novelraw Chapter 168: Peace
Chapter 168: Peace
The creature’s panic pulsed beneath him, vast and primal, every scale he touched humming with rage and pain and the dying-animal terror of something that had never been hurt before.
Its killing instinct was rolling out in waves so thick that Ye Jun’s Threat Assessment was screaming at him about the creature itself as a hostile entity.
’It thinks I’m one of them.’ he realized instantly.
He’d seen this before, not at this scale, but the pattern was the same. A wounded animal in its last hours, lashing at anything within reach. Trying to soothe it would get him killed. Trying to dominate it would get him killed faster.
A shadow crossed over them.
Ye Jun looked up.
Aerial predators were closing in, and of course, they weren’t small ones. They were things with wingspans like ships, with beaks shaped for cracking heavenly bone.
They had been waiting for the spears to do their work, circling at a careful distance, and now they were diving.
The first one came in fast, talons aimed at one of the spear wounds, going for the soft meat where the heavenly light bled out.
Ye Jun moved without thinking.
His Qi was suppressed but not gone. The chains had been the suppression source, and they were off him now, so the seal weakened with it.
He gathered what he could, channeled it into Ashen Phantom Steps, and let himself slide along the wind currents rather than fight them.
The creature’s body was huge enough that the air pressure off its scales formed pockets of relative calm. He used them and moved up the beast’s flank in three blurs of motion and met the predator at the open wound.
Fallen Star Sword Art came out of him on instinct, the form barely there, but his Ember sword bit into the predator’s throat as it dove past, and the thing screamed and tumbled away into the wind, leaving a trail of black blood.
"I will defend you," Ye Jun grinned and said. "It sounds fun."
The creature beneath him shuddered.
It had noticed.
Another predator came in and Ye Jun met it. Head-on. Then another. He couldn’t really kill the big ones with his sword alone, but he could turn them away, drive them off, force them to circle further out.
He used Hunter’s Focus, narrowing his perception to the next strike, the next angle, the next dive. He moved along the creature’s spine and flanks like a man walking on a battlefield, fighting for territory that wasn’t his.
The creature watched him, observed him.
Ye Jun felt it clearly. The hostility pulsing through the scales beneath his feet was still there, but it had shifted. The thing was no longer treating him as another attacker to crush. It was watching what he did.
A predator came in from below, aiming for the spear wound nearest the creature’s heart. Ye Jun couldn’t reach it in time. He shouted into the wind uselessly.
The creature’s tail came around.
The motion was almost casual, but it caught the predator mid-dive and crushed it against the side of its own ribs as black blood sprayed out into the storm.
Ye Jun stared at the tail in bewilderment. ’This guy...’
It hadn’t been moving like that before. It had been thrashing at random, lashing in pain. Now it had aimed at its enemies.
’You’re with me.’
He laughed again, this one less ragged. "Alright, big guy. Let’s hunt."
He moved up its spine. The creature tilted slightly to give him a better angle and he took the eyes of the next predator that came in. The creature’s wing slammed sideways and broke the spine of one that tried to flank him.
They moved together, clumsily at first, then with something closer to rhythm, like two predators in the same dying sky, killing what tried to take them.
For a long stretch of time, the sky belonged to them.
Ye Jun stood near the creature’s head, breathing hard, his Ember sword turned black with the blood of things that tried to kill them. The predators that remained were circling far off now, unwilling to come back into range.
"Haha! Reminds me of old times," Ye Jun chuckled and stood up again.
The creature was still dying beneath him. The spears had not been removed and could not be; after all, he was too weak. Its wingbeats were slower, the descent steadier. The storm around them was beginning to thin, the winds losing their edge as the creature’s panic finally gave way to something quieter.
It turned its enormous head toward him.
Its eye was the size of a courtyard, slit-pupiled, gold around the edges and dark at the center. There was nothing soft in it. There was no gratitude, but the hostility was gone as well.
It looked at him properly, for the first time.
Then it shared.
Ye Jun’s mind opened, and the sky opened with it.
He saw storms from above the clouds, watched them spiral across continents in patterns he had never been able to see from below.
He felt the great wind currents that crossed the world, the ones that carried scent across thousands of miles, the ones that carried prey along their backs without the prey ever knowing.
He saw a herd of beasts on a distant plain through eyes that watched from the height of heaven itself. The hunt from above. The shape of the world as predator-territory.
He felt his Wind Affinity stir, sluggish and small but present, drinking the vision in. His Taming Affinity, almost nonexistent before, settled into something with the faintest pulse of its own.
The creature’s eye dimmed.
It dropped through a layer of cloud, and Ye Jun felt the great body slacken beneath him. Its last wingbeat came and did not return. The descent steadied into a long, dying glide.
The storm dispersed.
Ye Jun stood on its back, watching the world rise toward them through clear sky. He could feel the creature’s peace and felt a strange peace too.
’Rest well, big guy.’
The world dissolved before the impact came.