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Leila was caught entirely in confusion as a very large number of sudden events were crammed into a very short interval. She couldn’t follow everything, but the last thing she clearly remembered was a loud pink-haired lady who appeared out of the woods had her pulled along with Toby under her arms - supposedly as ‘hostages’ - and screaming the words ‘turtle dragon’ repeatedly.

Also, Leila was almost completely certain that, when she looked at the flowers Ran plucked that were the start of all that fuss - she saw lines of white, pointy teeth lined between its petals.

Then her sight was blinded by Japhet’s flashlight, and Leila stumbled a few steps blindly forwards as Nympha let go of her alleged hostages.

Regaining her foothold, she turned to see Nympha, who had both hands thrusted forwards, and was still yelling:

[b]”TURTLE DRAGON!”[/b]

“...what exactly...is a turtle dragon?” Leila asked. The rest of the lot of humans and the Nobodies that accompanied them in their trek into the woods also appeared equally confuzzled. 

That is, with the sole exception of Toby, who joined in Nympha in her endless obnoxious chantings of ‘turtle dragon’.

And then the ground started trembling.

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[b]”RUN! RUN!”[/b]

But her feet stood still. Ace was equally hesitant. Leila looked around in a panic, stumbling in a struggle to not to be shook to the ground by the increasingly intense tremors while searching in vain for an identifiable source of those tremors.

The magnitude of the vibrations increased, and soon it felt like the entire forest was rumbling in accordance.

“Wh-what is happening?” 

The deep, angry roar of the turtle dragon boomed through the air.

[b]"ready to tame another dragon, Leila?"[/b]

Riley looked at her and smiled but Leila could see under the grin the thick cloak of worry.

“Wait - was that implying that -” [i]that she had tamed at least one dragon prior to this?[/i] When - where - did that happen? She didn’t remember ‘taming’ any dragons. But her voice broke before she could finish the sentence and everyone started scurrying in all directions.

Run, away. Away from wherever the turtle dragon was - but she couldn’t tell, because the howls were echoing throughout the entire forest.

Then before she could react to anything, Ran jolted forward and swept her off the ground and kept running with her carried.

“Ey wait-”

 Without much time to make sense of all that and suddenly feeling the thorns scrape across her skin as they drove straight into a thicker part of the forst, Leila struggled in protest and that was immediately followed by all of them falling over.

[b]“Lelia? Harper? Are you here?”[/b]

Groaning as she struggled to free herself from the vines and branches that were caught on her clothes and hair, Leila yelled back from under the bush that she was stuck in:

“I’m here, I’m alrigh -”

And that was when she saw it: The enormous figure of the creature against the sky, shell covered in earth and vegetation the side of a small island, and deafening roars emitted from its beak-like maw as it slammed its head against a layer of translucent pink in mid-air - and tearing through it, the translucent barrier cracking and then shattering into thousands of pieces.

The titanic creature’s every step shook the ground, and in its path - was it her imagination or was it really happening? No, her imagination wasn’t that good, not will she imagine something as infinitely dreadful. In the path of the turtle dragon, things [i]disintegrated[/i] - torn into chunks, shards, flickering like incorrectly loaded graphic files. Then, eventually, reduced to nothing but a cloud of fine dust, lifted upwards into the air - disappearing.

Leila’s eyes widened, she felt her heart sink.

[b]“Run! The tur….tle issssssss cooooom ing.”[/b]

The voice stretched, fluctuated in pitch and eventually became completely distorted as Leila watched in horror the running soldier being…[i]sucked away[/i] by the dragon.

[i]If you die in Nowhere, you disappear. Forever.[/i]

“No, don’t!”

She cried as she lept forwards from the bush, the vines and twigs torn apart as she did so. She tackled the fading figure of the soldier as if by doing so she was keeping him from being struck by some sort of projectile that they could just narrowly dodge. She didn’t know whether it would work - but that was the first thing she thought of and was what she tried because if there was a chance if would save him it would have to be attempted.

For moments she almost imagined that she was back at the Stone of Sacrifice, and the witch was there, and...

The two of them tumbled sideways, down a steep slope in the terrain covered in dead leaves and plants.

When it ended, Leila pushed herself back up, and the first thing she did was to check on the soldier:

“-are you alright? Are you - ”

She thought of shaking him, like trying to wake someone up, but did not. It felt almost unreal as what’s left of the upper body and the half of the face frozen in the terrified expression flickered and broke to pieces, leaking away through the spaces between her fingers and into the air.

Leila snapped back to what was going on. Where was she? She couldn’t see over the slope to anyone who was nearby. She was temporarily out of the area of the dragon’s vortex, but by the winds and trembling trees, not by much. She tried standing up, but couldn’t. She couldn’t tell where the turtle dragon was.

“Harper? Ran? Toby?”

She yelled the names without thinking, the names that she immediately remembered, hoping they were close enough to hear her:

“-Haku?”

She called out before she realized, and choked. But really her mind was too blurry by this point to speak of really realizing anything anyway.

She still found herself unable to move.