The door was closing. The wide rectangular opening at the aircraft's rear was shrinking, the heavy metal panel descending from above in a slow, inexorable arc. Through the narrowing gap, Raizen could see the platform - the warm yellow light from the hall, the unconscious guards, the night sky beyond.
The gap was a meter wide. Then half a meter. Then -
The lizard jumped.
Raizen felt it leave - the small weight in his pocket managing to finally escape, after all the minutes of struggle, the tiny body launching itself from the fabric with a force that something that size shouldn't have been able to produce. It cleared his chest, hit the floor, and scrambled toward the closing door with a speed that turned its small legs into a blur of black motion.
It reached the door's edge with centimeters to spare.
And then it did something Raizen had never seen it do.
It stood up.
The tiny back legs planted on the aircraft's floor, the front legs reaching for the door's descending edge, and the lizard rose to its full height – a few good centimeters of creature standing upright for the first time since it was born, its body forming a vertical line between the floor and the metal panel that was grinding downward with the slow, unstoppable force of a hidraulic machine that didn't know or care what was in its path.
Its scales changed.
The smooth black skin rippled from head to tail, each individual scale thickening and restructuring, the edges rising and overlapping the next in a cascade that transformed the lizard's skin from something soft and flexible into something hard and interlocking. Armour. Miniature plates of reinforced scale, each one clicking into place against its neighbour, the pattern precise and familiar in a way that hit Raizen with a shock of recognition - he'd seen this before. On something much, much larger. The same overlapping geometry, the same structural logic, the same design that covered the body of a creature with four wings enough speed to obliterate a Nyx in a single pass.
Elin's dragon. The lizard's scales looked like Elin's dragon's scales.
The door hit the lizard and stopped.
The hydraulic mechanism ground against the resistance - a deep, straining screech that vibrated through the aircraft's floor and walls, the machine pushing its full force against an obstacle that weighed almost nothing and should have been crushed instantly. The lizard's armoured body compressed between the door's edge and the floor, and a sound came from it that Raizen had never heard - not a shriek, not a complaint, not a word. A grunt. Low, physical, raw, the sound of something bearing weight that was orders of magnitude beyond what its body was designed for and refusing, through sheer will or stubbornness or whatever force lived inside a fragment of scattered Eon and memories, to let that weight win.
The gap was maybe thirty centimeters. The door had stopped its descent, pinned by a small armoured lizard that trembled visibly under the load, its reinforced scales pressing into the metal floor hard enough to leave marks.
"GO!" the lizard screamed. The word came out compressed and strained, squeezed between the pressure above and the floor below, but it carried - loud, desperate, carrying a command that left no room for hesitation or heroics or the instinct to help.
Raizen dove. Hit the floor back-first and slid on the smooth metal surface, his body passing through the gap between the door's bottom edge and the floor with centimeters of clearance. His shirt caught on something - a rivet, a seam - and tore, and then he was through, the lizard's armoured back scraping against his side as he passed under it. Hard, rigid, hot from the effort of holding against the hydraulic press. He felt the individual scales against his skin through the torn shirt, each one distinct and desperately solid.
Just as he passed the door, Raizen looked down.
The platform was gone.
Below him, where solid stone had been thirty seconds ago, there was nothing. Open air. The dark shapes of Ukai's trunks falling away beneath him, the amber dots of lanterns shrinking as the aircraft climbed in the air, the forest floor invisible somewhere far, far below in the darkness.
And he was now in the air, right above everything.
The aircraft had lifted off. While he was inside, while the alarm screamed and the door closed and the lizard held, the vehicle had risen from the platform and begun its ascent. Silently, smoothly, the autopilot engaging without warning or hesitation.
Raizen's hands found a ledge - a narrow rail that ran along the aircraft's outer hull, barely wider than his fingers. He grabbed it. His body swung outward into the open air, legs dangling, the full weight of him hanging from a grip that his fingers maintained through pure reflex and residual reinforcement still sitting in his forearms.
The wind hit him. Cold, fast, carrying the smell of wet wood and becoming colder with altitude. Below, the distance grew. Twenty meters. Thirty. Forty.
He twisted his head back toward the door. The gap was still there - the lizard still holding, its tiny armoured body compressed to its absolute limit, the scales cracking at the edges, the hydraulic mechanism screaming against the resistance.
Raizen hung from the ledge and couldn't do anything but watch. The gap was shrinking. Not fast - millimeter by millimeter, the hydraulic door winning its slow war against the creature holding it open. The lizard's armoured scales were fracturing at the edges, tiny pieces breaking away and dissolving into golden particles that the wind caught and carried upward into the dark sky.
The lizard's eyes found his through the gap. Pale gold, enormous, the pupils fully dilated. Its small body was shaking - a visible, full-body tremor that traveled through the armoured scales and into the door and into the aircraft's hull, the vibration of something that was giving everything it had and running out of everything to give.
"I can't -" the lizard said. The voice was strained, compressed, the words squeezed out between clenched lizard jaws and the grinding pressure of the door against its body. "- hold - much longer -"
