Beasts crowded in from all sides, snapping off stragglers at the edges. The mass of humanity contracted as hundreds of men and women fled inward. But they couldn’t flee very far—the Frost Dragon waited at the very middle, its neck ablaze with cruel qi as it charged an attack. Everywhere blood gushed in fountains; bodies fell in droves all around them, speared by Wyrm-fang or Vordor’s beak. The ground had stopped shaking but hysteria raged strong as ever; the emotion pulsed through hundreds of bodies in a relentless torrent. He saw it in the dropped jaws, the stifled screams, the mad rushing to nowhere. They’d all been reduced to animals seized by their basest instincts. Void of thought. The fighters among them were a little better, but even they’d been drowned in the chaos. There was no chance of mounting organized resistance, and Dorian still had no leads on the Shaman. At this rate it’d be over in minutes.

A flare of qi cut jerked him from his thoughts. He looked up, startled, and for a half-second thought his eyes played tricks on him. A flare of white light so bright it looked like a small meteor, but streaking upward—on a collision course straight for the Frost Dragon. It shone with the strength of the [Profound] Realm. A Tribe Leader? But no ordinary [Profound] had any hope of denting this monster’s surface-level defenses. Sure enough, The Dragon turned, derision etched on the lines of its massive face. It didn’t bother raising so much as a limb to block.

Then the meteor struck with the force of an extinction event. Bursts of red and gold fractured the world. Dorian raised an arm to shield his eyes and felt a gale of heat singe the whole front of his body. The force of the boom sent his ears ringing. When he looked again he saw the half-naked, panting form of a man who looked very much like Young Master Yalta, but even bigger. More muscled, and sporting a forest of hair from head to toe. Patriarch Yalta. To Dorian’s surprise the Dragon had been knocked back a step; a chunk of its scales were half-melted.

But just as Dorian’s hopes rose, harsh crackles filled the air. The scales glommed back together, hardening. In seconds they’d heal fully. His heart sank. Drat. There goes that try. All that was left was its simmering rage, primed to erupt.

As Dorian crouched to dive for cover, another Profound Aura filled the air. He swerved to face it, staring, and saw a white-haired take the scene. His beard and hair were both short, cropped to near-nothing. He was a collection of brutal angles; every inch of him had been sharpened to a pinpoint edge. To shake hands with him was to cut yourself in twenty places. Patriarch Narong! He yelled a high, short note, then blitzed in, his arms falling in slick arcs of light. This time the Dragon took the strike seriously—a giant icy shield crystallized in the air. Narong’s strikes flared against the shield, filling the air with shrill screeches. Dorian hadn’t a doubt that they were enough to cut any Vigor fighter clean in two, but against this shield they fizzed out. Then Narong had to blitz back. An instant later an avalanche of qi froze the spot where he’d been solid.

“Clan!” roared Yalta, his voice booming across the battlegrounds. “Gather in first formation! Secure the perimeter!”

At the same time, Narong yelled a phrase in a language Dorian didn’t comprehend. For the first time all fight Dorian saw warriors rising from the ground to challenge the encroaching hordes. On the surface, Yalta and Narong’s resistance might’ve done very little—but it’d established a starting point, a line in the sand. We will not be trampled without a fight.

The Frost Dragon, meanwhile, set its sights on Yalta. Its eyes narrowed in annoyance. Plumes of ice-qi billowed from its mouth as a river of white-blue flowed up its throat from its belly, and Dorian perked up in alarm. That attack could not finish!

Yalta dove in once more; Narong was hot on his heels, but with a wave of its claws the Dragon summoned a hailstorm of ice-qi. They were both forced on the defensive, summoning shields and strafing back. As they did the blue-white rose up, up, arching for the dragon’s throat…

“Ha!” To the left, a shock of yellow, a blink of light. It was a signal flare dropped straight into the Dragon’s eyes; it bellowed, rearing up, and unleashed its strike straight up. A blistering lightning-storm of hail and vivid qi left its throat, diffusing into the bleak clouds. Almost instantly, snow started to fall—the flakes were misshapen, edged black.

Sent to a grounded target, that strike would’ve transformed the whole of this landscape to an icy tundra. Dorian looked up to see the ethereal form of Matriarch Zhaopai flash by, trailed by wispy threads of her clan’s trademark silks. Behind her, spread out all along the crowd, a handful of other tribal chiefs lit up with qi and leapt into the fray, screaming battle-cries. At ground-level Pearl fired off another blast of God’s qi, adding his own voice to the mix. The resistance was in full swing: on one end, the common warriors and hunters trying to hold back the Wyrm and Vordor hordes. On the other, a dozen-odd Profound chieftains and elders trying desperately to bring down a legendary beast a Realm above them all.

