As he sprang forward, time seemed to slow in his awareness.
The wyvern's gaze locked on him, its pupils narrowing. Its tail snapped forward with the speed and weight of a falling tree. The air boomed as it moved, pressure slamming outward.
A sudden gust of wind hammered into Ilyas, lifting him off his feet.
He crashed into a thicket, vanishing in a spray of leaves and dirt, his crossbow skidding from his hands as arrows spilled across the ground. He groaned, then rolled, reaching desperately for a weapon.
Toma, teeth gritted, lunged from the right.
His spear scraped along the wyvern's flank, sparks flying where metal met scale. He didn't break through, but he drew the creature's attention for a heartbeat, forcing it to adjust its weight and angle.
The wyvern screamed.
It was a sound like iron being ripped apart and storms colliding. Spittle and blood flew from its jaws. Wind slammed against the trees. The ground under Noctis's feet vibrated.
He darted in low.
The tail came sweeping back, a blur of jagged bone and armored muscle. Noctis dropped into a roll, dirt smearing his clothes, feeling the rush of air above him as the tail passed inches from his back.
He came out of the roll on one knee, obsidian blade already in his hand.
The joint in the tail—the vulnerable point Noctis had studied and mapped in his mind—was briefly exposed as the monster's limb swung and began another arc. He struck.
The blade bit into the gap between plates.
Crimson-blue blood erupted from the wound, hot and sharp-smelling. The wyvern's tail spasmed wildly, the tip smashing into the earth hard enough to send cracks through stone. A spray of blood splattered Noctis's face and arm.
Above, Lena moved fast.
She loosed one arrow, then another in rapid succession. The first arrow slipped under the wing, punching through thinner scales and into the softer flesh beneath. The wyvern jerked mid-motion, its wingbeat stuttering.
Her second arrow hit a thicker ridge of bone and deflected off, disappearing into the brush. She hissed through her teeth, but did not stop looking for her next shot.
The wyvern's rage only intensified.
Wounded but far from beaten, the creature called on the power that made it master of the skies.
It flared its wings wide.
With a single, brutal beat, it dragged wind up from the valley and twisted it. Tornadoes exploded outward from its body, columns of violent air tearing across the battlefield.
Trees ripped from the ground, roots snapping.
Boulders that had been half-buried for decades wrenched free and hurled through the air. One spinning stone crashed into Toma, flinging him backwards into the edge of a pit. He disappeared from view with a shout, spear tumbling after him.
Another blast of wind snapped a branch from high overhead.
It spun downward like a thrown spear. Lena twisted aside at the last possible second, feeling bark graze her cheek as the branch slammed into the ground where she'd been a heartbeat before.
Yara saw chaos taking hold.
"Smoke!" she shouted, voice ragged.
She sprinted forward, dodging flying debris, and hurled a smoke bomb at the wyvern's feet. It burst in an oily cloud, swallowing clawed limbs and whipping tail in shadow and sting.
Noctis used that cover.
He ran along the edge of the smoke, boots barely making a sound. With a leap that used an updraft to his advantage, he propelled himself up the creature's side, fingers finding holds in scaled ridges and bleeding seams.
He hauled himself onto its back.
The world tilted.
From up here, every movement was amplified. The wyvern's muscles bunched and flexed beneath him as it struggled against traps and wounds. Wind roared around him.
Inches from his hands, at the beast's crown, lay the reversal scale.
The arrow Ilyas had managed to land earlier jutted from its edge, venom glistening.
Noctis yanked it free.
In one motion, he raised it and drove it down with all his strength into the center of the scale.
The wyvern shrieked.
The sound knifed through his skull. Its wings flailed wide, beating the air in wild, uncontrolled bursts. The whole massive body spun as it tried to dislodge the source of its agony.
Noctis clung on, muscles burning.
Below, Lena and Ilyas repositioned as best they could in the chaos. They fired at the wyvern's head wherever it broke through smoke. Arrows clattered off bone and scale, but a few found tender flesh near the eyes and nostrils, adding to its disorientation.
The tail lashed again and again, carving deep furrows in the earth, sending waves of force through the clearing that knocked fighters off their feet.
As if the wyvern's fury were not enough, the noise and scent of blood carried into the forest.
From the tree line, shadows detached and moved.
Armored panther-like monsters—sleek bodies sheathed in dark plates, eyes gleaming with feral hunger—slipped into the clearing. Their muscles rippled under heavy skin, claws leaving gouges in stone as they ran.
They hit the battlefield like daggers.
One panther slammed into Toma as he struggled to rise, claws raking across his leg. He roared in pain, swinging his spear even from the ground. The point skewered the creature through the ribs, but another panther was already leaping over its falling body toward Yara.
Yara spun, sword barely coming up in time.
Noctis saw this from the wyvern's back.
If Yara fell, the group's fragile cohesion would shatter. The panthers could tear through the wounded while the wyvern finished off whoever remained.
He made a choice in an instant.
Instead of holding his position, he pushed off the wyvern's shoulder.
He dropped.
Air tore at him. For a moment he was weightless, the ground rushing up in a blur of churned earth and flailing limbs. He landed in a controlled roll, letting the impact flow through his body rather than break it.
Three panthers turned toward him.
Their lips peeled back from razor teeth. They adjusted their stance, muscles bunching to spring.
Noctis flicked a handful of reflective oracle shards toward them.
The shards clattered across the ground, sending up small pulses of twisted light and distorted reflection. As the panthers charged, their eyes caught the reflections—false images of threats and prey, flickers of movement at impossible angles.
They broke formation.
One swerved sideways, slamming into another. A third misjudged its leap and went sprawling toward one of the spike pits. It tumbled over the lip and vanished onto the waiting spikes.
The other two panthers tried to recover, but the wyvern's next wingbeat changed everything.
Wind howled.
A sudden updraft grabbed them mid-bound, tossing them sideways and up. Their bodies, light compared to the wyvern's mass, were pulled into one of the smaller cyclones that ringed the battlefield.
They spun helplessly, slamming into trees and rocks as the wind whipped them around.
Elsewhere, panthers were caught in similar turbulence. Some were hurled into branches. Others crashed together. A few, maddened by pain and confusion, fled back into the forest.
Lena, separated from the main group by eddies of air, took the moment Noctis had created.
Through a gap in smoke and swirling dust, she saw the reversal scale again: cracked from the venom-tipped arrow, glistening with blood.
Noctis caught her eye and gave a small, sharp gesture.
Now.
She drew, aimed, and released.
The arrow whistled through the chaos and struck the already damaged scale. The skin there split further, a new line of blood tracing down the wyvern's skull.
The beast faltered.
Its roar choked for a heartbeat. Its movements grew jerky, one wing lagging slightly behind the other.