Chapter 123: Go Riker
Riker flew into the air above, and Silas rushed from below. Both of them did not have their weapons on them right now, and this was meant to be a scouting mission, which had now turned into a battle, and they had to fight that way.
Riker pulled both hands back and threw them forward. A surge of flames came out and rushed like a meteor. Most lizardmen were descendants of dragons, and their affinities were mostly fire.
The snake looked up as the flames came down. It tried to move out of the way as fast as it could, but the flames slammed into the ground. The snake slithered fast. One head locked onto Silas, and it unleashed a powerful venom projection.
Silas stomped his foot and manipulated the wind to divert the venom in the air and clear the way to the snake. He rushed forward, low and fast, wind claws forming around his hands as he closed the distance.
The snake’s second head swung down to intercept him.
Silas ducked under it, drove his wind claw into the side of its neck, and the impact pushed the head sideways with enough force to send it crashing into the ground. Riker came down from above at the same moment, both palms forward, a concentrated stream of flame driving into the snake’s body from the top.
The snake writhed.
It tried to pull both heads back and reorient, but they gave it no room to recover, Silas cutting off the ground angles while Riker controlled the air above, their rhythm finding itself naturally, each one filling the gap the other left before the snake could exploit it.
Flames hit it from above. Wind claws raked it from below. It took three exchanges of this, and by the third, the snake was visibly struggling, its movements losing the fluid precision they had carried at the start, its heads moving reactively rather than deliberately.
Then it released the fog.
It came from somewhere beneath its scales, not breath, not venom, just a dense grey cloud that expanded outward in every direction from the snake’s body faster than either of them expected.
Silas felt it on his skin before he understood what it was.
Not his lungs. His skin. A creeping weakness that moved through wherever the fog made contact, subtle at first and then not subtle at all, his legs feeling like the weight in them had doubled without warning.
"The fog," Riker called from above, his voice carrying the edge of someone who had just made the same realization. "It’s contact. It doesn’t need to be breathed."
Silas planted his feet and threw both arms out, driving a concentrated burst of wind outward from his body in every direction, pushing the fog back, carving a clear space around himself. He held it, the wind constant, his arms shaking slightly with the effort of maintaining it while the weakness from what had already touched him worked its way through his muscles.
The snake attacked.
It came with a fury it had not shown before. Something changed in the quality of its movement, more committed, more reckless, like something in it had decided the cost did not matter anymore. The first head came down at Silas with its full weight behind it, and he barely got a wind claw up in time, the impact driving him back several meters, his feet carving furrows in the ground.
The second head swung wide and fast.
Riker dropped in from the side, flame forward, trying to intercept it.
The head caught him anyway.
Not the bite, but the sheer force of it connecting with his body mid-descent and sending him sideways into the ground hard, his scales taking most of it, but not enough, and he hit the earth, rolled, and did not get up immediately.
One head swung toward him while he was down.
Silas moved.
He crossed the distance in a single burst of speed and threw himself between the descending head and Riker, his arm coming up as the only thing available to block with.
The teeth found his arm.
The bite closed around it, and the poison moved into his bloodstream immediately, not a slow seep but a rush, and Silas felt it the way you felt something that was not interested in being gradual about what it was doing. His vision swam once and then steadied, but the steadying cost him something he could feel the absence of.
The snake released him and drew back.
Then it started growing.
The process was not subtle. Its body expanded outward, the scales stretching and darkening, its heads rising higher as the neck lengthened, its overall mass doubling in the space of a few seconds until what stood in front of them was not the same creature they had engaged at the start of this fight.
Silas looked at it.
He looked at Riker, still on the ground, getting to his feet slowly.
"Go," Silas said.
Riker looked at him. "I am not leaving you here with..."
"Go find Master Ren," Silas said. "Tell him something is wrong out here. The monsters are not normal. They are stronger than they should be, more vicious. Something is changing them." He kept his eyes on the snake. "He needs to know."
"I am not leaving," Riker said flatly.
"Riker."
"No."
The snake’s head dropped low, both of them reading it, and then a figure stepped into the edge of the clearing.
Cloaked from head to toe, no face visible, no detail available, just a shape that stood at the treeline and raised one hand without ceremony. A ball of fire formed above that hand, not the controlled working flame that Riker produced, but something enormous and dense, the kind of fire that was not interested in being precise about what it touched.
Silas looked at it.
Looked at Riker.
"Leave," he said. "Now."
"Silas..."
The gust that came from Silas hit Riker before he finished the word, a massive, concentrated burst of wind that picked him up entirely and threw him deep into the forest, the trees swallowing him before he could reorient enough to fight back against the current.
By the time the wind died, he was gone.
Silas turned back to face the snake and the figure standing behind it.