Shrill, high-pitched screeches ripped out of the two grounded wyvern younglings, their bodies thrashing violently against the stone as their pinned wings tore further with every frantic tug, forcing the spikes embedded in their membranes to rip wider holes through their flesh.
One of the young wyverns bit down on its own wing in blind desperation, ripping a strip of membrane free as it clawed at the ground and tried to wrench itself off the spike driven straight through its elbow joint — but both it and its sibling had their suffering cut short as another wave of Earth Spikes cast by both Sam and Esmerelda erupted upward, punching through their torsos.
The adult wyverns recoiled backward into the air as they narrowly avoided both the wave of Earth Spikes and Deacon's charging strike, causing his blade to cut through empty space as his head snapped upward toward the now-airborne beasts.
With enraged screeches, the three adult wyverns beat their wings in full force, the gusts kicking up clouds of dust and bone fragments that rattled against the den roof and blasted Deacon backwards while slamming Jass's body into the wall beside her.
Clenching his teeth to keep from opening and disrupting his breathing technique, Deacon's eyes narrowed as he flooded his feet with mana and kicked off the ground, Flame Steps igniting beneath the soles of his rugged Windkissed Boots.
The spell launched him forward like a rocket, blasting him ten meters into the air within a second, only for the flames to explode even louder and double in both size and intensity as Deacon forced his way through the heavy, downward blasts of wind from the wyverns' wings.
At the same moment, Jass used the blasts of wind to her advantage and rolled her body along the wall, causing the stone touching her body to surge across her form in a smooth sweep – enshrouding her from within an armor of stone.
With her body enshrouded in stone, Jass sprinted toward the gaping entrance of the wyvern den — her armor giving her the weight to stand firm against the gale-force wingbeats while still letting her move with full, fluid control and without adding strain to her muscles.
As he blasted himself upwards, he angled both himself and his Ulfberht at the largest wyvern — the alpha of the wyvern flock and the one with a tail thick enough to bludgeon a horse.
Seeing Deacon charge straight at it, the alpha wyvern whipped its head toward him with startling speed for something so massive and snapped its jaws open, unleashing a shriek that blasted out in reverberating waves of wind, bowing the den walls outward and sending out a deep rumble that rolled throughout the mountain range of the Jagged Spires.
But none of it slowed Deacon's ascent.
Echoform Reliquary cut through the air in a black-and-grey blur, aimed straight for the alpha's neck, creating an arc of flame as he cast Flame Armament seconds before his attack would connect.
The alpha wyvern's eyes widened in shock at the speed of Deacon's swing. The flames wreathing his Ulfberht made the blade look twice its size, and in less than two seconds, it would carve into its scales long before its own jaws could reach the human.
In that realization, that shock within the eyes of the wyvern narrowed into fury as the horn on the left side of its skull split open, the spiral ridge cracking and crumbling like brittle stone just as a thin membrane of wind mana rippled across its scales.
What? Deacon exclaimed in shock as the wyvern's body jerked backward with a sudden burst of speed that caused Echoform Reliquary to whistle past its throat and tear into the wyvern's flank.
Ulfberht bit into the wyvern's side just behind its ribs, shearing through scale and hide in a long, brutal tear — its armored plates offering no more resistance than firewood as they snapped and popped under the force of the swing.
Just as Deacon's blade had just carved across the alpha's side, the momentum of his swing carried him forward.
He shot past the wyvern, twisting mid-air, and slammed into the opposite wall, bracing with both boots a split second before impact. The collision cratered the rock beneath his feet, rattling loose a cascade of pebbles that spilled down around him — seconds before a spray of steaming wyvern blood splattered across his face.
The alpha reared back with an ear-splitting shriek that rumbled through the den as its wings lashed outward, slamming into the cavern walls hard enough to knock loose chunks of stone and smear steaming blood in every direction as it thrashed against the walls and ceiling.
"…Great. He's a gusher," he said with a frown, spitting out a wad of wyvern blood and ignoring the barely audible shout of Bonehead.
"Stop its bleeding!" Bonehead shouted. "I need their blood to make better healing potions!"
For a brief moment, Deacon stayed crouched against the wall, half-sunk into the cratered wall, before narrowing his eyes as he focused his attention back toward the center of the den and not on the still thrashing alpha wyvern.
Muted under the thrashing of the alpha wyvern, Jass had just sealed the cave's entrance with a reinforced Earth Wall. But in doing so, she was charged at by the two other adult wyverns.
Spinning on her heel, Jass lunged forward with her entire body behind the strike, her glaive arcing upward in a brutal sweep that caught the nearest wyvern across the forearm and carved straight through the bone as if she were cutting through packed cardboard.
The wyvern's limb folded inward on itself as the force of its own slam boosted Jass's swing, the blade of her glaive tearing a horizontal gash across the membrane of its wing with incredible ease.
She didn't bother admiring the hit as she quickly had to leap away as a blast of wind struck where she had stood just a second prior.
Landing on the stone floor with barely a scrape on her armor of stone, she eyed the other wyvern that had rushed towards her and sent a blast of wind her way, and watched as it stood protectively in front of the wyvern she'd injured.
