The world was a shifting map of silver lines, but Elian's body was a dragging anchor. He rolled through the mud, dodging a blind swipe from the beast's obsidian wing. In his mind, he saw the perfect trajectory to avoid the blow, but his twelve-year-old limbs moved with agonizing slowness. Every muscle fiber, already strained by the "Integration" rebirth, felt like it was being pulled apart by invisible hooks.
The first Cliff-Shredder didn't retreat. It dived again, its heavy chest plates creating a wall of obsidian that pinned Elian toward the barracks' jagged stone foundation. He scrambled backward, his fingers raw as he gripped the heavy obsidian shard he'd scavenged.
The initial dry itch behind his frozen blue eyes had long since vanished, replaced by a slow, rhythmic heat that began to throb in time with his racing heart. The silver static in his pupils flared, pulsing with an intensity that felt less like a gift and more like a parasite feeding on his nerves.
He was trapped. The beast loomed over him, its beak open to reveal rows of serrated ridges. Through the lens of Insight, the creature's chest became a transparent mesh of vibrating energy. Beneath the overlap of its thickest armor plates, the Aether-heart pulsed—a knot of violent violet light that served as the beast's engine.
There, Elian thought, his breath coming in shallow hitches. That is the logic of your life.
He lunged forward, trying to slip inside the beast's reach, but his foot slipped in the blood-slicked mud. The beast's primary talon slammed into his shoulder, pinning him against the cold stone wall. A sickening crack echoed through his frame as his collarbone buckled under the weight.
Agony flared, momentarily blinding him. The silver lines of the world flickered and distorted, nearly plunging him back into the darkness of the barracks.
Suddenly, the slow heat in his eyes snapped into a searing, white-hot burn.
Elian let out a ragged gasp as the threshold was breached. It felt as though someone had pressed a glowing ember against the back of his optic nerves. The static silver began to bleed into the frozen blue of his irises, and thin, hot rivulets of blood began to well up in his tear ducts.
The clarity remained, but it was now wrapped in a veil of fire.
He didn't pull away from the beast's weight. Instead, he used the stone wall to brace his broken shoulder, using the very pressure that was crushing him to stabilize his aim. He saw the beast's chest plates shift as it inhaled for a final, bone-shattering screech.
The gap opened. It was no wider than a finger's breadth.
"I see you," Elian croaked, the words tasting of copper and dust.
With a final, desperate surge of his integrated strength, he drove the obsidian shard upward. He didn't swing with his muscles; he used the "Flow Line" of the beast's own downward momentum. The shard bypassed the obsidian hide and sank deep into the pulsing knot of the Aether-heart.
The beast went rigid. The violet light in its chest flared with a blinding intensity before abruptly snuffing out. Its massive weight went limp, crashing down onto Elian and burying him in the mud and the stench of cooling ozone.
Elian lay beneath the carcass, his vision a roar of silver fire and crimson shadows. He could hear the second beast on the roof preparing to dive, and he could feel the cold gaze of the Knight-Commander still watching from the wall.
His eyes were burning like hell, and for the first time since his reincarnation, the Hollow in his chest felt truly full.