Noctis did not rush the release of the gathered aura, because the value of what he held in his hand at that moment did not lie in how quickly it could be spent, but in how completely it could be shaped before it was allowed to move. Twilight Reaver remained raised, the edge angled slightly downward, and the layered density of power that had been condensing along the blade continued to build in a controlled accumulation that altered the atmosphere of the chamber in a way that even the unmoving serpent could not ignore.
The light from the torches no longer behaved in simple flicker, but bent subtly toward the weapon as though the air itself had begun to shift under the weight of what was being gathered, and the fine dust that lingered across the stone floor lifted in faint trembling patterns before settling again in uneven lines.
The serpent remained coiled, but its stillness had changed in character. What had earlier resembled a measured pause now carried a tighter compression, the front of its body drawing inward by small increments that betrayed readiness rather than restraint, and the tongue that flicked into the air did so with a faster cadence, tasting not just for position but for change.
It had felt the difference. It understood, at least in instinct, that the exchange had moved beyond the earlier stage where force could be tested and discarded without consequence. Noctis observed that shift without altering his stance, allowing the silence between them to stretch just long enough that the serpent had time to decide whether it would break that tension first.
It did not.
The choice settled cleanly.
"Then we move," he said, the words quiet, not intended to provoke, but to mark the end of waiting.
The motion that followed did not separate itself into preparation and execution. His arms moved as a continuation of the same controlled state he had maintained while charging the blade, and the downward swing of Twilight Reaver carried with it the entirety of the condensed aura that had been layered along its edge. The release did not erupt chaotically. It unfolded with precision, the energy compressing further along the line of the blade for a fraction of a moment before it expanded outward into a crescent that tore free from the edge and drove forward across the chamber.
The Oblivion Rend did not travel as light alone. It carried weight.
The arc widened as it moved, the leading edge cutting into the stone floor beneath it with a force that split the surface and drove fragments upward along its path, leaving behind a carved line that marked its passage even before it reached the serpent. The air displaced around it rippled outward in layered pressure, and the sound that accompanied it was not a single sharp report but a sustained tearing resonance that followed the crescent as it advanced.
The serpent reacted.
Not immediately.
The hesitation lasted no longer than a fraction, but it existed, and in that brief delay lay the difference between evasion and impact. Its head snapped upward, the coils beneath it tightening as it attempted to shift its mass away from the incoming arc, but the scale of its body and the speed of the attack did not align in its favor. The motion it began could not complete in time.
The impact struck.
The crescent collided with the serpent's body and detonated outward in a burst of force that expanded through the chamber in a layered shockwave, driving air, dust, and fragments of stone away from the point of contact in all directions. The ground trembled under the release, the echo of the explosion rolling across the chamber walls and returning in diminishing waves that overlapped with the initial blast. The torches bent under the pressure, their flames stretching thin before snapping back into shape.
Noctis remained where he stood.
The shockwave reached him, lifting the ends of his mantle and pulling strands of his hair upward in the disturbed air, but his stance did not break. His gaze remained fixed on the point of impact even as the dust surged upward, obscuring the serpent's form behind a thick, rising cloud. The sound faded gradually, replaced by the low settling of debris and the faint hiss of disturbed air moving back into place.
He clicked his tongue softly.
"I see."
His vision did not rely on the absence of obstruction. Through the shifting dust, through the lingering distortion in the air, his Omni Eyes resolved the truth of what had happened within the explosion. The serpent had not taken the attack cleanly across its core. In the moment of impact, it had twisted, not enough to escape, but enough to interpose a portion of its body between the strike and its vital line.
Its tail.
The rear section of its body had taken the Oblivion Rend, the crescent cutting across it with enough force to breach the outer surface where earlier attacks had failed to penetrate. The scales along that segment had split under the pressure, not shattered, but opened in a way that revealed the darker tissue beneath, and a thin line of blood traced along the cut before beginning to seep outward.
It was not a deep wound.
But it was a wound.
The serpent pulled back from the center of the dust cloud, its body shifting with greater urgency now, the coils tightening and releasing as it reoriented itself with a speed that had not been present before the strike. The section of its tail that had taken the hit did not hang uselessly, nor did it appear crippled, but the tension within that portion of its movement had changed, the flow of motion no longer as smooth as the rest of its body.
Noctis watched that carefully.
"So it can be cut."
