Chapter 74: The Feast Kei Made
That was not part of the feast .
That was what fed on it .
The thought held in Kei for the length of a breath — the flat recognition arriving the way operational facts arrived , before assessment , before plan . And in the same breath the question followed it .
What was it .
*[ INSUFFICIENT DATA AT THIS RANGE , ]* Epoch said . *[ THE VDU REQUIRES PROXIMITY TO RUN ARCHIVE CROSS-CHECK . THE ENTITY’S SIGNATURE IS NOT RESOLVING FROM THE FISSURE . ]*
Proximity .
Kei looked at the thing in the forest below .
It had coiled around the derived apparition — twenty meters of dark length or more , the eye in the bloodglow’s near-black phase reading it as serpentine , a snake of impossible scale pouring its coils around the volatile darkness it had caught . He held the shape in his vision and could not hold it . The edges would not stay where his eye placed them . The length read as one thing and then another , and the not-resolving was itself a kind of information .
The others saw it too .
He could tell from the stillness along the seam that the four other fissures held — the specific stillness of beings watching a thing their eyes could not agree on . He would learn later that what their eyes had registered varied : that the High Cleric had seen shadow filaments writhing in a mass that had no fixed boundary , that Corvyn had seen a long slender ribbed anomaly , a segmented length where Kei had seen a snake . No two of them holding the same creature . The thing presenting a different self to each set of eyes that tried to fix it .
Only one set of eyes fixed it .
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Tula’s web-fracture eyes had opened on the shriek and turned outward , and now , in the chaos below , she reached past the registers her ordinary sight produced and activated the thing her bloodline carried beneath them .
True Sight .
The luminescence in the fracture-lines deepening , the eyes ceasing to receive impression and beginning to receive clarity — and the creature resolved .
She saw it as it was . The alternating length of it — translucent black chitin and condensed darkness and the partial suggestion of an internal anatomy that the chitin did not fully conceal . The clusters of pale eyes growing along its segments , human in their shape and wrong in their number , none of them blinking in time with any other , all of them moving , scanning , even as the body held its coil . The mouth . A circular aperture rimmed with serrated teeth , opened now into the specific pout-shape it produced when it fed — drawing , the darkness of the caught apparition flowing toward the aperture in a thin continuous current , the apparition’s volatile body thinning as the current pulled it in .
She saw the creature whole .
She did not know its name .
And her sight , holding the thing it had finally fixed , faltered — because at the edge of the resolved clarity , near the feeding length , another thing caught the True Sight and pulled it off the creature entirely .
Kaiser .
Kei had jumped .
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He had jumped on the VDU’s word and not on the want .
The want had been there — the pack of frightened shadow beasts pouring past his fissure , the thrill points and the fiend points and the feast all bright in front of him , Doctor’s voice still in his ear . But the want had curdled when the long thing dropped , and the curdle had held him at the fissure’s lip for the heartbeat it took the VDU to fire .
*[ ARCHIVE MATCH , ]* Epoch had said , the resolution arriving the instant his proximity allowed it . *[ CHOIR-EATER . UMBRAL ARCHIVE — EXPEDITION RECORDS . PRIORITY : SHADOW OVER FLESH . CAPABILITY : SHADOW-DOMAIN CONTROL IN PROXIMITY — DO NOT DEPLOY SHADOW TECHNIQUE IN ITS VICINITY . ASSESSMENT : CAN BE USED AS A SYMBIOTE . ]*
Symbiote .
What do you mean , Kei had asked her — already moving , the question and the motion the same act .
Epoch had answered .
And the answer had assembled the plan in Kei’s head between one breath and the next — the whole shape of it arriving complete , the way a route arrived complete in a mind built to find routes . The creature prioritized shadow over flesh . It would not turn on a body while shadow-manifestation remained in reach to feed on . And the forest was about to be full of shadow-manifestation , because Kei was about to make it so . He had only to keep his own shadow silent and let the thing feed on what his blades produced .
He had summoned the Twin Umbral Wings .
