Chapter 26: Watch My Back

[Spirit of the East Wind]

Wind spiraled around both his hands as Kren guided the spirit through intent alone, letting it wrap around the barrels of both pistols. When he fired, the guns didn’t bark — they whispered, twin gusts of pressure launching the Aura rounds true. One took a Lyndwyrm clean through the eye. The other clipped a second across the ribs. The first beast let out a shrieking bellow of pain, flipping head over heels and gouging a deep furrow through the meadow, tearing a scar through the carpet of purple flowers as it crashed.

Aki and Ruhu each peeled off to meet a Lyndwyrm of their own, the meadow filling with the shriek of claws scraping uselessly against hide and scale, neither side finding purchase. That left two more bearing down on Kren. He holstered the pistols in one smooth motion and drew his sword instead.

[Spirit of the West Wind]

Kren shot forward, Toa and Fima staying close on either flank. He slashed out — the wounded Lyndwyrm twisted aside just fast enough to save its jaw from being sheared clean off, his blade displacing air with a low hiss as it passed. The beast’s head snapped back around, jaws driving for Kren’s exposed side. Toa was already there, Bunaya’s massive hooked blade flashing through the arc and taking the limb off at the joint before those teeth ever found flesh.

The Lyndwyrm screamed into the sky — a sound cut brutally short as Kren pivoted into an underhand strike. His blade, actively humming with the fury of East Wind’s edge, opened the creature’s throat in a single stroke, cutting clean through muscle and bone until the head separated from the body entirely.

But the fight wasn’t over. The Lyndwyrm still nursing its ruined eye dragged itself upright on powerful forelimbs and launched into the air, claws outstretched, aimed squarely at Kren.

Kren dropped into a guard stance, but he could already tell his blade wouldn’t reach in time — and Toa was too far to intercept either. Aki and Ruhu were both still locked in their own fights. For one gut-dropping second, Kren braced for the impact.

Then Fima was there.

The Margay tribeswoman moved like something loosed from a bowstring, closing the distance in a blur and dropping into a low slide beneath the beast’s trajectory. Both swords punched upward into its exposed underbelly as she passed beneath it, letting the Lyndwyrm’s own momentum carry it screaming over her head and past Kren entirely.

He sidestepped as it crashed down behind him, two long gashes tracing from the base of its neck all the way to the middle of its tail. It twitched once — and then its insides spilled out through the wounds Fima had carved into it. She flicked blood from both blades in one economical motion, tail flicking lazily as she turned to face him, expression barely disturbed.

"Are you all right, Your Majesty?" she asked, already stepping past him to deliver a sharp slap across Toa’s face.

"I’m fine—?" Kren answered, more confused by the slap than by his own near-death.

"Good." Fima said, turning her full attention on Toa, who looked every bit as stunned by the hit as Kren did.

"You swore an oath. To be of service and to offer protection against all harm. The next time a Lyndwyrm leaps for your king, you offer your own throat first." Fima’s words dropped like a thunderclap, but she was neither shaken nor done.

"That oath came out of your own mouth — no one forced it from you. Keep your word and protect him with your life like you promised, or your career as His Majesty’s bodyguard will end a lot sooner than you’d like."

Kren blinked, watching Fima settle back into position directly behind him as though nothing had happened. Toa looked over at him helplessly. Kren just shrugged — he genuinely had no idea what to say. If he was honest, he found Fima’s methods a little heavy-handed, even rude. As far as he could tell, Toa was a decent man doing his best in an impossible position.

But that was Kren’s opinion as a person. As a king — and as someone who understood, at least in part, the weight his people carried in protecting the last surviving N’kora, the last of the Blackmanes — he understood exactly why Fima had done it. His people needed him alive far more than they needed him comfortable.

"Don’t let your guard down — it’s not over yet! There are more of them still in the forest!" The warning came from atop the boulder, the first real words exchanged between Kren’s party and the survivors above.

"Get up here, quickly! There are a lot more of them hiding than the five you just killed!" Kren picked out the speaker — a boy who couldn’t have been older than fourteen, arms wrapped tight around a small black-and-white dog that, Kren only now noticed, had been barking this entire time.

"Can’t you hear me? Hurry up! Save yourselves!"

"Jomin, please. We don’t know who these people are or why they’re here. No outsiders are allowed this deep into the mountains — it’s against every rule we have. Leave them alone. With any luck, they and the Lyndwyrms will finish each other off."

"Now, that’s not very kind, is it?" Kren cut in, locking eyes with the one who’d just suggested writing them off entirely. The man flinched, unable to hold Kren’s gaze for more than a second before looking away. Kren turned his attention to the boy instead. "We’re delegates from the N’kora Kingdom. Here on our king’s orders to help you with your... pest problem." He said smoothly.

"Pests? We don’t have pests. The Lyndwyrms are the problem." the boy shot back, finally managing to settle the dog’s frantic barking.

Kren couldn’t quite tell if the kid was being deliberately smart with him or not, but he let it go. "You said there were more hiding in the trees. Where?" He turned left, then right, scanning the treeline and finding nothing. Jomin opened his mouth to answer, only for someone behind him to clap a hand over it and drag him back from the edge. Kren rolled his eyes — this tracked with everything he’d heard about the Storm Eagles. Deeply reclusive. Trusted no one outside their own.

"Winning this clan over is going to take a lot more than just killing a few Lyndwyrms." he muttered to himself, tuning out the noise above as he called on his newest Aura art instead.

[True Earth Resonance: Earth Sense!]

He regretted it almost immediately. His senses folded inward in a way he had no real words for — his awareness sliding out of his own body and into the earth beneath his feet, becoming both part of it and something separate observing it at once.

Touch, smell, sight, hearing, even taste — all of it shifted, realigning to the vibrations traveling through the ground itself. And there were so many of them. Infinite layers of vibration, born from an earth endlessly, restlessly alive.

He felt ants moving underground. Roots pressing deeper into soil. Stalks straining upward toward sunlight and rain. He felt the wind roll across the meadow and the way every flower bent in answer to it.

It was total, overwhelming sensation — so much that blood began leaking from his nose, his ears, the corners of his eyes. But beneath the noise, more vibrations were closing in, heavy and deliberate. He forced himself to focus past the flood, and clarity cut through at last: they were being surrounded. Several creatures, moving with the same slow, dragging gait.

Kren’s eyes snapped open. He sheathed his sword in one motion and drew both pistols, already thumbing fresh Aura cartridges into place — two shots per reload.

"The kid’s right. We’re being surrounded." Kren said to the rest of his party.

"How many?" Toa asked, worry plain on his face.

Kren paused, glancing at him. "Enough." Toa’s expression only grew grimmer at that. The juveniles they’d already dealt with sat comfortably at Aura Awakening — manageable in small numbers, three or four at most, about what they’d just cleared. Any more than that, and even with Aki and Ruhu still holding Beastform, their odds started looking a lot less favorable.

"Just breathe. Watch my back." Kren said, settling into a ready stance. "I’ll watch yours too."