The air trembled as the Sky Talon let out a cry that shattered the clouds. Its voice, unlike Judge's will, was not just to intimidate, no it was to command — an order for the very air to obey.
The wind thickened, turned solid, no longer an invisible force but a weapon with form and intent. It twisted and coiled like a living beast, swirling around the cloudweaver like a snake predating over its prey.
Judge heard a crack, once, twice — but the ship needed more than that to be destroyed, it was an emergency resource after all, and it needed to be sturdy enough to hold even against an adult dragon.
Lediya stood on the ship's deck, unbothered by the solid air around her. She held two dark blades that gleamed even without light. She did not make any hasty movements and observed as the bird readied for another attack.
Her eyes reflected the storm of madness before her. The bird seems to be taking its time. She was not one for dramatics, but this thing was seriously testing her patience.
As time passed without both making any actions, Lediya extended her arms as the two blades started to float around her.
The space around her shimmered, stretched, and bent. She cracked her knuckles, and the sound wasn't just a pop — it echoed like millions of glasses shattering together, but the sound soon quieted down.
The Sky Talon screeched, and suddenly, breathing became a labor. Air vanished — not moved, not pushed away, just gone, as if the very concept of it had been erased. The ship groaned as the vacuum crushed it, wood warping under pressure.
Judge, standing by the door, gasped, clutching his throat before Lediya flicked a hand, casually pulling breathable air from a distant part of the world and slamming it back into place. He finally understood why that bird was dangerous as he breathed in like he hadn't for ages.
"Annoying," she muttered, rolling her shoulders.
The bird flew up, it roared again.
The moment it did, the air became heavy. A force, unseen yet undeniable, pressed down as if a mountain had taken a nap on reality itself. The ship creaked, slowly being pushed down to the vast expanse of forest below.
Lediya, unfazed, stepped forward.
Space folded around her, each step stretching the distance between her and the bird while also bringing her closer. The Sky Talon flapped once, and the sky flipped. The ship was upside down, yet nothing fell.
Gravity didn't know what to do, so it just decided to not work as if it was a system error. Judge, now standing upside down on the deck, blinked. "Oh, wonderful. Reality's drunk again."
Lediya narrowed her eyes, unimpressed. She reached out, grasped something unseen, and twisted. The sky corrected itself with a shudder, flipping everything back into place as if scolded for misbehaving.
The Sky Talon screeched again, and this time, strange cracks started to appear in space itself, tearing holes into the world. Through them, glimpses of strange places flashed — a city where time ran backward, a wasteland where the sky was made of water, a void where nothing existed but endless, whispering wind.
She sighed. "Fine. No more playing around."
Inside the deck, one of Judge's guards came in, "Have you seen Miss Lediya fight? young master?" He asked casually, as if they were in the middle of watching a play.
"No," He answered quickly, but then paused as his brain processed what he had just said, "Miss? Isn't she a maid?"
His guard laughed, "Miss Lediya used to be a maid, but her unparalleled talent made the late Matriarch teach her swordsmanship herself. And the Patriarch asked her to be your maid after you were born."
Judge only nodded, he was more focused on the battle.
Lediya raised her hand, and suddenly, there were two of her. One slowly advanced forward with slow, measured steps. The other followed after a delay, each time the second one took a step, the bird screeched in pain, and it flailed its wings — trying to attack nothing.
The bird tried to attack, but every time it did, its attack landed where she had been, not where she was. It was like trying to fight an opponent that existed in a timeline half a second out of sync.
Then she merged back into herself, and in that fraction of a moment, the air around the bird froze. Not just in temperature — it stopped being air at all. It became a solid, unyielding prison, trapping the Sky Talon mid-flight, its wings frozen mid-flap.
For a brief, tense second, silence.
Then the bird shattered the air around it. The fragments of broken atmosphere hit the deck, the sails, the mast — but it damaged nothing as if these were mere snowballs being thrown at an iron wall.
Judge observed it, might be because those solid air projectiles have no mass. He did a rough guesss.
But one fragment slashed Lediya's shoulder, and a deep wound formed, not on her skin but on the space she occupied. She staggered, feeling herself being torn from existence, but gritted her teeth and touched the torn space on her shoulder — stitching reality back together around her like patching up a tear in fabric.
Blood dripped down her arm. The bird saw it and screeched, as in a threat to back off.
She exhaled sharply. "Okay. You die now."
The world around her rippled.
The ship, the sky, the wind — all of it twisted as if sucked into a whirlpool of existence. The Sky Talon tried to move but found itself moving backward, repeating its own actions, trapped in a loop of its own history. It flapped its wings — then flapped them again in the exact same motion, unable to break free.
Lediya stepped forward, hand outstretched, and compressed space around the bird like a clenched fist. The monster screamed, wind erupting from it like a storm trying to break loose, but the space it occupied was shrinking, folding inward, making the distance between its wings, its talons, its own body smaller and smaller and smaller — until the massive catastrophe-class beast was no larger than a mere speck.
A final, muffled screech.
She flicked her wrist, and the speck vanished, erased from space.
Lediya let out a slow breath, staggering slightly, one hand clutching her side where the wound still shimmered with fractured reality. She turned to Judge, who had not moved from the door, watching the whole thing with an unreadable expression.
He finally spoke. "You know, I think I liked it better when I didn't know how strong you were."
Lediya, blood dripping down her fingers, cracked her neck. "Apologies young master, I forgot to take the bird's meat in the heat of the battle."
Judge shook his head, "It is alright."