The wyvern dropped like a ruined star.
Its cry rattled slates and sternums alike; children clapped hands to their ears, and even the wind flinched. One wing was a rag of cartilage and char, the other beat with a sound like wet leather. Black ichor hissed wherever it fell, eating color out of grass and grit. Behind it, the Corrupter stood upon his chosen stone as if it were a pulpit, armor veined with guttering red, eyes the calm of a predator that has never once needed to run.
Andy stepped forward and the ridge seemed to steady with him. The Oathblade hummed like a throat clearing, the blade's edge braided in ember, surf and storm. He felt the form settle—Dragon Warrior Tier II—clean as a blade sliding home. Everything sharpened: the stink of old iron, the chalky taste of ash in the wind, the way Nia's breath eased when his aura touched her ward, the way Aurelia's foot rolled from heel to toe when she decided to move.
The system arrived like a hand at his shoulder.
[Engage Protocol: Orion Active]
Buffs: Corrupter's Bane I (+15% damage vs corrupted)
Shared Inventory: Auto-Summon (Ready)
"Left," Andy said.
Nia didn't ask why. She lifted the Staff of Lumina and a circle of silver glyphs flowed from its head and settled over the villagers like a second sky. Each rune chimed as it took its place, building a barrier more felt than seen. The fear-smell in the air thinned, replaced by the sweeter note of cedar smoke from the baker's kiln.
"Right," Andy said.
"Finally," Aurelia answered, smile narrowing into something that made space for teeth. She blurred, sliding along the parapet, then dropped to the slope with a hunter's grace. Her brooch ticked once, and the Moonfang dagger in her palm trailed a pale ribbon of light.
The wyvern's shadow took them all, then the beast itself smashed into the ridge with a shock that cracked stone. It snapped at Andy first—because even corruption remembers where the fire is—and he met it underhand, the Oathblade humming through a low arc.
"Ember Edge—Flame Spiral II."
Fire gushed from the cut like a red tide, the spiral folding in on the wyvern's jaw. Char flaked, teeth cracked; the close heat kissed Andy's cheekbones and the taste of smoke snuck under his tongue. The beast recoiled, flapping its good wing once, twice, dragging a gouge in the earth as it tried to buy itself space.
Behind it, figures in black-gleaming lamellar rose from the ridge grass like bad memories: corrupted knights, helms fused to skulls, eyes glossy and emptied. One lifted a horn whose bell had long since rusted through and let out a sound the horn no longer had room for. Five more answered with swords, jerky and sure.
"Villagers clear!" Nia called, and her ward flared brighter as she stepped forward into her own light. Sigils spun out around her: circles, lines, a geometry that only grace remembers.
"Glyphlight Barrier," she breathed. The barrier thickened enough to sing.
Aurelia took the knights like water takes a fall: already where it intends to be. She broke into them with a step and a twist, Moonfang in her right hand, her left snapping a second blade out of simple air—Inventory bloom, no delay, a neat click inside Andy's skull.
[Shared Inventory Event]
Quickdraw (Aurelia) → Moonfang Dagger (2)
Latency: 0.12s
She laughed once, low and delighted, and went to work, each cut a lesson in not wasting anyone's time.
The wyvern came again.
Andy moved without giving the thing enough dignity to call it thought. He met the slash of its good wing and slid under, the Oathblade catching the black spines and shaving them into glass. From the half-crouch he cut across its breastbone and twisted his wrist as if unscrewing a stubborn lid—
"Tide-Singer—Aqua Fang II."
Water teeth, lucid and merciless, erupted along the line of his blade and drove home. The wyvern screamed like iron tearing. Black blood fanned, sizzling where it landed. Steam lofted and rolled; through it, he saw Nia lift her staff and paint the air.
"Glyphstorm," she said, and the name was a promise.
Silver sigils materialized like a thousand small moons, then fell, a rain of symbols. Each rune landed with a bell's kiss and held, pinning corrupted knights by elbows and knees, sticking breath in their throats. The ward behind her didn't flicker; she was the still center of the thing she herself had summoned.
A pulse tapped under Andy's breastbone.
