The call of the ancient Orux through the jungle had genuinely almost knocked Banon unconscious, and that had been before it was even in sight. Now that it was in the clearing with him and charging full tilt, Banon became acutely aware of just how much attention he would have to pay towards that particular risk. He was familiar enough with the Orux call and the way it muddied the minds of any nearby Ooura, but the air-shaking roar that had come from this beast was simply horrifying in its potency. Even some of the extraordinary vigilance gained during Kimitrius’s blessing had been stripped from his mind, and something told Banon that if he had endured the same mind-melting call without the blessing, he wouldn’t be conscious at all at this point.

Just as he had hoped, the beast saw no threat in the Barnacles, charging straight into the trap, trailed by dozens of goliath dung beatles following the Orux’s lead. Clearly, the obscenely large insects were used to perceiving when their host and food source had identified a threat, and were now just as bent on attacking Banon as it was. As the Orux charged through the laid-out barnacle bombs, many of them were caught instantly by their sticky snare mouths and stuck onto its underbelly fur–which draped so low it dragged along the ground. Less than a second before its horns were going to ram through him, Banon flipped his staff over so the shooting end was planted into the mat.

Careful to position his staff and his body angled as close to perfectly straight up and down as he could get it, he braced with all his strength and activated the living reed’s secondary chute. Banon’s body shot straight up into the air like a stone thrown by a giant, and for a shockingly long time, he was flying upwards. Finally, as his upward ascent began to slow, the first explosions sounded from below him. As he reached the peak, and began to fall back down, several explosions had already gone off in rapid succession.

The beast was already bucking and kicking wildly as he fell towards it, explosions still continuing but less frequently now. Banon landed with bent knees, balancing on top of its huge, rounded back, his bare feet having no trouble with gripping onto its sticky overcoat. Orux intentionally rolled in Mew sap for the solidifying properties it gave, turning the outer layers of fur on their back and sides into an impenetrable natural armor, though they avoided getting the sap on their undersides, probably to keep the mobility of their legs intact. The large rounded top of its back and the hard and sticky surface the sap created were fantastically grippy and easy to stand on for an Ooura like him, who had honed his balance among the tree canopies his entire life. Even as the beast desperately thrashed beneath him, balancing atop its back came easy to him. What was less easy to deal with was the swarm of sharp-pincered giant beetles flying at him from every angle. Banon threw his body side to side to counter the Orux’s flailing and kicking, holding his staff over his head and using it as a lesser balancing aid as well while dung beetles buzzed and gnashed from all directions. Thankfully, they weren't the most coordinated, so many of them ended up bumping and smashing into one another instead of Banon.

The ones he did see coming, he easily batted away with his free hand or even smashed into chitin bits with his staff. Still, a few managed to get to him from his blind spots, and he felt their elongated pinchers slice into his back. Thankfully, even the ones that managed to pierce him with their pincers tended not to stick on for long, instead bouncing off, sent spinning out of control due to how much Banon himself was being thrown about from moment to moment.

Explosions continued to go off below, but none of the shrapnel came even close to hitting Banon since it was all concentrated on the underbelly of the Orux. He continued to keep his only focus on staying upright and warding off beetles for now, waiting for his moment. No small part of him was deeply curious what Ugtang thought of all of this, presumably watching it from somewhere nearby, thankfully not trying to intervene himself since this stage of the fight would have been by far the most dangerous to the Yubuou, given all the shrapnel flying everywhere. Finally, after the explosions ended, the beast paused just a little longer between thrashes than before. Banon used the steady moment to dive straight for its head, tossing his staff away so he had both hands free to grab on with.

He caught one horn in each hand, and before it could react, he pulled himself down and hooked the base of each horn in the crooks behind his knees. As soon as it realized what was happening, though, it began trying to throw him off even more urgently. But it wasn’t enough. Banon’s legs were cinched around the base of its horns. He had it.

Although he had expected this fight to eventually come down to whether or not he could land a staff strike to its temples, he had planned to try this maneuver from the beginning. It was worth the try, silly as it had sounded even to himself when he had run through the plan in his head. And yet, it had worked. Not intending to waste his advantageous position, Banon reached down to his waistline for his largest obsidian knife and found it… gone. He desperately pawed for it but never did his fingers graise its handle. It must have shaken out of the sheath at some point.

