The sandworm let out a piercing screech, shaking the cavern walls. Its tail lashed, carving trenches into the shattered stone as it twisted, enraged and wounded.
Darius met its fury head-on. His blade gleamed in the flickering light. His each strike was swift, purposeful, almost brutal in its precision.
Auri stayed behind the low ridge of broken rock where he had cast the emergency restoration, his heart still racing. His fingers trembled, not from fear, but from the lingering strain of threading through something so fragile. He watched as Darius lunged again, pivoted, then avoided a crushing blow by mere inches.
It worked.
Darius' blade struck the sandworm's armored exoskeleton, aiming precisely at the jointed plates beneath its thick carapace—the weak spots Auri had discovered by checking one of the hatchlings' Life Journal. But this was no hatchling. This was the mother, a far more evolved, hardened form.
