Noel didn’t look back. He grabbed Eleanor by the arm and lifted her as though she weighed absolutely nothing, his movents careless and almost rough with indifference.
She barely had ti to understand what was happening before he swung his arm and released her, and her body launched through the air like she was nothing more than a loose object he’d decided to set aside.
"HEY—!"
The scream tore out of her throat before she could stop it, raw and panicked, as the wind rushed hard against her face and the ground below her beca a blur.
Elderic saw it happen and didn’t hesitate. He shoved through the pain that had been grinding at him for the past several minutes and threw himself forward, and he caught her just before she could hit anything solid.
The montum forced him backward, his boots scraping against the cracked earth, but his arms locked around her and held on. For a mont, neither of them moved or spoke. They both stared at the sa thing.
Noel had already turned away from her completely, as though she had never been relevant to begin with.
His eyes were fixed on the Chira, and nothing else existed for him.
The creature roared and lunged, its massive tail whipping through the air with a force that bent the surrounding trees and sent dirt scattering across the ground. It was the kind of strike that could snap stone, the kind that left craters, and it moved directly at Noel’s body.
But it stopped.
There was no dramatic sound, no explosion of effort.
The tail simply stopped in the air, and Noel stood with one arm raised, his fingers wrapped around it like he’d caught a piece of drifting cloth. His expression didn’t shift by even a fraction. He held the enormous limb steady while it trembled against his grip, and then he pushed it away with a slow, almost bored movent of his hand.
The tail snapped back and slamd into the dirt behind the Chira with a sound that shook the ground.
Noel reached behind his back and pulled out a stick. It was a plain and utterly unremarkable thing, the kind you’d find on the forest floor without giving it a second thought, and he pointed it toward the Chira with the sa casual energy soone might use when gesturing at sothing mildly interesting across the street.
"Co here, baby."
The words ca out flat, almost gentle, and sohow that made them worse.
The Chira’s rage beca sothing almost primal.
It lunged again, its claws slashing down in rapid and relentless succession, each strike fast enough to blur.
Noel moved through all of it without apparent effort, his body swaying left and then right, drifting between the attacks with the kind of calm that didn’t belong in a fight. At one point, his hand shot out and he slapped the side of the creature’s face with an open palm, and the sound of it rang out sharp and clear above everything else.
The Chira paused for just a fraction of a second, sothing almost like confusion crossing those enormous, furious eyes.
Noel kept moving, kept dodging, but sothing in his face had started to change. His eyes had narrowed slightly, and they were tracking the creature with a focus that hadn’t been there before. He saw it now, clearly and without question.
The places where his attacks had landed were healing and growing.
The Chira was getting larger, its body pulling in on itself and rebuilding into sothing denser and more erratic, and the pattern of its regeneration had the quality of sothing deeply wrong. Noel slowed just enough to mutter under his breath, though his voice carried no particular alarm.
"The hell is going on?"
He turned his head slightly toward Reed, and Reed, who had been watching with a tension that had turned his whole body rigid, understood the question imdiately. He pushed himself upright and called out across the distance between them, his voice strained but steady enough.
"It regrows whatever gets cut, and it absorbs energy attacks by swallowing them whole. To actually kill it, you have to cut it into pieces first, then destroy everything at once before it can pull itself back together."
Noel turned that over for a mont, his gaze drifting back toward the Chira.
"Ah," he said simply, as though soone had just explained why a door was sticking.
He looked at the creature. The creature looked at him. And then the stillness that settled between them had a different quality to it, sothing that made Elderic tighten his hold on Eleanor without fully understanding why.
His figure blurred, and the stick passed through the air once, then twice, then several more tis in a sequence so precise and so rapid that the individual movents beca impossible to follow.
There was nothing theatrical about any of it. No charging of energy, no visible buildup, no sound beyond the faint displacent of air. The cuts appeared across the Chira’s body in long, clean lines that crossed each other in a pattern too deliberate to be anything but intentional, and the air itself seed to split apart at the edges of each one.
Trees at the far end of the clearing fell without any sound at first, severed through their trunks before the crack of it even reached the ears. The ground fractured along strange angles.
The Chira stood completely still.
Then the blood ca, all at once, erupting from every cut simultaneously, and its body ca apart in clean and terrible sections that hit the ground in heavy silence. The surrounding area had been reduced to fragnts, the destruction reaching out in every direction from where Noel stood, and he hadn’t moved from that spot.
He lowered the stick slowly.
"Now that makes more sense," he said, and exhaled once through his nose, sothing almost like relief in the sound of it. "Still annoying, though."
But the Chira was not done.
The pieces were already moving. Chunks of flesh dragged themselves across the torn ground, bones snapping back into alignnt with sounds like breaking branches, veins stretching between the separated masses like threads being pulled taut on a loom. Its roar ca out distorted and fractured, but the fury in it had not diminished by even a degree.
Noel watched it without moving.
"Finish it!" Reed’s voice cracked with urgency, and the sound of it clearly irritated Noel in a way that was quiet but unmistakable.
"Shut up and step back," Noel said, and his tone was flat and unhurried, though it carried sothing underneath it that made stepping back feel like the only reasonable option. "Let the man enjoy himself for a mont."
He turned his attention back to the regenerating mass before him and studied it.
"So you’re the kind that refuses to die," he said quietly.
His grip on the stick adjusted, just slightly.
The air around him changed in a way that was difficult to na, a pressure that settled against the skin and made the breath feel heavier, a shift in the atmosphere that had no visible source but was undeniable to everyone standing within range of it.
"Good," he said, and a faint smile appeared at the corner of his mouth.
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