Grub couldn't contain his happiness. "NO WAY!"
His voice cracked across the battlefield from the third wall, raw and unfiltered in a way that sounded completely foreign coming from his mouth. The dreary boy who measured every word and calculated every expression had just screamed like a child seeing a firework for the first time.
Luthiel flinched beside him and wiped her swollen eyes with the back of her mitten-like hands. Confusion pushed through the grief on her face as she blinked down at the battlefield. She wiped desperately at the symbols beneath her eyes, trying to clear her vision.
"Huh?" Lu's golden eyes were bloodshot and puffy, her cheeks still glistening. "What is happening, Mister Grub?"
She squinted through tear-blurred vision at the scene below, where a shirtless figure stood between the anomaly with Morrigan slung on his shoulder.
"Someone is helping Master!" Hope flickered across her face like sunlight through storm clouds. "Who is that?"
Grub didn't answer. His eyes were locked on the dark-skinned boy below, drinking in every detail as if confirming a ghost was real.
On the battlefield below them, the dark-skinned boy calmly shifted into a fighting stance. His bare torso glistened with sweat in the smoky afternoon light, the muscles across his chest and abdomen carved with freakish definition. And across his broad shoulders, Morrigan hung limply, her arms dangling, while her basin somehow still balanced on her head.
The Anomaly let out a shrill shriek before plowing forward.
Its four legs churned through the scorched earth as it barreled toward the newcomer, jaws stretched wide, that horrible emptiness behind its black eyes. The creature moved with a speed that had given even Morrigan trouble.
The newcomer merely stepped aside. His movements effortless, never once allowing Morrigan's unconscious body to slip from his shoulder.
His single right arm kept Morrigan secure against his back while his feet carried him laterally, smooth and unhurried. The Anomaly's jaws snapped shut on empty air and its momentum carried it past him, claws gouging the dirt as it skidded to redirect.
Without missing a beat, the one-armed Sky-Fallen tossed Morrigan gently upward. The motion was skillfully controlled, launching her just high enough to free both his arm and his mouth for a brief window. In that window, his right hand dropped to his waist and pulled a weighted staff from a strap across his hip. He caught the weapon between his teeth, then reached up with his freed arm and caught Morrigan on the way down.
Methodically, he slid the unconscious kappa onto his back, adjusting her weight so her arms draped across his shoulders. Grub couldn't hear the words from this distance, but he saw his lips move, whispering something to the woman draped across him. Whatever he said, it worked. Morrigan's clawed hands found his neck and locked together with whatever dregs of strength she had remaining.
She was alive and holding on with what little vitality she had left.
Interrupting the moment, the land snake's tail lashed toward them in a horizontal sweep that could have taken both their heads off. The newcomer spat the staff into his hand, pivoted, and slammed the weighted end down onto the incoming tail with enough force to cause a shockwave. The earth cracked beneath the impact, as the creature's entire body lurched sideways from the arrested momentum.
Then the boy grabbed the pinned tail with his bare hand.
Grub watched in stunned disbelief as the one-armed boy planted his feet, flexed, and lifted. The Anomaly, a creature longer than a house and heavier than a bear, rose from the ground. Wrighty's arm bulged, veins standing out against dark skin, as he heaved the serpentine body overhead in an arc.
The impossible strength made everyone freeze.
"W-What..." A Guardian whispered.
"How?" Said another.
The land serpent flew through the air before crashing into the battlefield with an earth-shaking boom. The impact shook the battlefield, while dust exploded skyward. The creature bounced once before crashing to a stop in a heap of tangled limbs and ashen scales.
The dark-skinned boy didn't wait for it to recover. He launched himself forward, closing the distance in two explosive strides, and dropped the weighted staff to his hand and raised it above his head. The weapon plummeted downwards in a swift motion and struck the creature's neck with a meaty crack that echoed off the village walls. The Anomaly's skull was driven into the dirt, its body going rigid from the force channeled through its spine.
The beast screeched. Its claws lashed wildly. But the dark-skinned boy danced between every strike.
One claw nearly clipped Morrigan, but he was able to avoid it by twisting his body. Another strike carved through empty air, before he hopped off the creature's body and landed a few feet back, reassessing.
The Anomaly pulled itself upright and fixed those bottomless eyes on him. Its jaws stretched open, that awful, impossibly wide gape that seemed to swallow the world around it. The land snake lunged forward, trying to consume him the way it had consumed many soldiers.
Not keen on dying, Wrighty jammed his staff horizontally into the creature's mouth. The weapon caught between its upper and lower jaw, propping the maw open like a doorstop. Trying to close its jaws, the vile anomaly thrashed about, but the staff held firm.
The beast growled furiously, before a paw caught Wrighty across the chest while he was braced against the jaw. The blow launched him backward, Morrigan still clinging to his back. Before he hit the ground, he twisted his body midair, contorting himself so that his back faced upward and Morrigan was shielded from the impact. He landed on his feet with a wince, absorbing the force through bent knees.