The conclusion did not come with surprise, but with confirmation, and the faint curve at the edge of his mouth returned as the path forward clarified. The Oblivion Rend, even in a reduced form, had achieved what the earlier methods had not. It had penetrated. Not deeply enough to end the fight, but sufficiently to prove that the armor could be breached under the right conditions.
"Good."
He did not allow the moment to linger.
Twilight Reaver remained in his right hand, the residual aura still clinging to its edge, and the Bloodfang Reaper in sword form settled more firmly into his left as he drew additional power into both blades. This time, the accumulation did not reach the same depth as the first release. Instead, it formed in quicker, more immediate layers, enough to produce repeated strikes rather than a single overwhelming one.
He moved.
The first follow-up slash came as a continuation of the previous motion, the blade cutting across the air in a horizontal arc that released another crescent of energy, slightly narrower than the first, but no less defined in its structure. The second followed immediately from the opposite angle, the left-hand blade carving upward to produce a crossing trajectory that intersected the first line further ahead.
The serpent felt them before they arrived.
It moved.
The body did not attempt to absorb the attacks this time. It twisted, the coils shifting in rapid succession as it pulled itself out of the path of the incoming crescents, the tail dragging through the fractured stone where it had already been struck. The first Rend grazed along the outer edge of its movement, carving a shallow line across the scales before passing through and striking the chamber wall behind it, while the second missed cleanly by a margin so narrow that the displaced air still rippled across the serpent's body.
Noctis did not pause.
The blades continued to move, each swing releasing another Oblivion Rend, the crescents layering into the chamber one after another in a sequence that did not rely on singular impact but on sustained pressure. The arcs varied in angle and height, some cutting low across the ground, others rising higher to intercept potential escape paths, and the cumulative effect transformed the open space into a shifting field of intersecting trajectories that the serpent was forced to navigate.
The chamber reacted continuously now.
Each strike that missed the serpent struck stone, carving into the floor or walls with explosive force, sending fragments outward that had no time to settle before the next impact displaced them again. The air remained in constant motion, shockwaves overlapping and interfering with one another as the repeated releases pushed against the boundaries of the space. Dust did not have time to fully fall before it was lifted again, creating a persistent haze that thickened and thinned in uneven patterns.
The serpent abandoned offense.
It moved with speed that bordered on desperation, the length of its body coiling and uncoiling in rapid succession as it slithered across the chamber floor, then along the walls, then back down again in a continuous attempt to avoid the incoming barrage. Its head weaved through the gaps between the crescents, its body following with less precision but greater urgency, and the tongue flicked constantly, sampling the air for the origin of the attacks even as its eyes tracked the visible arcs.
It was not thinking clearly.
It was reacting.
The cuts it had already taken, shallow as they were, combined with the pressure of the incoming attacks to create a perception of danger that exceeded the actual lethality of the strikes. Each Rend carried enough presence to suggest that a direct hit could be fatal, and the serpent responded to that suggestion with full commitment, avoiding even those trajectories that would have resulted in minimal damage.
Noctis recognized that immediately.
"You're overreacting," he said, his voice carrying through the layered noise of the chamber without needing to rise. "These won't kill you."
The serpent did not understand the words, but it understood the tone.
And it did not trust it.
He continued to attack, the blades moving in a steady rhythm that maintained pressure without exhausting his reserves, each release calculated to limit the serpent's options rather than simply overwhelm it with force. The cuts that did land were shallow, carving lines across the scales that opened into thin bleeding marks before sealing partially under the creature's natural resilience. The damage accumulated, but slowly, each wound adding to the next without immediately compromising the serpent's ability to move.
The creature's body began to show it.
Blood traced along multiple sections now, dark lines breaking the uniform surface of its armor, and the tension within its movement increased as the number of wounds grew. It remained fast. It remained dangerous. But it had shifted fully into defense, its earlier attempts to attack replaced entirely by evasive motion.
For a time, the pattern held.
Then it broke.
The serpent surged toward the wall, its body driving upward along the vertical surface in a motion that defied the expectation of something so large, the scales finding purchase against the stone as it climbed. The height it gained was not excessive, but it was enough to change the angle of the next movement, and when it reached the point it had chosen, the coils compressed tightly beneath it.
Noctis saw the shift before the release.
The serpent launched.
