Kin of Jörmungandr

As I tumble towards the earth, the lizard finally stops flinging its scales. It knows I'm coming, and reorients its wicked body my way.

With my body as heavy as it is in this form, I gain incredible momentum. Air whistles past me and crashes outwards, blasting through the cavern with a visible pressure wave.

The Fenghuang kin's jaw ripples with metal teeth, as their buzzing accelerates with the anticipation of something to sink into and tear to shreds. While the scales along its body — especially those of its spine — appear dangerously sharp, those teeth are what I need to be wary of most.

Nearing the shifting earth, my jaw snaps wide, baring my fangs to my prey. The lizard hisses out a low, grinding growl in response and pounces. Its huge body — as long as mine, and many times heavier — rises to meet head on. It has a confidence in its jaws that I cannot match.

But I don't need to match it.

A hole appears between us, and my full momentum slams into the side of the beast. My fangs snap shut on its neck even as it flails to try and snap down on me. The lizard's reaction is unnaturally fast, but it can only scrape those deadly teeth across the side of my body before the tip of my tail crashes down on the top of its head. My tail, having transferred all of its momentum into the creature's metal body — leaving a painful amount of creaking to pass through its body held in my jaws — finally slides after the rest of my body through the bend.

As my length wraps around the lizard, my fangs sink deep past its metallic exterior into the soft flesh hidden within. The vibrating scales cut into my gums. My scales put up a much better resistance, but they too eventually break under the strain. I'm only able to pin one leg beneath my weight, so the rest flail and scratch into my body freely.

At least the most dangerous part — the head — is pinned. I fight against its efforts to buck me off. To twist and bite into my length so it can shred my innards. The beast is strong, and has weight behind itself, but my body is entirely muscle; I can resist it just enough to continue trying to crush it.

Of course, as with nearly all beasts this large, they are not so easily disabled.

I create bends to deflect the claws of the three legs that try to scrape at me, but I'm not always successful. The bends, if not layered with enough focus and control, will simply collapse under the immense power of the lizard's strikes. My scales tear open, and I feel blood trickling down my body, but they aren't deep, and not worth the effort to worry about. Not while I'm winning.

But I've fought enough of these battles now to not underestimate these giants. They all — almost without exception — have something to set them apart. Their bodies have only reached such pinnacles because they too have fought thousands of conflicts where death stared them in the face, yet they came out on top. Sometimes, as with the elementals, that simply means fleeing. Others, it means some hidden strength that their predators didn't notice until too late.

So when I see all the metallic scales along its body converge along its spine, I let go. I don't even lament the loss of the optimal position with its neck in my jaw. All I care about, is not letting myself be killed by some lethal blow.

Even as I slide through the hole and appear entire body lengths away, many of its scales strike me. I inspect myself while I have the space, and find the mass of scales still moving despite having lost connection to its body. They slide into my wounds and try to slice me up from inside.

With how they now almost flow like a liquid on the Fenghuang's kin, I made the right choice by abandoning my advantage.

I flex and compress my body, shaking off the unwelcome scales. Those that have found a place to nestle themselves and spread my wounds from the inside, I create dozens of holes for them to fall out. Wringing my body, I'm soon free of the invasive blades.

But the lizard is not content to let me go.

The endless sea of gravel ripples beneath the lizard as it leaps from the ground. It kicks up waves and topples mountains where the ripples amplify, and even sinks the skull of a long dead Titan beneath the surface.

Knowing the creature has no hope to hit me up here, I simply slide through a hole to avoid its arc. But I don't expect the scales to slide along its back and shape themselves into wings. The Fenghuang's kin are mostly birds, sure, but I didn't this lizard could fly too.

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Fortunately, its weight and body shape make flying impossible. The fake wings it grows simply angle it closer to my distortion, where those scales explode into a mass that stretches and forces it open for the lizard to follow me through. It is far too fat to fit; it barely fits its nose through before it hits resistance.

Its jaw clamps down on the tip of my tail even as I let go of all control of the bend and try to drag myself away with the help of two more. Its teeth don't let go. Surprisingly, it has the awareness that if its jaw continues its vicious buzzing from before, then it would slice through my tail and I'd be free, so they simply hold me. Unshredding.

Its claws grasp at the edges of the distortion, and try to scrape it open wider, helping the fluid-like mass of hard metal scales that hold it open. I watch, startled as the beast actually pushes more of its head through. Using both its scales, the power of its claws, and my own tail as leverage, it stretches the bend wide enough to slide through.