It was valiant. It wouldn’t be enough. Dorian knew the difference between Profound and Earth better than anyone; the Chiefs might serve as admirable distractions at best, but was all. He could say the same of the common warriors; already he saw the front-lines starting to fray, saw Wyrms crashing through and wreaking havoc in the soft interior. Many would die, but their lives served a useful purpose. It bought him time to try to end all of this.

He tore his eyes from the central fight and soaked in the battlefield. He looked for signs of a Shaman: closed eyes, faces in deep concentration, unnatural calm or mental strain. Whoever it was did an excellent job of blending in—none caught his eye immediately. Growling, he descended to ground-level and dashed among the hordes of combatants, seeking suspicious signs. Still nothing.

He scanned the crowd once more, then stopped on one of the hordes. He blinked. Rust Tribe! All alone, hemmed in by four massive Vigor-Realm Wyrms and their own flock of Vordors too. For a clan of this size it was overkill; Rust and Tuketu struggled to beat back the Wyrms. The Vordors, meanwhile, were making mincemeat of the Hunters Rust tribe had left.

Frowning, Dorian rubbed his eyes, and a worry wormed up his chest. Where was Kaya? She couldn’t still be… he eyed his collapsed tent and saw a bleeding figure pinned under, weakly flailing. She’d been so smashed from last night he’d be surprised if she could move without all that weight on her. Then he saw a line of jutting sand race in her direction—a Wyrm! They hunted their prey through vibrations in the sand. One must’ve heard her fluttering heartbeat; in her state she was worse than defenseless. He swore, turned to face the rubble, and swore again. His Shaman-hunting mission would need to wait a few seconds.

“Io!” He paused. Rust had screamed the word. The man’s eyes were bloodshot—he was barely clinging onto his battle as he taxed his bloodline powers to their limits. All he could do was jerk his head in the Hunters’ direction. Dorian followed his gaze and winced. A Vordor had seized Kuruk by the arm; another three dive-bombed the broken Hunters. Most were screaming, their faces half-melted by Vordor acid, easy prey as the Vordors swooped for another dose. Without intervention they’d all be finished in seconds.

The choice was obvious. He could save Kaya or the Hunters. He felt Rust’s gaze burning a hole in his skull. He made his decision without a second’s pause.

He dashed for the collapsed tent, blasting aside the poles and the covers. Rust’s rage-filled roar rang out behind him but he forged on. Kaya lay half-conscious; in the chaos she’d been buried under a lump of shattered glass and sandstone. As he found her arms and hoisted her by the shoulders, he was acutely aware of the tremors in the sands beneath, the way the sands shifted, ready to cave open at any moment.

Sorry, sis. He yanked her out by force. Even in her half-lucid state she hissed, bloody scrapes opening up on her legs. Then Dorian dragged her to the sky, and not a second too soon. Hundreds of Wyrmteeth reared up from the sands, clamped over thin air, and submerged once more.

A second later, a horrid scream punctured the air. Dorian looked back to see a massacre where the last of the Hunter resistance had been. Corpses lay so disfigured by acid none seemed human, their features sliding off their skulls. But the cry had come from above. Dorian glanced up to see that Vordor had closed its beaks around the waist of Hento Rust. His cheeks had been drained of their rosiness and his legs bent at awkward angles; screaming, he tried to prise off the beak with no success. Then the Vordor bit down hard, all its peak-Vigor muscles bringing the brunt of its vice-like beak on Hento’s spine. Hento’s screech was fodder for nightmares. His gemlike eyes found Dorian’s, and in his gaze Dorian read a glut of pain, regret, a most of all a childlike, naked terror. Then there was a sharp crack of severed bone, and Hento drooped. His body was broken in half. The light faded from his eyes. Still the attack wasn’t over; a black mist seeped from the mouth of the Vordor, ready to turn Hento’s insides to liquid.

Dorian didn’t stay to see the aftermath. He fled, Kaya in tow, for the interior, seeking a space wedged between the two front-lines. She was finally stirring, mumbling a gentle incoherence. He parked her under a makeshift tarp-shelter alongside a small gaggle of civilians. Tapping his Interspatial Ring, he drew out one of his stronger Elixirs of Healing.

“Wuh?” She groaned as Dorian forced it to her lips.

“Drink.” Their gazes met, and a flash of recognition filled her eyes. She was slowly reviving. “Stay here,” he implored, pressing the flask to her hands. “Finish this. I’ll return soon.”

With a final nod he waded back into the masses. Warriors were flagging on all sides. The Frost Dragon had slaughtered several Chieftains and still it didn't have one lasting wound; the beast horde was sawing through men all along the perimeter at a frightful pace. For all his surveying Dorian was still no closer to discovering the Shaman.

Then Old Man Fate’s line drifted across his mind once more. The All-seeing Eye?

He knew where he’d find an answer.