The Shattered Peaks did not welcome guests. They tore them out of the sky.

  Three days after leaving Oakhaven, the heavy cloud cover finally broke, revealing a jagged, violent spine of mountains that looked like the teeth of a dead god. The air up here was thin, freezing, and fundamentally hostile.

  Navigating The Hungry Griffon through the outer canyons was not a matter of simply flying forward. A three-story ironwood building is a massive rigid body, and pulling it through high-altitude crosswinds subjected the chassis to terrifying aerodynamic forces.

  I stood at the helm, my hands clamped tightly around the control yoke. The wyverns—Crimson, Azure, Jade, and Onyx—were struggling. They provided a massive forward thrust vector, but the sheer drag of the tavern's flat, wooden face required constant, microscopic adjustments. If I let the tension on the right-side mythril chains slacken by even a fraction, the crosswind would catch the broadside of the hull, creating a rotational moment that would snap the tethers and send us tumbling into the abyss.

  "Trim the port-side eaves!" I shouted back toward the dining room, my voice barely carrying over the howling wind. "We're catching too much drag on the second floor!"

  Yuno rushed out onto the freezing deck, his hair whipping wildly around his face. He didn't have his shadow-walk to stabilize him, and the violent, unpredictable pitching of the tavern forced him to rely entirely on his raw physical balance. He grabbed the manual winch near the railing and began cranking, pulling the heavy, hinged storm-shutters flat against the hull to streamline our profile.

  Inside the kitchen, Myria was fighting her own battle.

  I had ordered her to keep the main hearth burning to maintain the thermal updraft beneath our floorboards—a necessary countermeasure against the sudden downdrafts of the peaks. But she was failing.

  Through the open doors, I could see her clutching her bandaged hands, staring in frustration at the sickly, sputtering orange flames in the iron stove.

  "It's dying, Master!" she yelled out to me. "I'm pushing mana into the coals, but the fire keeps choking!"

  "It's not your mana, Myria!" I called back, fighting the yoke as a sudden gust tried to throw us off a fixed axis. "It's the altitude! Combustion requires a chemical reaction with the air, and the atmosphere up here is too thin! You are starving the fire of oxygen!"

  She flattened her ears against her head, her golden eyes wide with panic. "How do I fix the air?!"

  "You don't! You compress the mana! Stop trying to build a big fire, and build a dense one! Condense the thermal output to the core of the coals so the heat radiates outward without relying on a large, open flame!"

  It was a brutal lesson in thermodynamics, but she didn't have time to argue. She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, and forced the expanding, chaotic energy of her spell tightly inward. The sputtering orange flames vanished, replaced a moment later by a localized, blinding white-hot glow deep within the iron grate. The tavern instantly lurched upward, buoyed by the renewed, highly concentrated thermal lift.

  I exhaled a sharp breath, locking the yoke into a stabilized holding pattern as we found a relatively calm pocket of air between two massive stone spires.

  "Drop the anchors," I ordered.

  Yuno hit the release levers. Two massive iron spikes shot down from the underbelly of the tavern, embedding themselves deep into the solid granite of the mountainside. The mythril chains groaned, then went taut as The Hungry Griffon successfully docked itself against the sheer cliff face.

  The wyverns, exhausted from fighting the turbulent fluid dynamics of the canyon winds, immediately curled up on their extended perches, wrapping their leathery wings tightly around themselves to conserve body heat.

  I stepped back from the helm, my shoulders aching from fighting the mechanical strain of the flight. I wiped the freezing mist from my beard and walked into the kitchen.

  Yuno was already there, leaning against the central prep island. He looked out the porthole window at the jagged, unforgiving landscape. He was quiet. He had been quiet ever since Oakhaven. Without his glass boning knife, the sous-chef felt entirely unmoored.

  "You feel useless," I stated plainly, walking past him to the heavy iron lockbox in the corner of the pantry.

  Yuno stiffened, but he didn't deny it. "I am a butcher without a blade, Master. If we encounter a Class-5 predator out there, I cannot properly harvest it. A standard steel knife will drag against the kinetic barriers of a Wind-Shear Falcon, and iron will taint the meat."

  "A chef doesn't stop cooking just because he broke a whisk," I said, hauling a small, heavy, lead-lined crucible out of the lockbox. I set it down on the island with a heavy thud.

  "Your last knife failed because it was forged for lateral slicing, not the high-stress torque of Class-6 armor. It had poor shear resistance. Up here, we face a different problem. The Wind-Shear Falcon moves at supersonic speeds. It creates localized pressure waves—sonic booms—to stun its prey. If you swing a standard blade at it, the air resistance alone will rip the knife from your grip before you even make contact."

  I opened the crucible. Inside lay a single, rough chunk of Volcanic Dragonglass. It was pitch black, dense, and practically humming with trapped kinetic energy.

