A screech ripped through the air and vibrated me to my bones. Because of the air escaping through the hole in the neck the shredded musculature and membranes whipped violently around my body. Thanks to the gusts rippling the membrane, my shoulder slipped.

"AAAAAAAAHHHHH!"

I tumbled out of the sizable gash in the Wyverns neck with a shout of fear. I flipped head over heels as the feeling of the sudden fall dropped my blood into my stomach, and all I could make out were darkening skies and Grimm. The fall stopped completely by chance with a full-body jolt and a harsh impact under my sword arm that nearly ripped Crocea Mors from my grip.

"Kah-!" I grunted on impact, scrambling my feet against the surface to try and find leverage, only to realize it was completely vertical. "What the hell?"

My eyes adjusted quickly to the new light, but I had to blink confusion out of them. I flicked over to see my arm had caught around a massive rib, the exact last one on the Grimm. They extended slightly from the chest of the Wyvern, ironically just enough for me to wedge my arm between the rib and the skin. I took a deep breath before hiking myself up to a better position by wedging the rib more firmly under my arm. Crocea Mors was carefully put away at my side. The prospect of losing my ancestral weapon made me uncomfortable. Despite my better judgement, I decided to peer below.

"Holy shit…" I muttered. The Wyvern was climbing altitude like it was nothing, and it was as close to vertical as it could get. The academy was left behind, and for a campus that large it sure looked insignificant from this height. I was directly over Vale, but even that looked tiny. The buildings I could make out looked like building blocks from a child's toy set. I gulped, seeing that we were easily thousands of feet up and still climbing steadily.

"No turning back, then." I muttered flatly to myself.

I shook off the sight and turned my head up instead. The sight of the giant gash sliced down the neck of the monster gave me a sense of satisfaction. Seeing the shredded cords of muscle and flesh flail in the wind was just funny. Beyond the head of the massive Wyvern I saw that clouds had begun to swarm the open sky. They were gray and black in color, and they were quickly filling the gaps that were left where sun still peeked through. The beast puffed up its chest and let loose a screech that ripped through the air. My arm clutched tight against the rib until it was done, feeling the vibrations rock through me the whole time. I simply scowled and decided to move.

I unwedged my arm and moved to the next row of ribs, leaving me with a pseudo-foothold with the last one. I gripped the rib tight and sidled along the chest of the Grimm towards its side, careful of my footing. The intense wind was throwing my hair so violently I couldn't help but be cautious of it. I kept moving, bracing myself when the beast flapped its wings. In a minute of hard work I'd made it to the starting point of the external ribs. A quick examination of this area of the Grimm led to a smirk sprouting on my face. The deep black skin of the Wyvern was broken up by random outcroppings of bone. They were jagged and ranged from a small stone to a bowling ball in size. By the looks of the crude shapes and the large numbers of them, they would make perfect handholds.

'Though,' I thought to myself, eyeing the bone outcroppings. 'I'll need a safe anchor to move between…'

Crocea Mors was drawn from the scabbard carefully, then immediately plunged into the fleshy black side of the monster once I leaned over. I gripped the handle tight and swung over like a pendulum to the closest boney protrusion. It was perfectly shaped for a handhold, and I smirked as I yanked my sword out of its side. The Grimm rumbled with another screech that filled the sky, but I ignored it in favor of impaling it once again and moving to the next bone plate. I stabbed my way up the side of the creature, heedless to the calls and grunts of the Wyvern with a grin on my face.

"SCREEEEEEAAAAAAAKAHA!"

A scowl quickly replaced that smirk as the Grimm bucked in the air. The move was so sudden and violent that Crocea Mors nearly left my grasp. Thankfully, my grip on both the bone plate and the sword remained, if barely.

"Shit!"

The curse flew from my lips before I could think as the beast I was climbing on tilted harshly to one side, a screech being set free. I scrambled to deepen the hold I had on my position just in time for it to jolt the opposite direction. My grip stayed strong, even as the Wyvern resorted to random and powerful flaps of its wings. They shook me with every flap and it took lots of strength to keep glued to its side, but I managed.

At least, I managed until it flipped upside down.

"JUST FLY STEADY!" I shouted as my grip on the bone outcropping finally gave out. My free weight at such an odd angle forced Crocea Mors to slide out of the flesh of the Wyvern and fall with me. For about 10 seconds all I felt was panic and the sensation of falling. That all blew over when I hit something with the sensation of a hammock. I flicked my eyes to my side, and sure enough I'd landed on the underside of the wing close to the body. A breath of relief left me as I lay there motionless… then the world started tilting again. We were flipping yet again.

'I can't faithfully say that I'll be able to grab those bone plates before I fall!' The thoughts ran through my mind like lightning, as did solutions to the problem. I chewed on the inside of my cheek and grabbed my family weapon tightly in thought. 'Alternate path it is!'

Since I was resting on the underside of the left wing, I'd be left to slide along to the main body before dropping thousands of feet to the ground. I immediately threw away that solution, and decided to toss the plan to catch myself on the body away with it. I went through what felt like a hundred crackpot plans in seconds, but in the end I decided to follow a classic quote.

'If you can't go around it, go over it. If you can't go over it, go under it. If all else fails, go through it.'