The entire front of its body sprang from the wall, the stored tension in its coils converting into forward momentum that carried it through the air toward him in a descending arc. The head led, the jaws opening again, but this time the movement did not commit to a simple bite.
It prepared something else.
Noctis answered with motion, the blades already moving as he adjusted his stance to meet the incoming line. Several Oblivion Rends left his weapons in rapid succession, the crescents intersecting the serpent's path and striking across its head and upper body as it descended. The impacts left visible marks, shallow cuts that traced along the scales and drew additional blood, but they did not halt the advance.
The serpent closed the distance.
Its jaws opened wider.
Then, instead of snapping shut, it expelled.
A surge of liquid burst from its mouth, not as a narrow stream, but as a wide, pressurized spray that expanded outward as it traveled, covering a broad area in front of it. The substance carried a sheen that caught the torchlight unevenly, and the air around it reacted immediately, hissing faintly as the liquid displaced it.
Noctis crossed his blades.
Both Twilight Reaver and the Bloodfang sword moved in unison, the slashes intersecting to form a cross-shaped release that drove two Oblivion Rends outward to meet the incoming spray. The collision between energy and liquid did not cancel cleanly. The crescents cut into the front of the spray, forcing it back momentarily and dispersing part of it into mist, but the volume behind the initial wave continued to press forward.
It was enough.
The delay created a window.
Genesis Step carried him out of the line of attack before the remaining liquid could reach him, placing him at a new position across the chamber as the venom struck the ground where he had stood.
The result was immediate.
The stone did not simply stain.
It reacted.
A sharp hissing sound filled the air as the liquid spread across the surface, eating into it with visible effect as the material softened and broke down under contact. Small pockets of vapor rose where the reaction intensified, and the edges of the affected area darkened as the integrity of the stone was compromised.
Noctis exhaled.
"…That would have been unpleasant."
His gaze remained fixed on the spreading damage for a moment longer before lifting back to the serpent, the faint smile returning as the fight shifted once more.
"So you had that hidden."
The next phase would not be the same.
Noctis did not immediately move after the serpent's venom finished spreading across the stone, because the shape of the battle had changed in a way that made impatience less useful than judgment, and the next decision would determine whether the creature before him remained an enemy or became something far more valuable. The chamber still carried the aftermath of every exchange that had come before, the ground split by impacts, the walls marked by cuts and collisions, and the air thick with drifting dust that turned the violet torchlight into layered haze. Across that damaged space, the serpent's body remained active, its coils shifting over one another with uneasy force as it adjusted around the pain of its wounds, and though blood traced along several of the cuts he had already made, the creature still held enough vitality to continue fighting without any immediate sign of collapse.
That was precisely what made killing it inefficient.
His focus turned inward for only a fraction of a moment, and even then it did not leave the serpent so much as deepen around it, the beast path of the blood grid surfacing in his awareness as a practical structure rather than a distant category of possibility. The skill of beast taming had already revealed its current limit to him. Two slots. Not an abstract number, not a vague future expansion, but a fixed present condition that meant any choice to bind a creature would carry actual weight. A meaningless beast could fill a slot and become a burden. A useful one could become an extension of his own battlefield control.
The titan serpent was already proving itself worthy of that distinction.
Its scales had turned away his guns, resisted the cutting force of the Bloodfang Reaper, and endured the neck strike of the guan dao without surrendering structural integrity. Its speed had exceeded what its mass should have allowed. Its instincts had adapted mid-fight. Even its venom had introduced a threat that required respect rather than dismissal, and taken together, those qualities no longer made it something to finish quickly. They made it something to keep.
The thought settled into certainty without needing deliberation.
"There's no way I'm wasting something like this," he said quietly, the words emerging not as a challenge to the serpent, but as the formal end of the question inside his own mind.
Once that conclusion fixed itself, his weapons ceased to matter in the way they had a moment earlier. The Bloodfang sword in his left hand dissolved first, its edge unraveling into strands of blood that withdrew cleanly along the line of his arm before vanishing back into him, and Twilight Reaver followed without resistance, the relic sinking into the blood space with a controlled absence that left both of his hands empty. The removal of steel from the equation did not diminish the threat in the chamber. It clarified it, stripping away the intermediate forms through which he had been testing the serpent and leaving only the line between his own body and the creature he intended to take.
