Chapter 40: Lion VS Lyndwyrm I

The Lyndwyrm alpha was more than a creature of raw instinct. It was a beast of intent — of want, of goals, of strategy. That was exactly why it had spent years biding its time, slowly chipping away at the Storm Eagles in its patient bid to reach the sovereign bloodlines it had sensed buried within their village. All this carnage, this slow-burning war — all of it, in service of power.

So long as it kept devouring pure bloodlines, sovereign blood chief among them — the most potent fuel available, even diluted down to such a low grade — it stood a genuine chance of ascending into something closer to a true dragon someday. The purer the meal, the greater the gain. But it had learned to be careful in its approach. It was more than base hunger wearing scales. Its thoughts ran rudimentary, yes, but sharp enough to understand one crucial truth: these beastmen were not so easily handled as prey.

Which was exactly why, when the call reached it, the alpha nearly refused to believe its own senses. Someone or something was using BeastTongue. And beneath it, an Aura saturated thick with a Mid Grade bloodline — except this one carried something else layered underneath it. An extra edge the storm eagle Tribesmen it had already tasted entirely lacked. Every instinct told the alpha to ignore the call outright. The wiser path was obvious. This reeked of a trap, and there was no reason to feed a fool’s ego by playing along with his obvious bait.

"Are you a coward, worm? Do you really believe yourself blessed with the blood of the scaled fathers? You’re a mockery of everything it means to be draconic. A joke. A worm playing dress-up as a god."

"I’ve seen a dragon before, Alpha. A real one. And you are not it. You will NEVER be it. Now get up here and fight me! Either you devour me today, or I devour you. COME!"

That, the alpha could not swallow. Trap or not — so what? This was a direct challenge leveled against the purity and sanctity of its very existence, and such a challenge could not go unanswered. It welcomed it instead. Whatever fool believed himself worthy of standing against the might of dragons would learn exactly how wrong he was.

"ROAAAARRR!"

The alpha threw its head back and roared, pushing off the stone floor as its powerful wings beat the air into a violent gust, launching it skyward. True flight was beyond it — its body carried the wrong proportions, its wings nowhere near as developed as a proper draconic species — but it could still use that lift to glide and vault between the massive support pillars, climbing steadily upward toward the single shaft that served as the cavern’s only entrance and exit.

The moment it entered the shaft, the call sharpened, grew almost unbearably vivid. The purity of that bloodline hung thick in the air, rich enough that the alpha could practically taste the meat behind it already. A meal worth savoring slowly. And beyond that meal — power, waiting to be claimed. It climbed, pace after deliberate pace, until the crown of its skull finally broke free of the shaft’s opening into open air.

That was the exact moment the earth decided to answer back.

A deep tremor rolled through the cavern floor below, building fast, climbing the length of the shaft until it reached the alpha’s claws. The stone beneath its grip simply gave way. The alpha let out a startled squawk as the walls of the shaft began crumbling in on themselves, dragging it downward in a violent cascade of rubble and dust. Beneath it, its entire clutch screeched in unison — confusion first, then raw panic — as the ground buckled a second time, a chain of concussive blasts rippling outward through solid rock, each one closer and more violent than the last.

The alpha clawed forward with everything its forelimbs had left, wings tucked tight against its ribs as it fought its way up through the collapsing shaft, dragging the bulk of its body clear just as the stone beneath it finally gave out entirely. It leapt the last few feet, clearing the mouth of the hole and landing hard on the open peak above, utterly indifferent to the buffeting wind now whipping across the summit. Behind it, the earth sank — not subtly, but all at once, the shaft widening violently into a gaping crater as the entire cavern roof folded inward on itself in a single, thunderous collapse.

The alpha watched it happen with something bordering on genuine shock — an expression that had no business sitting on a face built for nothing but hunting and killing. Three jagged rock spires crowned the summit nearby, standing like broken teeth on a crown. The alpha scrambled up the nearest one on instinct, loose stone sliding away beneath every clawed step.

