The Ash Basilisk lunged forward from its perch atop the clouded eye, its sixty-meter body tearing through the liquid iron with the speed of an avalanche. A packed stream of liquid dark rock and high-pressure white steam erupted from its gaping gullet, aimed directly at the center of Titus’s shell.
“Pip, intercept the breath weapon!” Arthur ordered, his voice cutting through the roar of the rapids. “Grimm, target the third chest joint!”
Pip launched from Arthur’s shoulder like an arrow loosed from a siege bow. As the raptor met the oncoming torrent of white-hot melted rock waste, he didn’t dodge. He dove straight into the center of the breath weapon.
To a normal creature, diving into a jet of twelve-hundred-degree liquid rock was instant vaporizing suicide. To Pip, whose veins carried the ancient lineage of the Nine-Sun Golden Crow, it was entering a warm bath.
The raptor flared his wings, his golden feathers rotating like the blades of a high-speed turbine. He absorbed the heat energy of the basilisk’s breath in a nonstop, greedy vortex, transmuting the raw heat into radiant solar star-fire. The jet of molten stone collapsed before it could reach Titus’s shell, sucked dry of its heat driving force and reduced to a harmless shower of cooling gray dust.
