Chapter 41: Lion VS Lyndwyrm II

You find yourself falling through the sky. Maybe it would be easier to just give up and let death take its course. Kren was not the type of beast Tribesman, neither did he have the arts to survive a drop from this height — but he had never once been the kind of man who rolled over and accepted death quietly. Not even now. Not even falling toward his own.

The Lyndwyrm alpha fell beneath him, its ruined body trailing a wide smear of blood and spilled entrails through the open air as they plummeted together. Kren had already lost one musket somewhere above, swallowed by the wind the second his grip loosened. He holstered the second and twisted his body sharply, angling himself in freefall, cutting speed toward the Lyndwyrm’s hurtling mass.

The world around him had become nothing but wind and noise — a deafening roar tearing past his ears, as he fell the mountainside was blurring into a smear of grey stone and white snow at the edge of his vision. He reached the alpha fast, slamming down onto its back and locking both fists into its scales a bare instant before its entire body crashed into the mountain face. A sickening crack rolled through the creature’s frame and up into Kren’s own bones, jarring him so hard his teeth clacked together.

That was just the beginning.

The Lyndwyrm struck the mountainside a second time, and this impact came far harder. Kren felt his left shoulder blade give out entirely — not a clean dislocation, but a full, grinding collapse, bone caving inward beneath muscle and skin. The beast’s body rolled, Kren’s own frame skimming barely an inch above jagged rock before the creature smashed into the slope a third time. His right leg caught beneath its enormous bulk on that pass, crushed nearly to pulp in the space of a single heartbeat.

He screamed. The wind and the alpha’s own agonized shrieking swallowed the sound whole before it ever reached open air.

For one brief, dizzying moment, Kren genuinely considered letting go. Just releasing his grip and ending he and the Lyndwyrms combined journey here. But he had no idea how much mountain remained beneath them, how far the fall still stretched — and some stubborn, animal part of him refused to simply stop. They tumbled a few more agonizing meters down the rock face before gravity reasserted itself fully, and the two of them were weightless again, spinning free through open sky.

Kren forced his eyes open. Blood — his own, he realized distantly — ran thick down one side of his face, blurring half his vision red. He risked a glance downward through the haze. A rocky outcropping jutted from the mountainside below them, roughly halfway down the slope, maybe less. Not the base. Small mercy, that. But close enough, and hard enough, that hitting it would either kill them outright or leave whatever survived them both broken beyond use.

The alpha noticed it too.

Barely a flicker of life remained in its ruined body, one wing shredded uselessly, the other somehow still intact. Not nearly enough left to glide them both to safety — but perhaps, just perhaps, enough to turn a fatal impact into merely a devastating one. The Lyndwyrm forced its remaining wing open against the screaming wind, dragging both of them out of a straight fall and into a erratic, barely-controlled spiral downward.

Kren counted silently in his head, forcing calm into a body that had none left to spare. Fifty meters out, he drew his second pistol and opened fire point-blank into the one functioning wing. Three rounds remained in the chamber.

The first bounced harmlessly off thick membrane, the glowing Aura round ricocheting off into the churning wind. The second tore a narrow seam through the leathery surface. The third finally punched clean through, opening a ragged hole straight through the wing’s structure.

It wasn’t enough to fully strip the alpha of what little control it had clawed back. But it was enough to disrupt it — enough that their spiral tightened, speeding up, the rocky shelf rushing toward them with terrifying speed now. The Lyndwyrm let out a panicked, broken roar as the ground closed the final distance. Kren gritted his teeth hard enough to taste blood, locked both fists deep into the scales ringing its neck, and braced for impact with every fiber of strength still left in his shattered body.

THUD!

Kren felt half his ribs give way on impact — maybe all of them, he genuinely couldn’t tell through the sheer wall of pain that followed. And somehow, impossibly, he was still clinging to the Lyndwyrm’s back when the world stopped spinning. The pain was total. Absolute. There wasn’t a single inch of him that didn’t scream in protest, and even drawing breath felt like swallowing broken glass.

’Is this how I die?’

The thought surfaced on its own, dark and quiet, as nothing about this had gone the way he’d planned. The explosives should have been enough on their own — the alpha should have simply dropped off the mountain, dead weight, finished. He’d badly underestimated its resilience. Its raw, stubborn power. It had absorbed everything he’d thrown at it, survived being hurled bodily off a literal mountain peak, and it was still here. Still fighting. It was simply, terrifyingly, too strong.

Shift. Scrape.

Kren went utterly still. It was the only thing left within his power to do. He couldn’t bring himself to believe it — even gutted, missing more than half of its internal mass, even after a fall from a peak cold enough to carry permanent snowpack, the damn thing was still moving. Still alive. He felt it beneath him, a slow and deliberate scraping motion, dragging its ruined body back upright inch by agonizing inch.

It was dying. That much was certain, beyond any doubt. But it clearly still had enough left in its dying body to finish what it had started. Unless Kren found some way to stop it first — except what, exactly? His arts and spells demanded movement he no longer had. His remaining musket was gone, lost somewhere above during the fight for the wing. His body was far too broken to even lift his sword arm, let alone swing it with any force.

The Lyndwyrm shifted its massive skull, its single remaining eye rolling to fix directly on Kren, burning with raw, undiluted hatred.

[I will devour you. And I will make it ten times more agonizing than every wound you’ve carved into me.]

Kren couldn’t manage anything beyond a broken whimper in response. This was it — him and death, staring directly at each other with nothing left standing between them. Was he afraid? Yes. Completely, utterly afraid. After everything he’d survived, every year spent powerless, to end here, on the edge of oblivion, felt obscenely unfair. He wanted to live. He wanted to win. He wanted to be the king his people actually needed.

He wanted to be Emperor.

It was that same desperate, animal need to survive — fear twisted into pure, furious will — that reminded him he had one final card left to play. Kren forced his head up, locking eyes fully with the alpha’s one remaining gaze. Beast Tongue sat heavy and ready on his tongue, but his shattered body wouldn’t allow him the breath to speak it aloud. So he let his actions answer instead, reaching for a spell he had never once dared to use.

[Sinful Mane: Greed Moon.]