[Voidknight Ascension] Chapter 159 - That’s no bird

Raiko cursed up a storm as the featherless flying monster hauled her into the air upside down. Its talons clamped onto her armored legs like a vise.

The gangly beast soared past the treetops with great speed, leaving behind the dullahans and the fires that raged through the [Forest Tile].

Sil’mara wasn’t going to have much of a forest for long.

This monster had been attacking the dullahan with that mutant Treant and saw how the battle would play out with Sam’s explosive arrival. Naturally, it fled rather than be ambushed.

Of course, it wasn’t a complete coward. It wanted a tasty morsel on the go and decided Komachi was the perfect thing to eat.

Raiko got in the way of that.

Fortunately, Komachi hadn’t been alone at the time. The cat was perched on Raiko’s shoulder. The buffing music she played had more than likely caught the thing’s attention.

Rather than let the Bard be scooped up, carried away and meet a grisly fate, Raiko shoved Komachi into her protective ronin hat. Where the soul aeder should have been to begin with, but the encounter happened so fast there had been no time.

No one was prepared for a battle to be raging on their Skyshard, with the dullahans struggling to survive. Neither was Komachi trained to find places of safety upon a person at the first sign of danger.

Raiko hardly blamed her. The cat was used to Sam, and to just about never be directly targeted. Whether Komachi had been using [Stealth] at the time, she didn’t know.

It sure didn’t seem to work against this flying beast.

Then again, Sam always seemed like a glowing beacon of enmity to any and all monsters. Next to him, Komachi would be all but invisible.

Raiko would have preferred to strike against its reaching talons to potentially cancel out the grappling attack. However, with little to no time to react, it was best to shelter the cat first.

Even if that meant getting scooped up by the leathery bird instead.

Using [Evasion], she attempted to roll and dodge in the same motion of putting the cat away. The whole exchange should’ve turned in Raiko and Komachi’s favor.

But what she didn’t expect, was that whatever this thing was, it was faster than her.

I need more Agility!

However, it was more than that. If Raiko’s Awareness, maybe even her Insight, had been slightly higher, she might have noticed the swooping creature sooner. That would’ve allowed the Ninja a longer window to react, rather than dodging too late.

Though her Awareness and Insight stats weren’t bad, they were starting to seem more and more important than she previously figured.

No, I don’t need just more Agility. I need more everything!

No wonder Sam hadn’t been able to do anything in time. He probably didn’t even notice, considering he was in the middle of attacking that Treant.

For all his high physical stats, his Awareness didn’t seem particularly invested in. Which made sense, when various other stats plainly had greater priority.

Bonus points only went so far when Jobs didn’t offer much in the way of the perception boosting Awareness stat.

Ordinarily, why would you bother with Awareness and Insight if you could just hit your enemy harder and faster?

“Whut is that?” Komachi asked curiously. She didn’t appear to mind being hundreds of feet in the air. “A dinosaur?”

“A what?” Raiko cried, dangling upside down and slashing at the monster’s scaly legs. Her blade went wide as the lizard-like beast swerved to the side. The Water rift passed by its leathery wings harmlessly.

“Ya know,” Komachi continued as if this was an everyday casual conversation. “Those resurrected creatures that got loose in some park from those movies… ah, I guess you don’t even know what a movie is, huh?”

Raiko’s attention homed in on just one thing. This was going to be a lot worse if that was true. “Resurrected. Are you saying they’re immortal?”

“Whut? No!”

Raiko didn’t know what to make of that. There were no creatures considered dinosaurs on Islegard. Various lizards, salamanders and the like, which weren’t whatever this monster was.

The closest thing this resembled was dragons or wyverns of some kind, but it was too thin and boney. And its snout was all sorts of wrong.

“This is from Earth, isn’t it?” Raiko asked, horrified.

“Dang, I guess so.”

That was something disturbing to unpack later. Ancient Magic welled up in Raiko’s katana, preparing to strike. Just hacking at its legs wasn’t going to do anything good, not when the forested hills were far beneath them.

The direction of the ground kept shifting like a crazed pendulum, making it difficult to time the landing. If it could even be called that.

The monster screeched, and Komachi yowled fiercely back.

Somewhere ahead, Raiko could see the [Lake Tile] coming up. In Raiko’s scathing opinion, it wasn’t much of a lake. She wasn’t sure why the Shard considered it so, it was more the size of a pond. Not the most spacious of targets.

Falling into the water from this eye-watering height would be considerably less lethal than a direct hit to the ground.

The trick was taking the monster out above it.

“Can ya still run on air?” Komachi asked, wisely casting [Warding] upon the two of them. Additional physical defense might do something for the impact.

“Nope, that was the tree’s sacrifice.”

A Skyshard loomed on the horizon, its surface densely covered with stony pillars and more of those flying lizard-like beasts. The floating isle at least had the decency to be nowhere near the Black City, but was brazen enough to be considerably closer.

“Er, how bad is falling damage?” Komachi asked.

“For you? Likely nothing.”

