The void womb tried to attack the encroaching void, consuming it from above, but this thing… This void also adjusted its pattern, and the wave became ash before it landed.
There was a dance here that it hated and did not understand, but there was no option but to dance to this tune.
It tried to attack from intermediate elevations; however, the void seemed to reach through the rubble fragments, and the spawns climbing them bled out in cascades before they could leap.
Then out of desperation, it tried to send its smarter children, the ones who had been alive longest and had begun to show something like intelligence. They flanked, feinted, and tried to time their assaults to the rhythm of the spider-legs' sweeps, but again, the void simply adjusted.
The void womb did not understand how, but they adjusted. The patterns the smart children attempted were met with patterns the spider-legs invented in the moment, and the smart children died as easily as the dumb ones, and their ash flowed into the thing's body like all the other ash, and the thing kept coming closer.
The Void Womb screamed; it had a thousand mouths, and they opened together, and the sound that came out of them was not a sound that the ear was built to hear; it was a vibration in the deep places, and it pushed up through the pit and out across the district.
The surviving candidates in the central square felt it as a weight on their chests, and they paused. It was inevitable that they would move towards the pit after they had had a chance to rest, rather than leave.
These candidates were here for whatever was in the pit. If the creatures emerging from it were fundamentally different from any creatures they could find around, then they needed to see their origin, because such drastic evolution and their numbers could not just emerge from nothing. The prize inside the pit could change their destiny.
They should be leaving; that was the common-sense option, especially when they heard this strange cry from the pit, but power always comes at a painful price.
Elias, ahead of them, felt the scream as the most interesting thing that had happened in the last hour. Unlike the others, he had quickly noticed that the structure of these creatures that he was fighting, although they had slight variations, was almost exact, almost as if they were not born, rather they were raised.
Every one of them was a peak-level Fury Forge. Elias knew that such a thing should be impossible given their number, and even if that was the case, with so much Fury Forge numbering what he suspected were hundreds of thousands of these creatures. There should be thousands of Mist Phantoms among them, and higher-level creatures also.
He also could not shift the correlation between this creature and the mutated mother and her babies, whom he had fought inside the Fragment of Divinity.
Those mutated babies were all at the Fury Forge level as well, and only their mother was at the Mist Phantom level. Elias suspected that he might see the same thing here.
What was most telling about this was also the numerous pieces of bodies that were flooding the white sands of his Lumina Space. Eyes, ears, heart, a piece of rib bone, and so on, after he killed each of these creatures, were all the evidence for Elias that these creatures were not born complete, but rather were produced.
It seemed that they were not made for survival, as he did not know how long they could live or even function with just a small piece of their soul inside them.
Still, these were all speculations, and it did not matter to Elias at this point if the creator of these things was a Mist Phantom, or perhaps even an Amber Exile. He was here for a challenge that would bring him past his limit, and he was sure that the Commander would not give him any trial that would not shake him to the core.
He did not stop walking, even when he noted this discrepancy; his spider-legs swept, and the ash flowed.
Vein Completion (Void Scripture): 15.84% → 16.71%
Vein Completion (Crimson Vein): 45.83% → 46.94%
Vein Completion (Art of Stone): 31.22% → 32.58%
He kept walking through tides of bodies, and no matter the changes happening from the enhanced creatures who seemed to be a bit more intelligent than the rest, which he found to be delightful as it gave his mind something to puzzle out before he reached the pit, he found nothing that could hold him back.
Ⓒ
The pace at which Elias moved was perhaps the strangest thing about him to the candidates watching from the central square.
He was not running or lunging. He was not even moving with any particular sense of urgency. He was just walking, three feet at a time, with the patience of a man crossing his own dining room, and around him the world was in chaos.
Elias made his movements look easy, but there were only hundreds of candidates here when there had been thousands, who had the best training, equipment, and companions, yet they all nearly perished.
Sera, who had set her sword across her knees and was sitting in the ash with her back against the broken fountain, turned her head to follow his progress.
"Look at his feet," she finally said, after watching him for the last few minutes.
Theron, who was beside her, had been focused on the Lumina Constructs tearing through the beasts, and now he looked.
The cobblestones were cracking beneath each step the armored figure took, and the cracks were not random. They radiated outward in expanding rings, and where the rings reached, the spawns lost their footing, and where the spawns lost their footing, they fell, and where they fell, they died.
He was using the ground itself as a weapon, but not in the way Theron's stone-shaping squadmates had used it, with violence and force. He was using the ground the way he had seen advanced earth shapers use it, with patience, as if the stone were doing the work because it wanted to do the work.
"That is not something a Fury Forge should be able to do," Tarian said quietly, beside them. He had walked over without anyone noticing.
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