Specter, p.1
Specter, page 1
Specter
Reincarnated As A Drow Breeder
Dragon Cobolt
Uruk Press
Science Fantasy
Uruk Press
Great Britain
Website | Twitter
Specter © Dragon Cobolt 2025
The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover art by Starri Art.
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
Dakota State opened his eyes – and for a few lurching moments of disorientation, he forgot everything that had happened over the past few months of his life. Because opening his eyes turned out to be a serious mistake. Stabbing pain shot through his brain at the speed of light. He closed his eyes and turned his head away, feeling the tingling brightness of the lamp shining on him.
He also became aware of his arms. They were lashed together above his head, wrist to wrist, palms facing one another. He concentrated on that ropy connection over the pain in his eyes and remembered that he wasn’t Dakota State anymore.
Da’kota Spiderblood, cadet of the Drow Empire’s Pathfinder Corps, opened his eyes and let them slowly, painfully adjust to the brilliant light shining on his naked body. Of course he was naked. He had gone to sleep dressed – it was hard to undress when one was running the hideously difficult training course to quality for the Specters. When one had only two hours of sleep a day, augmented by magical spells and stimulant drugs, wasting the time it took to strip out of your training gear was just a sick joke. He had walked to bed after another marathon session of cramming, training, and nearly being killed by said training, fallen face first in, and been aware and conscious just long enough to hear his girlfriend’s soft coo of sympathy.
Now, he was dressed in nothing but a sleek speedo, roped up, and standing on his tip toes.
“You know,” he said, slowly. “This is actually significantly more pleasant than the normal way I get woken up.”
A fist slammed into his belly. He wheezed and tried to make out his assailant. Then the figure in question shifted, so the brilliant light was no longer silhouetting him. Da’kota blinked slowly, his brow furrowing. For a few moments, seeing the features before him was so alien and surreal, he wasn’t even sure what he was looking at. Then his sleep-addled, pain-wracked brain caught up with reality and he sighed.
“Ah.” He cocked his head. “A dwarf. I was wondering when I’d meet one of you.”
“We got a really sheltered shroom-sniffing spiderfucker,” the dwarf said, smirking. He was blunt featured, hard where elves were round and soft, straight where they curved, and masculine where drow tended towards the feminine. Both in the literal sense that he was a man where, in a drowish interrogation cell, this would be a woman. But even the male drow that Da’kota had seen tended towards, at best, the futch. Could men even be futch? Da’kota wasn’t entirely sure, but he was confident his girlfriend could have laid out the entire spectrum, with diagrams and examples from pop culture across two dimensions.
“Actually,” Da’kota said. “I’m from Project Soulbound. Heard of it?”
The dwarf shook his head, then turned to the other dwarf in the room. Da’kota noticed that, despite the fact he was currently on his tip toes, the dwarfs came up to his face. He craned his head and saw that they were clad in elaborate mechanical exoskeletons with brass gears and exposed pipes, tubes and connectors. They were chicken legged and broadly spaced, more like seats than the power armor that he was used to seeing in the drowish military.
The other dwarf was a female, and while she lacked the thick bushy beard, she had a stolidity that most drow women lacked. Her features were broad, her nose flat and wide, and her eyes bright gold, rather than the crimson, ruby, or blood red that most drow tended towards.
“It’s their attempt to try and fix the population problem, sucking up souls from other universes,” she said, nodding.
“Yeah. I’m human, reincarnated as a drow,” Da’kota said.
“Oh fuck off, you can’t even pick something believable?” the first dwarf asked, rolling his eyes. “Like a dragon or something?”
“In the world I come from, humans are significantly more-”
The dwarf grabbed his chin.
“What. Are. You. Doing. In. Our. Territory?”
Da’kota frowned at him, silent as his lips were distorted by the dwarf’s grip – he’d be damned if he tried to talk like Daffy Duck. The dwarf glowered at him, then released his mouth.
“I have no idea,” he said, Da’kota said. “Last time I checked, I was in the Everdark training facility on my…” He paused. “Third? No, fourth month of training for the Pathfinder Service.”
The dwarf snorted in disbelief. “Oh yeah? Which specialization?”
“The specters,” Da’kota said, sighing. “I didn’t think you’d care.”
The dwarf punched him in the stomach with a growl. “You expect me to buy that those man hating wenches would ever, in a million years, let a male become a specter?”
“Uh, Brunj, he’s telling the truth.”
The female dwarf was holding up her finger. Dangling from it was a large, glowing rune that waved back and forth before his nose. It glowed blue.
The two dwarfs looked at one another. Brunj scowled, then muttered, “Let’s talk to the boss.”
The two hurried out.
Da’kota sighed softly as he rolled his head back to look up at the ceiling – if only to get some of the light out of his eyes. His mind was already beginning to tick trough the possibilities. Attempted assassination via proxy seemed to be the most likely right now, but he couldn’t overlook the possibilities that this was a botched kidnapping or a training mistake. More than a few of his fellow cadets had been working on teleportation spells the last time he had checked, and at least one had accidentally flung herself into a stable Lagrange point between Everdark and her moon. Fortunately, the cadet had been wearing power armor at the time, but by the time a shuttle had managed to pick her up, she had been getting worrying close to the atmosphere.
