The shadows swept over the dirt road first. They were massive, overlapping patches of darkness that moved far too fast for normal clouds.
Mirelle gripped the heavy leather reins, her blistered hands throbbing. She looked up into the clear sky. The air suddenly grew heavy, carrying a foul, suffocating stench of sulfur and rotting meat.
Her breath caught in her throat. Hundreds of wyverns blotted out the sun.
They were terrifying beasts, each the size of a small house, with leathery green wings and long, spiked tails. Their collective screeches echoed off the mountain walls, sounding like metal tearing against metal.
Mirelle's heart beat fast with terrifying rhythm. She looked at the road ahead. It was a narrow, winding mountain pass.
To her left was a solid wall of jagged gray rock. To her right was a sheer, bottomless cliff. The heavy wooden wheels of the carriage were rolling just mere inches away from the deadly drop. One wrong move, one panicked jerk of the horses, and they would all plummet into the abyss.
Her twelve-year-old mind frantically ran the math. There were three humans in this carriage. Two of them were asleep or resting. Above them were over a hundred Disaster-class predators.
In the Imperial Capital, a single wyvern sighting would trigger the city's alarm bells and mobilize an entire battalion of armored knights.
She could not hold it in. Pure, primal panic consumed her.
"Wyverns!" Mirelle screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice cracking with sheer terror as she yanked the reins. "There is a whole swarm! We are going to die! Help! Do something!"
The wooden door behind her remained firmly shut.
"Quiet," Kian's muffled, incredibly annoyed voice drifted from inside the carriage. "I am trying to sleep."
Mirelle's jaw dropped. She stared at the wooden door in absolute disbelief. Is he insane?
Up on the roof, Lexi shifted. She sat up slowly and stretched her arms above her head. She looked at the massive swarm of deadly monsters circling above them, then looked down at the screaming Princess. Lexi let out a long, lazy yawn.
"Shut your mouth," Lexi ordered coldly, her voice entirely flat and devoid of any fear. "The Master is sleeping. Do not disturb him."
Mirelle was paralyzed by a chaotic mixture of pure terror and utter confusion.
Her blood was turning to ice. Her chest heaved with rapid, panicked breaths. She could not comprehend what was happening
Her bossy, terrifying master was actually taking a nap in the middle of a massive monster ambush.
Meanwhile, his bodyguard was acting like the hundred flesh-eating wyverns in the sky were nothing more than a minor annoyance interrupting her afternoon breeze. Lexi looked completely bored.
A piercing screech shattered the air. The alpha wyvern folded its huge leathery wings and entered a steep, blindingly fast dive. It was aiming directly for the driving board.
Mirelle watched the beast plummet toward her. She could see its jaws opening, revealing rows of yellow, razor-sharp teeth dripping with acidic saliva.
She could feel the violent wind pressure generated by its huge body descending upon them.
The wyvern came closer. And closer. And closer.
Mirelle's hands completely froze on the reins. Her survival instincts completely shut down. She tightly squeezed her eyes shut and pulled her shoulders up, fully accepting her horrific fate. She waited for the large teeth to tear her frail body in half.
CRACK.
It was a deafening, sickening sound. It did not sound like metal hitting metal. It sounded like a big boulder being dropped directly onto a hollow tree trunk. A massive gust of wind blasted Mirelle's face, whipping her blue hair wildly.
But there was no pain. No teeth. No claws.
Trembling violently, Mirelle slowly forced one eye open.
Lexi was standing on the wooden driving board directly beside her. The maid's right leg was extended high in the air, locked in the perfect follow-through of a devastating high kick.
Mirelle looked to the right. The huge alpha wyvern was plummeting down the side of the sheer cliff. Its neck was bent at a horrific, unnatural ninety-degree angle. Its skull had been completely caved in by a single, casual strike.
Lexi slowly lowered her leg, casually dusting off the hem of her jacket. Not even look at the falling beast. She simply looked down at the terrified twelve-year-old girl.
"Continue driving," Lexi instructed bluntly. "Do not look back."
In a blur of motion so fast that Mirelle's eyes could not even track it, Lexi vanished from the driving board, returning to the roof of the carriage.