  "We are going to forge a new blade," I said, meeting his dark, analytical eyes. "And we are going to forge it using the same principles that keep this tavern from falling out of the sky. We are going to shape it for zero drag."

  The Volcanic Dragonglass sat heavy and inert at the bottom of the lead-lined crucible. It was completely black, swallowing the dim light of the kitchen.

  "Standard smiths use hammers," I said, pulling a pair of heavy leather and mythril-weave gauntlets over my hands. "They heat the steel to a malleable state and beat the impurities out, shaping the edge through brute force. But glass doesn't forge that way. If you strike it while it's semi-solid, you introduce micro-fractures into the lattice."

  Yuno leaned closer, his dark eyes locked on the crucible. "Then how do we shape it, Master? If we cannot strike it, it remains a stone."

  "We don't hit it," I replied, placing the crucible directly over the white-hot, super-compressed coals Myria had prepared. "We let physics shape it. We control the pressure, and we calculate the flow."

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  The Dragonglass didn't melt like ice; it began to slump, the sharp edges of the stone softening into a viscous, glowing orange slag. The ambient temperature in the kitchen spiked, the intense thermal radiation pressing against our skin.

  "Your last knife failed in the Iron-Mantle's fat because its moment of inertia was too low to resist the torsion," I explained, pulling a set of heavy iron tongs and an obsidian casting mold from the rack. "When you applied lateral force, the blade twisted. This new blade will not be cutting through fat. It will be cutting through solid walls of air pressure."

  I clamped the tongs around the crucible. With smooth, practiced motions, I poured the glowing, viscous glass into the obsidian mold.

  "The Wind-Shear Falcon flies at Mach 1.5," I continued, setting the empty crucible aside. "It weaponizes the air around it. When you swing at it, you are not just fighting the bird; you are fighting the kinematics of the atmosphere itself. If the blade is shaped like a standard chef's knife, the drag coefficient will be catastrophic."

  I pointed a gloved finger at the glowing, cooling shape in the mold. It didn't look like a standard knife. It was terrifyingly sleek, lacking a pronounced spine, tapering to a needle-point with a cross-section shaped almost like an elongated teardrop.

  "Notice the geometry," I instructed. "We are shifting the centroid of the blade entirely. If the aerodynamic center of the knife sits too far from its center of mass, the supersonic air pressure will generate a violent, counter-clockwise rotation from the perspective of your wrist joint. It would shatter your arm before the blade even touched the bird's feathers."

  Yuno’s brow furrowed in deep concentration. He wasn't just learning a recipe; he was learning rigid body dynamics. He traced the air above the mold with his bare hand, visualizing the cut. "So, I cannot use a standard downward chop. The air will catch the flat of the blade."

  "Exactly," I nodded, stepping back as the deep orange glow began to fade into a dark, bruised cherry red. "You cannot swing this knife. You have to pierce with it. You align the edge with the ambient wind current, minimize the friction, and let the sheer velocity of the target do the cutting for you. You are simply holding the edge in place; the Falcon will butcher itself against it."

  "But Master," Yuno murmured, his analytical mind catching the fatal flaw in the plan. "If the Falcon is moving faster than sound, I won't hear it coming. How do I time the strike? If I am a fraction of a second late, I miss. If I am early..."

  "If you are early, you're calculating the interception incorrectly," I finished for him. "You can't just subtract the time difference in your head when the target is moving on a multi-axis trajectory. You have to read the pressure drop before the impact."

  I pulled a bucket of specialized quenching oil—rendered Class-3 slime-extract and crushed cryo-mint—and set it next to the mold. The glass had cooled to a dull, solid black, but the core was still dangerously hot.

  I clamped the tongs onto the unsharpened tang of the new blade and lifted it.

  Before I could submerge it in the quench, the entire tavern lurched violently sideways.

  It wasn't a gust of wind. It was a concussive shockwave. The heavy ironwood floorboards buckled beneath my boots. The copper pots hanging above the island slammed into each other with a deafening, chaotic clatter.

  A split second later, the sound hit us—a terrifying, earth-shattering CRACK that made my teeth ache and forced Yuno to drop to one knee, clutching his ears.

  Outside the porthole window, the cloud layer was violently split apart, leaving a perfect, circular vapor ring hanging in the thin mountain air.

  I plunged the dragonglass blade into the quenching oil. The bucket violently hissed, sending up a thick plume of fragrant white smoke.

  "It seems our ingredient is impatient," I said, pulling the sleek, black blade from the oil. The edges were razor-thin, designed to slip through a sonic boom without catching a single ounce of drag. I flipped the blade and caught it by the tang, holding the hilt out toward my sous-chef.

  "Get up, Yuno. We have a bird to catch."

