Chapter 5 - Absolute Dread
She made the mammoth look like a mangy dog.
Ignis didn't land; she dropped like an executioner’s axe. Her wings didn't flutter—they snapped outward, blotting out half the visible horizon, blotting out what little gray daylight the ash sky offered. Veins of radioactive violet fire writhed beneath her obsidian scales, pulsing rhythmically from her chest plate straight up to her crown of jagged horns.
She stood sixty feet tall at the shoulder, radiating a heat so intense that the dry grass caught in the mammoth’s fur began to smoke instantly.
Zephyr, lying broken in the dirt between her front talons, shrank until he felt smaller than a pebble. He could feel the sheer, suffocating gravity of her aura. She wasn't just his mother right now; she was an ancient calamity that had survived the purging of the world.
She didn't look down at him. Her eyes were locked solely on the mammoth.
"You touched the bloodline," she didn't speak through her mind; she vibrated the very marrow in the mammoth’s bones.
The bull mammoth was terrified, but it was an old bull. It had survived saber-toothed prides and ice storms. Driven by primal instinct, it lowered its head, leveled its massive iron-banded tusks, and let out a bellowing squeal of defiance. It dug its rear feet in, churning the volcanic soil, and charged.
Ten tons of furious, muscle-bound beast rocketed across the twenty-yard gap.
Ignis didn't even shift her stance. She didn't crouch to brace for impact. She simply raised her left foreclaw, a terrifying web of black bone tipped with scythes longer than broadswords.
She met the charge with an open palm.
The collision sounded like a cathedral bell cracking.
The mammoth hit her claw at full gallop—and stopped dead. The kinetic shockwave rippled back through the beast’s body, shattering its collarbones with an audible crunch. Ignis didn't yield an inch of ground. Her talons merely clamped down over the bull's forehead, digging through thick hide and bone plate like it was wet clay.
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She leaned down, her maw splitting open to reveal rows of glowing, white-hot daggers.
"Run," she whispered.
