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.
