The Fallen One

FORZA

The thunder still rang in my ears—an echo that refused to die down.
Maybe it was a warning.
A whisper from the storm itself, telling me to turn back.

But I didn't.

I never wanna—especially not when it counted.

Tracking Lucius and the Chimaera through this gods-cursed storm was no easy task. Between the terrain and the chaos of clashing mana, it took longer than it should've. His mana signature flared only once—sharp and sudden—beside a dense swamp pond nearly swallowed by the storm. A dying flare. A beacon.

I changed course instantly, but before I could reach him, his aura shifted again, violently flung in a new direction. Something had knocked him clear across the field. Not good.

The winds responded to my urgency. They knew where I needed to be.

By the time I reached him, the beast had already pounced—massive limbs bearing down, claws outstretched, ready to crush him like a forgotten insect beneath its heel.

I didn't hesitate.

The second I met her eyes—those feral, soulless orbs—I struck.

My staff met her mid-lunge. A focused, reversed grip strike to the side of her skull, enhanced by a compacted wind-ord no larger than a fruit pit. It detonated on impact. The Chimaera roared as momentum flipped against her, hurling her sideways into a tangle of trees and swamp, crashing with enough force to crack the sky itself.

Lucius was safe. For now.

I turned to check on him, and what I saw nearly made my heart seize.

His body was... torn.

Blood leaked from his mouth, from his nose, and from his eye. One of them was swollen shut, the other flickering with something between fire and fatigue. His torso was a mess of slashes and shattered armour. Claw marks—or maybe bite marks—ripped across his chest. His chestplate? Cracked like a broken eggshell.

But he was alive.

Barely.

And burning.

Flames licked across the surface of his longsword—Crimson Ultima, if I wasn't mistaken—dancing against the rain. His entire mana signature pulsed with heat.

That's not possible, I thought immediately.

Lucius… he's a non-elemental. I know that.

And yet the fire danced around him like it belonged. His signature blazed like a sun, like a high-tier fire mage in peak form. But it wasn't him. It couldn't be.

The sword.

That sword was the source.

Blueish-crimson, forged with something far beyond standard magical alloys. It didn't just burn—it attracted the fire element. And not just passively. It was pulling fire mana from the atmosphere—what little of it there was in this storm-soaked region—and amplifying it.

But how?

No time.

I forced myself to look away. The Chimaera wasn't done yet.

Lucius caught my gaze. "I'm fine," he said.

The way he said it—like it was both a reassurance and a dismissal—almost made me smile. As if the blood pouring down his armour was cosmetic.

I nodded, nothing more. There wasn't time for sympathy. Not yet.

He summoned two healing potions from his storage ring and downed them, one after the other. His breathing was shallow. I could hear it from here. Each swallow looked like it burned, by his reaction.

His injuries were worse than I'd realised. Deeper. The armour wasn't just scratched. It was falling off in fragments, like his body was rejecting the weight of failure.

I wanted to say something.

An apology. Another apology, perhaps a promise. Anything.

But the ground chose that moment to speak.

A boom cracked through the swamp like divine wrath. I turned toward it instantly—toward the direction I'd thrown the Chimaera.

Lightning.

But not from the sky. From the earth.

Tendrils of raw voltage spiralled upward from the ground, thick, rooted like branches of an ancient tree, but pulsing with pure elemental fury. The air snapped. Rain hissed. The light swallowed shadows whole.

I narrowed my eyes.

The Chimaera had stopped playing. This wasn't a recovery lunge.

This was an open challenge.

One, I had no intention of refusing.

FORZA

I lunged forward, winds coiling at my back like summoned serpents, ready to crush and cleave anything in my path. The Chimaera was around thirty meters ahead, standing atop the swamp waters using mana-walking as if her own weight meant nothing to her or the swamp beneath.

I saw it then—a glint of dark red pooling beneath her neck.
A wound.
Deep. Narrow. Precise.

Not a shallow cut. A stab.
Had Lucius done that?
There was no blood on Crimson Ultima that I could see—but the angle, the depth... it had to be him, it had to be a sword-strike, I was sure.

'Good job, Lucius,' I thought to myself, the faintest grin tugging at my lips. Injuring a beast of this calibre wasn't just luck—it was proof. Proof of his hidden, unknown capabilities.

The Chimaera roared, claws cracking against the water-soaked swamp. Her tails thrashed like whips, slapping the ground with enough force to send waves crashing upward. Lightning danced around her fur, encasing her in a veil of blue-violet electricity.

She locked eyes with me.

Unblinking.

Unapologetic.

But I didn't flinch.

Her affinity may have been lightning, but mine was wind—and in this storm, I held the advantage. Not through raw force, but control.

Then came the first strike.

A barrage of slender, whip-fast vertical arcs of blue electricity lashed out from her position, cutting through the rain like linear thunderstrikes. Reflex took over. With a single flap of my wings, I sliced one forward and across, channelling a wind slash wide enough to cleave the incoming voltage.

