The ascent hit him like a wall. One instant they were flying forward through the canopy, and the next the world rotated ninety degrees and they were going straight up - not climbing, not ascending gradually, but launching vertically with an acceleration that pressed Raizen's body against Elin's with a force that made his arms scream, his vision tunnel and his consciousness flicker at the edges like a candle in a hurricane.
The trunks fell away below them. The platforms shrank. The lanterns became dots, then specks, then gone. Ukai's canopy - the dense green ceiling that had been his world for days - disappeared beneath them as the dragon punched through the sky and kept climbing, the four wings beating in a rhythm that was no longer flight but powerful propulsion, each stroke driving them higher with a power that compressed the air beneath them into visible shockwaves.
Raizen couldn't open his eyes. The wind was too fast, too cold, too forceful - it would have torn the moisture from the corners of his eyes and left him blind. He kept them shut and felt the ascent through his body instead. The pressure. The acceleration. The temperature dropping with each meter of altitude gained, the air thinning until each breath delivered less oxygen than the last and his lungs had to work harder for diminishing returns.
They were above Ukai. Way above. At least two times higher than the tallest trunks, higher than anything Raizen had ever been, climbing through open air that had nothing in it except cold and wind and the increasingly close glow of something vast and white above them.
The clouds. They were flying toward the clouds.
Raizen forced his eyes open. Just a crack - a narrow slit between his lids, his lashes filtering the wind, tears streaming horizontally across his temples from the sheer velocity of the air.
And through the blur and the tears and the narrow gap between his eyelids, he saw it.
Right in front of them, filling the entire sky, close enough that the glow was no longer diffuse but textured - close enough to see the shapes within the white, the density variations, the slow internal movements of something that looked like light made solid - the cloud ceiling.
The permanent, grey, centuries-old ceiling of the world.
Glowing from within. The ceiling no aircraft, creature or drone could have passed before, because of the sheer Eon currents running through it. Kenzo told him of specialized aircrafts - best technology the world has ever seen - made for the sole purpose of passing through the clouds. They all failed miserably, leaving only scraps behind. The Eon frequencies and sheer strength ripped apart anything that tried to pass. โฆAt least, anything mechanical.
And they were flying straight into it.
The dragon didn't slow down.
Its wings adjusted - the angle shifting, the beat pattern changing from raw vertical thrust to something more controlled - but the speed was the same. They pierced the cloud layer's underside and the world became white.
Not the gentle, diffuse white that Raizen had seen from below - the sourceless glow that had turned Ukai's night into something dreamlike. This was dense. Thick. A wall of compressed moisture and light that swallowed visibility instantly, reducing the world to a sphere of maybe three meters around the dragon's body. Beyond that sphere, nothing - just white, pressing in from every direction, so bright and so uniform that Raizen's sense of direction dissolved within seconds. Up, down, left, right - the cloud layer ate them all and replaced them with a featureless nothing that hummed.
The Eon hit him next.
It wasn't like the ambient boost he'd felt on the ground - the gentle, five-times amplification that had fueled his training with Kenzo. This was raw. Chaotic. The Eon currents inside the cloud layer didn't flow in any direction Raizen could track. They collided, split, reformed, collided again, crossing each other in patterns that had no pattern, generating interference waves that pressed against his body from every angle simultaneously. His skin tingled, then ached, then burned in patches as competing Eon frequencies passed through him in conflicting directions.
He squinted upward through the white. And he could see them - the discharges. Far above, deeper in the cloud layer, where the Eon density climbed toward whatever lay at the ceiling's core, the currents became visible. They looked like lightning, but wrong - curved and jagged at the same time, intertwining instead of branching, thick ribbons of raw Eon energy that arced across the white space and shredded anything in their path. They moved in slow, serpentine coils that crossed and recrossed each other, weaving a lattice of destructive force that covered the sky above him in every direction.
Nothing could pass through that. Not metal, not wood, not any material humanity had ever built. The specialized aircrafts Kenzo had mentioned - the best technology the world had ever produced - would have been torn apart in miliseconds. The Eon currents weren't a barrier in the traditional sense. They were a grinder. A shredding field, perpetually active, perpetually chaotic, reducing anything mechanical that entered the upper layers to components so small they ceased to exist.
Behind them, the drones followed into the cloud layer.
โฆFor about four seconds.
The first drone crossed the boundary and immediately began sparking - blue-white arcs jumping between its housing and its rotors, the neon lights on its underside flickering in rapid, irregular patterns. Its flight path wobbled, corrected, wobbled again. The chaotic Eon currents were doing to its systems what they'd do to anything mechanical - scrambling navigation, disrupting electronics, feeding conflicting signals into sensors that had been designed for clean air and stable frequencies.
The second drone fared worse. It entered the cloud layer tilted, one rotor already stuttering, and the Eon interference hit its control systems like a hammer hitting a clock. It spun once, twice, its lights blinking in a frantic morse code of system failures, and then it dropped - falling backward out of the cloud layer, trailing smoke and sparks, its rotors seizing one by one.
The third drone didn't even try. It hovered at the boundary, its lights blinking, its systems calculating, and then it banked away and fell, completely dead. The machine equivalent of deciding that this wasn't worth it.
The pursuit was over.
But they were still inside the cloud layer.
