Third Person's POV
A knowing smile tinged with mischief and silent certainty began to unfurl across her lips when suddenly a jarring screech sliced through the air and shattered the stillness like glass.
Listening to it, her grin vanished, and her gaze snapped to the roiling black mist, which now throbbed like a living wound in the clearing.
It bubbled and quivered while pulses of blue and black light flashed from within like the beating of a heart on the edge of rupture.
In the next instant, a small figure shot out from the gloom in a blur of movement.
It was none other than the blue scorpion, but its body was now twisted and scorched.
Large sections of its once-glistening crystal blue carapace had blackened and melted like slag under that unnatural but intense corrosion of the dark.
Its limbs twitched, and it shrieked in raw, gut-wrenching agony and anger, but it didn't flee.
