear the rare
Huh-huh-huh
that meant Ares was laughing. Gregor laughed, too. They were both in uncharacteristically good moods.
    In fact, Gregor felt better than he had in ages. "It's the rager thing," he thought. The last time he had fought — it had been against snakes in the jungle — he had apparently been grinning his head off, which had upset him at the time. But here, with the battle around him, he didn't care.
    And as for Ares laughing... for the first time. Gregor had to wonder if his bat might not have a little rager blood in him, too. Or maybe it was just the relief of finally doing something, something real. Of obliterating that feeling of intense frustration they had experienced as they watched the mice suffocate to death while they were helpless to stop it.
    At any rate, they were both flying high.
    "Ready for more?" asked Ares.
    "Yeah, go for it," said Gregor. Then something caught his eye. "No, hang on a minute, Ares!"
    For the first time, the action on the ground seemed to have taken on some kind of order. Gregor and Ares were among a group that was dealing with the rats along one front. But there was a second line of intense fighting on the far side of the cavern, nearly blocked out by the dust cloud it caused. "What's happening over there?"
    As Ares flew toward the cloud, Gregor began to make out more of the scene. A long shelf of rock jutted out of the cavern wall about twelve feet from the ground. Under the edge of the shelf, a wall of humans was on the ground trying to hold off an intense rat attack. Their bats were performing some kind of strafing maneuver from the air, diving down on the rats and literally ripping chunks of flesh off of their bodies.
    "It is the nibblers! Our army is trying to get them to safety!" said Ares.
    Gregor squinted into the dust and could just make out a line of mice. The humans were protecting them as they scurried from a cave along the cavern wall to a tunnel opening some twenty yards away. But it was a very dangerous task, since the humans were at a complete disadvantage fighting on the ground. There was no choice, though. Gregor could see that. The stone shelf made aerial fighting unthinkable. The rats would be picking the bats off right and left at that altitude.
    At the mouth of the tunnel,