The air cracked—the clash of lightning and wind erupting into a blinding explosion of energy. Opposites colliding.

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The Chimaera leapt, lunging across trees with an agility that belied her size. Her claws dug into bark and trunks like climbing holds, launching herself forward in short, rapid bursts. Each leap echoed with thunder, each movement precise and unrelenting.

I followed, my own wings cutting through the storm, arcs of wind spiralling around me like blades waiting for command. At a thought, they fired slashes of compressed wind mana spiralling after her. She fired back, hurling bolts of lightning like javelins. Each clash detonated mid-air, shockwaves rippling across the storm-torn canopy.

We moved like phantoms through the forest—each step, each dodge, each impact shaking the air around us. The Chimaera's afterimages left crackling echoes behind, her body flickering between tree limbs like a streak of stormlight. I closed the distance. Again and again, we clashed—my reinforced staff slamming against claws sharpened by decades of survival. Our hits reset each other, force versus precision.

But her tail—gods, her tail.

It was massive, unnaturally nimble, almost serpentine. It acted like a third pillar—balancing, pivoting, redirecting momentum. She used it to twist mid-air, recover from off-balance stances, and strike in unexpected ways. The moment I recognised the pattern, I pressed the advantage.

And I landed a hit.

Finally.

My staff's edge, infused with a compressed blade of wind mana, grazed her side. A clean shot. A direct impact. Until—

She unexpectedly dodged. At the last instant. Her body twisted mid-motion, and she repositioned, placing me in a vulnerable spot, low and off-angle.

Her tail snapped like a whip.

I braced to block—but she wasn't aiming for me.

The tail curled around my staff.

Tight.

Constraining.

Like a viper around its prey.

I yanked, twisted—no good. The grip was solid, alive, and intentional.

And then I felt it.
That sudden spark.
A discharge surging through the metal—a flash of lightning channelled through her tail directly into my staff.

If I held on for a moment longer, it would've been a conduit straight into my bones.

I had let go.

Mid-fight. Mid-air.
A risk I didn't want to take. But necessary.

The instant my hands were free, I formed a gauntlet around my right arm, wind-forged, reinforced, and surged forward, targeting the rear of her falling form. Her hind legs were exposed, her momentum off-centre after the weapon-tug. One solid strike and she'd crash.

My fist closed in. Her eyes met mine.

And that's when I saw it.

She smiled.

If beasts could smile, this one did.

From beneath her coiled tail came her trump card.

Unlike most serpents, a Chimaera's tail mimics the viper, not just capable of injecting venom, but launching it. Her scales pulled back, revealing dozens of tiny barbs—like miniature fangs—and a split-second later, a fine mist of venom sprayed toward me.

Corrosive. Acidic. Lethal.

Armor-melting. Flesh-dissolving. And infused with the foulest poison this region was known for.

A trap. Laid and baited.

Reflex took over.

I launched upward, hard, my wings detonating a blast of wind behind me to catapult me into the open sky. My true domain.
The one place the Chimaera couldn't reach.
Not with her lightning. Not with her fangs.

She glared up at me, venom mist hissing beneath, eyes glowing with electric rage.

But I was already reforming my gauntlets, calling my staff back, gathering wind in spiralling halos around my legs.

"Let's try again," I whispered.

This time, I would not play by her tempo.

The Chimaera reacted with brutal elegance.

Dozens of mana arcs burst to life around her—each crackling with lightning, their edges sparking like miniature comets. She was preparing a barrage. And not just any barrage—this was a calculated, high-speed curtain of destruction, the kind that forced even me to pull back, up in the skies. I hovered sixty, maybe seventy meters above the ground, and even I felt the pressure.

But spells like that came at a cost.

Time. Focus. Mana.

I could feel the elemental distortion in the air. So I didn't wait. I forged my own counter—hundreds of wind-infused needles, miniature arcs of compressed slicing wind—and fired them all at once.

Her reaction was immediate.

She blurred. Lightning cloaked her again, supercharging her muscles and reflexes. Afterimages fractured through the forest as she zipped across the swamp's surface, leaping between trees, vaulting off protruding roots and branches. She was dodging every single needle I fired as small explosions erupted like a meteor shower.

Her speed was staggering.

Years—no, decades—of refined battle instinct guided her movements. She wasn't just strong. She was supposed to be injured. But she isn't. And that was our mistake.

Lucius and I had assumed—hoped—that this Ex-Alpha had come to us with some lingering wound, some fault line in her strength after losing the position of Alpha against a rival Chimaera. But no.

This was a prime Chimaera, at least it felt like it. Youthful, intelligent, overflowing with mana—and far more dangerous than we'd been prepared for.

And then, mid-motion, she made her move.

She stopped.

Right on the swamp's surface.

Then… she let go of her mana-walk.

And dropped.

Submerged beneath the thick, dark waters.

No!

