Calyx looked back toward the district. He could not see Elias from this distance, not clearly, as if something was blocking his view, but he could see the shape of what was happening: the way the density of bodies in the air above the district was thinning.
He saw the way the columns erupting from the pit had narrowed, ever so slightly, from what they had been an hour ago, and he could also see, and this he had not expected to see, that the distance between the armored figure and the pit was shrinking.
"He is moving toward it," Calyx said. "Bold and rash, how much essence should he have left, or did she give him a Divine Vestige?"
Turning to the woman by his side, "He is moving towards the pit, right?"
She looked at him with a strange light in her eyes, "Yes, Lord Protector."
"At what rate?"
She did the mathematics quickly. "At the current pace, accounting for resistance and his apparent speed, he will reach the pit in..." She hesitated. "I cannot give you a reliable estimate. The resistance is not behaving predictably. It seems to be... reacting."
Calyx's jaw tightened. "Reacting to what?"
"To him," she said. "The pit is reacting to him specifically. The emergence rate dropped when the constructs appeared. It dropped again when he began advancing. I believe whatever is directing the spawns is aware of him in a way it was not aware of the other candidates."
Calyx was quiet for a moment.
He thought of the agreement he had made with Commander Yseult, and for the first time, he began to wonder if she had not outplayed him so thoroughly that he would not understand the full shape of it until long after it was over.
He thought of the thing she had promised as a prize. Something old. Something powerful. Something in her keeping since before this city was built.
"She knew," he said quietly to himself. "She knew what was in that pit."
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The Void Womb was beginning to understand fear.
It had not understood it before this. Fear was a mortal thing, a reflex of bodies that knew they could break and minds that wanted to avoid that breaking.
The Void Womb did not have a mind in the way that mattered; it had the hunger its creator had given it, and the hunger did not fear, because hunger did not stop to consider what it reached for.
But this was different.
What moved through its children above was not supposed to exist. It tasted of the same emptiness that its creator tasted of, but also quite different.
To the Void Womb, its creator's void was a wound, like a ragged hole torn in something that had once been whole.
However, what moved above seemed to be an infinite abyss that swallows everything without letting a single bit of it out.
The Void Womb had been consuming its own children to grow. She had been pulling their essence back into herself after they turned to ash, ninety-five percent of their energy returning to her, and with it, she had been expanding, digging deeper, building the energy storehouse that would let it birth millions.
Except for this void above, the souls were not coming back.
She had noticed it slowly, the way you notice a faucet dripping, first as a background fact, then as something worth attention, and then as something that could not be ignored. The children she sent above were dying, yes, as they had always died, their bodies lasting only so long before the things that killed them found the way through, but the ash they left behind was not returning to her.
It was going somewhere else.
It pressed against the walls of its pit and tasted the air again, and the taste was the same as it had been, bottomless and cold and ancient, and it understood at last what was happening.
It was being fed upon.
It, who had been made to consume everything, was being consumed!
The fear was reflexive and immediate, and it did what feared things do. It produced more children while calling on its creator for aid, pleading for better templates to be used in this battle, but there was only silence.
The column from the pit widened again.
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Elias felt the change in the tide before he could see it.
The spawns that had been pressing against him from the front began to thicken, their bodies packing tighter, the pressure increasing as more poured into the space ahead of him. The ones that his spider-legs were processing never stopped, but the ones at the edges of his range, the ones just beyond the sweep of his constructs, were multiplying.
Elias was now sure that the pit had noticed him.
He found this interesting in the way he found most things interesting, with a cold, comprehensive attention that cataloged the detail and filed it against everything else he knew.
Whatever was commanding this creature saw him as a threat, and so more of these creatures were sent against him, which was exactly what he needed.
The void inside him was hard to fill, and it was unknown when he would be able to find creatures like these again for the forging of his flesh in respect to his Void Lumina Vein Art.
He spoke to the Void inside him, "Today we feast until there is nothing else to give."
The spider-legs behind him accelerated and carried Elias along.
The third and fourth legs were working in tandem, sweeping in opposite directions on either side of him, and the arcs they traced were not the arcs of weapons… They were the arcs of harvest.
Each sweep took perhaps forty spawns. The next sweep, a second later, took fifty—the next, sixty.
The pattern was not random. Elias was learning the shape of the tide, the way a fisherman learned the shape of a school, and the spider-legs adjusted their arcs to maximize the cull.
Where the spawns pressed thickest, the legs swept widest. Where the spawns had already been thinned, the legs reached further to find new density.
The fifth leg planted itself in the cobblestones beside his right boot, and the stone beneath him cracked outward in a circle, anchoring him to the ground so he would not be shaken.
The sixth leg worked the air above his head, moving in figure-eights that wove a ceiling over him, and the bodies that fell from above met it on the way down, and what had been raining flesh became raining ash. Each rotation of the figure-eight took perhaps thirty spawns out of the air. The legs did not slow. They did not tire.
They were extensions of his will, and his will, fed by the ash, was no longer running out.
In the center of all this, Elias breathed deeply as his vitality climbed.
5,000 → 5,400 → 5,800 → 6,200.
Sanguine Resonance pulled vitality from the blood the Crimson Shroud was wringing out of the spawns in his ten-foot radius.
Blood-Forged Flesh converted the dwindling impacts that still reached him into stamina. The ash that fed the void in his chest also fed his pools, drop by drop, and the drops were adding up to something larger than drops.
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