Missed.

  The whip-like tail whistled past its target, striking empty air with a pathetic, whistling swish.

  Idiot.

  In his defense it was the first time wielding or using anything remotely close to a whip.

  GROWLLL!

  The roar that shattered the stillness didn't come from the leader. It came from the smaller Skoll he’d just tried and failed to strike with its own severed limb.

  Its eyes blazed with a new, personal fury. The insult had been registered. It took a single, aggressive step forward, intent on joining the fight.

  The Alpha snarled in turn, a guttural, vibrating sound of reestablished dominance that shook the air.

  This prey was his.

  THWACK.

  Dion didn’t wait for their drama to resolve. While the Alpha was still bristling at its subordinate, he lunged forward and struck again.

  There was no rule stating he would stop after one failure.

  This time, his aim was true.

  The greyish limb whistled through the air and connected with a sickening crunch against the Alpha's hind leg.

  ROOOAAR!

  The sound was different this time, not a roar of rage, but a piercing shriek of genuine, shattering pain.

  The colossal Skoll staggered, its leg buckling under the weight of its own body.

  The Skollynx, sensing the Alpha's stumble moved, the other two following up.

  In a blur of vicious coordination, their whip-like tails launched not as strikes, but as projectiles. They extended from their rear, streaking toward Dion like grayish, barbed harpoons.

  Dion’s pupils constricted to pinholes.

  He dodged, twisted in mid-air, and threw himself to the side.

  Yet even with his Brine-touched speed, there was only so much he could do.

  BAM.

  The first projectile glanced off his shoulder, tearing cloth and skin, spinning him around.

  BAM.

  The second struck the ground where he'd just been, exploding stone and metallic gravel into the air.

  BAM.

  The third, faster and truer than the rest of the familiar two tailed Skollynx attacked.

  It was different from the rest

  It's two tails entwined like a braided knot before shooting out.

  The impact wasn't a cut, it was a hammer-blow that cracked ribs and sent him tumbling across the scree, breathless and bleeding.

  It was just the beginning.

  The attack…it began again.

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  Hopelessness.

  The only feeling that could describe Dion's internal state.

  He was not fighting. He was being dismantled.

  A claw ripped down his thigh, tearing fabric, flesh, and scraping against bone. The pain was so vast it was soundless.

  He collapsed, and the fall saved him as the second Skollynx crushing weight, a mass of rust-crusted iron plates, slammed into the ground where his chest had been.

  The familiar Skollynx one was on him before he could breathe. It scrambled over him. One barbed foot, like a bent iron spike, punched into his arm.

  Dion screamed then, a raw, tearing sound snapping him back to reality.

  He could smell death. It was his own.

  His heart hammered a frantic, deafening rhythm. Then, for what felt like a pico-second, everything slowed.

  Whether it was adrenaline or his Brine-touched perception sharpening in the face of death, he couldn't tell.

  The two-tailed Skollynx was on top of him, its barbed foot pinning his arm. Its segmented neck, a column of interlocking iron plates, was right before his face.

  The sapphire pulse in his own chest painted the world in cold, hyper-detailed light, highlighting every seam, every flaw.

  He still had the severed tail in his one working hand, a stiff, greyish cable torn from a different beast.

  He didn't have the leverage to strike. He didn't have the space to loop it.

  So he hooked it.

  With a desperate, twisting jerk of his wrist, he caught the jagged, broken end of the tail into the narrow gap between two of the iron plates on the creature's throat.

  Then, bracing his elbow against the ground, he shoved upward with every ounce of his failing strength.

  It was not a killing blow. Far from it.

  He didn't need it to be.

  It was a wedge.

  GRRHHK

  The Skollynx reared back with a sharp, guttural hiss, feeling an abrupt, choking obstruction.

  The sudden pressure against its throat-plates disrupted its balance and its killing focus for a single, crucial second.

  Its weight shifted off Dion’s pinned arm.

  It was the only opening he would get.

  Abandoning the tail, Dion twisted free from under the creature. He didn't rise to his feet, there was no time.

  He scrambled backwards on his elbows and heels, putting a few desperate yards of blood-slick gravel between himself and the enraged beast.

  The other Skollynxs were already moving, closing the circle once more. The Alpha was still favoring its shattered leg, but its fury was a palpable heat in the metallic air.

  Dion’s vision swam. The adrenaline was fading, leaving the raw, screaming truth of multiple injuries in its wake.

  His left arm was a useless, bleeding weight. He was backed against the steep wall.

  He had bought a heartbeat. No more.

  The Alpha moved. This time, the air itself seemed to flinch. Dion felt the shift in its stance, a deep, tectonic settling of weight.