"So, they are Wind Affinity ones," she muttered as she recalled Deacon's assumption that the wyverns they will be ambushing would either have a Fire or a Wind Affinity.
The wyverns they were ambushing lived high on the mountains, but not at the frozen peaks, which ruled out Ice-Affinity wyverns. They weren't Earth-Affinity either; the scales scattered across the den floor were far more angular than the flat and wide-shaped scales that scaled creatures with Earth Affinities had, with no stone growths or mineral crusting atop them. They also didn't live near the base of the mountain where lakes or pools were, so them being Water-Affinity wyverns was out as well.
Which left only two possibilities in Deacon's mind: Fire-Affinity or Wind-Affinity wyverns — the two types most commonly found in conditions like these. Other more rarer types of wyverns were clearly brushed aside, as finding a Storm Wyvern like the one the Iron Scales Guildmaster owned was practically an impossibility.
"Windy bois have weak armor and bones, but strong wind-based attacks," Jass muttered to herself in reminder as she cast Earth Wall mid-stride, slamming her heel into the ground and calling up a pillar of stone. "Meaning blunt force and piercing melee attacks counter them, and ranged ones do not."
It shot out of the ground beneath the chin of the second wyvern that had stopped protecting its injured flockmate and leapt for her throat, smashing upward into its jaw with a meaty, thundering crack that snapped its jaws closed and forced its skull to whip backward so hard and fast that she thought it would have torn from its neck.
It reeled back with a warbling shriek — and in the space of that shriek, the first wyvern she'd crippled lunged blindly for her, dragging its half-severed limb along with her lunge and spraying blood in its wake.
Jass stepped aside, slipping past the wyvern's thundering strike, and spun her glaive in her grip as she slid into its guard. With a single circular sweep, the blade carved clean through its neck, severing the entire head from its shoulders in one fluid motion.
She didn't get to enjoy even a heartbeat of stillness, because at the exact moment the wyvern's severed head hit the ground and slid away in a smear of blood, Deacon dropped from above like he'd been fired out of a catapult.
He landed hard on the Earth-Wall-stunned wyvern's skull, stomping its head back down and smashing its jaw against Jass's raised stone pillar with a loud crack. Riding the momentum of his landing, Deacon flipped backward in a descending arc, his Ulfberht sweeping out in a blazing swing.
The blade took the wyvern's head clean off in such a fluid and fast cleave that the wyvern didn't even register the cut from even happening as the pain of it's jaw smashing into the pillar of stone once again filled it with incredible agony.
A geyser of blood erupted upward, drenching Deacon and turning the mud and dung camouflage he wore to mask his scent into a thick, dripping paste across his armor.
The moment the head hit the ground, the den shook — a deep, guttural thunder rolling through the cavern as the alpha wyvern roared in fury.
Its remaining horn, the one on the right side of its head that ran along its skull, began to crumble in the same way the left had before, in order for it to be able to dodge Deacon's strike.
"Power up phase?" Jass muttered as she leaped to stand beside him – casting Cleanse on both him and herself, seeing that they no longer needed the camouflage on themselves.
The plates around the wyvern's skull began to quiver, shedding flecks of broken scale as it thrashed against the walls and floor.
"Yeah, I guess," Deacon answered, turning his head slightly in Jass's direction, but not taking his eyes away from looking at the alpha wyvern powering up. "Why? Do you wanna stop it?"
Wind mana coiled across its hide in violent, rippling bands, making its scales shimmer as though they had caught light from the sun, though the only light source within the sealed-off den was Deacon's flame-wreathed Ulfberht.
"… Nah," Jass answered as she stretched out her arms above her head to get rid of the knot she felt in her muscles from having to cling to a wall for an hour and a half. "Ambushing them really made this fight a lot easier than I thought it would be."
"Yeah…" Deacon sighed as he watched as he also took notice that Sam and Esmerelda had stopped their casting. A flash of worry took over his face, however, that vanished just as quickly as with Blood Sense active, he could see that they were fine and were lying down with their arms raised as though they were – "Great," he groaned, much to Jass's confusion.
"What?" Jass asked, her gaze flickering from the wyvern who was gathering more wind mana into his scales to power up, and to Deacon's face, before looking back at the wyvern.
"Esme, Sam, and Bonehead are playing that game on their manaphones again," Deacon sighed.
"The running one where you swipe left to right?" Jass asked as she couldn't help but turn to look at Deacon with a dumbfounded look.
"… Yup," Deacon duly said with a nod as he massaged his neck with his free hand, trying to loosen up the knot in his shoulder caused by him watching Sam suddenly wiggle around in joy - probably due to him reaching a new high score. "Mage Bozos indeed."
With a roar that sounded like a storm collapsing inward, the alpha charged straight at Jass and Deacon. Its paws slammed through the jagged Earth Spikes still jutting from the ground, impaling the flesh between its toes and tearing long strips of skin from its feet, but it didn't even slow down.
It had just watched its mates beheaded, its twin elder offsprings who would be leaving their den in a few moons from now, die before they could even put up a fight, and its younglings skewered to death by countless spears of earth before they could even spread their wings.
And now it was looking at the two humans responsible for their deaths, chatting with each other and paying him no mind.