Leo stared at the floating hexagon for a long while before finally looking away from it.
"Pass your first Seek," he muttered. "Very helpful."
The Auric Codex remained floating in front of him as though waiting for something else, but Leo had already lost interest in it. His attention shifted toward the endless black desert stretching beneath the bruised sky. Heat distorted the horizon while grains of obsidian sand scraped against his scales whenever the wind blew.
He still couldn't believe he was a snake. Not a normal snake either.
He slowly turned his head and finally caught sight of his own body. Golden-brown scales stretched endlessly behind him like a moving river of metal. Each scale looked harder than armor, reflecting faint crimson light from the sky above.
"...How big am I?" Leo muttered before pausing. "Wait. Why can I still talk?"
Nothing about this place made sense.
Mirage had only been here for a few seconds before awakening. Meanwhile, he had been dumped into a desert as some giant snake and ordered to find a castle he couldn't even see.
His tongue flicked unconsciously, tasting the burning air again. The sensation nearly made him recoil.
"Disgusting."
Still, he had no choice except to move.
Leo pushed himself forward awkwardly at first, but after several failed attempts, his body suddenly surged across the sand with frightening speed. The black dunes blurred beneath him as his long body slithered forward in massive curves.
His eyes widened.
"...Okay, this is actually amazing."
For the next several minutes, Leo moved through the desert while trying to understand his new body. He learned quickly that he could sense vibrations beneath the sand. He could also smell things from absurd distances away. At one point he accidentally rammed his head into a black stone pillar and shattered it instantly.
'Yariel would lose her mind if she saw this.'
The thought made him grin slightly before his expression darkened again.
He missed home already.
The further he travelled, the stranger the desert became. Massive skeletons buried beneath the dunes started appearing around him. Some belonged to creatures that looked vaguely human while others were far too massive to identify. Leo even spotted what looked like the remains of a city protruding from the sand.
"What exactly is this place...?"
No answer came. He was all alone in the endless desert.
At some point, Leo noticed giant trenches stretching across the desert floor. They were so massive they looked like rivers carved into the sand by some ancient disaster.
He slowed down and studied them. The trenches continued for miles. They were rigid and didn't look natural to him. In fact, they weren't natural. Trenches belonged beneath oceans and deep seas, not in the middle of a desert.
'Except...'
A low tremor suddenly travelled through the sand beneath his body.
Leo froze.
Another tremor followed shortly after, this time stronger than before. The dunes ahead started shifting unnaturally as though something enormous was moving beneath them.
His body instinctively coiled.
The sand exploded upward in the distance.
At first Leo only saw metal.
A gigantic blue plate emerged from beneath the dunes before crashing back under the sand, sending black grains flying into the sky. The impact shook the entire desert hard enough to make Leo's scales vibrate.
His heart started hammering.
The thing surfaced again, revealing more of its body this time.
It was a leviathan of blue metal, a whale so massive its skin looked like overlapping plates of reinforced cobalt. Sigils he had never seen before—ancient, pulsating runes of pure heat—raced across its metallic flanks like veins of lava.
Its body burnt and bruised as if it had been scavenging the black desert for ages.
Leo could only stare as the colossal creature swam through the dunes like an ocean beast moving beneath water.
The leviathan moved again. The dunes collapsed inward as if the entire desert had suddenly lost its structure. Massive waves of black sand rose and fell around the blue metal whale as it dragged itself through the ground like it wasn't even noticing the terrain, like the desert was nothing more than water beneath it.
Then it turned. The entire upper half of its body shifted with a grinding sound that echoed across the empty horizon. Those cobalt plates aligned one after another, locking into place as its massive form oriented directly toward Leo.
For a brief moment, everything went still. Even the wind stopped.
Not fear in the usual sense, but something heavier kicked into Leo's mind. Instinctively, his new body reacted before his mind could even finish processing what he was seeing. Every scale along his massive length tightened, coiling slightly as if preparing for impact.
"…You've got to be kidding me."
The leviathan didn't rush forward like a beast. It simply slammed into motion, and the desert reacted like it was being struck by a god's fist. Sand exploded behind it in towering arcs as it surged forward, closing the distance in an instant that made no sense for something that size.
Leo didn't have time to think. Instead, he kept slithering away from the abomination not wanting to die.
His body shot forward, golden-brown scales tearing through the black dunes as he slithered with everything he had. The desert blurred into streaks of obsidian and heat distortion as his speed increased, his body instinctively adapting to survival.
Behind him, the leviathan followed.
Each time it moved, the ground beneath it collapsed and reformed. Each time its metallic body shifted, runes along its sides flared with burning light, casting long crimson reflections across the sand like molten scars.
Leo twisted sharply, throwing his body sideways as the ground behind him erupted.
A massive section of sand lifted entirely into the air before being crushed back down as the leviathan passed through it. The shockwave alone sent Leo sliding several meters across the desert, his body scraping harshly against the ground.
"Okay..okay...this is bad!"
He forced himself forward again, ignoring the burning sensation along his scales. His body responded faster than his panic could catch up, but there was no rhythm nor technique to what he was doing except trying to survive.
The leviathan struck again. This time the desert split. A wall of sand rose between them as its massive head plunged through the terrain, carving a path directly toward him. Leo barely twisted out of the way as the impact shattered the ground where he had been a second ago.
Fragments of black stone and sand rained down on him.
His body coiled mid-motion and launched forward again, slithering in wide arcs as he tried to break line of sight. The desert became a maze of collapsing dunes and exploding terrain, every direction feeling equally dangerous.
Behind him, the sound deepened. Leo glanced back for only a fraction of a second.
The leviathan had changed position again, its massive cobalt body half-buried beneath the dunes, only its upper plates visible as it angled itself for another charge. Those ancient runes along its flanks flared brighter than before, heat rippling through the air like pressure building inside a sealed chamber.
"Yeah… no."
Leo snapped his head forward and pushed harder.
His body surged across the desert at full speed now, dunes tearing apart beneath him as he fled. The horizon stretched endlessly ahead, but he didn't slow down. Not even when the tremors behind him faded slightly. Not even when the leviathan's presence became harder to track.
He just kept running. Farther and farther.....until the black desert swallowed everything behind him again.