Rooooarrr!
The canopy erupted, branches cracking and leaves rustling as a massive figure leapt down into the clearing. Muscles rippling under striped cerulean skin littered in scars, the being raised from their crouched landing, brandished their sawtooth bone blades wide at their side and let out another guttural war cry.
Dark brown eyes widened behind exo-pack masks, when Ray and Gaile Bolin’s heads whipped up from their field books and found themselves face to face with a clearly aggressive, massive Na’vi male, one not like any they had seen before or befriended. The father and son duo had no time to wonder whether this individual was from the clans that had grown to hate the humans after the war with Hell’s Gate— an unaffiliated group from their own passive research colony that had operated on the main continent— as the warrior lunged towards them, seeking blood.
“Crap! Gaile!” Ray called, fear edging his voice.
Quickly, he grabbed a hold of his son’s jacket collar and pulled him out of his all-terrain powerchair before the great swords slashed down into the seat cushion, clanking hard against the metal support bars. The two humans fell into the mulch and stone riddled mountainous ground, gasping as the impact jarred their bodies. Adrenaline rushed through both of them, Gaile wrapping an arm around his father and using his other to try and help pull him away, his legs dragging behind him, Ray muscling his weight. Where were they to go for safety? The colony hub was a couple miles trek away and a Na’vi would outpace a human any day. Anything they could use as a possible weapon was on the other side of their assailant.
Near silent footsteps approached closer, the scarred warrior seemingly recognizing the minimal effort he would need to remove this threat to Eywa from Pandora. He stalked like one of the large jungle predators, yellow eyes narrowing on them as he raised his weapons, Ray and Gaile flinching—
A cry from the sky.
A large shadow swooped overhead right before a figure dropped from above, and pain ripped into the giant warrior’s shoulder. The swishing of a braid and tail against his back confirmed another Na’vi had launched the attack, the being smaller than himself. Feathers tickled his back as the other hissed a long stream of explicits and insults, promising threats of death and ending him while they pressed deeper into the spear in his back. The warrior grunted and reared back, flexing his bulk in an attempt to throw off this newcomer, succeeding. A splatter of wetness down his bare back was the tell the spear had ripped from his skin.
He circled around, coiling low as he faced a pale blue Na’vi, more faintly spotted than striped. The loose flaps of skin of their arms and legs, the ‘winged’ like fans of their tails, painted them as different from his terrestrial and aquatic brethren. But what the warrior could focus on was the furrowing of a maroon birthmarked brow and how those sunset eyes fixed like daggers upon him.
And he smiled.
Which earned him another vile hiss from the younger, who had put themselves between him and the humans. The warrior wiped a hand across his chest, licked the blood from his thumb, and crouched a few meters away. He could let them live a bit. But he needed to know.
“Who are you?”
“I am Flyntsyal. And I won’t let you kill my family.”