The cliff face dropped a good two to three hundred metres. To shake the Deviljho, Lin didn't hesitate for a single instant — he stepped off the edge and plummeted.
Whatever mysterious compulsion had been driving the Deviljho to hunt him, the creature at least had enough instinct not to follow him off a sheer drop. It could only rage at the clifftop, thrashing its tail and roaring twice at Lin's falling silhouette before finally giving up and retreating back into the treeline, swallowed by the jungle without a trace.
The plan to shed the Deviljho had worked perfectly. The problem was that the manoeuvre had shifted Lin's altitude — from the low band where he'd been hanging before, up into the open mid-air that was the Bazelgeuse's true domain.
Freed from any risk of overshooting and nosediving into the ground, the Bazelgeuse let out a deep, savage roar of pure satisfaction. It opened up with a volley of its teardrop-shaped scales, peppering the air around Lin — and then it folded its wings flat and dove, dropping on him from altitude like a bomber making its run.
Lin was fast. The Bazelgeuse, accelerating into a high-speed dive with all that potential energy behind it, was faster. The instant those scales blanketed the air around him, the Bazelgeuse was already there among them, wings beating hard, using the shockwave of its own passage to detonate every single one of the high-explosive scales it had seeded around him.
Lin tried to punch through and escape, but there was no gap, no angle, no opening. A twenty-metre kill radius of Bazelgeuse scales detonated simultaneously in mid-air, painting the sky in brilliant, roaring fire — and the inferno swallowed Lin whole.
The Bazelgeuse hung in the air on beating wings, appearing to savour the spectacle of destruction it had authored. But it was in for a disappointment. Lin did not tumble out of the smoke as a charred corpse.
The Bazelgeuse fanned the smoke and ash aside, curious — and received a superheated bolt of plasma through the murk in answer.
Lin hung in the air completely unharmed, Plasma Pistol in hand.
He had known from the start that there was no escaping the Bazelgeuse in open sky. So he had never tried. Instead, the moment the scales closed in, he had activated his Energy Shield — the one he hadn't needed to use in a long time — and simply tanked the explosion. The shield, reverse-engineered from Protoss technology he'd archaeologically looted from Zerg burial sites, had eaten the blast whole. Then he'd waited, calm inside the smoke and fire, for exactly this moment to strike back.
The Bazelgeuse lurched aside in a desperate dodge. Its massive bulk meant it couldn't get fully clear in time, but it managed to pull the critical area out of the direct line of fire.
Lin had been aiming for the scales packed along its tail — his plan had been to chain-detonate them and blow the tail clean off. The Bazelgeuse's reflexes had denied him that. He clicked his tongue in frustration.
Still, the Bazelgeuse was a Flying Wyvern, and Flying Wyverns were not known for their defensive resilience. It had protected its vitals, but a plasma bolt to the belly was still a plasma bolt to the belly, and the Bazelgeuse was clearly feeling it.
Watching Lin draw a ranged weapon, the already-furious Bazelgeuse surged into a higher pitch of rage. It screamed and lunged, both talons outstretched, trying to seize him. Lin twisted to the side and slipped the grab — but the close quarters gave him no room to charge the Plasma Pistol for another shot. He holstered it, pulled out his battle axe, and kept fighting in mid-air.
Nearly twenty metres of Bazelgeuse was an imposing sight — but against a target barely two metres long, all that size became clumsiness. The Bazelgeuse circled and lunged repeatedly, and Lin slipped every single grab with contemptuous ease.
Through this exchange, their altitude bled away steadily. Lin was now not far above the ground.
The Bazelgeuse, growing increasingly irritable as the stalemate dragged on, clearly understood that the open sky was its true arena. It wasn't about to let Lin keep descending. It raised its head — a telegraphed wind-up that left no doubt it was about to go dirty and use a ranged attack.
But Lin had already factored that in.
In fact, he had been waiting for exactly this.
