From the very beginning, the pace and initiative of the battle had been firmly in Logan’s hands.
Unable to fly and lacking sufficient long-range attacks.
In the face of airborne creatures with strong ranged capabilities, any numerical advantage meant nothing—just a bad joke.
No one’s ever heard of a caveman with a club taking down a fighter jet.
By continuously bombarding the enemy with flame attacks, Logan successfully seized the opening created when the Zinogre leader focused on countering the charging fireball, scattering the three Zinogres.
At this moment, he had reached enough speed to execute a stunning Immelmann turn, carving a graceful arc through the air.
Under the gaze of Mind’s Eye, he easily dodged Zinogre’s lunging bite and circled behind it. His flame-wrapped claws tore across its back with brutal precision—ripping away a wide patch of fur and igniting it in the process.
Without the insulation of its fur, the fire scorched directly into its flesh, and the Zinogre writhed in agony on the ground.
With a subtle twitch of his agile wings—almost as if he had foreseen it—Logan ascended just in time to avoid the lightning-charged claws swiping beneath him.
He wasn’t greedy. Carried by the wind pressure, he soared back into the sky.
The scales on his chest gradually turned red-hot, while the flames at the tips of his wings and tail began to fade.
“You can either save that Zinogre... or abandon it and keep running.”
Just now, Logan had every chance to kill that Zinogre.
But what’s more valuable than a dead Zinogre?
A wounded one.
Flames surged downward from the sky, carrying an aura of annihilation, engulfing the area below.
A full-force fan-shaped breath of fire turned the land beneath into a sea of flame, swallowing the Zinogre rushing in to shield its wounded comrade—and the leader that had just dashed forward in an attempt to interrupt Logan’s strike.
Even the surrounding trees withered in the heat. A nearby puddle began to boil, and mist rose in curls over the stream.
Both the compressed explosive fireball and this fan-shaped flame had become the culmination of Logan’s relentless efforts over the years.
The range might not compare to an Elder Dragon—but compared to a standard tempered Rathalos, his fan-shaped flame had tripled in spread while maintaining its high temperature and pressure.
That single breath of fire lasted a full 30 seconds.
Only when Logan’s flame sac finally registered the strain... did he stop.
As the flames receded, the area that had been engulfed by the fan-shaped fire was now scorched earth—so utterly charred that even the rocks showed signs of crystallization.
The blackened corpses of the three Zinogre were heaped together, as if their last act had been to shield something with their lives.
Amid flashes of lightning, the Zinogre leader transformed into a bolt of electricity and shot toward the distant mountains and forests without hesitation.
“It’s still alive?”
Logan had known from the beginning that an attack of this level wouldn’t be enough to take it down easily. His true aim had been to bait them in and gather the Zinogres together—to cripple the leader with a single fan-shaped blast.
What he hadn’t anticipated was that the three Zinogres would use their bodies as shields to protect the leader, preventing it from taking the brunt of the blow.
Unwilling to give it a chance to escape, Logan beat his wings and gave chase immediately.
But now, the Zinogre leader was focused solely on fleeing. Pouring electricity through its body to stimulate muscular activity, it reached its maximum speed across the unobstructed terrain.
Fireballs erupted from the sky one after another, but the wyvern dodged them all with uncanny agility. At this point, it appeared to the naked eye as nothing but a streak of yellow lightning—too fast for mere ranged attacks to halt its escape.
With no other choice, Logan squeezed his flame sac once more, his entire body engulfed in fire.
Anticipating the Zinogre leader’s trajectory, Logan dove. A massive fireball plummeted from the sky.
At this speed, even Logan couldn’t change direction quickly. He became a falling meteor, wrapped in searing flame, crashing toward the ground.
But in that exact moment, the Zinogre leader—almost as if it possessed Foresight like Logan—sensed the danger.
At the critical juncture, it suddenly veered off course.
Lightning and flame collided, and a small mushroom cloud began to rise.
With a deep, muffled cry of pain, the scorched Zinogre leader, barely holding onto its overcharged state, burst through the thick smoke. After a few staggered bounds, it crashed into the mountain forest.
