Gilded Ashes-Chapter 309: Before Impact

They heard it before they saw it.

The screeching came in bursts - sharp, layered with a distorsion that made Raizen’s head ache. It bounced off the trunks and platforms and came at them from every direction at once, making it almost impossible to pin down exactly where it was coming from. Except they already knew. The Academy. Straight ahead.

Kenzo passed through the gate first. He didn’t slow down - just dropped his shoulder so he wouldn’t hit the edge, boots slamming the wet wood as he crossed the outer walkway and cut toward the main training platforms. Raizen and Saffi were seconds behind him, rounding the last trunk -

And then they saw it.

The main training platform was chaos.

Students were scattered - some pressed against the far railing, some crouched behind equipment, a few sprinting toward exits. Their beasts were worse off. Eon constructs flickered and sparked across the platform - a wolf-shaped one limped in circles, its hind legs shredded into wisps of dissolving light. Another, something that might have been a boar, lay in pieces near the center, already evaporating.

And above it all, screaming, smashing, completely out of its mind - the Nyx.

It was shaped like a huge bird. A really skinny bird, with a body too narrow for its wingspan and legs too long for its frame. Its beak was the worst part - absurdly long, thin as a needle, sharp enough that the air seemed to split around it when it moved. Like a hummingbird, if a hummingbird was three meters tall, made of darkness, and genuinely furious about everything.

Its feathers - if they could even be called that - rippled and shifted like smoke clinging to a shape it kept forgetting. Wisps trailed behind it as it flew, leaving dark streaks in the air that dissolved after a few seconds. Its claws were long, curved, and currently doing terrible things to the platform’s surface - gouging lines in the wood every time it swooped low.

And its eyes glowed. Bright, unfocused, the kind of glow that said"nothing behind these is thinking clearly".

It banked hard to the left, clipped a branch with its wing, and sent a shower of leaves and rain down onto the students below. Then it dove - straight at a cluster of Eon beasts near the center - and its claws ripped through them like paper. Three constructs came apart in a spray of golden light. The students who’d made them stumbled back, faces white.

The Nyx pulled up, screeched again, and slammed sideways chaotically into a trunk. The impact shook the branches above. More rain came down. The bird didn’t seem bothered - it peeled off the bark, shook itself, and launched back into the air like the collision was a minor inconvenience.

It wasn’t terrifying, exactly. It was something worse.

It was annoying.

The thing was fast, erratic, and completely unpredictable. It didn’t attack with strategy. It attacked with chaos - bouncing between targets like it couldn’t decide which one it wanted to destroy, shredding whatever got in its path, then immediately losing interest and going after something else. Fighting it would be like fighting a drunk wasp the size of a horse.

Kenzo didn’t hesitate.

He veered left, hit a low branch at a dead sprint, and launched himself off it. For a moment, he was airborne - a big muscular man, moving fast, fist cocked back. The Nyx had just landed on a railing, its long claws wrapping around the wood, head twitching in sharp, birdlike jerks.

Kenzo’s fist connected with its side.

The impact was solid. Raizen heard it from across the platform - a deep, stone-like thud that sent the Nyx spinning sideways off the railing and across the open air. It slammed into a trunk on the far side of the platform, hard enough to crack the bark, and a cascade of accumulated rainwater dumped from the branches above, drenching everything below.

For a split second, it looked like enough to make it dizzy.

Then the Nyx’s wing snapped out.

It moved faster than something its size should have been able to - one moment crumpled against the trunk, the next fully extended, the leading edge of its smoke-feathered wing cutting through the air like a blade. It caught Kenzo across the chest before he’d landed. Not a slash. A slap. The full flat of the wing hitting him with enough force to send him stumbling backward, arms windmilling, boots sliding on the wet wood.

Luckily, Kenzo caught himself on a railing, and grunted. His coat was smoking faintly where the wing had made contact - the Nyx’s body leaving dark residue on anything it touched.

"Raizen!" he shouted. His voice carried the specific frustration of a man who’d brought his fists to a monster fight. "I can’t do anything without my hammer!"

Before Raizen could respond, the door behind them opened.