So that's exactly what I did. With a scowl on my face I raised Crocea Mors and stabbed through the membrane of the wing I rested on. The edge swiped up until I fell through to the other side just in time. I started sliding along the rough skin of the creature until I drove my sword into its flesh and held on, rooting me in place as the wing reached vertical. The slit in its wing caught the wind roughly, flapping violently and tearing further at the edges as the Grimm continued to spin.

"I can't believe that worked!" I shouted over the wind. The sword was yanked from the body of the Wyvern, and I carefully stepped along its wide back as it began to level out in the air. The wind smacked into me intensely with the speed we were flying, but I ignored the sensation in favor of resting against one of the massive spines of bone that jutted out of the Wyvern. They were jagged and oddly shaped. The one I was resting against and many others were chipped and thinner at the base than the top, and others were the exact opposite.

It screeched again. The entire surface of the Grimm shook, and it took me from my brief sense of complacency. I sighed heavily and pushed off the spine before weaving my way through the many pillars of bone towards the front. The entirety of the sky above us was now overcast, and making out the edges of the Grimm was getting tricky. Each step I took, my scowl became more defined. The sense of victory from surviving the situations before expired quickly, and all I was left with were the feelings I had before I was swallowed. They were slowly creeping back up, clawing at the very back of my mind with every breath I took.

I felt disgusted simply having my feet touching the creature that came to that woman's aide. The base of the neck was beneath me. It easily was larger in width than the wingspan of five men. I glared venomously at the spotless black flesh of the neck before the flared crown of bone as we sailed through the darkening skies.

"A neck is a neck…" I muttered to myself, a cool scowl settling on my lips as I drew Crocea Mors once more from my side. "Slice it and they die."

I raised the sword high above my head, then fell to my knees and plunged it into the back of the neck to the hilt. A screech ripped out into the air, and I retracted my blade. Once more I raised it and buried it into flesh. Then again. Then a fourth time. Then a fifth, and again, and again, and again. I stabbed, I cut, and I chopped at the Grimm from my knees. The pitch-dark flesh separated like wet clay at the edge of Crocea Mors and skin flayed away from the quickly growing crater of lacerated meat. The ringing in my ears returned the more fervent I got with my attacks.

Everything was in jeopardy when the Grimm started to tilt under me again though. My thoughts were quick and animalistic, and so were my solutions. I stabbed deep into the flesh multiple times away from the growing collection, and grunted with each one. With only a second of hesitation, I shoved my arm down into the wound up to my shoulder and grabbed harshly at the corded muscles inside its neck. It was hot and disgusting, but I soldiered on through the squelching.

A growl rumbled the beast, and it vibrated up through my arm. I snarled at the feeling, but the expression changed. The Wyvern tilted and bucked… but I remained anchored to it. My arm was firm in its neck, and I remained attached like a tick. My face adorned a grin of victory at the realization. To celebrate, I raised Crocea Mors and continued my assault. Slashes and stab wounds continued to pile up on the screeching and groaning beast, all the while it tried to remove me through spins and crazy flight patterns in the skies of Vale.

The sword split the flesh of the Grimm with little resistance.

"Damnit!" I cursed coldly. I rammed the ancestral sword again into the flesh of the beast, only to scowl at the damage in comparison to the size of the Wyvern. "It's like I'm stabbing it with paper clips! It's just-"

A long section of meat was slashed free and caught by the wind. It disappeared from sight in an instant.

"-NOT-"

Smoke spewed from the open wound into the sky, leaving a trail behind the Wyvern.

"- GOOD ENOUGH!"

I drove Crocea Mors into the deepest part of the crater of wounds, and the reaction this time was different than all the others. The attack was taken silently at first. The entire Grimm shivered, then it let loose a wail unlike the screeches from before. It popped in my mind that I must have seriously hurt it with that… or pissed it off.

I had to grit my teeth as the trajectory of my ride changed violently. We went from horizontal to vertical in a single flap of its wings. We ascended with ridiculous speed, such that the wind was tugging at my eyelashes so hard I had to close my eyes and hunker down around my buried arm until it was over. It felt like forever before the wind died down, but once it did I blinked my eyes open.

"Blue skies?"

My words were sewed with confusion, at least until we leveled out. I yanked my arm out of the gash in the Wyverns neck and stood tall, looking out over the sky.

"No." I answered myself. "We're above the clouds…"

I felt shocked to my core. The sun was bright and beating down on my skin, all this while we surfed above a sea of clouds that had turned a gloomy black. The wyvern skimmed between varying heights of the cloud tops, the peaks looking like small mountains or pillars. I waved a hand in front of my face when we passed straight through one, but kept my eyes locked.

'I'll never forget this sight.' I thought to myself, in complete awe of the sight of the sun shining down on the blanket of blackening, white-tipped clouds. 'Not for as long as I live.'

[AN- Yo, great comments last chapter! Thanks for that, glad to hear you guys are enjoying it so far. I hear you ab the sizes, but they'll have to remain the same unfortunately. Going to college and working fulltime are my priorities at the moment, and I honestly started this story just for my own enjoyment and fun. 2 thousand to 3 thousand are really friendly to my schedules and they're a decent sized, so I have them fluctuate between there. Hope that explains, enjoy the chapter!]