Growling his self-disdain, Banon reached to his other side and thankfully found his much smaller skinning knife still present. He drew it, all while being tossed around in a dizzying frenzy that he hoped was as taxing on the Orux as it was for him. All at once, he tensed his core muscles and wrenched forward. As his chest slammed into the bridge of its nose, his arms wrapped around the underside of its neck. With his empty left hand, he grabbed a tuft of fur around the underside of its neck and held strong. Wrapped around the top of the Orux’s wedge-shaped head like some giant parasite, he began to plunge the small knife in his right hand again and again into its neck.

It went on like this for minutes, the Orux never slowing down in its attempts to throw him off, even for a moment.

Eventually, Banon was nearing his limit of this, and finally realized something was wrong. Still hugging himself tightly onto the massive head of the Orux, he briefly withdrew the knife and held it in view of his face. There was no blood on it. None at all. This entire venture had been fruitless… all because he had dropped his only knife long enough to penetrate the thick fure under its throat. Well, it wasn't such a suprise. He hadn't even been sure his long knife could have reached through fifty years worth of fur growth, even in a relatively shorter furred area as the neck. At the very least, during this time-wasting exercise, he hadn’t incurred many more dung-beetle-related injuries since it seemed that while he was plastered so closely to the Orux’s body, they couldn't distinguish friend from foe. He considered ramming the knife into one of its temples, but he knew the obsidian would shatter. Only a living reed had the durability and blunt force to break through an Orux skull’s weak spots, and his staff he had tossed away already–not that he could have wielded that huge thing accurately enough to make for a properly braced chute strike from his current position even if he still had it with him.

Back up plan number one it was then.

Banon’s entire body had been tightly wrapped around the Orux’s head up until this point for the sake of minimizing the risk of being thrown off, but now he needed some separation. He pulled back just enough to be able to see what he was aiming for, cocked back his arm and plunged the knife towards one of the Orux’s huge yellow eyes. Time seemed to slow down as Banon watched the glimmering black blade draw towards the eye–which was easily larger than his closed fist.

And then, inexplicably, its cross-shaped black pupil snapped towards the approaching blade. It was a moment too fast to be sure of it, but Banon swore he saw the moment the Orux spotted the incoming danger. It was the only explanation for what it decided to do next. Abruptly, the most recent wild toss of its head stopped dead, and the Orux’s whole body was suddenly as motionless as a lake on a windless day. The instant loss of momentum–which Banon had been compensating for during his attempted strike–caused him to miss completely. The knife plunged harmlessly into its thickly tangled fur beside the eye. In the instant that followed, the Orux’s eyes snapped shut. And…

Stolen novel; please report.

And its mouth was opening. And a dull droning sound like an avalanche of churning and grinding bones was gradually building from the back of its throat. The call of the Orux would take a few seconds to build up to the level where it would incapacitate Banon… but he could hardly form a counter maneuver while in the position he was.

Banon decided to abandon this line of attack entirely. He jumped off the Orux’s huge head and rolled away. Before he’d even returned to his feet, his hands were clasped tightly over his ears. Even so, as the hulking maw rose into the air and the horrible, mind-grating call escaped its lips, Banon was brought down to one knee, his vision blurring, his muscles suddenly weak.

The call ceased, and Banon was still conscious, but everything was muddied. He sagged forward, staring at the ground. A moment later, something smashed into his head–probably a beetle, by the smell. Banon was sent sprawling onto his side. When he sprang up to his feet again, something was wrong… there was too much weight hanging on one of his arms. He held it up only to find a barnacle bomb dangled from his forearm by the snare mouth–a barnacle bomb that he had most certainly fell on roughly, more than roughly enough to shake up its internal chemicals, activating it.

The explosion was inevitable now. He only had seconds before he would lose the arm, maybe more. Reacting instantly, Banon severed the snare mouth with his obsidian knife, caught the barnacle by its stoney shell before it hit the ground and lobbed it with both hands towards the Orux. It exploded about two feet in front of the beast's face, stopping it in its tracks and preventing it from the charge it had just been making on him, clearly having intended to take advantage of Banon’s mild incapacitation in the wake of its call. He doubted the bomb would have killed it even if it went off flush to the front of its skull, but even still, the detonation rocked and disoriented it. Good, now they were even.

Banon used the moment of freedom to move back to where he had thrown his staff, weaving between the swarm of brown bugs and even killing several along the way with well-placed stab wounds. He scooped up his staff and, once again, was on level ground against the Orux again.

