She narrowly dodges a swipe from the massive creature's free arm. She leaps down to the stone floor and immediately swings to pull Navigator Minion along. "Yeah," she groans under her breath.
In but a second's time, they accelerate to the speed of a charging stallion, then to a large, fast cat, and then to a diving falcon. The thing tears through the hall behind them as they enter corridors and chambers, maneuvering with split-second decisions to stay ahead, even by a hair, of the beast.
To say their pursuer moves fast is an understatement. Scout Minion prides herself on being "crazy fast" as she puts it, but this thing is showing a comfort with the pace that it's almost like it's maintaining pace just to draw out the hunt.
The terrain becomes senseless at times, incomprehensible—like attempting to run through the insides of a kaleidoscope with an unthinkable demon's fangs an inch away from one's neck.
Scout ignores the terrified murmurs of Navigator Minion as she jerks and tugs through the horrors, inches away from the jaws of the dragon, with milliseconds to move each time.
The walls and ceilings of the structure twist and extrapolate, creating seemingly endless horizons as Scout pushes herself to the very edge of her nerves, but the more she relies on the physical and her senses, the more they fail her.
She scratches her hand on the wall as she attempts to jump. It feels more like pliant rubber backed by the thinnest plywood than the sure-shaped stone of the temple. Before long, she has no idea where she's even going. She's just moving, reacting to the nightmare, and she's pretty sure she still has Navigator Minion with her, though she doesn't even look back to check at this point.
Everything seems to be closing in and opening up all at once. Even with a mind shaped by ages of stress, battle, and perseverance, she cannot quite keep her cool.
What worries her the most is the lack of communication. She knows she's cut off from the others, mentally and spiritually. One of the very few—scratch that, one of the most significant—things about being a minion of the High Overlord is that you're pretty much on the same wavelength all the time. She could always at least hear others.
No matter the distance, it takes severe tampering to break the signal produced by their mana signatures. Here, this strange, ancient nightmare that's been poised, lying in wait like an animal holding its jaws open for a passing mouse, has clamped its jaws shut, producing a truly incomprehensible terror to the surprised rodent in its final moments.
Yes, what worries her more than anything else is the feeling of separation from the High Overlord, that one unspeakable assurance of safety and belonging within this conscious madhouse bent on her absolute destruction.
She leaps off something that looks as though it's supposed to be a ledge but feels like thin air. She's sure she's grasping for an opposing cliff, but it feels like she's falling. Then it feels like she's successfully recovering from the ledge, but it looks like she's landed in a pit of sharp rocks. It doesn't make sense anymore.
She reaches for her scarf, one of her few mementos of the past, and instead feels what seems to be meaningless arrays of colors and sounds. Even the comfort of burying her face in that old familiar garment is taken from her as the abyss below her opens and she falls upwards.
"Yes," a voice says. "Feast."
It's an abyss now, but an abyss with sensory flourishes smashing into every nerve Scout Minion owns. She's not floating, empty and meaningless. It feels to her as if she's been lowered into a small prison where she's going to be tortured. She feels a dense pain in her little chest, the same moment it feels like Chaos's fatherly caress.
In the dark, a loud snap erupts behind her, and then somewhere else, and then a mile up and to the right. She tightens her left hand as if to sink it around Navigator Minion's hand and finally looks over.
She cannot see anything, and with the flashing of the lights, she cannot even see her own body. She cannot feel anything except the piercing heat of a draconic predator, one of her own kind sinking his fangs into her.
She reaches for where she assumes the cranium of her pursuer is, but all she finds is nonsensical sensory noise. She swings again, and it feels like a bale of hay, then solid metal, and then a swing into gelatin.
Finally, the fangs sink so deep that something inside her—the ether that makes up her body—wakes her from her trance. A sort of subconscious arcane impulse that moves in a person's most dire need.
What she finally sees shocks her.
She's currently, with every fiber of her strength, attempting to impale herself on the solid, jagged rock jaws of an enormous draconic skull. Her muscles are locked in some kind of trance, contorting with all they have to destroy her upon the massive altar.
The room, much darker and splattered with the ancient brown hues of stolen lives, seems more like an execution chamber than a hall of celebration. Execution is a poor word for it, she realizes. This is a place where bodies go to give themselves to the master of the temple.
She swings her little minion head down and sees other parts of the jaws. Explorer Minion and Navigator Minion are also oozing white infusia. She sees the piles upon piles of thousands upon thousands of skeletons—sacrifices through the eons—and she finally connects the dots.
"Heraldics that can use mana dampening," she mumbles under her breath as she listens to the enriching sound of their white blood dripping slowly onto the floor, onto the mass piles below them.
"Y-yeah," Navigator Minion, half aware, bleats as he continues to look at the interior of the dragon's skull, as if there is some kind of secret waiting within.
"This isn't a normal clan," Scout adds.
"…Yeah," Navigator Minion agrees again, but this time in a tone of empty-hearted acceptance.
She looks around, and it makes sense. She blinks once, twice, and then her white eyes flash ever whiter in realization. "This thing's a shard," Scout Minion says after a long pause.
Explorer Minion coughs up some white infusia, making his mustache look a bit goopy and silly as he struggles to turn and look at her. "You're out of your mind. There's no way that could be real."
Scout Minion shakes her head as the three of them slowly bleed out, bodies locked and pushing with all they have deeper into the teeth of the skull.
"No, this is a shard of Ohrine," she says.
"Ohrine? One of the primordial dragons?" Navigator Minion asks, his voice tinged with disbelief. I thought they were a myth."
"You clearly should navigate your way to Library Tower," Explorer Minion scoffs out as best he can despite the pain.
Scout chuckles, still able to maintain a slight semblance of humor despite the misery of the situation. "Come on, dude. You know about other dragons, and you still think they're fake?"
Navigator Minion winces on the tooth as his body, entirely against his own will, pulls him an inch deeper into the jagged edge. "I guess I don't understand. How can some random dragon-kin tribe do mana dampening? That's like… theoretical magic."
Scout sighs. "Children of the Dragon Mother can take on the magic of her still-living but separated sister," Scout Minion explains. "Ohrine's brain still has her power, and kin can draw any magic she knows if they encounter the right part of her mind."
"Right. But that's like fire or ice or some generic elemental magic. Some kind of offensive invocation," Navigator Minion says. "Do you really mean to say that she knew something as insidious as this?"
"Well, according to the legends, she did go insane." Scout answers, glancing down the hall as a faint glow appears.
At the same time, a slow, steady chanting echoes from the dark passageway. "Here we go," she says, redoubling her efforts to free herself.
Navigator Minion looks over to where Scout's staring and spots the horrific glow.
"Oh, that… that looks pretty bad," Navigator Minion gulps out.
"This is it, fellas," she says matter-of-factly. "I guess it was only natural that we'd get beaten in some embarrassing way like this, far away from everyone." She pauses. "Not even Poppi are going to know we're dead," she adds.
Navigator Minion flinches but can't stop himself from gripping the jaws of the skull, as if his body has committed to his death.
"No, dude! Don't give up! It's a mind game!" Navigator Minion shouts.
"This can't be!" Explorer Minion shouts, wriggling free from the tooth he's on. "This can't be! I won't die like this! They can't kill me! They don't even have the—"
He trails off just as the glowing form presents itself: the blade of an arcane, highly enchanted knife, gripped by the chieftain spirit from earlier.
"This time the feast has come," the chieftain says, illuminating his grin with the blade that the minions know immediately is not simply enchanted to strike through blood and bone, but through mana and ether.