My wings beat down hard, accelerating forward. The second she vanished, I knew what she was doing. The swamps—already hell on our mana senses—would cloak her completely. But not herself. She could still see me with her own blueish sets of glowing eyes.

It was one of her innate gifts—submerged sensory awareness. She could track movement and mana signatures while remaining undetectable herself inside the swamps, an advantage her own habitat has provided.

She was hunting now.

I darted left, then jerked hard right.

Zzzzt!
The first lightning arc surged up from below—pure precision.

Another followed.
Then another.

Each came with less and less delay.

Soon, an entire web of lightning began firing from under the surface, timed perfectly with my evasive pattern. Each arc sliced through the air with whip-like speed, reading my trajectory as if she'd predicted every shift.

'How the hell is she maintaining this?!' I snarled aloud. So much lightning— so much mana. Lightning was one of the most draining elemental affinities, even for beasts—yet she flung them like they cost nothing.

I stayed aloft. Barely. Fighting to maintain flight against the turbulent air, spending mana just to stay stable while also raining down wind-based bombardments.

None of my shots landed. Not one.

She was submerged too deeply. Or too fast, or near a particular corner. Or all of them, changing her position as she switched from one place to another.

And slowly, doubt crept in as I was now barely able to keep up against the never-ending electrical barrage.

Should I retreat? Should I break off and search for Lucius? I still couldn't sense him. His mana… it was gone. Like he'd turned to mist. A ghost.

Or maybe…

Maybe he left me.

The thought punched through my chest harder than any attack I had faced till now.

But… even if he had, I couldn't blame him... No, I simply couldn't just.

This wasn't his fight to begin with, he didn't sign up for this, not this exactly, anyway. Not really.

This was my fight.

As that bitter thought began to fester, threatening to consume my focus... His voice suddenly ripped through the chaos.

"PRAISE: ULTIMA, THE CRIMSON FLAMES!"

The words were clear.

A chant.

A technique.

My head snapped around just in time to see it—
A small orb of condensed fire mana, no larger than a tennis ball, perhaps smaller, flared like a newborn star at the tip of his extended left hand, as he stood above a half-shattered tree with one leg kneeling down.

He fired it straight into the swamp.

The impact point?

Exactly where I'd been hammering for the last five minutes.

BOOOOOOM!

The explosion was blinding.

A roaring pillar of flame erupted from the murk, carving through water, mud, and swamp gas like a divine judgment. The air ignited. The surface detonated. Shockwaves punched outward, sending mist, lightning and debris flying in every direction.

And then—

CRACK.

The Chimaera's body exploded out of the swamp, screaming as she took the hit directly to her neck—the region near her gills.

She smashed into the base of a massive tree. The wood shattered beneath the force, splinters flying like shrapnel. Her body convulsed as flames still clung to her fur, burning in blotches across her scales and mane.

My jaw tightened.

Lucius.

That loyal one-eyed bastard!

Just when I was about to break, he returned.

With fire.

And vengeance.

Lucius didn't stop.

His extended hand shifted slightly—just the fingers, twitching with restrained command. For a brief heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then—

CRACK—WHHHHRUMMM!

The massive tree the Chimaera had crashed against snapped, not just falling, but plummeting as if something pulled it down. An unseen force, deliberate and oppressive, slammed it onto the beast with far more weight than gravity could offer alone.

The impact sent a shudder through the swamp. Muck and water erupted outward, the Chimaera's agonised shriek ripping through the air.

Lucius leapt.

Crimson Ultima in hand, his body blurred forward, closing the distance at an unnatural speed, feet gliding just above the swamp's surface. The beast writhed beneath the shattered remains of the tree, still twitching, discharging arcs of wild lightning from its scorched body as it tried to rise, to breathe, to kill.

But something was still pinning it down.

As if the tree carried the weight of an invisible world.

Another force? Another entity?

No time to dwell, as long as we live, questions will be answered.

"Not so soon!" I shouted.

Wind slashes erupted around me—dozens of them, whirling into formation and slicing downward like aerial guillotines. Lucius responded in kind—his mana arcs fewer, weaker, but accurate, relentless. Our barrage rained down in harmony, forcing the Chimaera deeper into the swampbed.

Lightning flared against her skin—defensive discharges, violent and untamed.

I felt my mana pool plummet. No matter.

This ends now.

I dove, wings folding behind me, becoming blades of compressed wind. All my speed, all my remaining strength, poured into this descent. Lucius did the same—his blade glowing white-hot with condensed raw mana, slicing the very air with its pressure.

The Chimaera was bleeding, her scales cracked open, her skin burnt away in patches. She tried to lift her tail. Tried to charge one last spell.

Too late.

Lucius was a single step from her, blade ready to stab her head, moments away from ending this nightmare.

Then—

My eyes widened as realisation hovered above me, along with something else.

... I wasn't alone up here.

Something above me moved. No rustle, no warning. Just a shift in the atmosphere. Like a presence that hadn't been there…until it chose to be.

My breath caught mid-flight. Something was watching us.

No! Something was descending, fast...