Mirelle swallowed hard. Her hands were shaking so violently that the heavy leather reins slapped against the horses' backs. She kept her eyes glued to the narrow dirt path ahead, terrified of the cliff on her right.
Then, the sky completely erupted.
Infuriated by the sudden death of their alpha, dozens of wyverns screeched in unison and initiated a massive, synchronized dive. They folded their wings and rained down toward the black carriage like a barrage of living missiles.
Mirelle gasped and immediately squeezed her eyes shut again, ducking her head between her shoulders.
Above her, the carriage roof groaned, but it did not break. The black carriage belonging to the Feeble Soul party was not an ordinary wooden wagon. The exterior looked normal, but the framework and the roof were heavily reinforced with a hollow, high-density alloy matrix.
It was a custom engineering masterpiece designed by the clan's mechanics for one specific reason: Lexi and Raze always used the roof as their primary footing in battle.
The roof was incredibly hard, capable of withstanding the explosive kinetic force of a high-level Adventurer launching themselves into the air, yet the alloy was light enough that two standard horses could pull the carriage without collapsing from exhaustion.
The real engineering genius, however, was the hidden towing mechanism connecting the horses to the carriage.
When Lexi launched from the roof or landed with the explosive force of a falling boulder, the sudden spike in weight should have instantly stopped the carriage, violently yanking the horses backward and snapping their necks.
To prevent this, the hitch was built with a big, heavy-duty iron coil sitting parallel to a thick metal cylinder filled with dense alchemical oil. Think of it like a spring. When Lexi landed, the carriage briefly acted like an unmovable anchor.
But instead of the horses hitting a brick wall, the heavy iron coil simply stretched forward, absorbing the heavy shock over three long seconds.
As the horses kept running and the carriage naturally caught back up to their speed, the thick fluid inside the cylinder acted as a brake for the spring. It prevented the iron coil from snapping back violently, slowly releasing the tension.
To the horses, Lexi's explosive impacts felt like nothing more than a gentle, delayed rocking motion.
Mirelle knew nothing about the hidden springs beneath the floorboards. She did not understand why the carriage was only rocking instead of snapping in half. She just gripped the leather reins and kept her eyes squeezed tight, waiting for the teeth.
CRACK.
The carriage shook violently as Lexi launched herself off the reinforced roof. A heavy gust of wind washed over Mirelle. Then, the horrific sound of shattering bone echoed through the mountain pass. A huge shadow plummeted past the right side of the carriage, tumbling down the cliff.
Mirelle opened her eyes and gasped for air.
Another screech pierced the sky. Three more wyverns dove simultaneously.
Mirelle flinched and squeezed her eyes shut again.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
Three rapid, explosive impacts echoed in the air, overlapping each other in less than two seconds. Three massive bodies fell past the carriage, crashing into the jagged rocks far below.
Mirelle opened her eyes again. Her chest was heaving.
The pattern kept repeating. Whenever she heard the violent rushing wind of a diving monster, she closed her eyes in pure, conditioned fear.
Whenever she heard the sickening crunch of a shattered skull, she opened them. It became a terrifying, rhythmic cycle of darkness and explosive violence.
Close eyes. Dive. *CRACK.* Open eyes. Falling shadow.
Close eyes. Dive. *CRACK.* Open eyes. Falling shadow.
After the fifteenth wyvern plummeted silently into the abyss, something shifted in Mirelle's mind.
Her curiosity finally overpowered her paralyzing terror. When the next wave of monsters screeched and folded their wings, plunging toward the carriage from all directions, Mirelle did not cower.
She gripped the reins tightly, tilted her head up, and forced her eyes wide open.
She watched Lexi.
It was an absolute visual spectacle. It was a brutal, beautiful, aerial ballet of violence that defied all logic and aristocratic common sense.
Lexi did not have a sword. She did not use magic spells. She stood on the reinforced roof of the speeding carriage, entirely relaxed, her hands resting casually at her sides.
As a wyvern lunged with its jaws wide open, Lexi kicked off the roof. Her immense leg strength created a physical shockwave that flattened the tall grass on the mountain edge.
She shot upward like an artillery shell and met the diving beast head-on in mid-air.