## CHAPTER 33: Shadow of the Reaper
The collision seemed inevitable. In the suspended silence of the twilight, Zerav was a falling silhouette against the bruised sky, and the Rabbid was a mountain of displaced gravity. As the beast's fist—a boulder of obsidian muscle—rocketed toward him, there was no ground to push off from, no air to grip. To the onlookers below, it looked like a suicide strike.
But Zerav didn't flinch.
At the last possible microsecond, he contorted his body with a sickeningly fluid twist, shifting his center of gravity mid-air. He didn't try to block the blow; he danced around it. The massive fist whistled past his ribs, the sheer wind pressure of the strike rippling his clothes, but it touched nothing but empty air.
With the agility of a predatory feline, Zerav redirected his momentum. His target was no longer the eye. As he spun, he brought the obsidian scythe around in a vicious, horizontal arc. The blade, pulsing with a sharp, malevolent purple glow, bit deep into the back of the Rabbid's neck, cleaving through the reinforced chitin armor as if it were parchment.
*"Grrrrrraaaaaaahhhhh!"*
The Rabbid's roar was a jagged explosion of agony. Even suspended in Diane's gravitational well, the beast began to thrash ferociously, its limbs striking out blindly. Zerav didn't let go. He rode the monster's back, his boots finding purchase on the jagged plates of its spine.
On the forest floor, the atmosphere was thick with a different kind of tension. Diane leaned against a mossy trunk, her face ashen and slick with sweat. She had just finished channeling the last of her restorative mana into Ben's shattered leg and Kael's bruised ribs. As the glow of her healing magic faded, she slumped forward, her breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches.
Ben immediately knelt beside her, his hands trembling—partly from residual pain, partly from a bruised ego. "What's going on? You look terrible," he said, the concern in his voice fighting with his natural arrogance.
"It's... it's draining me," Diane wheezed, followed by a fit of violent coughing. Every second the Rabbid stayed in the air, her mana-veins felt like they were being scraped with glass. The **Zero Grav** spell was a high-tier drain, and she was holding a monster that weighed as much as a siege engine.
"Then drop it!" Ben yelled, his pride surging back now that his leg could support his weight again. "Let it hit the dirt! We'll face it on the ground like real sorcerers."
"No!" Diane's response was a whip-crack of defiance. She looked up, her black pupils fixed on the chaotic shadow-play happening forty feet above them. "Zerav... Zerav will handle it."
Ben's face twisted into a mask of pure irritation. "How can you blindly trust him? An Ordinary! If I, a trained noble man, couldn't pierce that thing's hide, what makes you think a commoner with a garden tool can do better?"
"Because he's not like you," Diane snapped back, her voice low but vibrating with a strange confidence. "And that's exactly why he'll succeed. No pride, no deceit. He looks at people for who they are, not what their family name is. He's the only one who actually understands the stakes here."
She took a shuddering breath, her eyes never leaving the sky. "He believes in me to keep this thing stable. He's counting on me. That's the kind of person he is. It was your pride that got us broken on the ground, Ben. If we had just listened to him from the start, this would have been over hours ago."
Ben recoiled as if she had slapped him. He opened his mouth to retort, but the words died in his throat as a terrifying sound erupted from above.
High in the air, Zerav had found his window. He was standing on the Rabbid's neck, the scythe still buried deep in the creature's flesh. The monster was panicking, its massive fists thrashing the air, but Zerav was a statue of calm amidst the storm.
"**Dark Repulsion,**" he whispered.
His right leg ignited with a concentrated, void-black glow. He brought his heel down on the back of the scythe's blade with a force that shattered the sound barrier. A dark shockwave erupted from the point of impact, a ring of purple energy that flattened the trees below. The scythe was driven completely through the Rabbid's neck, the obsidian tip emerging from the other side in a spray of glowing red ichor.
*"GRAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHH!"*
The beast's final roar was a sound of absolute defeat. Zerav jumped backward, disengaging from the thrashing mountain of flesh. He caught a thick ironwood branch, swinging himself into a crouch as he watched the monster lose the light in its singular eye.
"Diane!" Zerav's voice boomed through the clearing.
Diane felt a surge of adrenaline. She ignored Ben's frantic protests as he hovered over her.
"Drop it!" Zerav commanded.
"Are you insane?" Ben screamed at her. "The monster is still kicking! If you drop it now, it'll crush us all! Diane, listen to me, not the commoner!"
Diane didn't even look at him. A dull, tired smile touched her lips. "Are you doing this out of spite, Ben? Because he saved your life and you can't handle the debt?" She turned her gaze to the floating, bleeding silhouette of the Rabbid. "I will never trust your pride over his strength."
She released the spell. The pink glow vanished instantly.
*BOOM.*
The impact was cataclysmic. The Rabbid struck the earth with the force of a falling star. The ground didn't just shake; it heaved, throwing Ben and Kael off their feet once more. A wall of dust and debris swept through the clearing, coating everything in a layer of fine, grey silt.
Minutes passed as the dust settled. Ben and Kael struggled to their feet, swords drawn and trembling. They crept toward the center of the clearing, where the massive black shape of the Rabbid lay motionless in a crater of its own making.
*"Groowwwwwllll..."*
A low, vibrating sound came from the crater. The boys stumbled back, cowering behind Diane, who walked forward with an exhausted but steady gait.
As they reached the edge of the crater, they saw a figure standing on top of the beast's carcass. In the pale moonlight, the figure looked monstrous—dark, looming, and wreathed in the fading purple sparks of the scythe. Ben's heart hammered against his ribs; he raised his sword, ready to strike at the "dark entity."
"Zerav?" Diane called out softly.
The figure turned. As the moonlight hit his face, the "monster" dissolved. It was Zerav. But he looked different. His revealing his striking black-and-white hair shun in the moonlight. His pupils, usually a dull ash, were glowing with a faint, predatory purple light that slowly faded as he exhaled. He looked devilishly handsome in the cold light of the moon, a stark contrast to the blood-stained nightmare beneath his feet.
"Your okay... thank goodness," Diane breathed, her shoulders finally relaxing.
"It's not dead yet," Zerav said, his voice returning to its usual flat, bored tone. He reached down and gripped the handle of his scythe, pulling it from the creature's neck with a wet *squelch*. A fresh river of red blood flowed into the crater. "But it won't be moving again. Its spine has been severed."
The Rabbid let out one last, pathetic gurgle, causing Ben and Kael to jump nearly a foot into the air.
"We can camp here," Zerav said matter-of-factly, reaching for his pack.
"WHAT?" Ben shrieked, his voice hitting a high, hysterical note. "Are you crazy? Camp beside that thing? It's preposterous! It's a Monster! We need to move!"
Zerav let out a long, exhausted sigh and shifted his gaze to Ben. The purple tint was gone from his eyes, but the cold, heavy weight of his presence remained. "What? Are you scared, Ben?"
"Me? Never!" Ben's response was immediate, his face turning a bright, indignant red.
"Then we camp here," Zerav said, his voice dropping into a dark, final tone that brooked no argument. "Or you can go off on your own and try your luck in this unholy night. I hear the Night-Stalkers have a taste for noble flesh"
A shiver of genuine fright raced down Ben's spine. He looked at the pitch-black woods, then at the dying monster, and finally at the calm, terrifying boy who had just dismantled it. He had no choice.
"Fine," Ben muttered, his pride finally wilting under the shadow of the Reaper. "We camp here."