Chapter 572: One After The Other

The creature rose into the dark sky and tore the mountain apart on its way up.

Stones lost their grip on one another and came away in slabs, whole shelves of rock sliding out from under themselves, and the ground was being taken out from under us one piece at a time. Running was getting difficult. Soon it would stop being running at all.

The little guy was the first to go. Injured as he was, he threw himself forward anyway, shoving against the land with everything he had while it crumbled at his heels. He ran with a desperate look on his face, a face that was begging to be saved, even as the collapse caught up with him. He grabbed a lip of stone and held on tightly with both hands, and then the whole surface he was clinging to tore loose with him still on it.

He was already screaming before he fell.

In the same breath, Light gripped Bren tightly by the arm and grabbed his wyvern by the leg, and the creature beat its wings and lifted off the ground.

I was ahead with Ilse, using Feather Step to jump from one stone surface to the next while each one broke apart under our boots. And it was right then, mid-jump, that I saw the wyvern take off and knew immediately that it was the biggest mistake Light had ever made.

I screamed back at them.

"Nooooo! Noooooooo! NOOOoooooo!!!"

But I was too late.

The thing coming up out of the red seam, shedding searing vapor as it climbed, opened one fiery eye the moment they left the ground. It was like a pit of hell had cracked open in the endless dark of the sky, and the whole slope turned the color of a forge.

The next moment, a claw of darkness came down like a pillar of calamity.

The wyvern let out a furious shriek and exploded forward with an immense velocity, covering hundreds of kilometers in a single second. I didn’t see it go at all. One instant it was beside the slope, and the next it had shot away at a frightening speed.

And what happened after that was the frightening part.

The claw was simply falling. By every calculation I had, it should have missed. But when it came down, it tore a good half of the wyvern away while the animal was still locked inside that speed.

Light and Bren only lived because he had been holding the other leg. The blow broke the wyvern’s flight apart, and the thing rolled end over end and burst in a rain of blood against the rock above.

I couldn’t afford to waste a second. I sent my chains into the sky, dimming their glow so the thing wouldn’t see them coming. I latched onto Light and Bren at the same time and hauled. I wrapped another around Ilse’s waist, glaring up at the creature lumbering above us.

It seemed sleepy. Only one of its eyes had opened, as a matter of fact. But the red seam was already gone because of it, and that was before counting the heat, which had pushed the air close to boiling. The sweat on my face dried before it could run.

Light had gone stiff and silent, and he didn’t fight me at all as I dragged him down. Bren, meanwhile, was holding on for dear life.

I let myself drop off the mountain, sending two chains biting into different parts of the slope to anchor myself as I plummeted through the darkness.

The creature roared.

As that roar rolled out of it, the mountain burst into a sea of lava that melted every stone it touched and began to pour downward, eating whole stretches of the landscape in an instant and coming straight for us.

It looked like the end of the entire landscape, and it was coming whether we liked it or not. It was like racing the inevitable.

The falling lava washed over the mountainside where my chains were hooked and melted the whole anchor point away. A vicious pain went through my core as the chains burned, like someone had pressed a hot iron to the inside of my ribs.

But that was the least of my worries, because now we were falling with nothing to hold us.

I took hold of the chain, withdrew it, and spawned it again. This time I sent it straight down ahead of us, and it kept going, flying ten times faster than we were falling.

Eventually I felt it strike the ground and bury itself.

It pulled taut, and I used that tension to snap all of us downward even faster. The darkness tore past us, wind roaring in my ears, and the glowing sea of lava shrank away above us until eventually we couldn’t see it anymore.

A moment before we would have slammed into the ground and smashed every bone in our bodies to pieces, I vanished with Feather Step, still connected to the chains.

I’d only done it as an experiment, hoping it would work. And it did. Every part of me vanished, the chains and the people they were holding along with me, and I reappeared on the ground with all three of them.

I breathed in and out, over and over, and couldn’t get it to settle.

’Wha— whatt— the...’

I crumpled to my knees, palms flat on the ground, the last few seconds playing back like a nightmare. I clawed at the rock, but my fingers couldn’t dig in. It was unbelievably hard.

Which was no surprise... because, of course, this was the Precipice.

I paused and stared at it. Then I looked left and right, trying to judge how far it went. There was only darkness, endless darkness. But something about this ground didn’t feel right. It was different from any other ground I’d stood on down here, the way a floorboard is different when there’s no floor under it.

Normally, I would have told myself I was overthinking it. This time I trusted my gut and shouted right away.

"Guys!! Up! Up!! Now!!! We must leave!!!"

Light was kneeling with the dark covering his face. He was probably still trying to believe he had just lost his wyvern, and honestly, it was hard to believe. Bren lay sprawled and spent, while Ilse was still fighting to catch her breath. So when I shouted, the best any of them could do was look up at me with pale faces.

They were slow.

And it cost us.

The ground heaved without warning and the whole surface shot upward at a maddening speed, straight toward the underside of the plain above it. I slid across it, vanished, and vanished again with Ilse, and even that wasn’t enough. I rolled over on top of her as the slab we were on slammed into the ceiling of that jagged plain, and everything was crushed to smithereens.

No doubt about it. Another dragon was waking up.