Chapter 362: Hold On
All of a sudden, the dragon banked hard and Raizen’s stomach tried to leave through his throat.
The world tilted - trunks swinging from vertical to horizontal, the glowing clouds rotating overhead, the amber lanterns of Ukai streaking past in blurred lines as the four-winged creature carved a turn through the upper canopy that would have torn a normal aircraft apart. Raizen’s arms tightened around Elin’s waist, his face pressed against her back, every muscle in his body dedicated to the single task of not falling off something moving at a speed his brain refused to calculate.
Elin flew the way she did everything - with a calm, precise control that made the impossible look like a minor adjustment in her schedule. Her body moved with the dragon, leaning into turns, shifting weight for altitude changes, her hands gripping ridges along the creature’s neck that served as natural reins. She hadn’t explained where they were going. She hadn’t asked what had happened. She’d caught him, confirmed he was alive, and just started flying.
The strip of shirt around Raizen’s face caught the wind and peeled upward, the knot loosening. He grabbed it with one hand, pressed it back against his nose, and immediately regretted letting go of Elin because the dragon chose that exact moment to tilt sideways between two trunks that were close enough together to scrape bark off both of them.
He didn’t grab her waist this time. He chose a deep ridge between two scales, something sticking out from the back, just enough for him to grip and not fall.
The dragon leveled out, its four wings beating in deep, powerful alternations that pushed them forward through the canopy at a speed that turned branches into whips and leaves into projectiles. The creature navigated the forest’s architecture with an instinct that suggested it had flown these spaces before - banking around trunks, ducking under bridges, threading gaps that looked too narrow until they were through them and the gap was behind them and the next one was already approaching.
Then Raizen heard it.
A hum. High-pitched, mechanical, coming from behind them. Not the organic wingbeat of the dragon or the natural rush of wind through canopy. Something engineered - a sound produced by motors, by rotors, by technology that had no business being in a forest at midnight.
He twisted his head and looked back.
Three shapes. Small, angular, moving through the canopy in formation - two flanking wide, one trailing centre. They were dark against the glowing cloud ceiling, their outlines sharp and geometric in a way that living things never were. Each one roughly the size of a large dog, with stubby winglets and a central rotor housing that produced the high-pitched hum. Lights blinked on their undersides - neon blue, rhythmic, the cold precision of automated systems tracking a target.
Drones. Three of them, maintaining formation, matching the dragon’s speed through the canopy with the mechanical persistence of things that didn’t need to breathe or rest or decide. They seemed autonomous – their motions were too smooth for a human pilot.
Raizen had never seen anything like them. The technology was beyond Neoshima, beyond the Academy, beyond even the Heart, beyond anything he’d encountered in his limited experience of the world’s hardware. They moved with a fluidity that suggested their navigation wasn’t pre-programmed but adaptive - reading the environment in real time, adjusting course around obstacles the way the dragon did, matching every turn and roll and altitude change with a delay measured in fractions of a second. Their surfaces were matte black and featureless, absorbing the cloud glow rather than reflecting it, which made them difficult to track against the dark trunks and the sky. If it weren’t for the neon blinking lights blinking on their undersides, they would have been nearly invisible.
And they were closing the gap. Fast.
Whatever propulsion system drove them was efficient enough to match a four-winged dragon in a forest canopy, which was a sentence Raizen never thought he’d need to construct and deeply wished he didn’t. The dragon was fast - faster than anything else Raizen had experienced in the air. But the drones were somehow keeping pace.
"Hold on!" Elin shouted.
Raizen remembered what those words meant when Elin said them. He’d ridden this dragon before. He knew the vocabulary. "Hold on" didn’t mean "be careful." It meant "what I’m about to do will try to kill you, and your job is to not let it."
He grabbed the scale with both arms and locked his hands together around it.
Elin leaned forward and the dragon responded - a sharp, violent change in trajectory that converted horizontal flight into a downward spiral, the creature corkscrewing through a gap between platforms with its wings tucked and its body rotating fast enough that the world became a centrifuge of dark and light and dark again.
The drones followed. Their formation broke momentarily as the spiral tightened, the two flanking units pulling wide to avoid a trunk that the dragon had threaded by centimeters, but the centre unit matched the spiral’s radius perfectly and closed the distance by two meters.
Elin pulled up. The dragon’s wings snapped open and caught the air, converting the downward spiral into a sharp vertical climb that pressed Raizen’s body against the creature’s back with a force that made his vision darken at the edges. They shot upward between two trunks, cleared a bridge by the width of a hand, and banked left into a corridor of open air between the residential platforms.
The drones reformed. Still there. Still tracking.
Raizen opened his eyes for a fraction of a second - just a glimpse, just enough to get his bearings - and a bolt of neon blue light passed so close to his face that he felt the static charge lift the hairs on his cheek.
It hit a trunk behind them. The bark cracked and sizzled where the bolt landed, a blackened mark left behind that smelled like ozone and burned wood.
Raizen’s blood went cold.
A taser projectile. Ranged, accurate, fired from a drone moving at full speed through a forest canopy. The neon blue glow he’d seen on their undersides wasn’t lighting - it was weaponry. Charged, ready, aimed at anything the drones’ targeting systems locked onto.
And they were locked onto the dragon.