For the next several minutes, Ooura and Orux danced towards the inevitable death of one them, the Orux trying to gore him with its horns and Banon deliberately baiting it into the remaining barnacle bombs strewn around the field. The explosions and the disorientation they caused the Orux gave him several openings, but his staff strikes never quite found the mark. His secondary chute slammed into its skull again and again, but not quite hitting the exact weak spot just under the horns, each time the Orux managing to clock the incoming threat with its perfect vision and flinching just enough to avoid death. Soon, however, his prepaired distractions were exhausted, all the bombs having been used up.

It was only then that Banon thought to scan around the forest's edge for Ugtang for the first time since the fight had begun. He spotted him almost immediately, standing on a branch, one arm propped against a tree trunk and the other holding a stick triumphantly over his head.

Ugtang seemed to have found a staff of his own.

Well, Banon had hoped not to have to involve Ugtang directly, but things were getting dire. Under the now unyielding attention of the Orux, Banon had ceased to be able to get around it enough to make any more real attempts at its temples. The dung beetles had all perished by now, smashed by his staff. At least that was done with. Their presence had put him firmly on the back foot. Every time he had managed to successfully slip away from the Orux’s attempts to gore him, there had been a beetle eager to bite into his flesh and hold on, giving him a real problem if he didn’t tear the bug away before it managed to grip a firm hold on him. At last, that problem was dealt with, but at the same time so to had the Orux weathered the storm of his barnacle bombs. If perhaps he had come up with a better plan to deal with the beetles first somehow… No. Idle thinking and reckoning with hindsight realizations was not what he needed now.

Now was the time to call in yet another backup plan he had hoped wouldn’t be necessary.

“Ugtang!” Banon shouted. “Now!”

Despite not understanding what ‘now’ meant, Ugtang certainly understood the name Banon had given to him, and had called him every since their first meeting. Yubuou didn't have names, or ones that Banon could understand or parse out from their normal conversation, anyway, but the name ‘Ugtang’ always had fit. And Ugtang certainly agreed, hooting once loudly to let Banon know he had heard.

The Orux’s head twitched, its eyes scanning for the originator of the foreign noise. Banon started an approach, but the beast immediately swung its attention back to him, a beetle carcass laying on the ground crunching under one of its hooves as it stepped forward to match him.

Another hoot, this time from a different direction. The Orux again reacted, unable to keep from glancing towards the cause. Banon stepped in again, but before he committed fully, the beast reoriented its attention onto him. He swore, and he knew he would never be able to prove it–and even more certainly never forget it–that the Orux was glaring at him in contempt for attempting such a dishonorable tactic as resorting to petty distractions.

Another hoot, even louder and closer this time. But the Orux was wise to them, not biting at their bait, eyes locked on and staring holes through Banon, its breath misting in front of its face. It was then something completely incomprehensible happened. The corner of the Orux’s lips slowly curled upwards.

It was smiling at him.

Or some twisted, rage-laced version of a smile, anyway. Banon resolved to tell Lonka about the fact that Orux could in fact smile, if he lived long enough to tell anybody anything at all, that was. It was only after its head began to tilt up and its mouth began to slowly open wider that Banon realized what the beast was so happy about.

It was ready to call again.

Instead of covering his ears again, risking putting his life in the hands of fate, Banon dashed forward. Before the call could strip away his sharpness of mind completely, he aimed his staff for its open mouth and activated the secondary chute, instantly shattering its front teeth and leaving it with half a staff lengths worth of chute plunged down its throat.

The call turned into a garbled wail, but it did not stop, continuing to build in volume and sounding all the more horrible for the pain its creator was experiencing. Banon’s grip loosened on his staff, his vision dimmed, and he felt his consciousness threatening to leave him. But he held on, gritting his teeth against the encroaching fatigue. A surge of energy pulsed through him as he began to realize that he was going to beat it out. The force of the concussive call was obviously being dimmed by the fact Banon’s staff was blocking much of its throat.

Just as the smile was growing on Banon’s face, his small victory was immediately turned on its head when he felt the staff wrenched out of his hands, and then, before he could react, the length of living reed he had come to love so much in the short time he had acquainted himself with it came back swinging towards him with all the strength of the Orux’s whose thrashing head carried it.

Banon only felt an instant of sharp pain emanating from the side of his head, and then nothing.

Nothing at all.