He straightened fully, and the adjustment that followed moved through him in a sequence too natural to be called preparation, though that was exactly what it was. His shoulders rolled once, the tension that had accumulated during the prior weapon exchanges settling deeper rather than leaving him, and the line of his neck turned with enough pressure to release a faint controlled crack before returning to center. His hands opened, flexed, and closed again, each knuckle aligning with a quiet succession of sounds that would have seemed almost casual in another setting, but here, in the center of a chamber still shaking itself back toward stillness, the gesture carried the weight of deliberate simplification.
His gaze fixed on the serpent. "I don't need to kill you. I just need to beat you down enough that you stop fighting back."
Omni Eyes resolved the creature's condition with immediate clarity. It had lost enough vitality to feel the fight. It had not lost enough to lose itself.
Seventy-four percent remained.
That was good.
That was enough room to break it properly.
He did not waste another breath standing still. His body drove forward, the force of the first step transferring cleanly through the fractured ground beneath him as he crossed the distance between them in a line that did not wander or feint. The serpent saw him come, but its understanding of what that meant belonged to the earlier phases of the battle, where his approach had ended in blade, gunfire, or energy release. It had no reason yet to expect the directness of what followed, and by the time the distinction might have formed inside its instincts, Genesis Step had already replaced distance with immediacy.
Noctis reappeared above the creature's head.
The shift in position did not interrupt the continuity of his motion, because his body had already committed before the displacement completed, the turn of his torso and the descending line of his right arm carrying through the transfer of space without any wasted correction. The fist that fell toward the crown of the serpent's skull did not rely on arm strength in isolation. The force in it came from the full coordination of his frame, from the anchoring memory of ground that still lingered in his legs, through the compression of his core and shoulder, into the narrowing vector of his arm and hand. Every part of that motion existed to deliver pressure downward and nowhere else.
The impact landed with a depth of force that the chamber felt all at once.
The serpent's skull drove into the stone floor beneath it, not with the slide or deflection of a glancing blow, but with the complete transfer of the strike through bone, scale, and mass into the ground itself, and the surface answered by fracturing outward from the point of contact in hard branching lines. The sound that followed was not sharp. It was heavy, a deep concussive report that traveled through the chamber floor, then up into the walls and ceiling, and returned again in reverberations that made the whole room feel momentarily denser. Dust rose in a low violent surge, fragments of loosened stone skidding and bouncing away from the strike as the creature's head remained forced down under the last of the descending pressure.
Noctis did not step away from that result. He stayed over it long enough to feel the serpent's body absorb the blow and pass the force along its own length, and in that instant the reduction in the creature's vitality resolved in his perception with the same certainty as the crack spreading beneath them.
Sixteen percent gone.
The result was enough to draw the slightest curve at the edge of his mouth.
"That's clean," he thought, not because the strike had been elegant, but because it had answered exactly the question he asked of it.
The serpent's first response came through the muscles of its neck and shoulders, those vast hidden chains of force tightening under him in a rapid attempt to reclaim the line of the body before he could strike again. Noctis rose just enough to keep his balance through that adjustment, not lifting himself free of the creature, but allowing the recoil to move beneath him while he reset the line of his arm. The second strike needed no experimentation. The first had already supplied the feedback. The crown was vulnerable to direct downward force not because the scales were weak, but because the head itself could not disperse impact through motion if pinned into the stone.
He dropped his fist again before the serpent could fully uncoil the answer it was preparing.
This time the blow landed even more directly. The serpent tried to lift, but in doing so it brought the head into the line of force more completely, and the descending impact met that rising resistance and overwhelmed it in the same instant, driving skull back into stone with a harder, denser collision than before. The chamber answered with another deep boom and a wider ring of cracking ground, and a visible fracture opened along the crown of the serpent's head where the strain of the second hit exceeded what the structure beneath the scales could keep hidden.
Twenty-one percent more of its vitality fell away.
Noctis felt satisfaction then, but not because the thing was losing. That had already become inevitable the moment he chose to keep it alive. What mattered was efficiency. A few more strikes of this quality and the serpent would be weak enough for the beast path to take hold, weak enough that domination would no longer need to be argued through combat.
He lifted his arm for the third blow.
The serpent panicked.