The bat-winged geometry of the twin blades resolving out of the weapon bead in his gauntlet beneath the carapace , the blood-bound summoning answering with the bead in proximity , the blades present in his hands — and the forked dagger at his waist , drawn and held . He had jumped from the fissure in a high arc and come down onto the forest floor and rolled , instantly , giving way to a shadow beast that had been running at the place he landed .
The beast ran past where he had been .
Before it could carry itself clear , Kei jumped again .
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He drove the twin blades into the kill spot .
The base of the neck — the junction he had learned at the boundary , where the shadow saturation thinned at the seam between the original creature’s spinal structure and the corruption overlay , the one place on a shadow beast where the blade reached something that killing reached . The twin blades found it together .
The beast’s unstable outline destabilized completely .
The physical coherence releasing all at once — the corrupted biological matter losing its structural integrity simultaneously across the entire body , the outline’s edge fracturing and then gone , the darkness where the beast had been returning to being simply darkness .
*[ THRILL POINTS : 2/5 . FIEND POINTS : 1 . DERIVED SHADOW APPARITION — SHADOW BEAST ONE — FORMATION INITIATED : 10 MINUTES . ]*
Fiend Points : 1 .
It registered .
The thing he had laid out to Asp in the Umbral Archive as a theory — that shadow-entity kills earned Fiend Points , that the relationship existed at all — confirmed on a corpse , on the first kill , the number present in the VDU where a theory had been . Not an inference . A body had produced it . Kei filed the confirmation with the flat completeness of a man who had needed proof and now had it , and moved .
He subdued the shadow domain .
All of it . The shadow domain pressed down to nothing , the shadow sense at 2/20 silenced , the Wraithskin and every shadow application withheld — because a shadow technique in the Choir-Eater’s vicinity would read as the brightest thing in the forest and turn the feeding length toward him . He ran instead on the rest of what he was . Deftness at eighteen . Muscle at eighteen . And the Perception at twenty driving both — the operational sight that placed every kill spot before he reached it , that read the beasts’ panic-routes a step ahead , that turned a body into an instrument moving through a problem at the speed the problem required .
He moved toward the main group .
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Two more beasts . Two more kill spots . The twin blades finding the base of each neck and the outlines releasing and the darkness returning to darkness .
*[ THRILL POINTS : 4/5 . FIEND POINTS : 3 . ]*
The Choir-Eater fed beside the slaughter and did not look up .
It had encircled the first apparition fully now , the coils tightening , the circular mouth drawing the volatile darkness into itself in its thin continuous current — and the satisfaction of it was visible , readable even to eyes that could not fix the creature’s shape , in the pale human eyes along its segments . They had changed . Brightened , in the specific way the eyes brightened when the feeding went well . A second derived apparition — a running volatile darkness , one of the pack’s own — came at the creature from behind , not in attack but in the blind imperative of a shadow entity moving to free another , and the Choir-Eater’s rearmost segments turned their eyes toward it without the feeding length pausing at all .
The shadow beasts ringed it in fear .
Fear of a predator that was to them what they were to lesser things — the specific stillness of beasts that had encountered something above them in the order of the dark and had stopped being predators and become , simply , prey deciding which way to run .
Team Noctis watched from the fissures in disbelief .
Only Doctor laughed .
" Good ! " The warmth breaking into delight along the seam , pitched low and carrying. " Good ! Haaaa haaa — the boy has chosen his path . " The laughter again , genuine , the gleaming pleasure of a scholar watching a hypothesis prove itself in flesh . " Good . Good . "
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Kei did not hear him , or heard him and did not register him as anything but ambient .
He had become the movement . The poker face gone slack with the specific emptiness of total operational focus , the body moving from stationary beast to stationary beast — the ones frozen in their fear of the Choir-Eater , the ones that had stopped running — and the twin blades plunging into one kill spot after another in a practiced flow , an acrobat’s economy , no motion spent that did not end in a base-of-neck and a releasing outline .
The counts ran in his VDU in unison .
*[ THRILL POINTS : 13 — LEVEL-READY , ADVANCEMENT DEFERRED . 14 — DEFERRED . 15 — DEFERRED . FIEND POINTS : 9 . 10 . 11 . ]*
He did not spend them .
