Thrain Iron-Grip kicks off the crumbling ledge, his mechanical glider wings snapping open with a hiss of steam. He's a veteran; even in mid-air, he swivels his sniper-staff, the muzzle glowing with a pre-charged Mana-shot.
"Stay still, [redacted]-boy!" Thrain bellows, firing a bolt of compressed Yellow Aether.
Tari is falling—but a Vanara, even with his tail cut off is at home in free fall. He doesn't panic. He grips his staff in the center and begins to spin it.
Technique: "Heaven-Shielding Propeller." Tari spins the staff with such ferocious velocity that it becomes a solid, circular blur of motion.
The Defense: He channels his "Broken Flow" Qi into the rotation. The spinning staff creates a localized centrifugal vacuum, a physical and spiritual barrier.
The sniper bolt hits the blur and is deflected harmlessly into the gorge walls. Using the momentum of the rotation, Tari "rows" through the air, adjusting his trajectory. He isn't just falling; he's diving. He closes the gap, his spinning staff humming like a hornet's nest, aimed straight for Thrain's mechanical wings.
On the ground, Oba Zimbila is a kaleidoscope of chaos, but his mind remains a fortress. The L× Shank is still buried in his obsidian spine, acting as a drain on his divinity.
He doesn't reach for it. Instead, he tilts his head back and begins to hum—a low-frequency vibration that originates in the core of his rhino-beetle horn.
The vibration travels down his spine, resonant and precise. He finds the "frequency of rejection." With a sound like a wet cork popping, the Null-Glass shank is violently pushed out of his back by internal pressure.
As the shank floats in the air, Zimbila catches it in a field of Indigo gravity. He doesn't destroy it. He reverses the compression.
The Null-Glass, which was a "vacuum" of Aether, begins to bloom. The stolen light trapped within—the raw Miasma and the fractured Prismatic energy—is released all at once. Zimbila opens his spiracles and absorbs it all into his body, using the enemy's weapon as a high-potency battery to stabilize his fractured aura.
The flickering colors snap back into a single, blinding Prismatic White. The King is whole again—and he is furious.
Thrain, seeing the King recover and Tari closing in, realizes his "glory hunt" has turned into a suicide mission. He's a gremlin of greedy, but he isn't stupid. He reaches for a flare-rune on his wrist.
"Fine! Have it your way!" Thrain snarls, smashing the rune. "I didn't want to share the bounty, but I'm not dying for a paycheck I can't spend!"
A streak of Violet light shoots into the clouds.
From the fog on the adjacent peak, a silhouette emerges. It isn't a drone or a machine. It's a person standing on the back of a Spectral Wyvern.
It's The Prophetess Salome, the Elven Slayer.
She wasn't supposed to intervene yet, but she's been watching from the mists, waiting for Thrain to fail so she could claim both the King's head and Thrain's "unauthorized" weapons.
"You always were a clumsy smith, Thrain," Salome's voice drifts over the wind, amplified by her Elven Grace. She raises a hand, and dozens of High-Grade Magigrams begin to weave themselves in the air around her, forming a "Star-Map" of offensive spells.
...
Tari is mid-air, inches from Thrain.
Nyra is scaling the crumbling spire to join him.
Zimbila is grounded but fully powered.
The Prophetess Salome is now raining down "Ninth Stellar" bombardment from the safety of the sky.