A storm of flesh and ash raged around Elias, and if it was possible to slow down the action for a second, an observer would see a spawn slamming into Elias's helmet, its body exploding against his stone skin, and another hit his pauldron, cracking the stone.
Following that, another spawn wrapped its limbs around his leg, trying to pull him down, but was crushed under his stone boot, and two more instantly took its place.
All of these happened in a fraction of a second, and time resumed its usual flow to display a scene of carnage that was unearthly.
However, these attacks by the spawns were nothing against their true weapons, which were not their claws or teeth; it was just mass, pure weight, either colliding with him on all sides or falling from the sky, accelerating with gravity, and then slamming into him again and again and again.
It did not matter that he had theoretically limitless vitality and a body made of stone; his overall Vitality kept dropping
6,200 → 5,800 → 5,400 → 5,000.
His regeneration was working. Blood-Forged Flesh converted damage to stamina. Stone Skin reduced the impact. But there were too many, and they fell in their hundreds, then thousands, a rain of flesh and bone and red eyes that did not stop.
Elias roared and pushed forward, hearing another bubbling eruption in his Lumina Space as his Lumina Pools reached 800 meters and another 45 purple orbs arose from them; he was now technically a third-level Fury Forge.
The Passenger inside his head continued to laugh as all of his active legacies were growing, his Art of Stone Vein completion breaking through to 30% and Crimson Vein Dominion reaching 45%; however, Elias could only look at his Void Scripture with glee as it had finally broken past 15%.
This trial was meant for him; it was the stage where everything would change. With a roar, he plunged into the mass of bodies.
®
Elias had been fighting for hours, and at this point, his arms were lead and his lungs, fire.
If his eyes were not made from stone and his body was constantly absorbing it, he would be blind at this point.
He had a limit, but it was a limit that was deep; however, even those depths had been scraped to the bottom.
How long had he been fighting, hours or days, and he had crossed halfway to the pit. Elias had stopped checking his progress; all he knew was that his 100 Lumina Pools were now 1300 meters in circumference, and he was technically a Level 8 Fury Forge, and he only needed one more level to reach the peak of this stage.
There must be other benefits to his legacies and his Elder Talent, but for now, he could no longer think of this, as Elias was slowly falling under the curse of intense bloodlust.
The spawns kept crushing against his body, and his shield was a ruin, his blades were shards, and his blood whips had been cut so many times they could barely hold form.
He was losing.
The thought came to him as a cold, hard fact. He had killed tens of thousands, maybe more than a hundred thousand, and yet it did not seem to be enough.
"Alone…" the Passenger whispered. "You have always been alone."
Elias did not answer because if he did, what would come out of his mouth was laughter, and the Passenger seemed to understand this as it crooned inside of him.
"Alone…" the Passenger said again. "But not empty… no, you have been filling up the void inside you with something… what is it?"
Every trial that was given to him by his master was meant to change something inside him, to forge him into a being worthy enough to be the pivot that would change this world… he could not say he understood the full breadth of her vision, but what he did understand was the changes that were happening within him.
Elias had always had a lust for battle and slaughter, but his mind, that analytical part of him that made him more like a machine than a man, kept his mind straight.
However, the unbridled slaughter of the past few hours was beginning to break the restraint he had over his spirit.
"Let it out… let out the hunter and stop fighting like a man. You are a walking calamity!" The Passenger whispered, and Elias knew that the voice was right.
By the blood of the fallen gods, the Passenger was correct. If he kept fighting the way he did, he would lose.
He remembered Rhys laughing at him during their clash under the Asylum, where he told Elias that he was still too weak to be holding back his power.
The Passenger screamed inside his head, "To hold back is the frailty of a man, and you are not a man… Why do you keep fighting like a man!"
Elias paused for a moment, and this slight pause was enough for him to be swarmed and buried under the tide of bodies, but his mind was not on his breaking flesh; there was another sound inside of him that had been slowly growing louder the more he fought, and now… he heard them.
This sound had been sleeping in his blood since the Fragment, no, it was even before then, since the stone blade and the first time he had recited the ancient words and felt them enter his body.
The Ascendant Swarm… His Ascendant Swarm
They were not silent; they had never been silent. He was not just listening hard enough, but they had always been roaring.
However, their roar was like a vibration, more of a pressure or a subtle weight that pressed against his skull from the inside, and he just did not know how to listen to sounds like this before.
Now that he could hear them, he knew they were chanting words that he had heard before, the words that he had spoken himself, words that belonged to a language that should have been dead for a million years.
"Khrath'ul voryn'grahn na'keth… ssael'vyr…"
"Your broken god commands… sing…"
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