[Constellation Sync — Orion Tier II]
Bond Pulse: Stable
Nia ⭐ 77% | Aurelia ⭐ 71%
Combined Progress: 37%
The corrputed wyvern flung its head and vomited a breath that was more absence than thing. Color fled where it passed. The grass went gray as a corpse's mouth. The dome around the villagers hissed like a thousand snakes.
Andy took one step and put the Oathblade horizontal.
"Stormbreaker—Gale Rift II."
The air didn't split so much as remember how to. The cut he drew looked like nothing and sounded like a page being turned very firmly. Wind blurred at the blade's edge and then stamped forward, the rift catching the breath and folding it up like a tent a man is too tired to sleep in anymore. Corruption spattered and skated away, turned aside, torn thin.
He kept walking through it. The wyvern, offended, snapped again; its teeth found only the ghost his shoulder had become. The Oathblade whispered back across its gums, and where the blade passed, rot peeled.
Aurelia's voice rode the edge of another laugh. "Eyes, love!"
He didn't need the warning; he went for them, but he liked that she said it. He slid under the next sniffing lunge, the Oathblade drawing a neat italic line up the beast's snout. It shook its head like a dog in river water and Aurora's arrow—no, not an arrow; the light had gone arrow-shaped to be polite—took it in the right eye.
"Moonpiercer."
She'd climbed a broken cart in two steps and leaned into the shot, hair whipping across her mouth, eyes bright as if the moon had remembered it could be worshiped by someone who was not afraid of night. The bolt bored in and burst, a quiet detonation of very clean light. The wyvern screamed again, this time with surprise salted into the pain.
The Corrupter clapped, once. The sound was a slow insult.
"Dragon-blooded," he called, and his voice came across the blasted ground untroubled. "Your mortal tricks dress nicely today."
"He's flirting with you," Aurelia said, knifing another knight down and using the corpse to bow to the next one.
Nia didn't laugh, but her mouth couldn't help smiling toward the corners. "Let him keep talking, then."
Another chime—deeper, like a bell inside his bones—folded through Andy. It coincided with Nia's hand brushing his shoulder as she swung her staff past him and Aurelia's foot sliding to brace at his flank like a flag planted in the ground they shared.
[Triad Sync — Orion]
Resonance: +12%
Effect: Movement +10% | Elemental Resistance +8%
Nia ⭐ 78% | Aurelia ⭐ 72%
Combined: 39%
Status: Stable
"Hold," Andy said, not loudly. Not needing to.
The wyvern came down, hard. Its good wing drove a blast of corruption-laden wind ahead of it, and the ridge shuddered. Andy stepped into the pressure, the Oathblade low, and lifted as if he meant to scoop a river.
Fire answered. Not in a theatrical roar, but in a clean surge that reminded him of bread pulled from an oven at exactly the right moment. Flame Spiral rose around the blade and grabbed hold of the downdraft, climbed it, and wrapped it, and turned the beast's own weight against it.
The wyvern flailed. The broken wing banged earth; the good one caught fire at the primary vanes and made a sound like a paper kite mourning a child. It staggered across its own shadow, scrabbling for purchase.
"Now," Nia said.
Andy didn't have to look to know where she was. Her staff cut a circle and a line, then nested them and flicked them open. Glyphstorm narrowed to a needle-fall, the runes spearing into the joints where wing met shoulder. Aurelia was already moving through the new geometry, stepping from rune to rune as if they were stones on a river, Moonfang arcing. She took the tendons she was given and made them irrelevant.
The knights tried a push then—half a dozen at once, their black swords chopping without rhythm but with the kind of persistence that makes a wall out of lesser men. Aurelia pivoted her weight, turned a parry into a dance step, and laid three of them open in a single curve. The fourth found Nia's ward and broke his blade on it as if on the memory of an oath he had once meant.
Andy didn't waste the opening. He sank his weight and drew the Oathblade in a long, unashamed line across the wyvern's chest.
"Dragon Fang Strike."
