Chapter 73: Mountain Pass

  Leaving the Sun-Bleached Citadel felt exactly like stepping out of a cool, quiet, white tomb and directly back into the roaring mouth of a blast furnace. The massive, ancient skeletal ribs that shaded the city cast long, final, imposing shadows over them as Zeno and Lyra marched steadily east. Their sights were set firmly on the distant, jagged, completely unforgiving horizon where the endless Shifting Wastes violently met the formidable, towering mountain range known as the Spine of the World.

  The grueling journey east was drastically different from their southern trek. The dunes here were significantly steeper, the ridges much sharper, and the sand itself was a deeper, angrier shade of burnt ochre. The desert wind howled constantly, carrying a fine, highly abrasive grit that aggressively found its way into every single seam of their clothing and gear.

  Lyra’s physical condition was a dark, heavy secret she guarded with the absolute ferocity of a cornered animal. The brief, terrifying flare-up in Vaelen’s bone-house had eventually settled, but the angry pink lines beneath her heavy leather bracer were now permanently, visibly etched into her skin, no longer fading entirely even with a full night of rest. She actively compensated by relying heavily on her natural physical agility and stamina, strictly refusing to use her pale green wind Tena, desperately conserving her uncorrupted energy for absolute, life-or-death emergencies.

  Zeno, meanwhile, was actively, cheerfully thriving. The constant, heavy resistance of the deep, shifting ochre sand was acting as a continuous, low-level training exercise for his massive, highly muscled legs. He walked with a steady, relentless, rhythmic power, often taking Gravel the mule’s heavy lead rope and physically dragging the stubborn beast and its cargo for hours at a time, entirely just to "even out the workout."

  On the fifth brutal day of their eastern march, the endless monotony of the burning dunes was violently broken by a terrifying new threat.

  They were crossing a particularly wide, incredibly flat expanse of hardened, blindingly white salt pan when the solid ground beneath their heavy boots began to vibrate. It wasn't the deep, rhythmic, heavy thrum of a Sand-Wyrm. It was a rapid, incredibly high-frequency, aggressive tremor, feeling exactly like thousands of tiny, frantic hammers hitting the earth simultaneously.

  "Movement at three o'clock!" Lyra shouted, her brass spyglass snapping instantly to her eye.

  A massive, triangular dorsal fin, easily six feet tall and covered entirely in jagged, bone-like, highly abrasive serrations, was actively cutting through the hard-packed salt flat with terrifying, explosive speed. It was leaving a massive wake of shattered white crystals behind it, and it was heading directly for them.

  "Sand-Shark!" Lyra identified instantly, her voice tight with genuine alarm. "Faster than a Wyrm, but less heavily armored. It hunts entirely by speed and massive kinetic impact. It’s going to try to ram us and shatter our bones!"

  Zeno dropped the mule's lead rope into the salt. He didn't look worried or panicked. He looked absolutely, genuinely excited.

  "A giant shark?" Zeno asked, his amber eyes widening with pure curiosity as he watched the approaching fin. "Does it taste exactly like a giant river fish?"

  "It tastes like old boots and pure hatred!" Lyra yelled, drawing her twin Elvarian daggers, completely refusing to use her wind magic. "Get ready to dodge, Zeno! Do not try to catch it!"

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  The Sand-Shark burst violently from the crust of the salt pan in a massive, blinding shower of pulverized white crystals. It was a sleek, heavily muscled, terrifying torpedo of a beast, easily thirty feet long, with tough skin that looked exactly like coarse, grey sandpaper and a massive, gaping mouth filled entirely with concentric rows of razor-sharp, triangular teeth. It didn't arc high into the air like the Wyrm; it stayed incredibly low, skimming the flat surface of the earth exactly like a biological missile.

  It bypassed the humans entirely, its primal instincts aiming for the largest, meatiest target: Gravel. The heavily laden mule froze entirely in place, letting out a loud, high-pitched bray of absolute, paralyzing terror.

  Zeno moved instantly. He didn't use the Flowing Step for pure speed this time; he used it for flawless, absolute precision. He stepped directly into the massive, charging shark's path, planting his heavy metal-plated boots wide and deep onto the hard salt pan.

  "No eating the luggage!" Zeno roared.

  He absolutely didn't try to stop the two-ton missile by punching it or catching it; his newly expanded intelligence knew the sheer, overwhelming momentum would shatter his spine. As the massive, terrifying shark opened its jaws to snap him entirely in half, Zeno dropped incredibly low, sliding forward on his knees across the abrasive salt.

  He raised his right arm, locking his elbow entirely, pointing the heavy, jagged obsidian spikes of his Rock Serpent gauntlet directly upward.

  He didn't swing. He used the colossal beast's own terrifying velocity entirely against it.

  As the thirty-foot monster lunged ferociously over him, Zeno drove the razor-sharp obsidian spikes directly upward, plunging them deeply into the significantly softer, unarmored pale underbelly of the shark.

  The sheer, unstoppable forward momentum of the charging two-ton beast did all the devastating work.

  With a horrific, deafening, wet tearing sound, the deeply anchored obsidian spikes completely unzipped the massive Sand-Shark from its lower jaw all the way down to its tail fin as Zeno slid cleanly underneath it.

  The massive beast shrieked in sudden, catastrophic agony. Its forward momentum carried it another fifty feet before it crashed heavily onto the hard salt pan, tumbling violently head-over-tail in a massive spray of dark blood and white salt crystals, completely and entirely eviscerated.

  It slid to a heavy, lifeless halt, completely dead before the dust even settled.

  Zeno stood up, dusting the white salt from his dark red Crimson Spider-Silk tunic. He looked down at his spiked right gauntlet, which was entirely coated in thick gore, and then over at the massive, completely ruined carcass.

  "It is definitely not a fish," Zeno concluded logically, inspecting the abrasive grey skin from a distance. "It has no shiny scales at all. But the big fin on its back looks very sharp. Can we use it?"

  Lyra stared at him, her daggers still drawn, her emerald eyes wide with absolute, stunned disbelief. She looked at the gutted, two-ton apex predator, and then back at the boy who had just casually used the earth and his armor as a fixed blade.

  "You just... you just gutted a Sand-Shark using its own speed, Zeno," Lyra breathed, shaking her head.

  "It was moving very fast," Zeno admitted, walking over to his dropped cauldron. "It did all the hard work for me. Now, let's harvest the big fin. I bet it makes incredibly good, thick soup stock."

  They harvested the massive, bone-serrated dorsal fin, tying it securely to the still-trembling mule, and continued their march east. Two grueling days later, the flat, blinding salt pans finally gave way to rising, incredibly rocky foothills. The burnt orange sand thinned out completely, replaced by sharp, dark grey shale and imposing, massive boulders.

  They had finally reached the absolute edge of the Jagged Peaks.

  The mountains before them were a terrifying, vertical wall of dark, unforgiving stone that literally pierced the sky. There was absolutely no clear, carved path, only a terrifying series of narrow, winding, treacherous goat tracks that quickly disappeared upward into the heavy, dark clouds. The ambient air grew instantly cold and incredibly thin, biting sharply at their lungs with every breath.

  "This is the Spine," Lyra said softly, looking high up at the towering, impossible cliffs, her breath pluming in the sudden freezing air. "The Obsidian Throne is located somewhere incredibly deep in there. We have to climb."

  Zeno looked straight up at the towering, deadly mountains. He didn't see a terrifying, impassable obstacle. He saw a massive, solid staircase.

  "Good," Zeno smiled broadly, adjusting the heavy straps of his backpack. "I really like climbing. It is exactly just walking, but going up."