When Logan beat his wings to clear the smoke around him, he caught a glimpse of the Zinogre leader disappearing into the treeline.
Unwilling to give up, he circled above the forest canopy.
But the trees were too dense—thick layers of leaves obscured his view.
The forest would severely limit his aerial maneuverability. The Zinogre leader, having veered away from the center of the blast and scattered part of the flames with its lightning, wasn’t as badly injured as it had appeared.
Charging in blindly now would likely backfire—there was a real risk he’d be ambushed instead.
The grounded Rathalos was even less capable in combat than a Rathian—an absolute difference rooted in physiology.
Once on the ground, its feet could only curl their toes to maintain balance, unable to stabilize enough to sprint, let alone fight properly on land.
Even Logan couldn’t escape this limitation.
After circling for a while and finding no trace of the Zinogre leader, Logan let out a frustrated roar, then decisively turned toward the Ancient Tree.
He was going to wake the dragon!
Rathalos may not excel at ground combat, but Rathian does!
One thing was certain—he would never allow such a dangerous enemy to coexist with him in the same territory.
Deep in the forest, beneath a tall platform of tangled vines, the Zinogre leader’s bloodshot eyes stared through a gap in the leaves, watching Logan fly away.
Beyond the fury in its gaze, there was also deep, gnawing greed.
That’s right—this was exactly what it had been searching for all this time!
The feeling of looming death filled it with ever-growing terror, and under that pressure, its mind had begun to fray.
The Zinogre leader didn’t believe its strength was inferior to Logan’s. It had glimpsed higher realms—come within a hair’s breadth of transcending its current form. It refused to die here, not like this.
A monster like Logan, with that level of strength, surely made its nest in the upper canopy of the Ancient Tree.
There, the interwoven layers of branches made every step perilous for any non-flying creature—one wrong move, and you'd plummet. Naturally, flying wyverns like Rathalos held overwhelming superiority in such a space.
But those same tangled branches also restricted a wyvern’s maneuverability. It wasn’t the same as soaring freely through open skies.
And so, the Zinogre leader made a decision—one completely unhinged.
It had little time left. There was no more room for laying traps or setting up ambushes.
It would strike first!
It would rally the remaining Zinogres in the Ancient Tree and launch a final war against the canopy above!
There, within that web of branches, it would hunt down this unusual Rathalos, rip out his wyvern gem, and complete its transformation to a higher plane of existence!
By now, the Zinogre leader no longer cared if the plan made sense, nor whether devouring the wyvern gem would truly bring evolution.
With death closing in, it could no longer calm its mind. Every sliver of hope had to be seized.
Even if it ended in death, it no longer mattered—there was no other path left.
...
Back in his nest atop the Ancient Tree, Logan had no idea how far into madness the Zinogre leader had descended.
A war between fire and thunder was about to begin—because of him.
At that moment, he hurriedly woke Aki from her afternoon nap and took to the skies with her. Along the way, he quickly explained everything that had happened.
The goal of this trip was simple: to find the Zinogre leader—and end it once and for all.
...
Logan and Aki had been searching for two full days. They even circled twice over the current territory of the Zinogre but still couldn’t locate the exact position of the Zinogre Alpha.
The only time they managed to detect any sign of him, they hadn’t even landed before spotting a group of Zinogres hidden within the forest. Among the ones Logan could see, there were at least two Tempered Zinogres.
It was obviously a trap!
Even ants can bite an elephant to death—let alone in a dense forest that put them at a disadvantage. So Logan decisively retreated with Aki.
They hadn’t found the Zinogre Alpha, but the two days of searching revealed something unusual.
The Zinogres, which had previously scattered like loose sand across the Ancient Forest, were once again gathering within that territory.
Just the regular Zinogres he had spotted already numbered over twenty. All of them were hidden in the forest, and every time Logan and Aki passed overhead, those cold, piercing eyes followed them—silent and unblinking—until they vanished completely from sight.
With the search turning up nothing, they returned to the Ancient Tree Nest. Logan instructed the Fire Wyvern Grimalkyne tribe to pay close attention to Zinogre movements within the forest and to actively reach out to other Grimalkyne tribes for help locating the Zinogre Alpha.
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