The air at this altitude was cold.
Not the biting cold of high mountains or open sea winds—but the particular cold of a forest night at speed, where the temperature dropped steadily the higher you climbed and the faster you moved through it. Damien had stopped noticing it so ti ago. It had beco background, the way most constants beca background once the body accepted them as fixed.
What he noticed instead was the forest below.
From up here, it was a different thing entirely from what it was on the ground. Down there it was density and weight and close terrain, the sense of being inside sothing that was larger than you and indifferent to your presence.
Up here it was a surface. An expanse. A dark, unbroken canopy stretching outward in every direction under the night sky, the treetops catching faint starlight and returning almost none of it.
Vast.
He had known intellectually that the Forest of Twin Disasters was large after spending a few years on it. He had moved through enough of it on foot and read enough about it beforehand to have a sense of its scale. But there was a difference between knowing a thing’s size and seeing it from above, laid out beneath you like a territory that had never been mapped because no one who tried had co back to finish the work.
Skylar held its altitude with the easy discipline of a creature that had found its preferred height and saw no reason to deviate from it.
The wing beats were consistent—not labored, not rushed, just the steady driving rhythm of sothing built for sustained flight covering real distance. Below, the canopy moved past at a pace that made the ground-level version of this journey feel like another world.
Damien’s eyes moved across the forest surface as they flew.
Not aimlessly. He was tracking the ambient demonic essence—the directional quality it had taken on since they left the second base behind, the faint pull that told him where the concentration was heaviest. From this height it was easier to read, the noise of the forest floor no longer interfering with his sense of it.
It was ahead.
Still ahead, and still at distance, but closer than it had been. Closing steadily.
He checked his reserves. He was very close to being fully saturated now.
The conversion had continued quietly during the flight, the background process undisturbed by movent or wind. He was approaching the range he considered operational peak—not full, mathematically, but close enough that the difference stopped being aningful in practice.
Good.
He would want to be sharp when they arrived.
Luton remained against his back, its grip unchanged despite the wind and the speed and the cold. The sli had adapted to flight over ti—not enthusiastically, not the way it adapted to combat, but practically. It held where it needed to hold and stayed quiet and did not make the process of traveling by air more complicated than it needed to be.
Damien had co to appreciate that.
He had co to appreciate a lot of things about Luton that he hadn’t initially anticipated when the sli first arrived as a summon.
Skylar adjusted its bearing slightly—a minor correction, the kind that ca from tracking a heading rather than a landmark, the wyvern’s own senses feeding it information Damien could only partially access. Whatever Skylar was reading in the air ahead, it was enough to refine their trajectory.
Damien let it.
He trusted Skylar’s navigation. Had tested it enough tis under enough conditions to know that the wyvern’s sense of direction was better than his own in the air, the way Fenrir’s sense of terrain was better than his own on the ground. Part of working with summons was knowing where each one exceeded him and not pretending otherwise.
They flew.
Minutes passed in the particular way flight minutes passed—larger than ground minutes, less granular, asured in terms of distance covered rather than ti elapsed. The forest below continued its dark, indifferent expanse.
Then Damien felt sothing.
He didn’t move imdiately.
The way he caught things—the habit of registering without reacting, filing before acting—held even at speed, even in the air. He extended his awareness outward ahead of them and read what was there.
Presences.
Not on the ground.
In the air.
He focused.
Three of them. Spread across a rough horizontal line, spaced at intervals that were too regular to be accidental. Not flying together—not a group traveling with the clustered proximity of Cerbe’s kind of movent. Positioned.
Stationed.
Aerial watch.
Damien’s eyes narrowed slightly.
He should have expected this. The third stronghold was the largest demonic presence in the forest, better defended than the others, and the demons who ran it were organized enough to have divided their intelligence records across multiple locations. Organized enough to have sent captains and strike forces and tracking units. Organized enough to post watches.
Of course they had aerial watches.
He processed the positions quickly. Three scouts, spread wide, each covering a section of airspace that overlapped slightly with the ones beside it. A decent formation for early warning—wide enough to catch most approaches, spaced so that anything that triggered one would be visible to at least one other.
Against most approaches.
Damien looked down at Luton.
The sli had already shifted. He could feel it against his back—a slight increase in density, the way its surface tension changed when it was paying attention to sothing.
He reached back.
His hand found Luton’s surface and the sli transferred into his grip without resistance, reforming into a compact, dense shape that filled his palm with the familiar slight weight of it. Heavier than it looked. It always was.
Skylar had not slowed.
Damien didn’t ask it to.
He adjusted his grip slightly, feeling Luton’s surface tension respond—the sli reading the change in contact pressure the way it had learned to read most of his physical signals, understanding the intent behind the handling without needing the words.
Ahead, the first scout.
It was positioned slightly below their altitude, hovering with the slow, occasional wing movent of sothing maintaining station rather than traveling. Its attention was directed downward and outward—scanning the canopy below, the forest approaches, the standard threat vectors for sothing expecting a ground-level presence.
Not up.
Not behind.
Damien waited until Skylar’s trajectory brought them to within range.
Then he threw. "Here’s a mid flight snack."
Not hard—not the way you threw sothing at a target you wanted to hit with force. More like a directed release, a controlled arc that sent Luton forward and slightly downward at the angle that would bring it into contact with the scout’s back before the scout’s senses could register the approach.
Luton left his hand.
It covered the distance in silence—no sound, no aura, no trace of essence that would register on anything short of the sharpest senses at close range.
The scout continued its slow hover.
Unaware.
Until Luton arrived.
The expansion was instantaneous—the sa motion it had used in the forest, the sa unhurried engulfing that turned the scout’s mont of confusion into the last mont it had before there was no longer a mont to have. The scout’s wings gave one reflexive beat and then there was nothing.
No sound.
No signal sent.
No ripple of disturbance in the ambient essence field that would register at the stronghold as a warning.
Just the scout, and then the absence of the scout, and Luton dropping back toward Damien’s waiting hand.
He caught it.
The sli reford in his grip, compact again, slightly warr than before.
Damien’s eyes were already on the second scout.
Further ahead. Slightly higher. It had not reacted—either too far to have registered anything or there had simply been nothing to register. The first removal had been clean enough that even the ambient essence shift was contained within Luton rather than released outward.
Skylar adjusted bearing without being told, the wyvern having tracked the second presence on its own and corrected their approach angle accordingly. The sa quiet competence it always brought to these things.
Damien waited.
The distance closed.
He threw again.
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