All at once, it tumbles through the distortion. Its jaw snaps wide, but I don't even have the time to make a bend beneath its fangs; it simply bites down on my midsection. Igniting with power, its teeth make short work of my scales and quickly dig into flesh.

The pain is sharp, but I ignore it. I bring us into an endless fall as I search the landscape. I thought my skill with bends had become impressive, but to stretch them wide enough to fit the lizard that refuses to let me go, I have to put all of my mind into it. Well, at least wide enough so that the lizard's fat doesn't slow us down.

Eventually, I find what I'm looking for.

We shift directions. The Fenghuang kin pays no attention to the world outside the resistance of my flesh and the taste of my blood. Its claws thankfully don't scratch at me, only cling tight.

We barrel through the air like two mountains of scale. Gravity continues to apply its endless force upon our bodies as speed toward the rising shard of a Titan's spine. At the last second, I jerk my body, turning the lizard directly into the impossibly hard bone.

The creature, having become accustomed to my lack of resistance — likely thinking I'd given up — isn't ready to to react as the sharp tip of bone smashes into its face with all the power of our combined weight.

My body jerks back as its teeth scrape through my side, but in an instant, I am free again. The lizard, meanwhile, has a horrible wound scraping the entire right side of its body. The pointy spike of the Titan's former spine caught the Fenghuang kin right in the eye, and there was nothing it could have done to avoid the unbreakable shard from ripping open its body.

The eye is missing, and so too is a small chunk of its skull. So much of its back is now torn open, revealing the bones and flesh hidden beneath metal scales. Blood gushes out, and while the lizard tries to stem the bleeding by shifting its scales back over the area, it hardly fixes the wound.

As the beast crashes into the earth, sending up a tidal wave of gravel, I shift back into the air and extract the lizard's scales that found their way back into my own wounds.

I really shouldn't have gotten myself stuck in such a situation — in the jaws of a larger beast — but I've long since learnt that in these battles, sometimes you just can't account for everything. Prey will do something completely unexpected. They might flee faster than I can follow. Or a Titan will charge through in mid fight. So much can go wrong, but whining about that unpredictability afterwards is pointless. I can only learn from them, and make sure to be more careful next time… even if some are unavoidable.

The lizard wades back to the surface after the collapsing earth tried to swallow it whole. It gets its feet under itself, and glares up at me. As fierce as ever. Despite the fact that it looks like it will keel over at any moment, it still wants to fight.

I comply.

❖❖❖

I swear my jaw opens wider now.

That lizard had to be five times wider than my body, and yet I swallowed it no problem. If there's anything I can say I like about the Other Side, its that the shifting earth makes swallowing so easy. I can just lay my meal before me, and as I start to work it down my throat, I can move my body under the sands so it will just slide inside under its own immense weight.

Long past are the times where I'll spend forever trying to swallow something only my own weight.

"Hello fellow sapients. I can talk."

Continuing back into my practice, each word seems to echo and roll with the hiss that gives them structure. Even by narrowing down my presence, it's hard to tell if I've pulled the speech down to a level the weak surface sapients won't flee at. I'm not sure how I'll be able to tell where I should take this speech without having a target to practice on.

Slithering through the air at about a tenth of my full size, I catch sight of something odd in my network of distortions. With how wide I can stretch my holes and rifts now, it is much easier to find rends back from the Other Side. I can leave a trail of holes behind me from where I've found them. As long as none of the links in that chain of distortions is disrupted, they remain technically close enough for my influence to remain.

It gives me the opportunity to see back to the warped tunnels whenever I wish.

And while nothing ever really interesting happens, that just changed.

A small group of sapients wander through the tunnels where they've never come before. They stick very close together, and it is obvious from just looking at them that they have less sense of direction than I think I've ever seen before. I mean, where they're walking, they'll tumble down through a shaft and into the magma ocean soon enough.

I suddenly realise I recognise the one at the lead. She was the first I actually spoke with, right after that battle with the warrior caste member that loved ice.

For a moment, I glance between the drab, endless wasteland of the Other Side, and the five tiny creatures walking to their deaths.

Well… a little deviation is fine. I'll be back to hunt and grow before the next cycle. I did want to test my voice, after all. Can't have that being overpowering when I finally get Scia back.