Bulging with terrifying physical strength, he ripped the entire chest right off the floor and hoisted it effortlessly over his head, slamming it down in front of Kaya and Veer just as the rain of arrows descended.
Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!
Dozens of venom-laced arrows buried themselves deep into the wood and iron of the makeshift shield.
"They have the high ground!" Veer shouted over the din, drawing his twin curved blades. "And they aren’t lethargic anymore! This room is heated by the torches!"
"Then we bring them down to our level!" Kaya yelled back.
Before the archers could nock a second volley, Cutie let out another earth-shaking roar. He grabbed the arrow-riddled chest of gold, spun on his heel to build momentum, and hurled the entire massive crate directly up at the balcony.
The chest crashed into the stone railing with the force of a siege weapon. The balcony shattered, sending razor-sharp obsidian shrapnel and hundreds of heavy gold coins exploding outward like a shotgun blast. Three of the elite archers were instantly crushed, while five others were violently thrown over the edge, plummeting down to the treasury floor.
"Scatter!" Kaya ordered, rolling out from behind Cutie’s massive frame just as the surviving Snake guards drew their spears and dropped gracefully from the remaining balconies.
The moment the guards hit the floor, the true, terrifying power of the Snake Tribe was put on full display. They were fast—impossibly fast. They moved with a fluid, slithering grace, their footwork practically nonexistent as they glided across the polished marble. Their bodies were covered in fine, iridescent scales that acted like living armor, deflecting glancing blows with a sickening scrape of metal on keratin.
Two guards flanked Cutie, their venom-tipped spears thrusting forward like lightning. Cutie roared, attempting to swat them away, but the snakes simply contorted their bodies, bending backward at impossible, spine-breaking angles to dodge his massive paws. One of the spears grazed Cutie’s thick shoulder. The bear-rabbit beastman grunted, his arm immediately twitching as the paralytic venom began to seep into his bloodstream. The sheer physical strength and flexibility of the reptiles were overwhelming the gentle giant.
Meanwhile, three elite guards completely boxed Kaya in. She dodged a vicious spear thrust, channeling that strange, weightless power in her legs. She leaped impossibly high, flipping backward over a swinging blade, but the moment her boots touched the ground, another guard was already there, sweeping his scaled tail to take her legs out from under her.
She hit the marble hard, the breath knocked from her lungs. The guards loomed over her, their cold, reptilian eyes devoid of any emotion, their spears raised to pin her limbs to the floor as Lord Siss had commanded. The sheer, overwhelming numbers and biological advantages of the Snake Tribe were suffocating. They were losing.
And then, the Vulture laughed.
It was a sharp, grating, terrifying sound that cut through the chaos of the room like a serrated knife.
"You overgrown lizards," Veer mocked, his voice echoing from the shadows. "You stay cooped up in this damp canyon for so long, you actually forgot what it means to be hunted from above."
Veer didn’t just step into the fight; he exploded into it.
If the Snake guards were fluid like water, Veer was a violent, unpredictable hurricane. An apex predator of the skies, his agility completely eclipsed their slithering grace. He launched himself off a nearby stone pillar, a blur of dark clothes and flashing steel.
He landed squarely on the shoulders of the guard attempting to pin Kaya. Before the snake could even react, Veer crossed his twin blades under the guard’s chin and violently scissored his arms. The guard’s scaled head was cleanly severed, hitting the floor with a wet thud.
Veer didn’t pause for even a fraction of a second. He kicked off the falling corpse, twisting in mid-air to deflect a spear thrust from the second guard. The snake’s armor might have been tough, but Veer knew biology just as well as Kaya did. He didn’t aim for the scales; he aimed for the seams. His curved blade slipped perfectly into the soft, unscaled joint beneath the guard’s armpit, severing the tendons and dropping the beastman to his knees screaming.
"Get up, wife!" Veer shouted, parrying a third spear with his left blade while simultaneously burying his right blade into the throat of another attacker. "The floor is for prey!"
Kaya didn’t need to be told twice. She kicked the knees of a stunned guard, scrambled to her feet, and gripped her hunting knife. She couldn’t pierce their armor, but she could exploit their anatomy. As one of the snakes lunged at Veer’s blind spot, Kaya sprinted forward, slid across the slick marble floor, and drove her hunting knife straight up into the soft, unscaled underside of the snake’s jaw, piercing straight into its brain.
Up on the remaining balcony, Lord Siss watched the massacre unfold, his beautiful face twisting into a snarl of genuine outrage. The Vulture chief was tearing through his elite, supposedly invincible inner guard like a scythe through dry wheat.
Veer was entirely in his element. The bloodlust had completely taken over. His eyes were wide, glowing with a terrifying, predatory ecstasy. A guard swung a heavy, venom-laced broadsword at his waist. Veer leaned back just far enough for the blade to miss his stomach by a millimeter, dropped his own blades, grabbed the guard’s wrist, and brutally snapped the arm backward. As the snake shrieked, Veer caught his own falling blade in mid-air and drove it cleanly through the guard’s heart.
"Is this the best the West has to offer?!" Veer roared, his voice echoing with mocking disappointment, his clothes splattered with cold reptilian blood. He spun like a dancer, deflecting, parrying, and dismembering with terrifying precision. "I’ve had a harder time hunting field mice!"
Cutie, inspired by the sudden turn of the tide and fueled by the burning pain of the venom in his shoulder, fully embraced his bear heritage. He gave up on trying to hit them with his paws. Instead, he grabbed one of the thick, iron-wrought candelabras from the floor, wielding the massive, thousand-pound object like a baseball bat.
He swung it in a massive, horizontal arc. The impact was devastating. Three Snake guards were launched entirely across the room, their thick scales doing absolutely nothing to protect them from the sheer, bone-crushing blunt force trauma of a giant, angry bear.
The elite guard was crumbling. The sheer numbers that had initially overwhelmed them were rapidly thinning out, leaving the floor slick with blood and scattered gold coins. Veer was a one-man meat grinder, entirely suppressing the remaining guards with his terrifying speed and lethal precision.
Lord Siss realized with a cold shock that his men were not going to win this skirmish. The Vulture was too fast, the bear was too strong, and the human... the human was entirely too unpredictable.
"Useless trash!" Lord Siss spat.
With a deafening hiss, the massive, thirty-foot serpent launched himself directly off the high balcony, bypassing the stairs entirely. He plummeted toward the treasury floor, the sheer weight and muscle of his massive lower body aimed directly at Veer, intending to crush the Vulture chief flat against the obsidian marble.
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