Elias's pools were growing, and he did not need to be inside his Lumina Space for him to feel this growth, but he still pushed his mind into the Ageless Echo to see what was happening inside him.
The thin films of Lumina spread across his Infinite Oceans expanded outward like ink dropped in water. The 1,300-meter circumference of each pool was thickening at the edges, pushing toward 1,400, and the edge of that growth was the edge of another threshold he had been chasing.
When that time reached, he would technically be at the peak Fury Forge level, meaning that he had achieved in a few hours what it took most Siphons years. Granted, most people were unable to kill tens of thousands in a matter of hours.
He opened his eyes, and even though they were made of stone, they had caught the dim light of the eternal twilight of this place, and for the first time in hours, the prismatic flicker that had once lived in his irises stirred beneath the granite.
If he played his cards right, perhaps he would not leave here just a peak Fury Forge, but he would have satisfied all the conditions for this level and complete the forging of his flesh in its entirety.
He took a step forward, and the spider-legs moved with him.
Ⓔ
The thing about a hundred thousand spawns was that they did not understand what they were looking at.
They had been built by the Void Womb to hunt, kill, and die.
Their hunting and killing was a function of mass, of overwhelming any single point of resistance with the weight of bodies pressed against it. They had broken everything sent to them in this manner, the Guild Enforcers, the people of this district, and they had been breaking Elias this way until ninety seconds ago, when Elias had stopped letting them.
Now, when they pressed against him, they encountered the spider-legs first, and the spider-legs did not press back, but cull them in sickening numbers.
A wave of perhaps two hundred spawns surged toward his shield from the front, packed shoulder to shoulder, claws extended, mouths open in a silent scream.
The first leg, sweeping in from the right, took the front rank. The second, sweeping in from the left a half-second behind, took the second rank. The third, descending from above in a curved chop, took everything between the second rank and the third. The wave became ash before it had crossed half the distance to him.
A second wave came from the right flank, perhaps three hundred this time, climbing over the rubble of a collapsed warehouse to reach him at speed. The fifth leg shifted, releasing its anchor and replanting on the right side of his boot, and the cracks that radiated from the new anchor reached the rubble, and the rubble shifted, and the spawns climbing it lost their footing and tumbled, and the third and fourth legs were already there to receive them.
A third wave came from above. A fourth from the left. A fifth from the rear.
The spider-legs handled them all.
It was not graceful, whoever said there was grace in butchery, nor was it elegant; a hunter did not hunt for the adulation of others.
For Elias, this was the methodical, patient, comprehensive processing of a tide by a thing that had become, in this moment, the natural predator of the tide.
Each minute, perhaps a thousand spawns died, and the ash flowed into him, and the moment of the next threshold drew closer.
He took another step.
The cracks in the cobblestones beneath his boots were no longer stopping at the edges of his anchor circles. They were continuing outward, resembling roots that branched and spread, and the spawns moving across the cobblestones did not see the lines until the lines had already destabilized them.
It was like every time he slammed the fifth spider leg into the ground, it was causing a mini earthquake.
Every step he took shook the ground, destabilizing the spawns who wanted to get near him, before they were swiftly killed.
He was consuming so much power and stamina every single second that if he were anywhere else, he was not sure he could maintain his spider legs for more than a few seconds.
However, in this place, he was killing so much and receiving so much essence as a result that he could burn so much power without risking his body exploding into pieces.
All of this was still incredibly strenuous, as he was moving enough power through his body in such a short time that he should have turned to ash in seconds, and his Elder Talent was feeling every single second that was passing by because Elias could see how much it was growing.
He did not know how this trial would end, but he knew that if he survived it, then the him that would come out from the other side would be something very different.
Elias pushed these thoughts out of his mind, because he could tell that the waves coming against him were adapting to his slaughter, and a deep laughter emerged from his chest, and he plunged into the endless waves… finally, a challenge!
Ⓔ
The Void Womb felt its spawns dying in numbers that should have been impossible.
It had made them to die, of course. They were expendable by design, each one a finger of its own hunger reaching out to grab and consume and bring back the essence it needed to grow.
After calling for its creator countless times, the Void Womb realized that it was alone, but even with this knowledge, it could not go against the will of the creator, and not create something more powerful to stop this threat descending upon it, and so it did the next best thing, it tried to directly control its spawns.
This was the only way it would fight.
It began to produce more spawns, because that was what it knew how to do.
The column from the pit widened, and the spawns came faster, and it sent them in tighter waves, packed denser, hoping that the sheer mass would overwhelm the void's hunger.
There should be a limit to that hunger, because while it was part of the void, it was not a true void; it could be overwhelmed… it has to.
The waves arrived, and the spider-legs swept through them, and the void came closer.
It tried to attack the void from a different angle, and the next wave climbed above the rubble of the city, but the void reached the rubble first, and the wave fell.
The wave after that came from below, through the cracks in the cobblestones; however, the void sealed the larger cracks and left the smaller ones as bait, and the bait did its work, as the wave died in the gaps.
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