The cold wind sliced through the thin air like a knife.
They were eight thousand meters above the ground, with the clouds beneath their feet like a gray sea of lead. Even dragons were reluctant to venture to this altitude, where the extreme cold could freeze boiling water in an instant and the thin oxygen could suffocate an ordinary human.
Yet at that moment, this stretch of sky was bustling.
[Bleurgh-!]
The sound of vomiting came over the comms again, followed by muffled curses.
[Damn it... this thing makes me sicker than five big mugs of hard liquor! My head's completely scrambled!]
[Shut up, Sam! Puke in the bag! If even one drop of that filth gets on the gears, I'll demote your ass to ground crew!] Ola hurriedly warned him over the comms.
More than a hundred Great Skuas were conducting an utterly chaotic maneuver drill.
They folded their wings and plunged vertically toward the sea of clouds. On their backs, the knights who should have been hugging their mounts were instead making movements that defied every biological instinct.
Clack, clack, clack-
As the Great Skuas rolled and twisted sideways to evade air currents, the hemispherical steel bases beneath the knights spun wildly. Lubricated with specially formulated whale oil, the bearings of the inner and outer rings turned smoothly, filtering out most of the jolting beneath the bases.
But that did little to ease the knights' suffering, because their vision was out of sync too.
Your body told you that you were falling, and your backside told you that you were spinning, but your eyes-thanks to that miraculous contraption beneath your backside-saw heaven and earth as a single vertical line.
That sensory disconnect left every one of these battle-hardened men deathly pale.
[Watch your six! That's the simulated enemy!]