The shift from resistance into panic did not come through a single visible sign, but through the total behavior of the body beneath him. The coils no longer moved with the structured violence of a creature trying to line up a counterattack. They surged in all directions at once, the entire mass twisting and rolling under a primitive drive to dislodge whatever had taken hold of its head and turned its own skull into the point of repeated ruin. The front of the body heaved sideways while the rear followed, and the chamber floor groaned beneath the weight of that turn as the serpent attempted to crush him under its own mass rather than contest him in skill or timing.
Noctis did not treat that movement like an attack to be weathered. He treated it like terrain that had become temporarily unusable. Genesis Step removed him from the immediate line of collapse before the largest part of the body rolled through the space he occupied, and the serpent's bulk struck down where he had been with enough force to shake broken stone loose from the nearest wall. The body continued through that roll, then into another, then into a violent half-twist that was more about escape than direction, and the chamber responded to each phase of that loss of control with new cracking sounds, rising dust, and the harsh scrape of scale on damaged floor.
Its motions had become chaotic.
That was useful.
Noctis watched the pattern for only as long as it took to understand where the serpent's own panic had left the largest opening. The head remained dangerous, the mid-body too heavily layered to seize directly, but the tail had been wounded already, and more importantly, it extended out of the tighter defensive pattern of the coils often enough that a commitment there would not immediately place him beneath the full weight of the rolling body.
He vanished from his current line and reappeared at the rear of the serpent where the tail dragged through fractured debris with less coordination than before. His hands went around it without hesitation, both arms closing over the thickness of the appendage not as though he were grabbing something slender enough to dominate by leverage alone, but as though he were choosing to anchor himself to a moving column of living armor. The scales beneath his grip were slick with dust and the faint damp of blood from the earlier wound, yet his hold settled deeper than surface friction, his fingers finding the structural pressure points in the line of the tail through pure force.
The tail was heavy enough that ordinary lifting would have been meaningless.
He did not try to lift it with his arms.
He rooted himself through the floor first.
His feet set into the broken stone, weight sinking through his legs, the line of his spine straightening while his hips and shoulders aligned behind the pull he intended to make. The first pressure he applied was not visible. It passed into the tail through contact before the serpent itself fully realized the direction of the threat, and the answer that came back from the creature's body was one of brute resistance, the mass of it anchoring into the chamber through sheer size and the friction of scale against rock.
Noctis kept increasing the force.
The pressure traveled upward from the floor, through his legs into his center, and from there outward into both arms, not in separate bursts, but in one continuous chain that tightened with terrifying steadiness. The serpent's resistance held for a fraction, then shifted, then failed all at once when the tail rose higher than the rest of the body could compensate for, dragging the creature's rear into the air and wrenching the balance of the entire titan out of alignment.
The serpent left the ground in stages too fast to be meaningfully separated. First the tail lifted. Then the back half. Then the rest of the body followed as the creature's own mass betrayed it, its length dragged after the line of force because nothing else in the chamber had enough purchase to stop the movement. By the time the serpent understood that it was no longer controlling the direction of its own body, the chamber itself had already become part of the next motion.
Noctis turned.
Not wildly.
Not with wasted motion.
He rotated through the anchored line of his own body and used that turn to redirect the serpent's weight into a broad arc that carried it away from the center of the chamber and toward the nearest wall. The titan followed the motion not because it wanted to, but because the leverage of its own size worked against it once the rear was no longer grounded, and the next instant drove its side into the stone with enough force to rupture the surface in a fan of cracks and blast loose fragments outward in a violent ring.
The collision did not stop the movement. It compressed it, turned it, and fed it back into the line of Noctis's grip.
He pulled again.
The serpent tore free of the wall in a burst of falling debris and was already crossing the chamber before the stone it had struck had finished collapsing behind it. Its body bent through the momentum, head and neck lagging only a fraction behind the pull from the tail, and then the opposite wall met it with equal brutality. The second impact came lower and harder than the first, the angle sending a deeper shock through the structure of the chamber and into the body of the creature itself, and the sound of it was not a single report but a long grinding boom as stone failed under moving mass.
Noctis did not let the cycle end there. Each rebound of the serpent's body became part of the next redirection, the line of force passing from his grip into the tail, through the length of the titan, and then outward into the chamber walls in repeated slams that did not grant the creature time to stabilize itself. The serpent tried to coil during one of those transitions and only succeeded in making the next impact worse when the folded body struck unevenly and bounced apart under its own rigidity. It tried to twist its head around to face him, and the attempt threw the center of mass off just enough that the next collision hammered the skull into stone before the rest of the body had finished arriving.