A fresh gash ran diagonally across his torso, blood welling from where the claws had raked his skin. Glancing down at the wound, he whispered, "...That'll leave a mark." Before sighing through his nostrils and dashing back in.
The Anomaly had wrenched the staff free from its jaws and spat it aside. It snapped at him as he approached, but the dark-skinned boy vaulted over the strike entirely, using the creature's own snout as a launching pad. His foot connected with the top of its skull on the way over, a devastating axe-kick that drove the creature's head downward and made its front legs buckle.
He landed on the creature's back, straddling its neck. His right arm wrapped around the thick, scaled throat, while his numerous muscles coiled.
The Anomaly thrashed about, its tail whipping wildly. Its legs clawed at the earth as its body bucked and writhed, trying to throw the boy like a wild horse bucks a rider.
Wrighty held on with one arm and his legs, his jaw set, his dark eyes focused. Then he twisted.
A sickening crack echoed across the battlefield. The snap was audible from the third wall. A deep, structural sound, similar to a tree trunk splitting in a storm. The Anomaly's body went rigid for a single instant before every muscle in its serpentine frame released at once. Its massive head lolled sideways at an angle that confirmed the neck was thoroughly, irreversibly broken.
The corpse struck the earth with a dull thud.
The boy rode the falling body to the ground and hopped off as it settled into the dirt. He retrieved his staff from where the creature had spat it, gave it a quick spin to shake off the saliva, and turned to watch the Anomaly's corpse.
Something strange was happening to the body. The ashen hide was flickering. The edges of the creature's form blurred and stuttered, reality itself seeming to reject the carcass now that the life animating it was gone. Piece by piece, the body disintegrated. Scales dissolved into particulate light. Muscle and bone glitched out of existence in cascading waves, each section vanishing with a faint shimmer.
Within seconds, the massive corpse had been reduced to nothing.
Nothing except a small, dense object resting in the dirt where the creature's chest had been. A core. Crystallized Anima from the beast's body, glowing faintly with a pale, iridescent light that matched the creature's strange blood.
The newcomer stared at it but didn't touch it. Instead, he gently lowered Morrigan from his shoulders and set her down on the ground. The old kappa was pale, her breathing shallow, blood still seeping from the wound in her back. The poison was working through her system and she showed no signs of consciousness. The dark-skinned boy looked down at her with a solemn expression that sat strangely on a face built for smiling.
Grub couldn't hold himself back any longer.
"WRIGHTY!"
His voice tore across the distance between the third wall and the battlefield. Wrighty's head snapped up, his eyes scanning the walls in confusion. For a moment he looked lost, searching for the source of a voice he hadn't heard in months.
Then he spotted Grub. Standing on the railing of the third wall, pale-skinned, black-haired and green highlights, his white coat flapping in the Ceasus wind. A boy who looked slightly bigger and considerably more battered than the last time Wrighty had seen him.
A massive grin erupted across Wrighty's face. His right arm shot into the air and waved with the unbridled enthusiasm of a child greeting his best friend across a playground. The gash across his chest was still bleeding freely, but he didn't seem to notice or care.
From the wall, Grub couldn't help but return the smile. Even now, that idiot was waving at him like nothing in the world was wrong.
Luthiel sniffled beside Grub, her tear-streaked golden eyes fixed on the scene below.
"She's not moving," Lu whispered, her voice fractured. "Master isn't moving."
Grub's smile faded. She was right. Morrigan lay motionless on the ground, her chest barely rising. The poison was still active. Without advanced healing or someone who could purge it from her system, the Great Sage Equal to Heaven was going to die in the dirt of her own village.
Below, one of the Guardians broke from the defensive line near the second wall, through a passage in the first wall, and towards Wrighty. His white vestments were torn and bloodied, his voice hoarse from hours of shouting orders.
"WHO ARE YOU?!"
Wrighty looked over, confusion written all over his face. The Guardian immediately shook his head.
"No—never mind that!"
"PLEASE!"
"Bring the Chief over here! We owe you our lives! Thank you for saving her!"
Wrighty looked at the Guardian with a blank, friendly expression. Then he shrugged his shoulders.
"I don't know what you're saying."
The Guardian stared blankly. "What?"
Wrighty shrugged once more, the same apologetic grin on his face. He pointed at his own ear and shook his head. The language barrier was thick. Wrighty hadn't learned a word of the local tongue. He simply had no idea what anyone was saying to him.
From the third wall, Luthiel turned to Grub with wide, questioning eyes.
"Is that...?"
Grub nodded. His blackish-green eyes hadn't left Wrighty since the boy emerged from the tree line.
"Yeah. That's Wrighty." He paused. "The first person I knew here. A Sky-Fallen, like me."