The aerial dogfight across the five-half-mile expanse of the vault ceiling was a spectacle of raw speed and ancient elemental fury. High above the suspended Solar Hearth, Pip and the False Phoenix wove a fine, detailed mix of golden star-fire and black smoke, their flight paths scarring the ancient stellar iron walls with deep, scorched gouges.
Pip was a creature born for the open skies. But inside the enclosed dome, his agility was multiplied by his total mastery of heat currents. The raptor banked through the searing rising heat updrafts rising from the floor, his golden body breaking the sound barrier every three seconds with rhythmic, bone-shaking sonic booms that rattled the heavy plates of Titus’s shell below.
High above the ground, the aerial duel escalated into a blazing bright storm of moving and heat violence. Pip flew with breathtaking, terrifying care. Every beat of his golden wings generated a nearby sky blast wave that tightly packed the surrounding air into razor-thin heat shears. It he hurled at the imposter with lethal intent.
The False Phoenix retaliated with terrifying, world-ending fury. Its eighty-meter wings beat with the sound of thunderclaps, throwing off vortexes of swirling black ash that formed nearby dark-matter tornados across the upper dome. The chimera snapped its serrated silver-steel beak, trying repeatedly to crush Pip in mid-air. But the golden raptor was always a split second ahead, slipping through the monster’s talons like liquid sunlight.