The Bazelgeuse finished its wind-up and snapped its head down to loose a tight burst of roaring flame — and what came to meet it was not Lin. It was a wall of blinding white light.
In the instant the Bazelgeuse had its head raised and its attention pulled upward, Lin had hurled a Flashbomb — made from luminous insects — directly into its face. Timed with precise calculation, the Flashbomb detonated at the exact moment the Bazelgeuse brought its head back down.
Searing white light consumed its entire field of vision and shredded its sense of balance. The Bazelgeuse could do nothing but fight desperately to keep itself aloft on instinct alone, wings spread wide, spraying fire in every direction at random to ward off any approach.
Its wild, thrashing attacks didn't intimidate Lin in the slightest. He knew the Flashbomb's disorienting effect wouldn't last long, and he also knew the Bazelgeuse was perfectly capable of landing and brawling up close. He had thoroughly enraged it now — if he didn't cripple it here, it would hunt him to the ground and beyond.
So he pressed forward instead of falling back. He closed the distance and came in right beside the Bazelgeuse's head. Robbed of its senses, the creature had no idea he was there and kept spraying fire uselessly into empty air.
Lin understood exactly how a Bazelgeuse breathed fire. They had no dedicated fuel sac the way proper fire-breathing wyverns did. They simply held a mouthful of their own not-yet-matured explosive scales and detonated them inside their jaws, producing a short, sharp burst of flame through the force of the micro-explosions.
He drew his weapon.
The moment the Bazelgeuse's gaping maw flickered with the first sparks of ignition — the telltale sign that it was about to detonate its scales — Lin pulled the trigger without hesitation.
The plasma bolt ignited the volatile scale-forming fluid in its mouth and throat directly. An internal detonation of that kind did vastly more damage than any external hit.
The Bazelgeuse let out a ragged, broken shriek. Its senses partly restored, it stared at Lin with those small, beady eyes in something approaching disbelief — as though it could not comprehend how he had found and struck every single one of its weak points.
Lin had a simple explanation for that.
"Nuclear weapons may be outdated," he said, "but box weapons are still very much in fashion."
The chemical cascade triggered by the plasma bolt in its throat kept spreading. The internal detonations worked their way down into the explosive gland organs that produced its scales. Internal pressure spiked and ballooned outward — the Bazelgeuse's body began to swell like a balloon being over-inflated. Wyvern physiology was tough enough that it wouldn't simply burst, but letting the process run its course was not going to end well.
Driven by a primal, screaming survival instinct, the Bazelgeuse wrenched its jaws open and vomited a chain of explosions outward, trying to vent the pressure — blasts so violent they tore open its own hide and flesh from the inside.
Lin had anticipated this. He had already thrown his Energy Shield to full power. But the shield had already spent a portion of its charge tanking the earlier scale-barrier detonation, and it simply could not hold against the sustained, cascading blasts.
He poured every erg of available energy into the shield and put as much distance as he could between himself and the self-destructing Bazelgeuse before it gave out — but when the Energy Shield finally overloaded, the pressure wave from the explosions behind him caught him like a hammer, hurling him forward without any control whatsoever, down toward the jungle below.
His jet engine was dead silent. The chemical stimulants that had been mounted along his steel spine to keep his brain alert — already exhausted during the earlier boarding action against the Black Legion — were all gone.
Lin didn't need to run the numbers to know this fall wasn't going to kill him. His body was more metal framework than flesh. But that human brain of his was another matter entirely. The probability of losing consciousness on impact was somewhere north of ninety percent.
"This one isn't going to be a clean landing…"
All he could do was hope he wouldn't be out for too long. But in a place he hadn't noticed, a group of creatures — cat-like in shape but walking upright on two legs — had been watching from the ground below, having witnessed the entire aerial battle between him and the Bazelgeuse from start to finish.
When Lin crashed into the jungle and sent up a billowing cloud of smoke and scorched earth, the small figures looked at each other curiously and padded toward the impact site to see what they had found.