For a heartbeat the world became very simple: the kiss of steel through ruined scale, the rush of heated air, the dark arterial spurt cut clean by the heat of the blade. The wyvern staggered back three paces. The third was a fall, except it hadn't yet understood it was falling. It slammed into the ridge on the next breath and made a crater of honest dirt into a bowl of sick soot.
"Andy," Nia said, the single word threaded with pride, caution, and an unnecessary plea to be careful, because that is what love does even when it trusts.
He heard the Corrupter smile.
"Better," the man-thing said. He lifted a hand that didn't look like a hand anymore, and the ground around his stone bulged. New shapes forced themselves out of it: more knights, less men, more habit. The sky around the wyvern puckered.
Nia pivoted, staff grinding a new sigil into the air, the lines luminous and patient. Aurelia, panting and flicking ash from her lashes, licked the corner of her mouth and showed her teeth to anyone left who might fear them.
Andy took another single step forward, because that is the distance that matters when the world tries to move you without asking.
The system touched him, almost gently.
[Orion Tier II — Progress Update]
Nia ⭐ 78% | Aurelia ⭐ 72%
Combined: 39%
Buffs: Corrupter's Bane I (Active) | Shared Auto-Summon (Ready)
Note: Dominance displayed without escalation (Tier II maintained).
The wyvern gathered itself—eyes a single oily pit now—and spat a line of breath that carved a furrow in the ridge as if it wanted to write its name there. Andy's blade came up, down, left; three swift cuts, each true. The breath broke, fanned, failed. Heat and wet and the bitter ghost of copper tongued the air.
"Andy," Aurelia called, voice ragged with triumph, "save me what's left of the good bits."
"There aren't any good bits," Nia said, but she laughed once, because Aurelia's joy was a weapon too.
The Corrupter's head tilted, birdlike. He did not yet step down from his stone.
"Then come take the rest," he suggested, almost kindly.
He raised his arms, and the shadows around his fingertips stitched themselves into barbs. The wyvern shuddered and stood—not at health's command, but obedience's. It screamed again, the note veering into fury, and launched.
Andy's heart didn't climb; it settled. The Oathblade felt small in his hand in the way tools do when they're exactly right.
"Stay with me," he said, an order that wasn't a question.
Nia's ward bent, not breaking, and then leaned into him like a tide. Aurelia's daggers flashed and folded away; a slender bow, crescent and keen, blinked into being in her hands with a little chime that felt like a wink.
"Moonpiercer, again and again," she murmured. "Until the sky forgives it for flying."
"Glyphstorm, narrow band," Nia said, teeth set. "I'll thread what you shoot."
The wyvern's shadow crashed down on them like a thrown net.
Andy cut it.
He put his feet in the truth and let the blade sing it. Fire wrote the first line; water cooled it into something that would last; wind carried it where it needed to go. The Oathblade traced a crescent, then completed the circle, and the beast ran into a geometry it could not keep. Its breastbone met steel; its scream met the storm; its breath met a luminous lattice of Nia's making and disintegrated into light. Aurelia's arrow drove through the fracture the moment it opened, found the brain behind the eye socket, and blossomed into a petaled burst of silver.
For a heartbeat longer than it had any right to, the wyvern tried to be alive out of habit.
Then the habit failed it.
It fell, all at once. The impact threw a dark halo of ash and sent a hot wind out across the ridge that smelled like quenching and old rain. Villagers who had forgotten they had voices found them and used them, ragged cheers stitched with sobs.
The Corrupter did not clap, this time. He merely drew his sword.
It was wrong. It wasn't forged so much as argued with until it consented to look like a blade. The air around it hummed and seized, as if holding its breath.
He stepped off his stone with a grace that didn't belong to anything human and smiled, small and pleased. The ash skirled around his boots and did not touch them.
"Then face me," he said, and his courtesy was colder than the ridge wind. "Bearer of two cores."
Andy set the point of the Oathblade to the earth for one sigh of a second, then lifted it again.
"I've been all morning," he said simply.
The ridge inhaled. The villagers went quiet as fish schooling. The system did not speak, not yet; it waited, like any good witness does when a promise is about to be tested.
And then the Corrupter moved.