As Lucian hopped back out of the way of the Wildfire Kite’s tail, an opportunistic Kiteling leapt down at him from a tree branch. Lucian had been aware of its presence, but his conscious focus at that moment was squarely on not getting turned into a leaky sack of charred mincemeat by the Kite’s spiked, fiery tail. He defended himself from the Kiteling on pure instinct, feeling the movement of the air and hearing the juvenile dragon. Lucian struck at the creature with a spear-hand uppercut; it was not the ideal strike in this situation by any means, but that was the one that came out. As his mind caught up to his reflexes, Lucian noticed the strange lack of resistance in place of the usual shock from hitting something hard with a spear-hand strike. He then noticed how stiff his hand and wrist felt, and how warm the Kiteling’s blood felt as it ran down his arm.

With a whipping motion, he threw the creature to the ground and brought his hand into view. The world felt as if it came to a halt. He recognized what he saw, having seen this before, but it still felt a bit unreal. His hand had become dark grey, changed into the shape of a bayonet’s point, three grooves visible in place of the gaps between his fingers. His middle finger as the stabbing point, a sharp, polished edge ran from the tip of his index finger, down the fronts of his fingers, and further down the bottom ridge of his hand all the way to his wrist. His thumb, which he had held mostly but not-quite flush with his palm, had taken the shape of a barb at the top.

BAYONET-EATER’S CREED: FLESH BECOMES A BLADE

He felt the Wildfire Kite whipping its tail his way again, and the moment his focus shifted to dodging, his hand turned back to flesh. Everything felt… Sharper, for lack of a better term. Lucian found that he had an easier time reading the path of the Kite’s tail-club, and he could even remain aware of Lydia and Makhus to a degree that laid out of his reach before. The dragon spun in a quarter-circle as part of a wide breath spray combined with a sweeping claw strike, its aura brushing up against his. In that same motion, the Kite stretched out its left wing in an attempt to catch Lucian with it.

He stood his ground, dug his feet in, and raised both his arms; his kriegsmesser in front, with his left arm bracing behind it, fingers held straight. This was one of the few techniques that required the first major breakthrough to function, with this basic version relying on defensive instinct as a trigger to merge the user’s arm with an external weapon to form a stronger defense. It was explicitly designed to counter the strikes of larger, stronger opponents, such as monsters. Nothing happened until the Kite’s wing was dangerously close to toppling Lucian and breaking his arms in the process, but at that last second, he felt his arm stiffen, and even felt the kriegsmesser’s blade, including the sensation of digging into the beast’s unreasonably tough flesh. The Kite raised its wing high enough to avoid taking a deeper cut, but it was done. Lucian had wounded it, he had forced this descendant of ancient god-killers to acknowledge him as more than a bug - a dangerous bug with pointy limbs and a sharpened nail grasped in its jaws.

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BAYONET-EATER’S CREED: BEARSTOPPER GUARD

He suddenly felt more than just adrenalin, he felt excited, violent impulses going off in his head, demanding him to act now, while there was still an opening, to jump onto that overgrown bat’s wing and shred the membrane to pieces. Without waiting another moment, he split his arm from his kriegsmesser, and then split his fingers apart too, the singular blade of his palm becoming five bayonets. With a herculean exertion of willpower and the sound of straining metal, he forced his left hand into a gripping, claw-like configuration. His fingers didn’t articulate as much as they snapped from one position to another, and it was just as difficult to do as it looked. His kriegsmesser had not visibly merged with his hand, but the connection was undeniably there; the sabre truly felt like an extension of him, in the literal sense; he felt the air whipping across the blade’s surface, and the lingering vibrations of its movement.

Focusing every bit of his strength in his legs and burning his full lung capacity, Lucian leapt upward, turning in mid-air and grabbing for the edge of the Kite’s wing-membrane. The momentum made his fingers cut a few centimeters into the beast’s flesh, boiling-hot blood gushing out, but Lucian was unharmed; the heat simply seeped into him, but could not burn his transmuted hand. Already the Kite began purposely whipping its wing, opening and closing it in an effort to force Lucian off, but he stubbornly held on, tearing away at the beast’s flesh and stabbing away. The way the wing closed caused him to be struck on either side each time, and each time, the beast’s immense aura pressed down on him, only to be cut apart by the fundamental blade-like nature of his own aura. Lucian simultaneously elbowed to the side while dragging his war-knife through the wing-membrane, only for a bayonet-blade to erupt from his elbow and stab between the Kite’s pinecone-like scales.

Lucian was inevitably forced to let go not by the Kite’s violence overpowering his stubbornness, but by a message from Senior Lydia: “Look in my direction. Let go of the wing once you see me. I will strike it with a ranged attack before the dragon can adjust for the absence of your weight.”

Without even thinking, he did exactly as was asked of him. While he waited for the right moment, twisting his neck to see, he held on tightly, allowing the dragon’s own motion to do the hard work of cutting. All Lucian had to do was keep his breathing steady and his focus honed in on reinforcing his war-knife and his fingers, even as his head pounded from the strain.