The storm reached its worst.
Wind, smoke, dust, and blood turned the clearing into a blur of color and motion. People and monsters both were tossed and dragged, lifted and smashed.
Two of the humans slammed into each other, knocked off their feet by a sudden gust. For a terrifying second, bodies tumbled so close together that limbs blurred, and it was impossible to tell who was who.
Blood—red from humans, deep blue from monsters—spattered across moss and stone.
Ilyas lay half-buried under a fallen log, breath ragged. His leg had taken a glancing blow from the wyvern's tail and bent at an ugly angle. He gritted his teeth and tried to move, but pain lanced through him.
He heard low growls.
Two panthers, ones that had avoided the worst of the wind, crept through the underbrush toward him. Their eyes gleamed. They moved low, shoulders rolling like liquid.
Ilyas scrabbled for anything.
His fingers closed around a broken spear shaft. He hissed through his teeth, forcing himself upright as far as he could manage, but he knew he couldn't outrun them.
Across the clearing, Lena's quiver hung nearly empty.
Her fingers brushed fletchings and found only two arrows left.
She saw one of the panthers closing on Ilyas, the other beginning to flank. She had to decide: keep pressure on the wyvern or save her friend.
She chose.
Her second-to-last arrow flew, burying itself in the nearest panther's eye. The beast screamed and collapsed in a thrashing heap. The other panther snarled and sprang, only to be intercepted by a panicked swing from Toma, who had dragged himself closer despite the blood soaking his leg.
Lena broke her bow arm free from a tangle of wind-flung branches.
Her bow dropped, snapped along its length. She cursed under her breath. In desperation, she grabbed the nearest solid object on her belt—the Bronze Wayfinder, a tool not meant for combat—and held it like a dagger.
When another monster lunged too close, she stabbed it straight into its eye.
The creature screamed and reeled back, giving her just enough space to stagger away.
Yara, chest heaving, rallied whoever was still close enough to hear.
"Left flank! Now!" she shouted.
Her body ached, but she moved anyway, using the rhythm of her own commands as a drumbeat. She dragged one of the less injured fighters forward by the collar, pointing them toward the tail.
Toma, bleeding heavily from multiple gashes, crawled through churned ground toward the thrashing tail joint.
His spear had splintered, but he still gripped a jagged shard of metal lashed to a strong shaft. Each movement sent fire through his injuries, but he didn't stop. If that tail remained intact, it could still annihilate them even if the wings failed.
Near the wyvern's head, Noctis fought his own battle.
Smoke clogged the air. The beast's venom and fire tainted every breath. Its eyes rolled wildly, pupils wide. Every few seconds it tried to draw in a massive breath to unleash another sonic cry, another wave of force—but its chest hitched, struggling.
Noctis reached deeper.
The Unknown Core within him pulsed.
He had learned, through impossible trials, how to shape its raw potential. Not always as a weapon, but as manipulation of what already existed. Now, instead of trying to blast the creature apart, he focused on binding.
He pulled energy into his hands, compressing it.
A sphere formed—no brilliant fireball, no screaming light, but a dense knot of force that hummed against his palms. It felt like a concentrated refusal, a command waiting to be aimed.
He slammed that sphere into the wyvern's throat.
The impact did not break bone. It did something subtler: it disrupted the flow of air and power inside the beast's neck.
The wyvern tried to inhale for another cyclone—its chest expanded, its ribs creaked—and nothing happened.
Its eyes widened.
The wind roaring around the clearing faltered. Tornadoes shrank, collapsing into sharp gusts that sent leaves fluttering instead of trees flying. The howl of air dulled to a ragged whimper.
For the first time, the field belonged more to the humans than the sky monster.
Yara saw the opening.
"Now!" she screamed, voice hoarse.
She snatched up a spear from the ground—someone else's weapon, abandoned in the chaos—and sprinted forward. Each step jarred her bruised ribs, but she forced herself on.
The reversal scale gleamed ahead of her, cracked and bleeding.
She hurled the spear with every ounce of strength left in her.
The weapon spun once, twice, then hit dead center. The scavenged monster venom smeared on its tip spread into the open wound as the metal cut through softened bone and into the vulnerable flesh beneath.
The wyvern gagged.
It reared upward reflexively, head jerking. Its roar came out strangled, half-formed, more like a crushing cough than a challenge. Its wings spread wide, then shuddered.
At the same time, Toma reached his mark.
Teeth gritted, vision blurring, he swung the broken spearhead at the tail joint with both hands. The jagged blade bit deep into the under-armored socket.
There was a grating crack.
Blue ichor exploded from the joint, spraying across his chest and arms. The tail spasmed violently, then crashed to the ground with far less force than before, its control severed.
Lena, chest heaving, lifted her last arrow.
She knew this had to count.
The wyvern's left eye was half-lidded, blinking furiously through blood and smoke. She drew, her fingers trembling. For a moment, the world shrank to the line between her fingers, the arrow, and that eye.
She released.
The arrow flew true.
It sank into the damaged eye with a wet, final sound. The wyvern's head jerked sideways, a scream ripping from its throat—but weaker now, scattered.
Noctis was already moving.
He used the last fading gusts of disturbed wind to launch himself upward. His muscles screamed in protest, ribs throbbing, cuts burning where shards and claws had found him earlier.
In his hand, he held a hand-forged spike—heavy, sharpened for one purpose.
He landed briefly on the wyvern's neck, felt the strained muscles convulse beneath him, and pushed off again to gain the final bit of height he needed.
He drove the spike down into the cluster of scales atop the skull—right where the reversal scale had cracked and opened.
The spike punched through cracked bone and into the brain beneath.
The wyvern howled.
The sound was beyond words, beyond rage. It was the death-cry of a storm being pinned to the earth. The forest itself seemed to shiver. Birds took to the sky in panicked waves miles away.
The beast staggered.
Its wings flared one last time, then folded crookedly. Its legs buckled. It crashed to the ground in a collapse that shook the clearing, tail smashing down in an uncontrolled arc that carved a trench through roots and soil.
Then it lay still.
For a beat, no one moved.
Then the surviving panthers, panicked by the fall of the apex predator and the strange stillness of the winds, scattered. They vanished into the trees, unwilling to challenge whatever force had managed to bring down their sky lord.
The cyclones died.
Leaves settled. Dirt drifted back to the ground. The air became strangely quiet, as if the forest were in shock.