Chapter 180: The Fallen Flight
Taking advantage of the monster’s disorientation and blindness, Ignis flexed his limbs and launched himself in a leap for the Eagle King’s neck. The feathered mass beat its wings to rise, but the fire bear drove his claws into the exposed flesh. With his jaws stretched wide, Ignis concentrated a core of flame at the back of his throat and detonated it point-blank against the monster’s jugular. The internal blast unleashed a tide of sparks and charred meat, forcing the beast to collapse onto the bedrock.
Kellar vaulted off his mount’s back and landed in front of the massive head.
"My turn!" shouted Kellar.
Seeking to deliver the finishing blow to claim the beast’s mystical skill through his shamanic bond, he drew his bone blade and drove it against the Eagle King’s plumage. However, the blade struck the steel-hard feathers with a dull spark and rebounded, shattering into fragments that rained over the dirt.
"Shit!" cursed Kellar, taking a step back as he looked at his broken weapon.
He needed to finish the creature himself to ensure the absorption of its essence, but those feathers made it impenetrable to ordinary weapons.
The Eagle King, driven by the hatred of its remaining eye, locked its gaze onto Kellar and unleashed a lightning-fast peck. Kellar reacted on instinct, rolling across the gravel to dodge the beak as the stone where he had stood was ground to dust.
Giving it no room to recover, Kellar thrust both hands forward and bellowed, unleashing his spellbook to its limit:
"[Poison Curse]! [Blindness Curse]! [Heaviness Curse]! [Weakness Curse]! [Pain Curse]!"
A necrotic surge of greenish and purplish energy enveloped the winged sovereign. The agony of the combined curses drove the beast wild; its body emitted a green glow, and with an agonizing beat of its wings, it generated a gust of razor-sharp wind blades flying straight toward Kellar.
Standing face-to-face with nowhere to retreat, Kellar had no space to dodge.
In the blink of an eye, Ignis threw himself between Kellar and the windstorm. The air blades struck the great bear’s chest head-on, carving deep wounds that nearly split him in half. Ignis roared in agony as fiery blood gushed from his torso, yet he gritted his teeth and tried to lunge forward to shield his master.
Seeing the scene unfold, Grok, fighting a few meters away, roared and activated the ability granted by the shaman’s totem: [Bear’s Fury].
The veteran hunter’s body glowed with a red aura. Leaping with strength, he buried his heavy axe into the side of the Eagle King’s head, prying open a fissure between the bone plates before being swiped away by a wing strike.
"Support the Shaman! Concentrate fire!" shouted the soldiers along the pass.
Even as the lesser eagles continued to harass them from above and dig their talons into the ranks, the riflemen and hunters ignored the immediate danger and poured concentrated fire into the great beast’s throat and open wounds.
Kellar did not waste his people’s sacrifice. Dropping the hilt of his broken blade, he gripped his war hammer with both hands and channeled the same ancestral power.
"[Bear’s Fury]!" bellowed Kellar.
A crimson glow enveloped his body, multiplying his strength. Kellar propelled himself into the air and brought the hammer down with a devastating impact directly onto the fissure Grok had carved into the monster’s skull.
CRACK-BOOM!
The impact echoed like thunder across the canyon, shattering the Eagle King’s bone structure and exploding its skull in a wave of blood and brains.
The gigantic corpse of the Eagle King collapsed onto the rocks with an impact that shook the ground one last time. A dense, greenish torrent of spiritual energy erupted from the carcass and surged into Kellar’s chest. The sheer overexertion and the flood of mana coursing into his body overwhelmed him; Kellar fell to his knees on the blood-splattered gravel, gasping heavily as he braced his hammer against the ground to keep from collapsing.
Upon seeing their sovereign fall, the surviving eagles panicked completely. Shrieks of terror echoed through the canyon as the remaining few hundred beat their wings frantically to flee toward the high mountain peaks, abandoning their shattered nests.
"Don’t let them escape! Keep firing!" shouted Lennis, her voice raspy.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The soldiers continued firing their rifles at the retreating shadows, bringing down a few more in mid-air. Amid the smoke from the explosions and the lingering dust, shouts of victory echoed across the pass, but they quickly died down, swallowed by the moans of pain rising from the battlefield.
The cost of victory had been devastating.
Kellar pushed himself up with effort, leaning on his hammer, and walked among the shattered remnants of the ballistas and the scattered bodies. Of the original force—comprising forty-five soldiers, fifty new recruits, and the twelve veteran hunters—half lay wounded on the ground, with deep talon gashes and fractured bones. The most gut-wrenching was the death toll: ten experienced soldiers and twenty recruits from the new battalion had lost their lives under the beasts’ kamikaze attacks.
Brak limped toward Kellar, clutching his side, his face covered in soot and blood. He held the hand of one of the fallen female hunters before closing her eyes.
"We won, Shaman..." whispered Brak, his voice cracking as he looked over the trail of bodies. "But we paid a price."
Kellar surveyed the scene in silence, clenching his fists as he stared at the motionless corpse of the Eagle King. Since his ceremonial bone blade had shattered against the beast’s feathers, the mystical absorption had failed to trigger, leaving him with only the exhaustion of battle and the weight of the lost lives.
"Recover the bodies of our fallen," ordered Kellar in a low voice, filled with a solemn firmness that echoed through the smoke of the canyon. "Tend first to those who can move and gather the dead. Every single one of them fought with bravery today; they deserve a proper burial."
Lennis nodded in silence, wiping blood from her face before issuing orders to the recruits who were still standing. The survivors, despite their profound exhaustion and the gashes lining their bodies, mobilized immediately. Some fashioned makeshift stretchers out of branches and scrap canvas from the supply wagons to carry the critically wounded, while others began retrieving the bodies of their comrades from amid the steel-hard feathers and black blood of the eagles.
Grok stepped toward Kellar, leaning heavily on his axe. His left arm was bleeding from a deep claw gash, but his eyes remained fixed on his leader.
"The Eagle King has fallen, Shaman," said Grok, his breath coming heavy. "Without their leader and with their nests shattered, this mountain range will never pose a threat to the tribe again. Their deaths were not in vain."
Kellar did not answer right away. He walked up to the colossal carcass of the winged sovereign and placed a hand on the beast’s shattered beak.
"They made sure our people have a future," said Kellar, turning back toward Grok and Brak. "Now it falls on us to ensure today’s sacrifice was worth the cost."