The rumbling continued for nearly three full minutes before the mountain finally fell still. A towering column of dust and pulverized rock billowed up out of the ruined shaft, carrying with it the pained, dying cries of hundreds of Lyndwyrms — some crushed outright beneath the collapse, others simply broken badly enough that death was only a matter of time now.

The alpha watched the pitiful remains of years of patient scheming drag themselves free of the wreckage below. A handful. Barely a fraction of what had lived in that cavern an hour ago. There might be a few more survivors buried somewhere in the rubble, but the sight of a dozen broken, mangled bodies crawling free filled it with a fury so total it had no name for the feeling. How had everything unraveled this fast? It hadn’t even had the chance to react.

And then it remembered exactly what had lured it out of the safety of its nest in the first place. The call. The challenge for power that had dragged it straight into this. It let out a savage snarl, head whipping left and right across the ruined peak, pure rage and the promise of violence written into every line of its massive body.

"If you’re looking for me, I’m right over here."

The alpha’s serpentine head snapped toward the sound — and found the silhouette perched casually atop the very spire it had just climbed. The human. The lion. It opened its jaws to roar —

*BANG! BANG!*

Both muskets fired at point-blank range before a single sound could leave its throat. At that distance, the alpha could do nothing but endure it — two Aura rounds punching clean through its right eye, blinding it instantly in a spray of dark fluid.

The Lyndwyrm reared back with a scream of pure agony, a kind of pain it had never once experienced in its entire existence. Kren gave it no room to recover. A sharp whistle cut through the chaos, and both Toa and Aki launched off the spire in unison, weapons already drawn — Aki mid-transformation, his Beastform taking full shape even as he fell. Blind on one side now, the alpha could only track Aki’s descent and do absolutely nothing to stop it as he dropped toward it like a comet carved from white fur and claw.

A wet, ripping tear split the air. Aki’s claws raked clean through the membrane of the alpha’s remaining wing, shredding it in one violent pass. The Lyndwyrm shrieked, its long neck whipping around to snap at the White Cat now clinging to the ruined edge of torn wing —

Except its jaws never reached him. Toa’s hooked blade caught the edge of its mouth mid-strike, tearing deep into flesh before lodging hard against bone and scale, wrenching the jaw open wide and holding it there.

Wide enough for Kren to drop both glass vials of explosive oil straight down its throat.

"Say ahhhh!" Kren called out, grinning, as Toa and Aki both cleared the alpha’s massive body in the same heartbeat. The Lyndwyrm convulsed, a strangled, hacking cough tearing loose from somewhere deep in its chest — and instead of breath, a gout of raw flame burst from its jaws, its midsection swelling grotesquely for one impossible second before detonating outward in a violent spray of blood and ruined viscera across the stone.

The alpha’s remaining eye locked onto Kren with something close to genuine shock. From the very start, Kren had never once planned to meet this thing head-on — it was simply too powerful for that kind of fight to end any way but badly. The Lyndwyrm shook, caught between agony and fury, and with one final, desperate surge of strength, drove itself upward off its ruined forelimbs — straight at Kren.

"Your Majesty!" Aki’s voice tore across the wind, pure alarm.

There was no time left to think. Kren called [Spirit of the North Wind] and [Spirit of the West Wind] together in the same breath, throwing up the familiar curved shield of compressed air — except this time, it barely slowed the Lyndwyrm’s sheer mass at all. Kren realized, half a second too late, that the beast hadn’t lunged to bite or claw him. It had lunged to drag him down with it. The only guaranteed kill left available to something this broken, this close to death.

Its body slammed into the shield. The impact, combined with Kren’s own defensive spellwork, sent him flying clear of the alpha’s reach — but with nothing left beneath either of them, no ledge, no handhold, no mercy — both of them plummeted straight off the summit of the Storm Mountains together.

"YOUR MAJESTY!"

Aki’s frantic scream was the last thing Kren heard clearly as the sky became the ground and the ground became the sky, the wind screaming past his ears as he fell. Straight down.

Toward whatever waited for him at the bottom.