Chapter 27: Lyndwyrms II

The Lyndwyrms fell on them without warning. For one suspended moment, the wind stilled across the clearing — an eerie hush, like the world itself was announcing the carnage about to follow. Then they tore out of the treeline like a pack of rabid dogs. One second there was nothing. The next, over two dozen Lyndwyrms were converging on them from every direction at once.

They came like a tide. Some launched into the air, half-formed wings catching just enough wind to glide them forward in short, brutal bursts. Others dug their forelimbs deep into the earth, tearing huge furrows through the meadow as the motion drove them onward. The rest slithered low across the ground, serpentine and silent, baleful green eyes fixed hungrily on the promise of a feast.

*BANG! BANG!*

Kren took the fist shot, taking one Lyndwyrm through the eye with frightening precision. The second shot caught another square in the chest — it staggered for all of three seconds before shrugging off the wound and charging on, a fresh hole punched clean through its ribs. Kren hissed at the waste and lined up his last shot.

One Lyndwyrm — larger than the rest, more confident — leapt off the back of one of its kin, spreading its thin, leathery wings to glide ahead of the pack and straight into Kren’s line of fire. Both remaining rounds found their mark. The first shattered the underside of its jaw, flesh and bone folding inward in a ruined mess — a spot he’d noticed lacked the same toughness as the rest of its hide. The second tore straight through a wing, sending it crashing down mid-glide.

Kren dropped both pistols without a second thought — no time left to reload — and drew his longsword instead, steel ringing clear across the meadow. He let out a roar of challenge, and his team answered it in kind.

Aki and Ruhu took the flanks and rear, backs braced against the massive boulder, the wounded Storm Eagles still perched safely above them. The rock gave them something solid to anchor against — a small mercy, considering how quickly this would have turned catastrophic if they’d been forced to fight fully encircled.

Aki and Ruhu met their attackers first, each set upon by no fewer than three Lyndwyrms at once. Snarls tore through the clearing as both men leaned fully into their beast forms — heightened instinct, raw ferocity, honed reflexes. Aki vaulted clean over one Lyndwyrm mid-charge, hooking a hand around its neck as he flipped, dragging its skull with him and snapping its spine with a wet, splintering crack that carried across the field.

He landed, launched forward without pause, and drove a second leaping Lyndwyrm to the ground with a spine-buster clean enough to have been rehearsed, the impact shattering something important on contact. Kren caught the sound of bone and skull fracturing from where he stood as Aki simply moved on to the next target, unbothered.

Kren’s own line had settled into formation — Toa slightly ahead, Fima a step behind and to his left, forming a rough triangle with Kren anchoring the point. Fima kept one eye permanently on Toa even now, unwilling to fully trust a Snake-kin at her king’s back regardless of the oath he’d sworn. Kren hoped, for all their sakes, that Toa would prove her instincts wrong before this was over.

Toa, for his part, was entirely focused. He stepped forward, the massive hooked blade in his hands flaring with a sickly purple glow as he spun it overhead and brought it down in one clean arc, the light along its edge surging as he called out the technique.

[Venom Blade Dance]

A streak of Aura tore loose from the blade, swallowing three Lyndwyrms whole. They barely managed three staggering steps before the venom took hold, dropping them writhing and convulsing into the dirt. In the same breath, the front line of Lyndwyrms finally closed the distance to Kren and Fima.

Fima’s twin blades flashed as she spun clear of a raking claw strike, her left sword finding the gap beneath a Lyndwyrm’s jaw and driving up into its skull in one motion. She twisted the blade once, withdrew, and drifted backward like smoke, evading a second strike without breaking her rhythm.

The first Lyndwyrm dropped as she slapped the flat of her other blade across a second one’s snout — it was a stinging distraction that earned her a pained whine from the Lyndwyrms. An instant before her sword came down, splitting its skull cleanly in two. A third Lyndwyrm tried to use the opening to close on her, but Toa was already there. One quick slash buried his hooked blade deep, catching hard on bone.

He wrenched it free with a wet, tearing sound, ripping the Lyndwyrm’s entire foreleg away along with a wide arc of muscle and a handful of splintered ribs. The beast crashed down, screeching in a way so mournful and raw that the rest of the pack froze mid-charge, every head turning toward the sound.

For one brief moment, Toa’s hands tightened hard around the sword — his brother’s sword. Bunaya had always been a sadist, without a shred of anything kindly left in him by the end. He’d deserved exactly what he got. But the proof of his cruelty lived on in the weapon itself — a blade built not for a clean death, but a slow, agonizing one.

The moment passed as Fima drove her sword through the wounded Lyndwyrm’s skull, silencing its cries for good. That seemed to shake the rest of the party back into the fight, and the charge resumed in full.

This time, Kren was ready. He called on his ranged option once more — [Spirit of the East Wind]. The tattoo along his arm blazed beneath his sleeve, flowing down into the length of his blade as he slashed outward, releasing the familiar spinning disc of wind that swelled larger the farther it traveled, this time catching three Lyndwyrms in its path.

He spun immediately to his other flank, summoning [Spirit of the North Wind] just in time to raise a wall of compressed air and intercept an incoming strike. The impact still drove him back two full steps, his Aura reserves draining hard under the strain. Ruhu’s snow leopard form sailed over his head a heartbeat later, jaws closing around the attacking Lyndwyrm’s throat, fangs sinking deep as he tore his head back, leaving the beast gurgling out its last breaths in the grass.

Kren frowned. More Lyndwyrms were still moving through the forest — he could feel them, which caught him off guard, since he hadn’t realized True Earth Resonance was still quietly running beneath everything else. More were coming, and while they were holding their ground for now, this position couldn’t hold forever. Fighting their way back to the ravine’s narrow passage would give them a natural bottleneck — a kill box that would turn the Lyndwyrms’ numbers against them. The problem was getting there.

He glanced back toward the boulder, where Jomin still crouched, arms locked tight around his dog. The remaining Storm Eagles were firing everything they had at the Lyndwyrms pressing in from the rear, but there were simply too many. There was only one option left.

"We have to get out of here!"