“…What about you, though?”

“I’ll survive,” Raiko lied.

***

Sam’s attention was wrenched away by a dual sensation of distance and pain. Pain from the Heartsblood Bond courtesy of his [Linked Royal Signet Ring], and distance from his connection to Komachi.

At first, he had thought the distance was the pair merely being off fighting something else, but now that the threat here was quelled, he could tell that they were moving far faster than even Raiko could manage.

What did I miss?

There was no use speculating. Sam turned away from the creatures. They would have to wait until his friends were safe and sound. They were moving fast. If whatever was going on was faster than Raiko, what hope did Sam have to catch them?

He climbed atop a dullahan, who extended its large hand and lifted him up as high as its arm allowed. Sam could just barely see through the smoke to the creature with Raiko captured in one of its talons.

Sam stared. “Is that a fucking pterodactyl?!”

Unwilling to risk his [Vulcan Blade], Sam removed his [Dullahan Greatsword] from his Inventory and put everything he had into that throw. Every ounce of his prodigious Strength went into the two-handed full-body throw.

It had worked before on the Abyssdiver, right? It could certainly work again.

Sam watched with bated breath as the glinting silver blade scythed vertically through the air with surprising speed and distance.

The blade gained on his friends and their captor. Even from far away, Sam could hear Raiko and Komachi scream in terror at the incoming weapon.

Only then did Sam realize that maybe he should think before he did certain things.

He could see, much to his horror, in his mind’s eye every possible wrong permutation of this action. The blade could hit Raiko or Komachi, killing or maiming either or both.

Luckily—or perhaps, not so luckily depending on your point of view—the blade’s arc began to drop well short of the creature, who was not only fleeing with considerable speed but still accelerating.

Cursing for losing his sword, Sam hopped down and hurried over to a burning swath of the [Forest Tile]. He motioned for the [Cinderblood Treants] nearby to give him some room.

I really hope this works, he thought as he crouched down low and summoned the [Source Chain] from the Skyshard.

He had never thought about using it in such a fashion, but it wasn’t as if he’d never ridden the damn thing before. He was stronger now and so was the Skyshard.

And by extension, the [Source Chain] was stronger as well.

Or so he hoped.

The tip of the chain’s spectral spear gently erupted from the burning ground. Sam laid a hand upon it and noticed how cool it was compared to the baking heat of the burning Tile.

That’s a problem for future me.

There was no time to waste. And, despite the way he had chided himself earlier for doing something reckless, he realized there was no time for thinking this through.

Raiko and Komachi were getting farther away with every heartbeat. He would not lose them like the Academy lost its students. He knew that Raiko and Komachi were plenty strong, so if this thing was able to whisk them away, then they needed help.

With a deep breath, Sam hunkered down and gripped the [Source Chain] with both hands as the spear tip launched out of the ground at an angle he hoped would take him over, or at least near, the flying dinosaur.

There was no space in his head for thoughts or idle curiosity about a dinosaur showing up to attack them.

With eyes watering, Sam’s every ounce of focus was on directing the [Source Chain] through the shifting winds and doing his best to see that it brought him as close as possible to the fleeing beast.

There was never any hope of spearing the thing with the chain. It would have been nice, but like his thrown sword, the risk was significant and besides, he couldn’t aim it that well.

Icy wind scythed through Sam’s armor, cutting him to the bone with its frigid cold, but still the [Source Chain] climbed and Sam rode it with fingers he could barely feel through the numbing cold.

Below and only slightly ahead, Sam could see the dinosaur. He could feel the [Source Chain] running out of juice. It had the power to be launched at a blistering speed, and then he could apply a slight amount of control to it.

Now that they were gaining and Sam’s eyes felt less like frozen spheres of pain even within his somewhat insulating helm, he wondered if he could train [Source Chain] in much the same way as he trained his stances to reflect his desired use.

There was no doubt that it would be useful.

With most of the chain’s energy spent, Sam launched himself from the spear tip with all the pent-up energy he had stored in his legs.

The chain floundered in the air and Sam quickly left it behind.

Currents of cushioning, almost guiding air seemed to wrap around him, and he could feel the influence of the Sacred Tree working in his favor.

Saying a silent prayer to the Tree, Sam’s trajectory took him not only over the pterodactyl, but beyond it as well. He held out his limbs like an insane medieval skydiver and did his best to adjust his fall.

Later on, he would offer considerable offerings to the Sacred Tree and the Sourcestone for their assistance, without which he wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell.

With their help and guidance, Sam managed to fall onto the wide back of the dinosaur and wrap his arms around its neck.

He wanted it dead.

There was simply no denying that, but he didn’t try to kill it. Sam just didn’t want to plummet to his death after bouncing off the thing.

The fall of a large, heavily armored man at terminal velocity onto the relatively thin and weak elongated neck of a dinosaur, however, proved immediately fatal.

Sam heard the snap at the same time as he felt the creature start to go limp.

It was not a welcome sound, especially not at several hundred feet in the air without wings of his own.