He had crossed the five that would have leveled him and he had let the points bank instead — Epoch holding each level-ready notice and Kei declining each one , because he was fighting a body he had calibrated precisely and he would not shift its attributes in the middle of using it , and because the points were capital and capital was for spending deliberately and not in the middle of a slaughter . He stayed at Level 1 . He took the kills and held what they gave him , unspent .
The Choir-Eater finished the first apparition .
Nothing remained of it . Not a thinning shape , not a residue — the volatile darkness drawn entirely into the circular mouth and gone , the place it had been simply empty , and the creature turning the feeding length toward the second apparition that had flanked it , the one that had come to free the first and would now take its place .
The shadow beasts counted down . Two dozen toward ten .
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The ten that remained broke .
Jolted out of their fear of the Choir-Eater by the nearer fear of the thing moving through them with the twin blades — the new intruder that killed without shadow , that they could not read as a shadow threat because it presented none — the ten ran . Toward the Cruentus Mouth . Their route carrying them across the open ground ahead of the joined Bleed Bark tree where Team Noctis sheltered .
Kei ran behind them for the kill .
A shadow ball landed among them .
It dropped into the running ten and broke — the force of it throwing them backward and sideways , the tight formation of their flight scattering into a sprawl of stumbling shadow-bodies on the forest floor . Kei glanced up .
Doctor . Waving from his fissure . The inked feather still in his other hand .
Kei nodded .
He pounced on the fallen .
The body moving in calculated rhythm now , the hands in a practiced flow that had stopped requiring his attention , the twin blades plunging and rupturing one kill spot after another as the scattered beasts tried to find their feet and did not find them in time . Base of neck . Outline releasing . Darkness to darkness . Again . Again .
The last shadow beast fell .
*[ TWENTY-FOUR SHADOW BEASTS KILLED . THRILL POINTS : 24 — LEVEL-READY , ADVANCEMENT DEFERRED . FIEND POINTS : 24 . ]*
Twenty-four . Twenty-four fiend points . One to one , clean , across the whole slaughter — the theory not merely confirmed but counted out , a number for every body .
And then the rest of the entry .
*[ CURRENT DERIVED APPARITION : 1 — ENGAGED WITH CHOIR-EATER . NEW DERIVED APPARITIONS : 24 — FORMING : 19 — FORMING IN NEXT 10 SECONDS : 5 . ]*
A pause in the VDU that was not a pause Epoch usually took .
*[ FIND SHELTER FAST . ]*
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Kei understood it in the instant it arrived .
The feast he had made .
Twenty-four shadow beasts killed , and a killed shadow beast did not simply end — it became , across ten minutes , a derived apparition , the pure shadow entity rising out of the place the corrupted body had released . He had not killed a pack . He had planted one . Twenty-four derived apparitions rising out of the twenty-four bodies — nineteen of them already forming across the forest floor where the beasts had fallen , five more within the next ten seconds , the volatile darkness already coalescing at the kill sites — some still faint , some almost manifested , one of them rising near him with the same quality he had watched rise from the first beast he had killed after coming down from the fissure .
Twenty-four apparitions . Forming where Team Noctis sheltered .
And a creature that ate apparitions , feeding twenty meters away , that would have nineteen new reasons to come this way the moment they finished forming .
He had set a table . He was standing on it .
Kei ran for the joined tree .
He reached the base of it , the fissures along the seam holding the four others and the one that was his — and before he put himself inside it , he stopped .
He drew the forked dagger from his waist .
He threw it .
Not at a beast . Not at the creature . He threw it across the open ground at a second Bleed Bark tree , a separate trunk standing apart from the joined pair , and the forked dagger crossed the bloodglow-lit dark and buried itself in the charcoal bark , embedded , its weeping handle the only part of it left showing against the slow red sap .
He entered the fissure .
He hid .
And he watched the scene outside begin to unfold — the apparitions rising from the forest floor in their two dozen places , the Choir-Eater finishing the second darkness and lifting the pale eyes of its forward segments toward the new abundance forming all around the joined tree , the feast he had made assembling itself in the red dark between him and a predator that had been , until this moment , facing the other way .
