The scene inside the gray cloud was surreal, disorienting, and indescribably terrifying. Dex was flying and running simultaneously in a chaotic blend of motion. His corroded wings beat against the ash-filled air to provide lateral thrust, while his boots occasionally struck the muddy ground in powerful strides, propelling him forward and executing sharp turns to avoid collisions.
His lungs burned with every breath, as if he were inhaling crushed glass mixed with sulfur powder instead of oxygen. His muscles literally groaned and tore with every sudden twist or swerve he made to dodge a massive tree trunk emerging abruptly from behind the smoke curtain, or a giant boulder that nearly crushed his skull. Trees blurred past him like distorted gray phantoms at breakneck speeds, and he could hear the sound of snapping branches and splintering bark wherever his fiery wings brushed past.
In his arms, Lumia clung to his neck with all her might. Her slender, cold hands wrapped around his scorched neck, her face buried entirely in his broad chest, which heaved violently. In this gray darkness, she could see nothing, but she could hear and feel everything. She listened to his heartbeat... they weren't regular human pulses; they were like mad war drums, beating at a dangerously erratic pace, telling her a tale of living terror and a savage determination to survive, the likes of which she had never witnessed in her long, abstract existence.
She felt the heat of his body, which nearly burned her pale skin. Yet, despite the radical contrast between her cold nature and his fiery one, she clung to that heat. She knew instinctively that these raging flames in his chest were the only remaining wall separating her from the absolute, cold death represented by the entity hunting them.
"Hold on... just a little longer..." Dex whispered in a hoarse, broken voice, sounding as if he were speaking underwater. Hot blood flowed heavily from his nose and the corner of his mouth, mixing with the sweat of battle and the ash.
Behind them, outside the dense smoke cloud, the "Eclipse Minotaur" realized the deception. The false god realized that the two insects it had intended to crush had slipped from beneath its foot and exploited the chaos to escape. The massive Minotaur did not run after them; running is a trait of creatures that fear losing their prey. Instead, the beast unleashed a roar.
But it wasn't a sonic roar that vibrated eardrums. It was a cosmic roar. The Minotaur opened its terrifying jaws and unleashed from its depths a concentrated, dark energy... a "Reverse Gravity Wave."
The entire "Danger Zone" in the Falus Forest trembled. It wasn't a seismic tremor, but a shudder in the very fabric of space itself. An invisible spatial shockwave erupted, but its physical impact was catastrophic. Everything the pulse passed through was destroyed in an anomalous manner; giant trees that had stood for millennia weren't broken, but rather uprooted from their deep roots, violently pulled upward, and then crushed. The earth itself turned upside down as if plowed by a divine plowshare, and rocks vaporized under the shifting pressure. This cataclysmic pulse surged at supersonic speed, tracking the trail of chaotic mana straight toward the fleeing Dex.
"Damn it... death is coming!" Dex screamed in his mind as he felt the air pressure behind him change drastically, as if an entire mountain was being dropped onto his back.
It was like taking a direct hit from a freight train moving at top speed. Even before the pulse fully touched him, his fiery wings vanished, failing instantly under the crushing counter-gravitational pressure. Dex's body, along with Lumia still cradled in his arms, was hurled through the air with unbelievable violence for dozens of meters, exactly like a small stone slung from a giant slingshot fired by an angry titan.
"Brace!" Dex roared with all the voice he had left, ignoring the agony of his torn body.
In mid-air, as they were thrown uncontrollably, Dex summoned every ounce of his physical awareness and muscle strength to twist his body. He positioned his broad back, partially protected by the remnants of his mana, to face the direction of the fall and the impending impact, while embracing Lumia with both arms and legs, wrapping his body around her like a shield of flesh to protect her from the coming collision.