With a quick glance to ensure Mona was still running, Noem slammed the glass orb to the ground. It disintegrated from the bottom-up into a fine powder that flitted down onto the Qi below, which exploded into motion. A burst of wind shot through the smoke and carried the powder with it, scouring away a perfectly spherical chunk of the smoke starting from the center of the impact.
Mona paused for a second, but before Noem could turn to yell at her to keep moving, she started up once again. He followed suit, possibilities racing through his mind as the apex in the smoke took its sweet time to spin up more tendrils to replace the ones he’d just blow away. Yet, for some reason, it didn’t. It simply stared unblinkingly as Noem kept his eyes on the thing and Mona’s breathing grew increasingly ragged by the second.
By the time the smoke filled in the tunnel was within reach. The apex raised its eyes and let out a low bellow that almost sounded like a laugh, then launched a dozen slow-moving destructive tendrils. Noem summoned another orb from his inventory and raised it, but the tendrils disappeared. Not just the physical thing, either; the Qi that had been sustaining them simply winked out.
Noem frowned and lowered his improvised dome of wind. “Is that all you can do?”
The apex’s gaze was heavy. Noem easily withstood it. When the apex once again raised its eyes and bellowed musically, Noem was sure it was a laugh. It leaned out as far as it could while still completely contained by the smoke, as if to show that its eyes were even bigger than Noem had thought, and blew out a single Qi-filled breath that washed over him like a gale-force wind.
Wind sheared away the smoke as Noem’s orb shattered against the ground, revealing a massive serpentine head that had draconic features and flowing smoky extras like puffed-out fabric. It didn’t react to being revealed in the slightest, with a body of solid smoke and scales that trailed small puffs of extremely light blue chi. And as the smoke curled around it once more, far faster than it had before, it pressed forward with terrifying speed.
“Noem!”
He whipped around to see Mona waving desperately from just inside the tunnel entrance. She was shaking horribly from a combination of exertion and seeing the apex, and Noem couldn’t justify delaying any longer than he already had. He turned on his heel and sprinted toward the tunnel as his mind whirred to try and find some reasoning for what the apex had just done, and why he’d reacted the way he had, but nothing made sense.
When he was a few steps away from the entrance, Mona activated Dash and ran further into the tunnel. But that wasn’t what Noem had planned. He pushed off hard on his last step, turned around in midair, and summoned an orb filled with a different kind of Qi he’d stolen from a Foaming Ceridaunt a few months back.
The smoke was, quite literally, nipping at his heels. He smiled for a reason he couldn’t explain and let the orb fall from his hand. A mass of foamy Qi erupted from the shattered glass and expanded in the blink of an eye, sealing off the entrance with a barrier that turned hard as stone once the Qi-infused glass mixed with it.
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Right before it fully expanded, the apex’s eyes gleamed with terrifying intelligence. But that wasn’t what sent an excited shudder up Noem’s spine–it was the amusement and curiosity behind the intelligence.
“What… was… that?!” Mona half-panted, half-demanded. “It was freaking huge! And one of the, like, hundred shadowy tentacles it sent after us almost took my arm off! That’s freaking strong as heck!”
Noem attempted to stare a hole in the hardening foam. Not a single sound attempted to creep through. Had the apex just… given up? No. The tunnel led somewhere. It had to be going for the other end, and would show up from there. But if it could grind away the path, then it could easily grind away the wall around the foam…
Mona tapped him on the shoulder. “Noem? Something wrong? Well… more wrong than everything that just happened, which was pretty wrong if I say so myself… oh, you’re turning around. Cool.”
The dim light of the tunnel framed Mona’s face in shadows. Noem shook his head and deactivated his skills. “Nothing else is wrong; just what’s happening right now. That was definitely an apex, and I don’t know how we’re supposed to fight it. Maybe we can find something else for you to bond…”
“No!”
Noem raised an eyebrow at Mona’s outburst. She crossed her arms and huffed with the most resolve he’d seen out of her since she woke up. “No?”
Mona nodded ever so slightly. “I’m bonding that apex. I’m so far behind everyone else that I need something to catch me up, and I have a feeling bonding an apex would do a lot more than that.”
Her logic was… sound, much to Noem’s dismay. But the worst part was that it didn’t sound anything like Mona. She’d always been a genius, but she was also a defeatist at heart. When something went wrong, she was the first to dust off her hands and throw away the possibility of success. It was exhausting to help her at times, but when she understood something, she learned like nobody else.
Noem clenched his fist until his knuckles turned white. This wasn’t Mona, and he needed to remember that. No matter how likable the Mona who stood before him was, she wasn’t Mona. She was Keira Baker.
“If you want to bond it, then we’re going to have to force it out of its anchor.” Noem said gravely. He put his back to the foam to feel for vibrations, and felt absolutely nothing. For now, he was safe. “And if you want it to bond with you, then you’re going to have to prove yourself worthy. This isn’t some tame little ceridaunt or vulpent; it's an apex of unknown origin.”
Little miss meteor’s extra chunks appeared in Noem’s hands with a thought. “Think on that. Take what you know about the quarry, and what we’ve seen from the apex, and make a plan on how you’re going to kill it. Oh, and a word of warning; never, ever go into this kind of thing with the expectation that you can always run away.”
Noem activated Steady, Focus, Ambidextrous, and Imagine. The skills coursed through him, and together, they gave him the confidence of an artisan. He held out his hand and summoned a long rectangle of metal that he unfolded into a table, then a set of tools far more specialized than the knife he’d used to make little miss meteor.
Mona watched with unbridled excitement. She was almost trembling as she took a few steps forward, then stopped herself. “You’re making my anchor now? Right here?”
“Are you complaining?”
A vigorous shake of her head that sent her hair flopping out to either side of her head was his answer. “No, sir! I’m just so freaking excited!” She let her legs drop out from under her and fell into a cross-legged position. “I’ll come up with the best plan to kill the apex, just you wait! Then I’ll bond it, go to the university, and be the best student the world’s ever seen!”
“You do that.” Noem chuckled as he set a very small carving knife to one of the crater corundum’s chunks. The apex had let them go for a reason. He didn’t pretend to understand the mind of something so much stronger than he was, but he hoped it wasn’t just for its own amusement.
If anything, it felt like the apex was testing him. Noem grit his teeth behind a placid expression of concentration and started to carve away chunks of gemstone as if it were soft butter. If he was wrong, it meant horrible things for Mona. So he couldn’t let himself be wrong.
Not again.