Thane studied him for a long moment. The morning light caught the scars on his arms, made them look like cracks in stone. "You've done this before. Not this exactly, but... you've stood alone against something that wanted you dead."
"Yes."
"And survived."
"Obviously."
"Then I'm trusting you." Thane moved toward the boulders, somehow making his bulk disappear into shadows that shouldn't have hidden him. His greatsword settled against his back with practiced silence. "But if you die, I'm going to be very annoyed about waking up early for nothing."
Reven allowed himself a small smile. Then he started walking toward the cliff face.
Openly. Deliberately. Making himself the most obvious target possible. His boots crunched in the ash with each step, leaving clear prints behind him. The whistling overhead intensified, became more urgent, more layered.
The Codex had said Scorchwings were intelligent. That they coordinated. That they operated as one.
It hadn't mentioned how fast that coordination happened.
Reven was fifty meters from the cliff base when the first drake dove. He saw it coming—the thermal signature dropping from the circling formation like a stone, wings tucked tight, accelerating faster than gravity alone could explain. He threw himself sideways just as talons raked the space where he'd been standing, the wind of their passage kicking up a cloud of ash and dust.
The drake pulled up, its wings catching air with a leathery snap, and began its climbing turn. Two more dropped from different angles, splitting his attention, forcing him to track multiple threats simultaneously. Reven didn't run. He stood and watched as they positioned themselves in a triangle around him, their wingbeats slowing to controlled glides, cutting off escape routes with disturbing precision.
Then the alpha appeared.
It descended slowly, deliberately, wings spread to display the full thirty-foot span. Larger than the others by half. Scales darker, almost black at the edges, bleeding into deep crimson at the centers. The glowing undersides pulsed with each heartbeat, brightening and dimming like embers in a forge.
And when it opened its mouth, Reven heard it.
A subsonic call that resonated in his bones, in his teeth, in the spaces between thoughts. It vibrated through the ash beneath his feet, through the air against his skin, through the Emberstone fragment in his chest. The surrounding drakes responded instantly, their heads snapping toward him with synchronized precision.
They moved as one.
Three dove from different angles. Evade one, and you'd run straight into another.
Two flanked wide, skimming low across the ash, cutting off lateral movement with outstretched talons. One stayed high, circling, watching, waiting to exploit whatever gap the others created.
The Codex called them pursuit hunters. Coordinators. Pack predators.
It didn't mention they were terrifying in their execution.
Reven's integration activated on instinct, the Razorwing talons extending slightly from his fingertips. The Emberstone fragment in his chest pulled at the ambient heat—from the ash beneath his feet, from the thermal vents nearby, from the approaching drakes themselves—drawing it inward, storing it. His body temperature spiked. His hands began to glow with dull red light, veins of orange crawling up his forearms.
The first drake's fire breath washed over him.
Should have killed him. Should have cooked him inside his own skin, flash-boiled his blood, turned his eyes to steam in their sockets. Instead, the Emberstone absorbed it—not all of it, but enough.
The heat poured into his chest cavity, building pressure, filling him with expanding brightness. Each heartbeat pushed the warmth against his ribcage like it wanted to split him open from the inside. Pain lanced along his sternum, but he couldn't stop it now.
The drake pulled up, confusion evident in the way its head twisted sideways, its wings faltering mid-stroke. Prey didn't survive direct flame. Prey didn't stand still and let itself be cooked.
Reven's hands shot out, managing to grab the drake's trailing leg as it passed overhead, his talons punching through scale and into the flesh beneath.
And pushed through it.
All the stored heat released at once. Directly into the creature's body, through his fingers, through the punctures in its hide, through the conduits of blood and sinew.
The drake shrieked—a sound like tearing metal, like a blacksmith hammering red-hot steel—and its leg came apart in his grip. It plummeted, trailing smoke and fluids, hit the ground hard enough to crater the ash, and didn't get back up. Its wings continued twitching for several seconds, reflex spasms that gradually stilled.
One down.
The alpha cried again. Louder. Angrier. A pressure wave that made Reven's vision blur at the edges.
The remaining drakes shifted tactics. No more coordinated dives, no more testing. Now they were swarming. Coming from all directions at once, abandoning precision for volume. Fire breath overlapped, streams of superheated air crossing and intersecting, turning the space around Reven into an oven. Talons raked at him from blind angles, forcing him to track not five but fifteen points of attack as the drakes never fully committed to any single pass. They were trying to overwhelm through sheer volume, through constant pressure, through the simple mathematics of attrition.
Each pass he managed to dodge at least two of their attacks, thanks to his Razorwing integration. However in his current capabilities, Reven was still receiving attacks from the ones he couldn't dodge. His Calamity Blood did its best to seal the wounds, but that's all it did, his wounds still hurt. And badly.
There were too many. He wouldn't survive at this rate. A talon caught his shoulder, tearing through his coat, and scored fire across his skin. Pain flared—sharp, immediate—but he couldn't let it distract him. Not now. Not when the alpha was watching.
Eventually the alpha would see the pattern and exploit it. Eventually—
Thunder split the air.
The sound of a greatsword moving faster than should be possible.
A drake fell from the sky in two pieces, bisected cleanly at the torso, its halves spinning away in opposite directions before they hit the ground. The ash swallowed them both with twin puffs of gray.
Thane stood where the boulder cluster had been, greatsword in hand, the blade unwrapped and gleaming. The weapon was massive, easily six feet of steel from crossguard to tip, the blade itself as wide as Reven's palm—but the big man wielded it like it weighed nothing. Like it was an extension of his own arm. His stance was wide, planted, immovable.
"Thought you could use a hand!" Thane charged forward, and the ground shook slightly with each footfall. The greatsword came around in a horizontal arc, trailing displaced air, already swinging at the nearest drake.
The creature tried to dive away, trying to bank left and gain altitude. Too slow. The blade caught its wing just below the shoulder joint, sheared through membrane and bone and cartilage in a single clean motion, and sent it spiraling into the ash-covered ground. It crashed hard, cartwheeling once, twice, before coming to rest against a smoldering thermal vent.
Three down.
The alpha screamed.
Not subsonic now. Audible. A sound full of rage and something that might have been calculation. The great wings flared wide, catching the thermal lift, and the massive head swiveled to track the new threat. Its eyes—deep amber, almost red in the dawn light—locked onto Thane.
The remaining drakes disengaged from Reven immediately. Their pack coordination shifted, reformed, reoriented. Three of them peeled away to flank Thane, while the fourth stayed low, circling Reven but not committing. Containing him. Isolating the bigger threat first.
"Big one's mine," he called out, and there was no fear in his voice. No hesitation. Just the calm assessment of a man who had done this before.
The alpha dove.
Not at Reven.
At Thane.
Its amber eyes tracked the new threat with unnerving calculation—as if it already knew how the game would unfold.