Chapter 363: Completely Vertical
"ELIN!" Raizen shouted. The wind tore the word before it reached her. He tried again, stretching his neck, trying to get closer to her ear without being flown back by the wind, his cracked lips nearly touching the dark red hair that whipped across her face. "ELIN! THE DRONES - THEY’RE FIRING TASER ROUNDS!"
She didn’t turn. Didn’t respond. The wind and the wingbeats and the high-pitched hum of the pursuing drones swallowed his voice before it could cover the distance between his mouth and her ears. He shouted again, louder, his throat raw, and the words scattered uselessly into the roaring air.
A second bolt fired. Neon blue, bright enough to leave an afterimage, streaking past Elin’s left shoulder close enough that the static charge made a strand of her dark red hair stand straight out from her head. The bolt hit a branch ahead of them and the branch exploded - a sharp crack, splinters flying, the wood blackened and smoking.
Elin saw that one.
Her body stiffened visibly. Her head turned - just enough to catch the smoking branch in her peripheral vision as the dragon flew past it, just enough to register the neon blue residue crackling on the shattered wood.
"Oh, shoot" she said.
The words carried genuine concern, which from Elin was approximately equivalent to full-blown panic from anyone else. Her eyes went to the dragon beneath them - a quick, protective glance at the creature’s wings and body, as if the taser bolts weren’t just a threat to the riders but to the dragon itself. Whatever those projectiles carried, it was enough to worry someone who’d been calm about catching a falling teenager at terminal velocity.
She responded the way Elin responded to everything: by making the situation more extreme.
The dragon dove. Not the controlled descent from before - a full, committed plunge, wings folded, body streamlined, dropping through the canopy like a stone with intent. Raizen’s stomach inverted. The trunks blurred into vertical streaks of dark brown, the platforms becoming horizontal flashes of lantern-lit wood, the entire vertical structure of Ukai compressing around them as they fell through its layers at a speed that made the wind scream.
A gap appeared between two massive branches - barely wide enough for the dragon’s wingspan, the clearance measured in centimeters on either side. Elin aimed for it. The dragon’s wings flared at the last instant, adjusting its trajectory by fractions of a degree, and they shot through the gap so close that the wingtips touched bark on both sides and left thin lines of scraped wood behind them.
Two of the drones followed. The third tried a wider path around the branch and lost ahalf-second of positioning.
Elin rolled. A full barrel roll, the dragon’s body rotating three hundred and sixty degrees around its longitudinal axis while maintaining forward velocity, Raizen’s world inverting and righting itself in a continuous, nauseating spin that he survived only because his arms were locked around the scale, and trying to let go would have meant death.
A taser bolt passed through the space where they’d been a half-second earlier. Then another, from a different angle. The drones were firing in alternation now, staggering their shots to cover the gaps between each other’s reload cycles. The neon blue bolts stitched through the dark air in patterns that were tightening, narrowing, learning the dragon’s movement profile and adjusting their lead accordingly.
Elin pulled another manoeuvre - a sharp climb that became a sudden brake, the dragon’s wings spreading wide and catching the air like parachutes, the creature decelerating from full speed to near-stationary in a distance that no living thing should have been able to survive. The drones overshot, their momentum carrying them past the suddenly stopped dragon, and for one second all three were ahead of their target instead of behind it.
Elin used the second. The dragon dove again, banking left, threading a new path through the lower canopy.
But the drones corrected. Their rotors adjusted, their navigation systems recalculated, and within moments they were behind the dragon again, formation rebuilt, distance closing. Whatever was driving them - whatever automate intelligence, was making decisions behind those neon blue lights - it was learning. Every manoeuvre Elin tried, the drones adapted to. Every gap she threaded, they followed through. Every trick that bought a second of distance was repaid with interest as the machines adjusted their algorithms and tightened their pursuit.
Elin couldn’t lose them.
Raizen felt it in her body - the shift from confident evasion to something slightly slower and more calculated. She was running out of tricks. The canopy was running out of obstacles. And the drones were running out of patience, their taser bolts coming faster and closer with each passing second.
"Hold on." Elin said again.
But this time the words were different. Quieter, carrying a weight that the previous "hold on" hadn’t had. This wasn’t a warning about a manoeuvre. This was a warning about a decision.
She leaned forward. All the way - her chest pressing flat against the dragon’s neck, her body conforming to the creature’s shape, minimizing drag, becoming part of the aerodynamic profile rather than an obstacle on top of it. Her hands found grips that Raizen couldn’t see, and her legs tightened against the dragon’s sides with a pressure that mosty likely meant "this is going to be fast and I need you to not fall off because I won’t be able to catch you a second time."
"Hold on as strong as you can" she said.
Raizen didn’t question it. His mind was too blurred, too battered, too saturated with adrenaline and grief and wind and the residual shock of everything that had happened since he’d opened a folder in an aircraft and found out that Eiden’s hand was fighting a war against Eon itself. He just grabbed.
Both arms around Elin’s waist, pulled tight, his chest against her back, his cheek pressed into the space between her shoulder blades. He held on with everything his exhausted body had left – even a bit of Eon reinforcement flooding into his arms and hands from reserves he didn’t know he still possessed, the Eon boost from the glowing clouds feeding him just enough to maintain a grip that his natural strength couldn’t have sustained.
Elin gasped. A short, sharp intake of breath as his arms compressed around her midsection with more force than she’d anticipated. She didn’t tell him to ease up.
The dragon’s wings changed position. All four of them - the two primary and the two secondary - rotating unnaturaly on their joints, angling upward, the configuration shifting from horizontal flight to something Raizen had never felt before.
Vertical.
Completely vertical.
