Chapter 213: Chapter 213

The air beneath the grates detonated into a column that seized Fabrisse’s legs, back, ribs all at once. He felt his feet leave the ground, but then the sensation was gone.

Fabrisse peered down and saw a crystal bulwark already blocking the wind beneath them. Faceted and translucent, it angled downward like the face of a slanted shield. Wind screamed against it, scattering into a thousand fractured currents that clawed along its surface.

They didn’t rise as fast.

That was the victory.

“Vertical denial.” Severa gritted her teeth. “Approaching this bat is going to be profoundly inconvenient.”

The bulwark shuddered again. The pressure didn’t fluctuate; it layered, like the chamber was stacking the same force over and over rather than changing direction.

That was when Fabrisse noticed the silence between gusts.

No crosscurrents grabbed at his cloak. No eddies scraped sideways along the shield’s edge. The air was laminar, impossibly so, a single coherent flow rising from below and threading the entire chamber like a spine. Every breath, every loose thread, every grain of grit moved with it or not at all.

Shapes peeled themselves out of the darkness above and dropped themselves into the current. The miniature vaultwings came first, angling their bodies just enough to let the rising air catch beneath their membranes.

They didn’t flap. The wind carried them.

They accelerated frighteningly fast, silhouettes sharpening into jagged detail as they rode the same column lifting Fabrisse and Severa.

He took out his Stupenstone and placed it on his slingshot. This wasn’t time to think about wind.

Severa didn’t turn her head. Her left hand remained splayed, and with the remaining hand, she shot a Fireball at the incoming bats. It struck the lead vaultling; it flashed white-hot, smashing into the ones behind it. Immediately, five bats were incinerated.

If she could do that—

Another vaultling broke formation, peeling away from the column in a shallow arc that would bring it close; too close.

He sighted slightly below the creature, judging where the column would carry the stone once it left the sling. I have to keep the wind against me in mind,

He’d never fired before. Not into a moving air mass this dense, not while being carried by the same force he was trying to exploit. But the theory surfaced anyway: wind advects. Once a projectile surrendered to a coherent flow, it stopped behaving like something being resisted and started behaving like something being transported.

Which meant fighting it was pointless.

You compensated by letting the wind do the work and correcting for the moment of entry.

Fabrisse tilted the sling a few degrees off-center, not aiming at the vaultling but at the space it would occupy after the stone was caught by the column. He adjusted again, lower than instinct allowed, forcing himself to trust the math rather than his eyes.

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The theory was sound. The execution wasn’t.

His release was too clean. The Stupenstone soared forward, vanished into the column . . . and then simply wasn’t there anymore. The wind accepted it and carried it somewhere above and behind, out of sight and utterly uninterested in his intentions.

Fabrisse’s stomach dropped.

The vaultling twitched. Not evasive—aware. Its obsidian eyes locked on with a focus that made his skin crawl. The laminar flow tightened around his body, lifting his left side higher than his right. Being held by Severa, his center of mass slipping just enough to turn his stance into an awkward diagonal. There would be no way to catch the creature with his Aetherrealm pocket from this angle.

The vaultling banked fully out of formation now. Its path bent toward him in a shallow spiral, fanning its wings. No time to reset properly.

He yanked another stone from his pouch and set it into the sling one-handed. His leg kicked the empty air. Don’t aim where it is. Aim where the wind will take it to me.

The stone lurched into the column, got seized by the wind, got swung back into the main flow, then punched the vaultling in the head as it turned.

Estimated Launch Velocity: 37 m/s + 20% (Tailwind)

[Damaged Dealt: Bone-Crushing Damage]

The stone shattered against bone. The vaultling screamed, its alignment collapsing as the laminar flow rejected it instantly. It tumbled past Fabrisse in a blur of limbs and torn wing, vanishing downward into the dark.

Severa’s last Fireball exploded in a shower of cinders, and the remaining miniature vaultwings evaporated into nothingness. The chamber fell silent for a heartbeat, except for the roar of the rising column beneath them. Fabrisse’s boots scraped against the bulwark, keeping him aligned with Severa’s controlled ascent, and he squinted downward.

Below, Tommaso hovered like a glowing comet. His entire body blazed in Fireform, the aura rippling along him as if he were both conduit and engine. He bent his knees, tilted his torso, and fired the natural propulsive jets of his fire aura like some sort of thruster, pushing sideways to thread the stream of wind and avoid being swept uncontrollably toward the ceiling. Fabrisse felt a pang of respect: this was raw skill, an intimate understanding of airflow, energy, and self-preservation.

Yet even with every maneuver, Tommaso was nowhere near Noctyn. The apex predator remained a dark silhouette high above, bathed in shadow and rippling with weirdly distorted aether.

Seeing an opening, Tommaso ignited a Pyrostream. The stream hissed as it cut into the wind, but the laminar column refused to let it through. It peeled around the fire, diverting it sideways before it could even graze the creature.

Tommaso adjusted again, floating laterally with the wind instead of resisting it, seeking calmer patches of the current. Even at full Fireform, he could only keep pace with the column; getting to Noctyn was a distant dream.

Fabrisse murmured, “That creature . . . it’s a living atmospheric governor.” It didn’t generate the wind, but it had perfect control over how wind behaved inside this chamber. “Tom will never get to it.”

Severa only nodded. She was probably deep in thought. So Fabrisse kept watching.

The Grand Luminary was still standing. Barely.

His aura glowed, brilliant and dense, compressing the air around him into a shimmering cocoon of resistance. Wind struck it and warped, flattening into smooth, impossible curves as if pressed against invisible glass. For a heartbeat, it looked as though he truly had mastered it.

Then the pressure increased again.

I saw it then—the tell.

His shoulders tightened. The lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. The aura didn’t weaken, but it thinned, stretched like metal under too much load. The wind slid, flowed, found angles that didn’t exist a moment before.

The current curled underneath him, and lifted him. His teeth bared, breath forced out in a sharp exhale as he drove power downward, trying to reclaim authority over something that refused to acknowledge him.

The wind didn’t fight him.

It rose anyway, carrying him with it, inexorable as a tide.

Severa huffed. “I’ve told him. We need to assist him.”

“No time.” Fabrisse pointed up.

Noctyn’s wings folded. Its eyes lit up like purple lanterns.

Then it glided down, straight at them.