Dust thickened. Stone fell. The torchlight wavered and bent under each shockwave. The chamber no longer felt like a room in which two combatants exchanged techniques. It felt like a space being used as the instrument of a single will, and that will did not belong to the serpent.
He increased the speed gradually, not because the serpent required more spectacle, but because momentum answered every question the creature asked with greater force than a slower sequence could. The arcs tightened. The intervals between impact and redirection shortened. The serpent's body no longer had enough time between collisions to understand where it was before it was elsewhere again, and the whole of the titan became a long blood-marked line of armor and muscle thrown again and again into stone by the grip of one man at its tail.
The creature's panic became visible in the eyes.
They widened first during the third major rebound when its head came up high enough in the arc to look down the length of its own body, and what it saw there did not fit any pattern it had ever survived through before. Noctis was still there, still holding the tail, still the fixed center around which the rest of the serpent's mass was now moving. The realization that the force dominating its entire body did not come from the chamber, from the dungeon, or from some invisible binding, but from the figure physically attached to its own tail, cut through whatever instinct remained coherent enough to think.
The serpent struggled harder after that.
Its coils contracted, trying to fold inward toward the point where it was being controlled. Its head snapped and twisted, mouth opening not to bite, but to find some angle from which its own body would no longer be an obstacle to reclaiming itself. Each effort only worsened the imbalance. The more it fought the line of the swing, the more violently the next redirection punished it, because every contraction changed how the weight distributed and allowed Noctis to exploit that change against the creature.
He felt all of it through the tail.
The tightening. The attempted recoils. The shifts in center of mass.
His grip adjusted constantly to those changes, not with visible strain, but with the minute corrections required to keep complete authority over the line of the body. He was no longer just lifting and throwing. He was steering the serpent through the consequences of its own resistance, and each time the creature tried to reclaim itself, it supplied new force for him to redirect into the next slam.
At one point the head struck the wall and dragged along it hard enough to carve a broken streak of scale, stone dust, and blood across the surface before the body was yanked away again. At another, the rear coils hit first and folded under the rest of the incoming mass, trapping the serpent's own midsection beneath itself for a fraction before the next pull ripped it free. Noctis let none of those moments become pauses. He stayed inside the flow of motion completely, his body serving as the fixed vector through which the titan's impossible weight was made mobile, and the chamber ceased to be a battlefield in the usual sense. It had become a proving floor for dominance.
The serpent was no longer attacking.
It was enduring.
That difference mattered more than any single injury he had dealt so far, because the decision to tame it had always required this exact outcome. He did not need it dead. He needed its understanding broken, and understanding did not break simply because a creature took damage. It broke when resistance and agency parted ways, when every effort to fight only confirmed that fighting had already ceased to belong to it.
By the time he had driven it through enough collisions that the chamber walls bore a map of where its body had struck, the serpent's motions no longer carried the same violent urgency they had at the beginning of the sequence. It still moved, still strained, still tried to gather itself, but the responses had become slower at the edges, less coherent, more dependent on instinct than intention. Blood seeped from a greater number of cuts now, not great wounds, but enough to darken portions of the scales and leave streaks across the ground and stone where the body had passed.
Noctis tightened his hold one final time and swung the serpent through a broader arc than before, carrying the titan up and outward before driving it into the wall with a collision heavy enough that the entire chamber answered with a long, low tremor. The head snapped sideways. The coils lost their line. Fragments of rock rained down through the haze, and when the body tore free of the wall and sagged back through the next portion of the motion, the eyes found him again.
This time what lived in them was not rage alone.
It was comprehension.
It had understood.
The thing controlling its entire body was not the room, not the dungeon, not some unseen force. It was him.
Noctis met that realization without softening his expression, and the line of his mouth shifted only enough to acknowledge that the serpent had finally reached the point he had been forcing it toward since the moment he chose not to kill it.
"Yeah… now you're getting it. You're not the one deciding how this goes anymore," he said, his voice low, steady, and entirely free of strain despite the weight still hanging from his arms through the line of the tail. "Good."
He did not release it.
Not yet.
The chamber held around them in dust, cracked stone, broken echoes, and the sustained violence of motion barely contained, while the serpent's body remained suspended within his control and the difference between predator and prey had already inverted so completely that only the serpent itself was still catching up to the truth of it.