Without any other evidence to go on, move to step two: escape.
He weighed his options, while the door opened and in came the dwarf woman again. Her exo-walker whirred and thumped as carried in a bowl with several glowing runes set inside of it.
Da’kota grinned slightly at her. “So, those are truth telling, truth seeing, and, ah, some pain inducers and healers. Not exactly what you were expecting when you graduated from runecrafting academy, huh?”
The dwarf blinked up at him. “Huh?”
Da’kota shrugged. “Guessing you’re running with some pretty nasty people. Pirates?”
“Yeah,” she said, then frowned. “How do you know I’m not a nasty person, spiderboy?”
Da’kota smiled at her. “You have kind eyes,” he said, his voice soft, pitched just so. The dwarf girl flushed and she looked into his eyes, then looked away.
“We don’t normally take prisoners like you, but we got paid a bunch and-”
“Hey,” Da’kota said. “I understand. It’s a hard knock galaxy out there. Still, think you could at least give me a little kiss before you start throwing those runes at me?” He smiled, playfully. “It’ll give me something to cling to before your buddy comes back.”
The girl bit her lip, glancing at the door, her right hand fidgeting on the small control stick she used to stomp her exo-suit around. She gulped, then flicked a switch in the armrest and the legs hissed and then popped up on a few notches that were built into the bottom half of the chicken-legged suit. This brought her up until her face was exactly on the level with his, required as she was shorter than Brunj. She brushed some of her coppery hair back behind an ear that came to a less pronounced but still quite evident point, then leaned in and planted a kiss on his cheek. When she drew back, Da’kota noticed a tiny twinge of regret on her face.
He chuckled, softly. “Let me guess. Part of you is sad I didn’t turn it into something hotter.”
“W-Well, I mean, in the books and holovids, drow boys are, you know…”
“Big man sluts?” Da’kota asked.
“Required to be pliant sex slaves or they get killed,” the dwarf said, blushing furiously as she turned her head away from him, her hand stroking her exo-suit’s joystick with a nervous twitch.
“The Empire’s actually undergone a lot of remarkable reforms, you know?” Da’kota said, shrugging. “Males can actually vote now, and own land, and I think last time I heard, there was one on the Empress’s council as more than just a toy.” He patted her cheek with his hand, then leaned in and gave her a warm, warm, warm kiss on her lips. Her eyes half closed and she leaned into the kiss as his other hand tucked the bowl out of her lips and tossed it behind him, where it clattered softly to the floor, runes shifting around inside.
It was only a few seconds into the kiss that it registered in her brain that Da’kota had slipped his wrists free. She drew back, gasping in shock as he winked at her.
“How the fuck!?”
“Told you,” Da’kota said, stepping back and twirling her side-arm, a blunt and short barreled mana pistol. “Specter. Well, specter cadet.”
She flushed, then lifted her chin. “I will scream.”
“What if I say I can get out of here without killing a single person?” he asked, arching an eyebrow at her.
The dwarf girl looked into his eyes. Da’kota had gone to enough courses to learn how to tell as many lies as you could possibly want, for days and days. The funniest thing though was that it usually was far harder to get the truth to be believed. So, he had practiced again and again and again at simple, honest, direct diplomacy – as a specter, he was needed to not merely master the martial arts of a pathfinder, but also the specialized diplomatic and etiquette skills of the silverhawk branch. Even though more of his classes had been focused on the more direct application of a silverhawk’s talents, he had practiced this the most.
And he saw it pay off. The dwarf girl sighed. “I’m holding you to that,” she whispered.
“Don’t worry,” Da’kota said, holstering the mana pistol in the air next to his hip – his innate magical field ‘snapping’ it into place and holding it there. “How many pirates are we looking at? And where are we?”
“Sixteen,” she whispered. “Most of them are ex navy. We’re on a jungle world called Karik II.”
Da’kota nodded, frowning as he thought through the endless list of worlds that he had needed to memorize during training. Karik II, known for explosive pollen plants, mushrooms that made you horny, and gigantic preying mantis creatures that spat acid and had claws that could sheer through tank armor. Cakewalk. He turned to the door – but then a soft, short fingered hand grabbed his shoulder. He turned back.
“TThere’s one guy,” the dwarf girl said, quietly. “Torjbirak the Red. He has a red beard, lots of tattoos, eyes like a spidershark, and this knife collection he always wears.”
Da’kota nodded.
“Kill him,” she whispered, her voice venomous and fierce.
Da’kota felt a strange echoing distance between himself and who he had been before he had died and been reborn here. The old Dakota State, he was fairly sure, would have felt a mingled rush of eagerness to do some genuine good in the world and a sense of horror at the violence it took.
Da’kota Spiderblood? He just gave her a thin smile, and murmured, “Consider it done, ma’am.”
