Hide stood completely still, his blue eyes locked onto the churning, bruised-purple heavens. The majestic, luminescent blue dragon continued its slow, anti-gravitational coil around the central typhoon, its massive golden eyes already looking past them as if they were nothing more than insignificant insects.
Hide stared at it in a daze. And the sight didn't fill him with terror or shock, but greed.
'I want it,' Hide thought, the dark whisper echoing in the back of his mind. To kill a dragon of the sky and turn it into a phantom—to wield that apocalyptic storm as his own weapon. It was an insane, suicidal notion, but the desire was undeniably there.
CRACK!
A chunk of magically dense hail the size of a tennis ball bypassed his guard, striking the bedrock and ricocheting directly into his face and shattered his trance, bringing him back to reality.
Hide winced, recoiling backward into the shallow recess of the rocky overhang to avoid the continuous, punishing downpour.