Not urgently. Slowly, with the deliberate pace of someone who had assessed the situation from inside and decided it wasn’t worth rushing for.

Atman stepped out.

He looked different without the drowsy, post-drugged-meal energy Raizen had last seen him with. His eyes were sharp, as always. His posture was loose - the kind of loose that fighters cultivated, where every joint was ready to move in any direction at any moment. He took in the scene with a single sweep - the Nyx on the trunk, the scattered students, Kenzo braced against the railing - and nodded once to Raizen and Saffi.

Short. Almost playful.

Then he grinned.

Dark smoke gathered at his wrists as he shook the stiffness out of them. It curled out from his sleeves in thin tendrils - controlled, precise, nothing like the wild smoke-feathers of the Nyx. It wound around his forearms and condensed into something denser, almost solid.

He walked toward the Nyx.

The bird had recovered from Kenzo’s punch and was clinging to the trunk sideways, claws buried in the bark, head twitching as it tracked the new arrival. It screeched - shorter this time, almost defensive.

Atman flicked his wrist. A tendril of smoke lashed out and cracked across the Nyx’s beak like a whip.

The bird recoiled, screeching louder.

Another flick. Another crack. Atman was literally playing with the thing. This one caught it across the wing, and the Nyx lurched sideways, losing its grip on the bark for a moment before scrambling back up.

Atman laughed. Not a nervous laugh, or a battle-high laugh. The genuine laugh of someone who was enjoying themselves more than the situation warranted.

"Hah!" He twirled a tendril around his finger. "It’s just a weakling. Fortitude four-point-five, at most."

The Nyx’s head stopped twitching.

Its eyes - glowing, unfocused, wild - locked onto Atman. Something changed in its posture. The erratic energy compressed. The smoke-feathers flattened against its body. Its claws tightened on the bark.

Then it moved, but not in the the chaotic, bouncing, pinball flight way from before. A straight, quick lunge - wings tucked, beak forward, claws extended, aimed directly at Atman’s throat.

Fast. Really fast.

Atman’s grin vanished. He threw himself backward - spine bending, shoulders dropping, the lean taking him just far enough that the claws passed through the space where his neck had been a quarter-second earlier. He felt the wind of it. The displaced air ruffled his collar.

He hit the ground on his back, rolled, and came back up on one knee.

The Nyx was already twisting - its body corkscrewing mid-air with a flexibility that shouldn’t have been possible for something with a normal skeleton. Its claws swung around for another pass, and Atman barely had time to raise a wall of smoke between himself and the incoming strike -

Kenzo came from behind.

He grabbed the Nyx by its tail - a long, trailing appendage of condensed shadow that whipped behind it like a garden hose. His hands closed around it and he pulled, using his full weight, his full strength, as much as his body could handle without Eon.

The Nyx’s flight path broke. Its body jerked backward, wings flaring wide. Kenzo planted his feet and threw - a full overhead heave, the kind that used the hips and the core and every muscle from the ankles up.

The Nyx sailed through the air. It cleared the platform’s edge, tumbling end over end, smoke-feathers scattering in its wake.

It landed a few meters past the railing. Hovering, wings beating hard. Regaining its balance in the open air between the trunks.

Then it stopped.

Everything stopped. The students stopped. Kenzo stopped. Atman, still on one knee, stopped.

Because another sound had reached their ears.

...Or whatever hearing organ the Nyx had.

Not a screech. Not a roar. A whistle - high and powerful, the sound of something moving through atmosphere at a speed that compressed the air ahead of it into a narrow, screaming cone. The sound a missile makes in the half-second before impact.

It was coming from above.

Raizen looked up.

A black blur - small, dense, moving so fast it barely registered as a shape - dropped through the canopy like a stone thrown by a god. It punched through branches without slowing. Leaves exploded outward in its wake. The air around it rippled with the kind of distortion that only came from extreme velocity. 𝒇𝓻𝓮𝓮𝙬𝙚𝒃𝒏𝓸𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝓬𝓸𝒎

It was aimed directly at the Nyx.

The Nyx turned its head. Its glowing eyes caught the blur for a fraction of a second.