The door opened into sleeting rain and night that was, to his drow eyes, bright as day. The encampment that the dwarf space pirates had set up was the kind of temporary settlement that shardcraft used when their crews needed to work on their hulls, or to simply let the shardcraft dump their excess mana charge. Faster than light magical travel had been one of the courses that Da’kota had actually enjoyed whole heartedly: every shardcraft in the galaxy was able to use farcasters to travel immense distances, but the magical artifacts from a bygone civilization were themselves quite rare and only in certain places.
So, shardcraft also carried their own alterative disjunction drive – or ADJ drive, for short. The basic upshot was that focused magical energies were used to essentially remove distance from space. For a few moments, the light-years ahead of a shardship were turned into mere light-seconds, and the thrusters that the ships used to traverse the vacuum between planetary bodies could fling them across immense distances without needing to spend centuries getting up to speed and centuries drifting.
Even with vampires, drow, dragons and dwarves all having life spans that could actually encompass such trips, no one wanted to spend that much time in what amounted to a tin-can, no matter how comfortable it was made.
The issue is that the space had to go somewhere. It was too mystically expensive to shunt it into alternate planes of existence while in the depths of space, so the ADJ instead stored the excess space in small pocket dimensions that had once served as the center of the ubiquitous magical piece of tech called a ‘bag of holding’ before the homeworld of all these fantastical creatures had exploded. Once those extra-dimensional storage units had been filled up with too much conceptual distance, a ship needed to park itself on a planet and ‘dump core’, as it was called. By adhering to a planetary environment and synchronizing the ADJ to the higher planes of reality that a world used, the excess space could be safely and easily shunted off over a series of hours into the same mystical sympathetic link that nature magic used to turn people into wolves.
Funny to think, just a few months ago, I’d have looked at myself if I was insane if I said that, Da’kota thought as he looked over the pirate shardship, watching the glowing threads of conceptual bleed-off reaching away from the extended pylons that jutted from the ship’s boxy, rectangular frame and towards the trees. But now I know the math that explains it all.
Around the ship was a few rapidly deployed shield spells that kept the wildlife away, a few pop-tents for crew to stretch their legs outside of the cramped interior, and several thick tubes running from the ship’s generator to a string of lights, scanners, and other tools the pirates were using in their camp. One of those was an industrial scale daedela which was being used to fabricate simple components that dwarf mechanics were hauling onto the ship to repair bits and parts of it that had broken during their last jaunt.
Da’kota nodded and then drew magic into his body. It flowed in from higher planes of existence, tingling along his pores and he breathed out the soft words that snapped it from potential into reality. His body blurred, shimmered, then turned invisible. He started to move away from the prison that the dwarfs had thrown up near their camp – it was just a cube of foldable metal, cheap as sin and easy to put up and take down. The guards for the camp were mostly focused on the wildlife surrounding them, with heavy mana rifles aimed at the shield spells in case anything came at them and tried to push through.
Da’kota’s plan solidified in that moment. He sprinted forward, his feet slapping wetly on the rain soaked, mussy ground. Rain pattered along his naked body, the faint shimmer of him visible to anyone looking close. But he took advantage of the night and the shadows to get up close to one of the landing struts. Dwarfs were in conversation at the gangway and he knew that trying to sneak past them would draw note – he’d drip, for one thing. So, instead, his bare hands grabbed onto the landing strut and he climbed, hand over hand, up along the strut to the skin of the ship. He looked around and, with a trained eye, spotted one of the many access points shardships had for maintenance.
Getting it open without one of the tools he’d normally have as a cadet learning the arts of the spidersoul - the pathfinder archetype that handled tech and infiltration - was trickier than it normally would be. But he had been taught what to do if his tools were missing or gone. Conjuring a pry-bar from thin air by whispering softly and tugging elemental earth into his veins from another universe had once been as impossible as, well, seeing in the dark or getting a girl off using only his dick.
Now, all of it seemed easy.
He levered open the access hatch, then wormed his way in, out of the blood warm rain.
In the vents, in the close confines of the ship, Da’kota was at home. He crawled through the vents, moving as silently as he could, and peeked out – spotting a shower, where several dwarfs had shed their exo-walkers and were soaping their muscular bodies down under warm water while chatting cheerfully with one another, talking about they’d split their cut.
Then he came to the communications center of the ship.
Peering in, he saw a big, burly dwarf male with a short red beard, and an impressive set of knives covering his body. He had the eyes of a cold, dead thing. Vicious eyes. Da’kota didn’t even need his training in threat identification and rapid psychoanalysis to tell that this man was deeply, deeply broken. In this line of work, there was no chance he had avoided indulging in those instincts. He was currently tapping away at the communication console of the ship, sending a missive off using the scrying antenna.
Da’kota eased open the vent and dropped down into the chamber with a whisper of noise, invisibility cascading off his body like the water he had shed in the air vent. The issue with invisibility was, well, it took an even better mage than he to sustain magical invisibility in the face of a deadly intent. And right now, he was using one of the hardest things he had been taught.
As a specter, he had also covered the art of the soulblade, the stealth assassins of the Pathfinder Corps. Soulblades could use their own spiritual essence to power a deadly killing weapon, and then that weapon would drink the souls of its victims – as Da’kota’s instructors had told him: I would not advice being killed by a soulblade.