  The playful, testing fury was gone. What remained was a cold predator.

  BANG.

  The Alpha moved. Its massive, rust-crusted tail, twice the size of regular Skollynx, snapped forward like a hydraulic piston.

  Dion felt the air compress before it hit. This was no probing strike.

  It was a declaration.

  BOOM.

  The tail didn't simply whip, it hammered the ground where he’d been a fraction of a second before.

  The impact, resulting in a concussive blast that sprayed shattered rock and sent a visible shockwave through the gravel.

  It wasn't trying to catch him. It was trying to erase him along with the patch of earth he stood on.

  Dion's gaze hardened, if he was going to die, then the beast was coming along, he stretched his hands, one last desperate attempt to push out ‘wither’

  There was no time for a mantra. Only the end.

  Then it stopped. A strange silence rushed in.

  The pack froze, their body went rigid. Its head cocked. The alpha head cocked up,and the predatory eye was no longer fixed on Dion. The focus was gone, shifted past him,

  Deeper into the labyrinth of twisted, metallic trees and glowing fungal growths.

  Its gaze was fixed on a single, specific point in the middle distance.

  Dion felt it then. A vibration through the ground, so low it was more a slight tremor.

  Something else was coming. And it had the beast complete, undivided attention.

  Dion held his breath, his senses straining against the oppressive silence.

  At first, there was nothing. Just the hum. Then he caught it. A soft, rhythmic shuffling, like heavy, woolen robes being dragged with deliberate slowness.

  From the corner of his eye, Dion could make out Pello. The man had been trying to crawl away, dragging his broken body through the glowing moss in a pathetic, crablike scramble.

  Now he too had frozen, his flight forgotten.

  He stared into the same darkness as the leopard, his face a mask of incomprehension.

  "D-dont tell me it c-called another one?” he hissed, his eyes wide with a fresh layer of fear.

  His voice was rising, fraying at the edges and edging towards hysteria. "We're dead! We're—"

  The shuffling grew closer. Finally, the figure emerged from between two trees whose bark was not bark at all, but a complex, interwoven lattice of tarnished copper and silver wires, pulsing with a faint, sickly light.

  The new entrant finally emerged.

  A man, tall and gaunt, his height exaggerated by the way he seemed to glide rather than walk.

  He was draped in robes of a dusty, unadorned grey, the color of cooled hearth-ash. A deep hood cast his face into an impenetrable shadow.

  He moved as if on a contemplative stroll through a palace garden, not in a nightmare forest of metallic trees and predators.

  The Skollynxs reacted instantly.

  They fled. A frantic, skittering retreat into the jagged gloom.

  Well, most of them.

  The two-tailed Skollynx, the one that had fought Dion with such personal fury, stayed behind.

  Its gaze flickered between the newcomer and its bleeding prey.

  It could smell Dion's end, so close. It released a low, rumbling growl that vibrated through its metal-plated chest, a sound meant to shake the marrow.

  The man in grey halted at the opposite edge of the clearing. He did not glance at Dion or the whimpering scavenger.

  His entire, unnerving presence was directed with a laser-like intensity at Dion, as if the creature before him were no consequence.

  “A pitiable little thing, isn't it?” The figure spoke, his head tilting slightly.

  Dion felt his voice was a soft, dry baritone, like stones grinding together in the deep, cold dark of a cavern. It was a voice utterly devoid of urgency.

  “You tore off its appendage,” the man observed. “Now it wants you dead. In a way… this is justified.”

  He paused, the silence stretching, thick with the beast’s trembling fury and Dion’s ragged breath.

  “But nature is not fair… and existence is even less so.” He took a single, deliberate step forward.

  It was the slightest of movements, but to the creature, it was a provocation.

  The Skollynx erupted. It was not the powerful, coordinated leap from before, but a desperate, furious lunge, a final, frantic attempt to claim its kill before the interloper could act.

  The man in grey did not move.

  Because the attack wasn't aimed at him.

  Dion flinched. Even with the new figure’s arrival, his focus had never left the beast. His heart hammered against his shattered ribs.

  His good arm, trembling, stretched forth one last, desperate attempt to invoke the Wither.

  “No need.”

  Dion heard the voice of the figure, calm and clear, an instant before everything… stopped.

  There was no flash of light.

  No blast of force.

  No roar of summoned energy.

  The world did not bend or warp.

  Dion watched something that could only be described as impossible

  CHI

  The Skollynx simply froze.

  Its head came off.

  Yet, its body In mid-air continued it's motion.

  The Skollynx….it didn't even know it was dead.