  Yuno stepped out onto the freezing outer deck, the heavy oak door snapping shut behind him.

  The wind immediately tore at his leather vest, threatening to throw him off balance. The air up here in the Shattered Peaks was brutal—thin, freezing, and wildly unpredictable. Below, the cloud layer was a sea of turbulent grey, pierced only by the jagged, monolithic spires of the mountains.

  He held the new Volcanic Dragonglass blade in his right hand. It felt entirely alien. The center of mass was tucked tightly against the hilt, making the elongated, teardrop-shaped blade feel almost weightless. It wasn't designed to chop. It was designed to pierce a solid wall of air.

  "You won't hear the approach," my voice drifted evenly from the warmth of the kitchen doorway. I leaned against the frame, watching him. "Supersonic kinematics, Yuno. The sound wave is lagging behind the physical mass. If you track the noise, you'll be cutting empty air."

  Yuno didn't look back. He widened his stance, sinking his weight into his knees to anchor himself against the deck. He closed his eyes, locking his internal mana tight against his skin to stave off the biting cold.

  Boom.

  Another deafening crack echoed through the canyon. A mile out, a massive ring of condensed vapor bloomed violently in the sky. The Wind-Shear Falcon was banking around a granite spire, using the mountain's natural gravity to accelerate its dive.

  Yuno’s mind immediately began to race, his tactical instincts translating the environment into rigid mechanics. He gauged the distance to the vapor ring. He estimated the velocity.

  Calculate the time of arrival. Subtract the delay of the sonic boom from the visual distance... He shifted his weight forward, his wrist tightening around the hilt. He prepared to plant the blade in exactly three seconds.

  Wait.

  He froze, his analytical mind catching the fatal flaw in his own math right before his muscles committed. In his initial calculation, he had simply subtracted the delay of the sound from the bird's total flight time. But that would lead to an entirely incorrect answer. The bird wasn't just launched ahead of the sound wave; it was continuously outrunning it.

  If he relied on the visual cue of the vapor ring and subtracted the time linearly, he would be a full second too late. The bird would shatter his ribs before his arm even locked into place.

  He couldn't use his eyes, and he couldn't use his ears. He had to read the atmosphere.

  Yuno breathed out, a long plume of white mist vanishing into the wind. He stopped trying to track the falcon and instead focused entirely on the empty space directly in front of his chest.

  The ambient wind howled, pushing heavily against his leather vest.

  Then, for a fraction of a millisecond, the wind simply... stopped.

  The air pressure directly in front of him plummeted into a localized vacuum, violently displaced by the approaching mass of the Mach 1.5 predator.

  Yuno didn't swing. He stepped sharply into the sudden drop in pressure, locked his elbow, and presented the aerodynamic edge of the Dragonglass blade directly into the invisible slipstream.

  Shhhk.

  It wasn't a loud crash. It wasn't an explosive collision. It was the terrifyingly quiet sound of sheer velocity meeting absolute, zero-drag resistance.

  The Wind-Shear Falcon—a massive, terrifying blur of razor-sharp silver feathers and condensed wind mana—materialized out of thin air. It didn't even have time to register the boy on the deck. Its own immense kinetic energy drove it straight down the length of the black glass blade.

  Because of the blade's geometry, the falcon's protective, localized pressure barrier didn't shatter; it simply parted. The dragonglass slipped through the aerodynamic seam, sliding cleanly between the wishbone and the dense, wind-infused breast meat.

  The impact tore Yuno’s boots an inch backward across the floorboards, but his locked wrist held firm.

  The massive bird collapsed onto the deck. Its momentum carried it forward, sending it sliding into a heavy, dull thud against the ironwood railing.

  Then, the sonic boom hit them.

  The delayed shockwave washed over the deck, rattling the tavern's storm-shutters and nearly knocking Yuno off his feet. He dropped to one knee, gasping for the thin mountain air, his arm trembling violently from the sheer kinetic shock he had just grounded through his own skeleton.

  Silence slowly returned to the freezing deck, save for the howling wind.

  I walked out of the kitchen, my boots crunching faintly against the frost forming on the wood. I knelt next to the massive, silver-feathered carcass resting against the railing.

  The cut was immaculate. The Volcanic Dragonglass had severed the central nervous system instantly, bypassing the tough, wind-hardened exterior muscles entirely. Not a single ounce of the highly prized breast meat was bruised by the impact.

  "Your timing was slightly heavy," I noted, looking back at the kneeling boy. "You almost miscalculated the relative velocity."

  Yuno looked up, his chest heaving, but a faint, fiercely proud gleam lived in his dark eyes. "I realized my error in the subtraction, Master. I relied on the pressure drop instead."

  "Good," I smiled, tossing him a heavy canvas tarp. "Because the meat is pristine. Wrap it up, Yuno. We're having supersonic fowl for dinner."